LeBron James’ ‘Space Jam’ Reboot Is an Abomination

Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. [Manage newsletters]( [View in browser]( [Image] with Kevin Fallon Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. This Week: - I feel very attacked by Space Jam. - Zaila Avant-garde! We stan! - The batshit fake Céline Dion movie has been seen! - I feel very attacked by Emily in Paris. - Good for Britney Spears! Space Jam: A New Legacy Ruined My Childhood Last weekend, as “research” for [the Space Jam sequel]( starring [LeBron James]( that’s out Friday [in theaters and on HBO Max](, I rewatched the original 1996 film for the first time in at least two decades, though it is important to point out that, in that first year after it came out, I probably watched it at least 15-20 times. Revisiting such nostalgia after so long can be traumatizing. Surely, I thought, it was going to be dumb, bordering on unwatchable. Obviously, [Michael Jordan]( would make me want to pull my arm hairs out one by one to disguise the pain of his acting. Whatever pedestal I had put my toon pals on was about to come crashing violently down in my dumb little apartment, [redacted]-year-old me devastated by fond memories now ruined. But guys, the original Space Jam still slaps. The opening scene alone of young Michael Jordan practicing hoops in the middle of the night while “I Believe I Can Fly” plays—once you have let out the “yeesh...” after recognizing [who sings that song](—is iconic. It’s moving if you’re a [redacted]-year-old youth in 1996 and about to love the movie so much you force your mom to buy you a novelty bomber jacket with a Space Jam decal on the back from Burlington Coat Factory. It’s still moving if you’re watching it again 25 years later with some wine, thinking about whether you could pull off that coat today. Then that “come on and SLAM and welcome to the JAM” [song starts booming]( and oh my fucking god. The irresistible music never relents. (All-time great soundtrack.) Mostly, I was impressed with how much of it impressed me. There are really clever meta jokes about Jordan’s ill-fated baseball career. The pacing is seamless, moving from the events on earth to the ones on the Looney Tunes’ planet. And when the two worlds meet, the effects are pretty spectacular. The Three Stooges-esque humor is still funny. Jordan does a surprisingly good job acting in what I’m sure was a challenging, bizarre green-screen shoot. Wayne Knight is in it, the only true identifying mark of a ’90s pop-culture phenomenon. I bring all this up because it pumped my heart up, Looney Tunes-style, to oversized excitement for the sequel, Space Jam: A New Legacy, before I saw it earlier this week. Instead, it was truly one of the most unpleasant times I’ve had watching a film in recent memory. Would I use a hyperbolic word like “abomination” to describe it? I don’t know. Maybe Bugs Bunny would. When it finally ended after what seemed like another 25 years had passed—evidently only 115 minutes in the real world—I almost felt shell-shocked. I don’t remember getting back to the street from my theater seat. It’s as if I floated out in a daze. I pride myself on grading these kinds of things on a curve. It’s a big-swing blockbuster. It’s meant to appeal to kids. The corporate opportunism is going to be glaring. But you can still do that with a sense of fun and style. Even just recently, [Cruella did just that](. I was shocked by how cynical the whole thing was. The animation and the effects were confusingly ugly. LeBron James makes Michael Jackson look like the Meryl Streep of athlete-actors. There was one good joke—which I won’t spoil—and other than that I legitimately don’t remember laughing. At the Looney Tunes!!! The whole thing, and I can’t believe my career has come to the point where I am about to type these words, misses everything that was magical about the spirit of Space Jam. When I describe to you the plot of this film, I need you to imagine sitting in a theater ignorant of it, watching it unfold in utter disbelief. LeBron James and his son, Dom, have tension because Dom wants to be a video game developer and James wants him to be a basketball great just like dad. Warner Brothers approaches James with the idea of incorporating a digital likeness of the NBA star into the company’s entire suite of franchises, which James rejects but Dom finds at least technologically fascinating. But the offer, you see, was calculated by a megalomaniac computer algorithm (?) named Al-G Rhythm who takes the form of Don Cheadle. Al-G is offended that James doesn’t appreciate his genius, and so he kidnaps both James and Dom, trapping them in the never-not-baffling Warner Brothers “ServerVerse” (like, inside a computer). As James travels through the ServerVerse’s solar system of “planets” which house various WB intellectual properties—a Harry Potter World, a Game of Thrones planet, a DC Comics one—Al-G recruits Dom and uses a basketball video game he invented to threaten James. James can only save his son if he recruits a team of Looney Tunes players to help him defeat Al-G’s virtual Goon Squad in an immersive version of Dom’s video game. If you followed that, congratulations, you’re now in Mensa. The thing about the original Space Jam, which vaguely has a similar and strange plot, is that the impetus for the basketball game is that the Big Bad Guy wants to pimp the Looney Tunes out as a gross corporate attraction and that’s considered a bad thing. Here, that pimping is the entire point. The film becomes “spot that absurdly out of place Warner Brothers property!” more than anything coherent. There are incessant Game of Thrones shots of Khaleesi’s dragon and the White Walkers. Pennywise from It is there. The War Boys from Mad Max. Characters from A Clockwork Orange. King Kong. The Mask. You know, classic kid stuff. But even that game of I Spy can’t make the climactic basketball game, which I swear lasts probably half of the film’s screen time and is impossible to follow or make sense of, any fun. I guess that’s the thing: I expected fun and got whatever the complete opposite of that is. (The complete opposite is LeBron James listening to explanations of what a computer algorithm is for two hours.) And I had just experienced the fun of what it could have been. Has Space Jam: A New Legacy gaslighted me into believing that the original film was a masterpiece? Maybe that’s its most impressive special effect. The Zaila Avant-garde Fan Club Meeting Is Now in Session! In the current news cycle that spins with the menacing speed of a malfunctioning carousel in a Final Destination film, it gravely concerns me that we have let one of the greatest stories of the year to slip under the radar. Have we truly paid enough attention to [Scripps National Spelling Bee champion Zaila Avant-garde](, a 14-year-old wunderkind for whom winning one of the country’s most prestigious academic competitions may be one of the least interesting things about her? Again, a spelling-bee winner whose last name is Avant-garde? [Alternate text] Before she correctly spelled “murraya,” the confetti fell, and she became the first Black American to win the competition in its 93 years, she already held three Guinness World Records...for her juggling and bouncing tricks with basketballs. [According to the New York Times](, those records are for “the most basketballs dribbled simultaneously (six basketballs for 30 seconds); the most basketball bounces (307 bounces in 30 seconds); and the most bounce juggles in one minute (255 using four basketballs).” Three years ago, before her spelling-bee fame, her basketball tricks were showcased in a [commercial alongside Stephen Curry](. Watch her show them off in [this Live With Kelly and Ryan clip](, his shocked expression I think the most authentic he’s ever been in his television career. Oh, and during the appearance she is wearing a WHITNEY HOUSTON T-SHIRT. My heart!!! She plans to play basketball at Harvard and is apparently torn between a career at NASA or as an NBA coach, a totally routine conundrum so many of us face when thinking about the future. She can divide five-digit numbers by two-digit numbers in her head. Meanwhile, it was with beaming pride that earlier today I remembered how to put an accent on an “e” to type the name Céline Dion without having to look it up for the 27th time this year. The Cinematic Era of Aline Is Upon Us What was until this moment just a tease of greatness to come, a fleeting balm to soothe our scarred souls, merely the promise of total spiritual and emotional transformation—a [whisper in the morning of lovers sleeping tight](, if you will—is now a glorious, harrowing reality. Aline, the biopic of Céline Dion that uses her life story and some of her songs but not her name, has premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. I have not seen the film, though, in some ways, I have been witnessing the film all my life. It’s as if it has always existed and, now that it actually does, perhaps never should. That’s the power of Céline, of Aline, of love. Since its Croisette debut, I have made it my life’s mission to consume every word written about it. And, wow, did these people seize the opportunity to make this batshit film and, channeling the spirit of Céline, bellow, “Shall we go for it?” Did you already think it’s strange that this is a film with every biographical detail about Dion but her name? That’s the tip of the iceberg. (Iceberg. Titanic. Get it?) The film was written and directed by its star, 57-year-old French comedian Valérie Lemercier. Those two identifying details are important because, as Caspar Salmon [wrote in his Daily Beast review]( of the film, Aline plays “like a Will Ferrell movie without the jokes”—everything about it is to the edge of absurdity, but blown back from the cliff by the gale-force seriousness with which everything is played. It’s a tone no one really knows what to make of. Lemercier’s age is important because, while Dion is 53 now, Lemercier plays her from age 4. [Writes Vulture’s Rachel Handler](, “The eye and the brain understand instantly that something is fundamentally wrong. No longer are we looking at the face and body of a child. We are looking at the face and body of a 57-year-old woman, shrunk down to the size of a child.” What else can I tell you? Apparently Aline does not shy away from the fact that the singer’s lifelong romance with late husband René Angélil began when she was 12 and he was in his late thirties, and it is played as nothing short of a fairy-tale, star-crossed romance? There is a sequence in which she is lost in her expansive villa trying to find her way back from the pool. Apparently, it also fetishizes her eating habits. [From Vulture](: “We see her dip a croissant in Champagne at breakfast. We see her go to absolute town on a cheeseburger and fries. She waxes poetic about her love for chocolate to a doctor who tells her she can’t have it anymore.” In other words, Oscar for Aline when? When Will Emily in Paris Stop Terrorizing Me? What is it about Emily in Paris? Listen, I have nothing against Paris. Never been! Would like to go one day! I hear the French are rude but that they eat a lot of bread and wine and that’s kind of my whole vibe. I’m not particularly anti-Emilys either, though that was the name of the barista who spilled a latte on me once at Starbucks and I used to intern with one who would just kind of purse her lips into a snide half-smile and nod whenever I said hi to her. (The rumor was she took a cab to the office every day.) I’m not even against guilty-pleasure TV shows, the harmless froth you watch because the people are pretty, the plots are soapy, and the entire endeavor is entirely mindless. So why have I been forced to devote so much of my mind to this damn show this year? [Alternate text] First came its Golden Globe nominations, allegedly won after Netflix offered free trips to the City of Lights to voters, setting into motion [the entire award show’s demise](. Emmy voters somehow saw that fallout and outrage and decided, “Hmm, should we try chaos, too?” Well, say bonjour to [Best Comedy Series Emmy nominee](, Emily in Paris. I cannot imagine who watches that show and thinks, “That should win a major award!” The same way I cannot imagine who has the option of voting for Beyoncé’s Black Is King in any category, let alone ones [to do with hairstyling and costumes](, and passes it over for...Dancing With the Stars??? Anyway, in a year when awards voting has been absolutely bonkers, I am proud to be part of the Television Critics Association. The nominees for our annual awards came out this week—[see them here](—and they are, refreshingly, flawless. (Obviously. I was a voter.) Finally, Good Britney Spears News Britney Spears posted the #FreeBritney hashtag [on her Instagram]( for the first time and, more, it was in the context of celebration: she scored a major victory in her conservatorship battle. No, you’re crying. [Alternate text] [Alternate text] - Schmigadoon!: Never has a show been more tailor-made for me. But maybe for you, too! (Friday on Apple TV+) - Making the Cut: About me: I find the pairing of Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn to be irresistible television. (Friday on Amazon) - McCartney 3, 2, 1: Explore 50 years of music history with Paul McCartney. A delight! (Friday on Hulu) [Alternate text] - Sexy Beasts: A dating show in which contestants are made up to look like animals to disguise their true looks. I hate this whole idea so much. (Wednesday on Netflix) - Space Jam: A New Legacy: A travesty. (Friday in theaters and on HBO Max) Advertisement [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( © Copyright 2021 The Daily Beast Company LLC 555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011 [Privacy Policy]( If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, [click here]( to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. 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