Eavesdropping At The Movies

1996's Space Jam is beloved of people Mike's age throughout the Western hemisphere, despite basketball's limited reach beyond North America - it was a Looney Tunes film, full of imagination and laughs, and is today a nostalgic linchpin for millennials. And because millennials now make films, it's back, twenty years on, with Space Jam: A New Legacy, featuring LeBron James in Michael Jordan's central role as the basketball star who joins forces with the Looney Tunes to defeat a team of superpowered villains. But the wit and tone of the 1996 original is nowhere to be found here, beyond those unacceptably brief moments in which Bugs Bunny and co. get to shine. There's a heavy focus on family, a theme that's come up more than a few times on recent podcasts and never feels intelligently explored, with LeBron's son held hostage in scenes that are supposed to heighten the sense of threat but in fact just grind any sense of entertainment to dust. But even that isn't the film's biggest problem - it's the corporate pro