ONE SPOON OF CHOCOLATE, the new movie written and directed by The RZA, is a little bit deranged. I say that in a neutral way. I kind of like that it’s crazy, but I don’t overall think it’s a movie that works. When I describe what it’s about to you it’s going to sound like a pulpy exploitation movie, a ’70s style revenge thriller with a modern GET OUT type edge, something that could’ve been branded as part of a GRINDHOUSE double feature if those had become an ongoing concern like V*H*S. (In fact it has a “Quentin Tarantino Presents” credit and an appearance by Red Apple Cigarettes.) But most of the time the tone is very earnest, kinda dour, sometimes feeling like a PSA. And when the hero finally gets to fight the lead villain the score (by Tyler Bates and The RZA) chooses not to hype us up like it’s the big pay off, but just give us some synth textures, like it’s sad. It’s kind of a downer. (read the rest of this shit…)
Posts Tagged ‘Blair Underwood’
One Spoon of Chocolate
Thursday, May 7th, 2026Longlegs
Monday, July 22nd, 2024
LONGLEGS is a new horror movie from writer/director Osgood Perkins (THE BLACKCOAT’S DAUGHTER, I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE, GRETEL & HANSEL, also played Young Norman Bates in PSYCHO II because he’s Anthony Perkins’ son). If you saw his other movies, or the bizarre, creepy-as-fuck trailers, you probly got the hint that it’s not a normal commercial horror movie, but more in the slow-horror/arthouse/early-Ti-West/stereotype-of-what-A24-releases tradition. Nevertheless it had the best opening weekend ever for distributor Neon, it’s Cage’s first live action film to open above $20 million since GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE twelve years ago, it’s already made a profit and become the highest grossing original horror movie this year.
Set sometime during the Clinton administration, it stars Maika Monroe (THE BLING RING, THE GUEST, IT FOLLOWS, INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE, WATCHER) as rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (hmm…) who has such uncanny intuition in the field that they test her for psychic powers and assign her to a decades old case. Families with no connection other than their daughters having the same birthday fall victim to murder-suicides, and on the scene are found coded letters signed “LONGLEGS.” Working closely with supportively pushy, hard drinking superior Agent Carter (Blair Underwood, POSSE, SET IT OFF), Harker quickly cracks the cypher, decodes some of the riddles, finds patterns in the dates of the crimes, and comes up with new insights into the case. But somehow Longlegs seems to already know who she is. (read the rest of this shit…)
Deep Impact
Wednesday, May 16th, 2018
May 8, 1998
For many, the 1998 summer movie season will always be remembered as the comet vs. the asteroid (or the dueling asteroid movies, if they forget that one was a comet). DEEP IMPACT is the first released, the less popular, and the more grown up of the two movies. It’s way less stupid, less hectic, less hateful, and more forgotten by society. But that’s not necessarily undeserved. It’s not all that exciting.
The story begins with high school lovebirds Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood, THE TRUST) and Sarah Hotchner (Leelee Sobieski, THE WICKER MAN) enjoying some amateur astronomy when Leo discovers a comet headed for the earth. His teacher sends the evidence to a pro (Charles Martin Smith, MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITI) who verifies it but is immediately killed in a car accident.
(Summer of ’98 note: Like BLACK DOG it’s a sleepy-truck-driver accident that sets everything up.)
I don’t understand that turn of events. It skips over a year, so for a second I assumed the accident prevented them from finding out about the comet in time, but no. Actually the government found his information and named the comet after him and Leo. What’s the story purpose of killing him off? Not wanting to keep checking back in on a guy that knows about stars and shit? I’m not sure. (read the rest of this shit…)
Set It Off
Thursday, August 13th, 2015
Long before he directed the new biopic STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON, F. Gary Gray was already linked to members of N.W.A. He’d directed the video for the Ice Cube classic “It Was a Good Day” (1992), and later the action-movie-inspired “Natural Born Killaz” by Dr. Dre and Ice Cube (from the soundtrack to MURDER WAS THE CASE). When Gray started in features it was with Cube, who wrote, produced and starred in FRIDAY. And he also did the video for Dre’s “Keep Their Heads Ringin” from that soundtrack.
So in ’97, when he did his first action movie, he cast Dre in a small role as Black Sam, an underworld figure who provides guns for the protagonists, an all female crew of bank robbers.
Hear me out on this, but I do not consider N.W.A to be super respectful of women. Their songs talked endlessly about the bitches and/or hoes. FRIDAY also did some of that, in arguably a more playful way. The men are all doofuses, but Nia Long and Regina King aren’t, so you can’t take it completely seriously. But there’s a whole lot of humor about the women they do or don’t want to get laid by, and one hilariously has as her theme song “Hoochie Mama” by 2 Live Crew. “Big booty hoes – up wit it!”
So with that in mind it’s pretty cool that Gray’s second movie has an entirely female POV. (read the rest of this shit…)
Posse
Monday, February 16th, 2015
“You talkin bout a black KKK raid on a white town? That’s crazy!”
Recently I wrote about the Mario Van Peebles movie PANTHER, and talked a little bit about that time in the ’90s after Spike Lee hit it big and other black directors were starting to get a shot. At the same time hip hop had bled into pop music, and therefore rappers were starting to appear in movies. In the few preceding years the most respected rappers had been political or pseudo-political. Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions struck revolutionary poses, and even the so-called gangsta rappers like N.W.A. and Ice-T considered themselves rebels against the establishment (mainly the police, then the politicians above them). There had been a high commodity put on “dropping science” or “reality” and/or “positivity,” consciousness was encouraged, people had temporarily traded their gold chains for Africa medallions, were interested in reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and knowing the names of the Black Panther founders and shit like that. For a time it was at least as important to act smart and enlightened as it was to be tough. And that’s why Van Peebles was able to make PANTHER and before that, in 1993, POSSE.
About six months before POSSE was released, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic came out, and it was so undeniably good that, you know, that was the end of that. But before Van Peebles knew that visions of blunts would be bouncing on hydraulics in our heads he made a western for the Knowledge Reigns Supreme era.
There’s a couple reasons why this fits into the trend. One of them is that about a quarter of the cowboys in the old west were black. TV and movies make it seem like it was a hundred white guys for every Cowboy Curtis or Lord Bowler, and Van Peebles wanted to correct that. (read the rest of this shit…)
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