I’m not stupid. I knew it would be, uh… problematic. “Probaly unwatchable” is I believe how I pre-described it to friends. But I figured as long as it stars the team of DMX and Kris Kristofferson I’m gonna get something out of it.

True, DMX has failed to deliver on the promise I thought I saw in him when I first saw BELLY. He seems to have pretty much lost his mind (up in here, up in here) and is not above making cameos in unwatchable DTV garbage in order to pay the legal bills for his poor driving, impersonating of federal officers and lack of dog feeding. So DMX alone is not a selling point.

But teamed with Kris Kristofferson? Blade’s mentor? FIRE DOWN BELOW’s villain? Mohammed Ali’s white cohort in the TV movie FREEDOM ROAD? Guy who should play me in a movie if Nick Nolte is not available? Could the creators of the albums ‘The Silver Tongued Devil and I’ and ‘It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot’ really be standing side by side, weilding their guns in a fortress of flames and sparks?

That is a hell of an odd couple there. Those two names above the title sold me. They didn’t even need to bother with that terrible photoshopping, they already had me.

But badly photoshopped covers are promises, and like politicians, DTV movies never keep their promises. If the two bodies who had DMX and Kris Kristofferson’s heads attached to them on this cover ever passed each other in the hallway outside the photography studio then that’s more of a relationship than X and Kristofferson have in the movie. They are not a team, not in any scenes together, I don’t think they even know each other exist. The actual main character of the movie is Detective Travis Roundtree (Ameer Baraka, not pictured). DMX doesn’t show up until 23 minutes into the movie and it’s unlikely he shot for even a full weekend. He mostly just quotes the Bible menacingly and plays pool in one part.

The good news is that Kristofferson really is in the movie. It opens with him and Baraka in a car hauling ass to a crime scene where a guy is about to blow himself up. Kristofferson gruffly rants about Willie Nelson and how he’s better than “Tu-Pack.” He brings up Willie Nelson throughout the movie and also declares Ray Charles’s “Modern Sounds In Country and Western Music” one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

His character is supposed to be obsessive compulsive, he says due to the violence he’s seen on the job and in Vietnam. So he complains about birdshit on picnic tables and uses hand sanitizer alot.

Also he fucks his wife alot, always offscreen through ADR. So for example there will be a shot of the outside of his house and the actress playing his wife makes sex sounds, then it cuts to him in the bathroom with no shirt on.

Now would be a good time to mention that this movie is strictly amateur hour. The opening scene takes place in the day, but when the cut to the exploding car it turns to night. The police work makes no sense – they just go around shooting people and leaving the bodies on the ground with no consequences. There are alot of conversations taking place in cars with greenscreened backgrounds. All of the supporting actors seem like they’ve never acted before. The script is made entirely from post-consumer recycled cliches, so those Kristofferson character quirks are the closest thing to imagination in the movie. Take a guess what the drug lord villain is named:

a) Salazar

b) Santiago

c) Sanchez

(not that it matters, but the answer is b)

For a few minutes I was mildly amused by Kristofferson complaining but not doing anything while his partner Goes Too Far and puts a gun in a guy’s mouth To Get Him To Talk. Kristofferson just acts like his partner torturing people is an annoying habit like snapping his gum or something. But you can only squeeze so much juice out of these cliches by having a gruff old man react to them.

On the positive side it looks like it was really filmed in New Orleans and although it has the filmatic sophistication of DOLEMITE deleted scenes it at least doesn’t look like all the other DTV shit. I have the feeling the movie would have Avid farts and digital shit all over the place if these filmatists knew how to do that stuff, but luckily they don’t. There’s a CGI bullet and some fake digital fire but with the raw, dirty look of the photography and the clumsy crudeness of the thing it mostly looks like it could’ve been shot in the ’80s. And alot of the dudes playing cops and convicts seem like tough guys the director (credited as Mr. V) must’ve known from his neighborhood instead of your usual Hollywood phonies. So at the beginning it has a certain straightforward integrity to it.

But not for long. A story and characters this generic might be acceptable to string together action sequences, but when there’s not much action you got a problem. When Kristofferson isn’t talking the movie is boring as shit.

DMX’s character is some kind of psychotic hitman who wants revenge on Santiago for the death of his sister. While the hero, Roundtree, is having his climactic showdown with the villain all the sudden DMX shows up and fires a bullet into a barrel, which catches Santiago on fire that appears to be digitally enhanced and then erupts into almost a fireworks show. Then DMX gets on his motorcycle and drives away and nobody seems to wonder who he is or think there was anything unusual about what just happened. To be fair, I’m sure all kinds of crazy shit happens in post-Katrina New Orleans, maybe this sort of thing is not that surprising.

But the girlfriend of the villain, who is now the girlfriend of the hero, says that “It’s over,” and I guarantee you’ll be as relieved as she is.

[ratings]

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I gotta warn you, it’s meandering and slow, sometimes amateurish, sometimes pretentious, and mostly humorless. But I still thought it was pretty fuckin good and I’ll explain why. (that’s what I do in these writings.)

First of all I gotta mention that this is the movie directing debut of Hype Williams, some famous music video director. What’s unusual about him doing this movie is that instead of getting some hired gun gig doing a sequel or a shitty eddie murphy comedy or something, like most of them do, this guy wrote his own script, an attempt at a personal statement, and did it independently and on a low budget.

Also unlike many music video directors who come up with shitty half assed movies like ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS, the look of this movie is absolutely stunning. Really, it’s one of the best looking movies I’ve seen in a while. I figured this Hype was obsessed with the visuals and not the storytelling (since that’s where he needs the most work), but it doesn’t sound like it on the commentary track. He credits the look to director of photography Malik Sayeed and some film processing thing called silver retention, which I believe Mr. Fincher used on SEVEN. And he complains that he cut out too much and it didn’t make sense and he didn’t put enough emotion into the movie. (which is true.)

Anyway whatever he did, this movie LOOKS fantastic. The quality of the photographicry and lighting is a step above what you get in most any movie. It just looks so vivid, like you’re looking at the world closely for the first time.

I think this movie should be seen in the tradition of movies made by musicians who save up some money and then write a movie about themselves or their lifestyle. Examples include the Prince pictures, TOUGHER THAN LEATHER, and etc. It probaly shouldn’t be compared to the Beatles pictures. Anyway if you see it in that light, it’s pretty spectactular.

Now, I’ve seen some of these low budget crime pictures starring rappers. I kind of liked LOVE AND A BULLET but that’s the only one I can think of that I actually sat through. I tried to watch RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE from the same director, but I didn’t get far. BELLY is different because although it has some of the same flaws (over explanatory narration poorly performed by a non-actor, to name one), the feel of it is so strong, you know right from the first shot that you’re not only dealing with A REAL FUCKIN MOVIE, you’re dealing with something a little more. The whole thing has a heightened reality, where it can seem highly stylized and documentary style at the same time. The acting styles (when they work) are naturalistic non-actor shit, like you get in BLACK AND WHITE or SLAM. But at the same time the look is out of this world. After a surreal shootout at a dance club (with strobe light and glowing green eyes) they go back to DMX’s house, where the carpet and furniture are solid black and everything else is white. The whole house is like a giant painting. And then DMX plays GUMMO on his big screen tv and his buddies get all confused.

It made me wonder though, what if you bought some doritos or something, or you were wearing the wrong clothes. It would just look stupid in a black and white house. Or it would draw attention to itself. If you’re standing there having a conversation with somebody, and you’re both wearing all white, and you’re holding a sandwich, your friend is gonna be staring at the sandwich the whole conversation. Unless the sandwich is painted black or white.

There are a couple of gun battles and car chases that have that adrenaline pumping, oh shit this is really happening chaos that I liked so much when Mr. Pink was on the run in RESERVOIR DOGS. These don’t come off as thrilling action sequences, they come off as sudden explosions of violence. You don’t enjoy them.

And as soon as you think you’ve figured this picture out, DMX goes to Jamaica. The real Jamaica. The footage is great and there are some exotic characters there, straight out of a Luc Besson picture. There is a guy with a blond mowhawk with white feathers carefully attached. He gets shot though, too bad.

His Jamaican connection is a legendary drug lord named Ox. I’m not sure if the actor was really Jamaican but if not he is incredible. This guy is a classic character, very menacing and likable, you kind of want to hang out and watch soccer with him in his living room to find out what kind of crazy shit he’ll tell you. One thing though: you can’t understand half the shit he says. The accent and slang are impenetrable, like Lee Scratch Perry or somebody. A couple times DMX even says, “Say again?” You get the idea he’s pretending he understands him even when he doesn’t, which is probaly what I’d do too. Anyway I’ve seen about ten thousand fake ass “yeah mon” Jamaicans in movies, thank god this Hype Williams finally gave us a real one.

DMX is great too. He does a nice poem at the beginning and end, otherwise I couldn’t tell you anything about his music. But the guy has a real presence and seems like a natural actor. I mean he stole EXIT WOUNDS right out from under Steven Seagal, that tells you something. Well, it doesn’t tell you much. But Morris Chestnut couldn’t do it in UNDER SIEGE 2, and he’s a real actor.

By the way here’s a tangent about this rapper versus actor business. Samuel L. Jackson never said he didn’t want to act with rappers. He actually likes the rap singers. What he said was he didn’t want to accept roles in movies that were just vehicles for a rapper to act in, or any other celebrity non-actor who gets to star in a movie just because they’re famous. His view is that an actor has to work hard to get those roles and it’s not fair for some fuckin tennis star or tv chef to take those roles just because they can. He probaly wouldn’t've done CROCODILE HUNTER either.

I have heard people say they don’t watch movies with rappers in them, and that’s just retarded. First of all you got a couple rappers who are good actors, like Ice Cube and Will Smith (in ALI only). Second of all, how come it’s not okay for rappers to jump right into movies, but it’s okay for comedians? Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Tim Allen, Bill Murray, Michael Keaton, Steve Martin, Michael Meyers, Robin Williams, Adam Sandler, Kevin Spacey… nobody complains when these jokers make movies, but they started out standing on a stage telling jokes. Well, maybe people complain when they make movies, but not because they didn’t start out as actors.

But anyway back to the movie though. DMX is good. A guy called Nas is actually the main character, and he’s okay. The actual filmatistic language is easy to follow, it’s not that quick cut shit you expect from MTV guys. But Mr. Williams still needs to learn to tell a story. You don’t really get to know the characters very well, too much is explained with narration instead of shown, and the story doesn’t have enough focus or flow to get you very involved in what happens to these dudes.

BUT, this is a real interesting debut. Next time this guy directs a movie I’ll see it right away, instead of dicking around for four years without renting the dvd.

p.s. I have no fuckin clue why it’s called BELLY. My best guess is something about “belly of the beast” but I couldn’t tell you why.

[ratings]

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Joel Silver originally announced this as Untitled DMX Project, supposedly a remake of Fritz Lang’s M. If that was the case, then I guess Tom Arnold (our generation’s Peter Lorre) would’ve been playing a perverted child killer whose killing spree had caused the police to clamp down so hard that organized crime would be pretty much put out of business. So the leaders of rival gangs (DMX, Jet Li, Mark Dacascos) would pool their resources to catch Tom Arnold so everything could go back to normal.

I knew Silver was trying to put one over on us though ’cause I remembered when Romeo Must Die was supposed to be a “hip hop/kung fu adaptation of Romeo and Juliet” and when Exit Wounds was supposed to be an adaptation of John Westermann’s novel Exit Wounds. It’s all hype. When people hear something like “they’re doing a remake of M starring DMX,” they get riled up, and this guarantees that they will later see the movie when it comes out as Cradle 2 the Grave and turns out to be about diamond thieves who steal diamonds that are actually magic plutonium weapons and their daughter gets kidnapped so they have to team up with a Taiwanese intelligence agent to do various stunts and kung fu to save the daughter.

(?)

No, I guess actually come to think of it I’m not sure what they were thinking comparing this to a movie it has no relation to in any way. Or calling it Cradle 2 the Grave, which only relates to the plot in the same way that “Grape Nuts” describes that nasty cereal that doesn’t have grapes or nuts in it at all. But these guys are professionals, they must know what they’re doing.

If not, I’ll tell them what they’re doing. The approach to these movies is this: we don’t have a good story or characters, but we know what audiences want. They want Jet Li. They want DMX, on the screen and on the soundtrack. They want the end credits from Exit Wounds. They want a bunch of fire. Going off jumps. Stuff crashing. There should be high tech equipment. Ultimate fighting. Motocross. A hot chick stripping to her underwear (but no further. This is America, fer crying out loud).

Some of these elements do in fact work. DMX rarely appears in a halfway decent movie, so he has a lot of practice at being better than the movie. He is as magnetic and charming as usual, and this time he doesn’t believe in guns and just wants to save his daughter so he can hug her and talk about angels. Jet Li does a lot of good kicking and jumping around and climbing down buildings and shit. But I’m not sure I like the way the Americans always doll him up, giving him spikey hair and sunglasses, trying to make him look that kind of cool. Jet Li is kind of a timeless figure. When you try to hip him up and dress him in all black (but not a kung fu tunic) you emphasize that he’s this little babyfaced dude with a squeaky voice. He seems like he’s trying to overcompensate for something, which is ridiculous. Jet Li doesn’t need to compensate at all.

The screenwriters are in fact overcompensating though, figuring if they can pile enough complications onto the storyline then everybody will get confused and forget how dumb the movie is. At one point in the movie, Jet Li is in a cage, swinging an angry bald kung fu midget at 20 kickboxers and Ultimate Fighting Champions, while Tom Arnold scans the crowd trying to find a particular guy wearing a particular ring, and this keeps cutting to Anthony Anderson and friends trying to get a limo to a particular parking garage in Chinatown so they can meet up with DMX, who is driving an ATV/quadracer/4-wheeler/whatever you call those god damned things across rooftops, being chased not only by police but by the angry professional motocross racers who he stole the thing from. And meanwhile DMX’s daughter is taped up in a motorhome inside a building where “international scumbags” will later meet to see a demonstration of the new powerful artificial plutonium weapons, and until then she is watching her dad get chased on TV.

And that pretty much sums up what this god damn movie is like. Except I want to say one other thing. At the end, Jet Li takes some kind of atomic weapon and shoves it down Mark Dacascos’s throat, forcing him to swallow it. There are then shots from inside his throat. And on the outside, he starts to glow from his neck, mouth and eyes, and his face melts like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I just want to say, that was really dangerous Jet Li, you should probaly go see your doctor, you don’t know what kind of effect that could have on you being right next to that shit. It’s unhealthy.

Honestly, this movie was more entertaining than some less retarded but equally unimaginative action movies. But it’s still a low down shame to think how much effort goes into an enterprise like this. Why not take all that elbow grease, bottle it up, and save it for a real movie? I know DMX is ready for one. Or if you can’t handle that, you could probaly take this budget and make 7-10 really hilarious straight to video Seagal movies.

[ratings]

See, I really thought this was gonna be his breakthrough. It’s the first movie where he does not have a co-star of equal or greater “star power.” He is the main attraction. And at the same time it is not some Hollywood action vehicle that the Rock or somebody turned down, it is an independent crime movie based on a novel by the legendary black crime writer Donald Goines. Also it’s directed by the sometimes decent director Ernest Dickerson, who has some credibility because he used to be Spike Lee’s cinematographer. Also because I kind of liked BONES.

But my friends I am sorry to report that NEVER DIE ALONE does not work. And I will try to explain why. Because that’s what I do.

DMX plays King David, a drug dealer with what you might call a pretty poor attitude towards other human beings, especially the ladies. In the opening scene, he is dead in a coffin and narrating about his life. “The Hindus have a word for it… ‘karma.’” Oh, thanks for introducing that exotic new concept to us there bud. Then it goes back to two days earlier and I was ready to see a thrilling story about the last two days before this guy got killed.

At first it’s pretty interesting. He’s just returned to New York after many years, and he has hair on his head that’s supposed to make him look old. He wants to “quit running from his past” so he decides to pay back some money he owes to this guy Moon (Clifton Powell). There’s some good dialogue and I like the part where Moon sees in his book that David owes him $8,000, then lies and tells him he owes $15,000 plus interest. David says, “That sounds fair” and rounds it up to $30,000! Just to fuck with him! There’s alot of good dialogue and tension in this setup where you meet two of Moon’s guys, one of them with a scar on his face and a mysterious lifelong grudge against David. And Moon asks him to go collect the money and nothing more. So you know there’s gonna be some stabbings or shootings or something.

And pretty quick the shit hits the fan. Yes, you get your stabbings and your shootings. David and some other people end up dead. A car window gets punched out, which is a personal favorite of mine. A school girl gets shot and flies ten feet across a parking garage. And you see some of the other bad motherfuckers that work for Moon, including the great Tommy “Tiny [Zeus]” Lister. There’s also a joke about Tupac coming back from the dead, which is weird because Ernest Dickerson directed Tupac in his first movie role, JUICE.

So far so good, but I seem to remember that at the beginning DMX was dead and was going to narrate the story of how he died. And now he already died and the movie is just starting. What the fuck are we gonna do now, watch his body rot?

Well no, now it turns out the story is actually about how David Arquette is a writer who is interested in black culture. We know this because he has Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Wu-Tang Clan on his wall. But also because his girlfriend points it out explicitly, for those of us who are retarded. And he happens to be there when King David gets shot, and, being one of the more “good” type Samaritans, drives him to the hospital. That’s when King David dies, but it’s the thought that counts, so Arquette ends up inheriting King David’s money, his jewelry, his pimped out ride, and a bunch of tapes that were the King’s memoirs. So this scene is basically telling you “For now on DMX will not be narrating from the dead, he will be narrating from some tapes he made before he was actually dead. DMX regrets the error.”

This is where the movie totally falls apart. It goes into the story of some of King David’s relationships, how he tricked women into snorting heroin, and turned the cast of a Baywatch-type show into junkies. Alot of the drug shit is really over-the-top, turning these supermodel type actresses into hags with monster makeup on. For those of us who haven’t heard about DRUGS = BAD SHIT. But I guess that sort of fits Goines’s style. I haven’t read this particular book, but the overall feel of the picture reminds me of the sort of corny but gritty feel he sometimes has.

Well, I gotta admit, I am no expert on this dude. I have only read Daddy Cool, and based on that I prefer Iceberg Slim (who inspired Goines to write about what he knew – heroin, pimps, hustlers, and more heroin). But watching this movie makes me want to just go read the book, because I’m sure it is less convoluted, and at the same time it’s gotta have more meat to it.

The problem with the movie is it seems like this is going to be one of those great rise and fall of an anti-hero type stories, like Scarface, Carlito’s Way, Belly, or ten thousand other entertaining movies. But the story is over before it really starts, and even what little piddly amount of story is there keeps losing its momentum by cutting back to Arquette listening to the tapes and writing the shit down.

It is a kind of complicated story because it also has to show how the other characters, like the guy with the scar, tie into the flashback story of King David and what happens when they track down David Arquette in the present, driving the dead man’s car. But there’s just not enough going on in the flashback to have much impact when it all connects together at the end.

To make matters worse, there is a horrible score by George Duke. I know the motherfucker is a professional musician and everything and if I remember right he has played good music before. But he ruined any chance the movie had at working. In the beginning, he porns the shit out of every scene. DMX can say some tough lines but he’s not gonna seem all that badass if there is some goofball constantly piddling around on a horn on the soundtrack. I mean, let’s have some quiet time here, George Duke. I think they wanted Curtis Mayfield but instead it sounds like they got Kenny G’s marginally more soulful black golf buddy. And then later on the shitty jazz fusion drops away and is replaced by a really corny “dun dun DUN!” type keyboard score. The only other movie I’ve seen based on Donald Goines was a really terrible straight to video movie that I couldn’t even get half way through. This one seemed more like a real movie, but they might as well have lifted the music right off of the straight to video one. I honestly think the movie would’ve worked better if there was no music in it at all.

On the positive side, this is an Ernest Dickerson picture so some of the photography looks really beautiful. Even if there are too many showoffy camera angles.

It’s really too bad. If they would’ve done a better job on this script and pretended they weren’t home when George Duke showed up to record, they might’ve had something there. They had the right cast, the right basic plotline and a few gritty scenes. But whatever they were trying to do, they didn’t end up giving DMX much better to work with than they did in his moronic mainstream buddy movies. Oh well, maybe he did better in that go-cart movie. I’ll have to watch that one.

Also it was good because I got to see trailers for alot of movies that they don’t put before the white people movies. I found out about new movies starring Bernie Mac, Cedric the Entertainer with Steve Harvey, and another one with D.L. Hughley. That’s all the Original Kings of Comedy!

[ratings]

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What’s historic about this one is that it’s the first picture ever made in English with Jet Li as the star. The only English language picture he’s done in the past is I believe Beverly Hills Cop 4 or one of those type of movies, where he played the bad guy in a couple scenes and then the good guys make fun of him for being chinese. But he was so much more popular in that movie than the movie itself that now he is being groomed to join the pantheon with Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Rudy Ray Moore and other martial arts superstars who have made it big in the states. And what better to story give this motherfucker than one by the bard of writing, Mr. William Shakespeare himself, the genius behind Titus and other hits.

Well, that’s what they WANTED us to think. I’ve been reading about this piece for a long time and every single time they call it an update of Romeo and Juliet. I knew they wouldn’t talk like Shakespeare, and obviously there is gonna be some liberties as well as possibly some karate. But I thought it was gonna be a serious, modern karate type of picture which coincidentally happens to be about the warring capulets and whatsits and how Romeo and Juliet meet and fall passionately in love and then the shit hits the fan if you know what I mean, as far as a bunch of karate scenes happen and what not. Of course that would be totally ludicrous. I think it would be very enjoyable.

Unfortunately there must have been alot of script doctors and what not on this picture, who thought they were a regular William Shakespeare, taking out scenes from the original and adding their own. Because what they ended up with is your basic americanized karate picture that has no fucking connection to the original story. There are two families, yes, one black and one chinese. And there is one scene where Jet Li looks in a window at Alliyah, which I guess is supposed to be like the balcony scene. Otherwise, there is no connection. You got no nurses, no apothecaries, no Tibalt or Mercutio types, no forbidden love, and even the rivalry between the two families turns out to be fake. Boys Don’t Cry was actually a much more faithful update of Romeo and Juliet. Hell, Titus was a more faithful update of Romeo and Juliet. I mean, if Shakespeare was alive he would probaly take his name off this project in my opinion, unless he is a very big Jet Li fan but even then he would probaly be very torn.

I mean wouldn’t it be funny if it actually followed the story very closely, but then Romeo starts flying around kicking guys? That is true Cinema in my opinion. At the very least I expected a Romeo and Juliet-like romance, but the relationship here is as cold as a cold beer. They barely know each other, they never even say they are into each other, nobody except a wacky fat guy makes a serious attempt to actually forbid their forbidden love, and at the end all they do is hug.

I mean we don’t even know for sure Jet is straight in this picture. The closest they do to going on a date is Jet convinces Aliiyah to go with him to the night club where he expects everyone to get massacred. Which I guess could be considered romantic I mean what do I know. Yeah, I guess it’s romantic, way to go Jet.

I mean it’s not that bad. There is a couple good action scenes. The best one is where Jet doesn’t want to punch a girl so he moves Aliiyah around like a doll and uses her fists and feet to beat up a gal. Delroy Lindo plays Aliiyah’s dad, an evil gang boss who is the nicest guy you’ll ever meet and never does anything bad or mean during the whole movie. And both Jet and Aliiyah are very likable.

There was a couple things I didn’t understand. Like why do they keep talking about starting an NFL team even though they live in Vancouver, a part of Canada. And how come when Delroy Lindo sees Jet Li he says, “Is this Han?”, even though he’s never heard of him before. There is also a subplot about how people turn into skeletons when they die, I didn’t get that at all man I guess it was over my head.

Maybe I am too much of a purist when it comes to the Shakespearean works, though. I guess you can’t expect every Shakespeare production to be as faithful and tradtionalist as Titus, Theater of Blood or Strange Brew. But even as a straightup karate picture this doesn’t deliver as much excitement as Black Mask, which everybody and their uncle claims is straight up shit compared to Fist of Legend and all those. Come on you americans, if you’re gonna use Jet Li use him well you are wasting a national resource here motherfucker and he’s not even ours yet.

[ratings]