"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Whoopi Goldberg’

Monkeybone

Thursday, December 1st, 2022

Here’s a story I may or may not have told before. It takes place on February 28, 2001. A few minutes before 11 am there was a 6.8 earthquake epicentered in the southern Puget Sound. I was at work and I saw some shelves wobble and a few things fall down, but nothing serious. Downtown there was some damage – some vehicles got crushed by falling bricks, and I remember a couple clubs where bands used to play in Pioneer Square (OK Hotel and Fenix Underground) were wrecked enough they went out of business. I called my roommate at home to make sure none of my stuff broke, and he made fun of me.

After work I went to Pacific Place to see this movie MONKEYBONE. All the advertising looked cheesy, but I was hoping it might be interesting because it was from Henry Selick, the director of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Unfortunately the advertising was pretty accurate. I remember a couple times during the movie something playing on a bordering screen made a loud rumble that vibrated the whole row I was sitting in. I thought about the three escalators I took up through the mall to get to the theater, and the fourth escalator inside the theater that goes up to the floor where this one was showing, and I thought, “That’s an aftershock, and the building is gonna collapse, and I’m gonna die watching fucking MONKEYBONE.” (read the rest of this shit…)

Sister Act

Friday, June 24th, 2022

SISTER ACT was released on May 29, 1992 and is of course the Golden Globe nominated feel-good fish-out-of-water comedy smash hit starring Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in THE PLAYER) as a lounge singer who witnesses a murder is put into witness protection pretending to be a nun in a convent and then ends up leading and reworking their choir. It’s not the type of movie I usually review, and I don’t really know how to dig as deep into it as I do on some of these, but I want to write about it if only to make this point: this, the most mainstream middle-of-the-road normal movie in this summer of ’92 retrospective so far, has kind of the same story as the (no pun intended) most alienating one, ALIEN 3, which came out the week before.

Think about it. Deloris is trying to escape from an unpleasant situation (dating mobster Vince LaRocca [Harvey Keitel in the same year as RESERVOIR DOGS and BAD LIEUTENANT]) when catastrophe forces her to seek shelter and live primitively within a tight knit community of same-gendered (female in this case) devout Christians. She’s made to look like them (wearing a nun’s habit rather than having her head shaven) and is unwelcome to some, particularly the person in charge (the Reverend Mother [Maggie Smith between HOOK and THE SECRET GARDEN] rather than the warden). But she ends up using her unique skills to lead them all in accomplishing the seemingly impossible (in this case making their choir sing well rather than killing a xenomorph without weapons). (read the rest of this shit…)

House Party 2

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

tn_houseparty2kidnplayHOUSE PARTY 2 has that typical sequel problem: holy shit, the first time we were just doing what we wanted to do, now we gotta live up to people’s expectations. So in the beginning they kinda redo the beginning of the first one. It’s another fog machined dream of people dancing, but this time they got recent Academy Award winner Whoopi Goldberg to do a cameo as an evil professor. And there’s lightning and stuff. Spooky.

They also had a less typical sequel problem: holy shit, the best part of part 1 died right after it came out. So they dedicate the movie to Robin Harris, have Kid say a little prayer to Pop, have photos of him around that sometimes come to life in brief clips from part 1. At the very beginning of the movie Kid says, “About that party – you were right to whoop my ass,” referring to the beating he was about to get as the credits rolled. Weird that that’s what his mind jumps to when he remembers his dad. Only way I can explain it is either Kid knows he’s in a movie about that house party, or Pop died while administering that beating.
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Whoopi Goldberg: This Month’s Janet Jackson

Saturday, July 17th, 2004

WhoopiSee, the few of you out there who read this shit, you say I should write these things more often. And I like to write them, to get all this out of my system, but at the same time I feel like a broken record. (For you kids, a record is a large black double sided CD used for hip hop scratching, and when it is “broken” or badly scratched it plays the same part over and over. That’s what it means, saying the same thing over and over, it’s an analogy.) Because it’s always the same themes, just the details are different.

I just looked a few columns back, and I was complaining about how ludicrous it is that, with all the blood on the hands of the Bush administration (and let’s be honest, it’s not just on the hands anymore, these fuckers are dipped head to toe like the dance club vampires at the beginning of BLADE), that the media matrix would really try to convince us that we should set that all aside, get over it, and focus our outrage on JANET JACKSON’S NAKED TITTY and THE NIGHTMARISH HORROR OF TWO MEN WHO LOVE EACH OTHER HOLDING HANDS. (read the rest of this shit…)