Posts Tagged ‘Yaphet Kotto’

Truck Turner

Friday, February 18th, 2011

tn_truckturnerEverybody knows Isaac Hayes’s music for SHAFT, but he also scored TRUCK TURNER. And while he was at it he decided to also star as Truck Turner. Why not? I guess at one point it was gonna be Robert Mitchum, which would’ve made for a really weird blaxploitation movie.

Under Hayes’s super-funky theme song the movie opens with a montage of vintage L.A. lowlife spots: liquor stores, blood banks, pawn shops, a corner where a bunch of old drunks have an awkward slap fight until a cop breaks it up. And I’m pretty sure those are real dudes. The montage also shows the signs for more than ten bail bonds places, which shows that our man Truck has alot of competition.

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The Running Man

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

tn_runningman1Arnold Schwarzenegger is… THE RUNNING MAN. That’s actually what it says on the credits, which makes me feel good, makes me proud to be an American. In fact, I’m gonna make a new tag for this review called “is…” If you can think of some other movies where the star “is…” the title, let me know. But only if it’s in the actual opening credits, not just the trailer or the poster, at least for now. We’ll see how many we can find.

THE RUNNING MAN was a book Stephen King wrote in 1982 when he was on the lam and hiding out under the alias Richard Bachman. I read it back in the ’80s so I don’t remember it in much detail, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the same kind of goofy cartoon shit as the movie. It was about a brutal game show of the future where contestants tried to get across the country without being killed. I think there were bounty hunters after them, but also they’d become famous through the show and regular people would try to kill them to collect a reward. It’s like American Idol except instead of participating by calling in you do it by shooting at the guy. The main character was kind of like Kowalski in VANISHING POINT, he ended up capturing the hearts of everybody at home and they started rooting for him to get away.

The book was written before “reality TV” even existed. There wasn’t even COPS or THE REAL WORLD. It could’ve been influenced by DEATH RACE 2000, but I still give King credit for predicting this type of shit. When THE AMAZING RACE started I thought shit, we’re half way there. Just cross this with AMERICA’S MOST WANTED.

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The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

Saturday, February 25th, 2006

This movie stars Steve McQueen as a bank robber, which automatically makes it worth seeing. And this is a good movie. But to be honest it doesn’t live up to its reputation or its potential. I know that Steve McQueen, like me, was someone who often could be spotted out and about striving for excellence. So I don’t think he would have a problem with me holding him to a high standard of achievement.

The first thing you’ll notice about the movie is that it’s very stylish. The opening and various other scenes use split-screen up the wazoo, splitting the screen into something like six different little boxes to show the different people intersecting for a heist. The cinematographer is Haskell Wexler (see TELL THEM WHO YOU ARE above for more on him) so despite all the showoffery in the editing alot of the footage is very handheld, documentary looking, like you’re there. Alot of the scenes are just dialogue-free footage of Steve McQueen as Thomas Crown fucking around. For example he flies in a glider or drives around really fast in a dune buggy. The dune buggy footage is pretty spectular, it seems like he’s about to flip over at any moment and you can’t help but notice he’s got no roll bars above his head.

After the opening heist, the rest of the movie is about a hot insurance investigator (Faye Dunaway) tracking down the mastermind Thomas Crown and seducing him, toying with him, falling in love with him and finally realizing maybe she doesn’t want to bust him. It reminded me a little bit of OUT OF SIGHT and the whole romance between bank robber and federal marshall. (more…)

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Blue Collar

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Paul Schrader. He is sort of a lesser known legend of independent film. Legendary because of the many screenplays he wrote for Martin Scorsese, including Taxi Driver, lesser because he went on to direct crap like the rock band movie Light of Day with Michael J. whatsisdick. And that sort of thing tends to lower people’s opinion of you. I mean, you don’t see the dude who did Satisfaction with Justine Bateman going on to inspire a new generation of filmmakers. That’s just the way it works.

But Paul Schrader did make sort of a comeback. After a really terrible Elmore Leonard/Tom Arnold picture called Touch he did Affliction with James Coburn and got some Oscars and what not. Now I am in favor of any picture that gets an Oscar for James Coburn just on basic principle, but I haven’t seen it yet so instead I will review Mr. Schrader’s first work as a director, and still maybe his best, Blue Collar.

You see this picture is important to me because it is one of Richard Pryor’s few great film roles outside of his stand up films. Richard was in many shoddy films made by people with no understanding of his talents or desire to display them properly. So you get the man dressed up as a chicken or running around getting his ass bit by piranhas or what not. The kind of garbage that Robin Williams could even do. And as Richard once confessed to me, by writing his autobiography, he was too far gone in his addiction to really care any more. He just wanted “the moneys” and so would sign on to pictures like Super Man Part 3 that he thought were crap.

So Blue Collar is one of the few pictures where he actually got to play a multi-faceted, dramatic type role where he gets to be funny but also gets to display other emotions convincingly and organically within the story. He gets to change throughout the movie, but not in the, “It turns out I have a big heart after all and love kids” type of way. I mean it’s the other way around, he turns into kind of a villain, he sells the fuck out. (more…)

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