Posts Tagged ‘Craig Brewer’
Tuesday, July 29th, 2025

If you’re keeping track, please add HUSTLE & FLOW to the list of summer ’05 movies that hold the fuck up. Maybe at the top. I think this is the first time I’ve seen it since the theater, and I wasn’t sure if I was building it up in my memory. No, this is really something special.
It takes place in Memphis, where small time pimp and weed dealer DJay (Terrence Howard, WHO’S THE MAN?) revives an old dream to become a rapper. It kinda happens by coincidence. First one of his customers (Claude Phillips) insists on trading him a Casio keyboard for drugs (“What am I, a pawn shop?”), which gets him thinking about playing music. Then he runs into Key (Anthony Anderson, URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT), who he knew in middle school, at a convenience store, has a conversation and ends up going to watch him record a singer at a church. If DJay had shown up five minutes later or if Key hadn’t needed batteries none of this would’ve happened. But they do, so DJay later shows up at Key’s house, raps for him and convinces him to come over and help him record a demo tape. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Anderson, Craig Brewer, DJ Qualls, Elise Neal, hip hop, Memphis, Paula Jai Parker, Screen Actor's Guild Award Winner Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Taraji P. Henson, Terrence Howard
Posted in Reviews, Drama, Music | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, October 23rd, 2019
DOLEMITE IS MY NAME is a dream come true – topnotch director, writers and cast making a beautiful, warm, well produced triumph-of-the-underdog epic about Rudy Ray Moore, the small time club singer who reinvented himself by selling dirty comedy records out of the trunk of his car and then strutting his way into independent filmmaking. The script is by kings of the oddball biopic Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski (THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, MAN ON THE MOON, The People vs. O.J. Simpson) and it’s got a whole lot in common with their best film, ED WOOD. It’s another story about an L.A. misfit perceived as a failure who, through tenacity and lack of self consciousness, puts together a family of people to will their silly, awesome dreams into reality.
ED WOOD glorifies people whose work was and continues to be made fun of, arguing that the passion and personality behind these works imbues them with an artistic purity and value that they hadn’t previously been given credit for. Moore and friends work with a similar scrappily amateurish zeal, but they in fact made a hit movie that, at least in some parts, was intended to be laughed at. So the happy ending in this one is real! (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: biopic, Craig Brewer, Craig Robinson, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Eddie Murphy, Keegan-Michael Key, Kodi Smit-Mcphee, Larry Karaszewski, Mike Epps, Rudy Ray Moore, Ruth E. Carter, Scott Alexander, Tituss Burgess, Wesley Snipes
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Wednesday, July 13th, 2016
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: THANK YOU studios for continuing to make these expensive old-timey adventure character movies even though they are always financially disastrous. I for one appreciate the gesture!
Of this type of movie, Gore Verbinski’s THE LONE RANGER is far and away the most entertaining and masterful. THE LEGEND OF TARZAN is closer to the level of the last major Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, Andrew Stanton’s JOHN CARTER. It’s a little slicker than that one, but also a little more normal since it takes place on Earth with Earth type animals. Yet it’s not what I expected at all. It knows that you already know the basics about Tarzan, so it tries to walk that delicate line of giving you a different spin without sacrificing the classic Tarzan shit you expect. It also tries to capture some of the feel of stories written a hundred years ago while looking at matters of race, gender and culture with today’s eyes. And it does these things fairly successfully.
In the opening we meet Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, THE GREEN HORNET), a cruel Belgian mercenary searching for the fabled diamonds of Opar, and Mbonga (Djimon Hounsou, AMISTAD, LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE), a menacing cheetah-masked Chief willing to trade the diamonds for the capture of his greatest enemy, name-withheld-but-cut-to-the-title-THE-LEGEND-OF-TARZAN®. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: adventure, Alexander Skarsgard, Christoph Waltz, Craig Brewer, David Yates, Djimon Hounsou, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Margot Robbie, old timey adventure, Samuel L. Jackson, Tarzan
Posted in Action, Reviews | 23 Comments »
Saturday, March 10th, 2012
Enough about premaquels. How about a good old fashioned straight up remake? Kinda refreshing!
I guess I never saw the original FOOTLOOSE before, ’cause I always thought it was about a town where you’re not allowed to dance because they’re real religious. In this remake by Craig Brewer (yes, HUSTLE AND FLOW, BLACK SNAKE MOAN Craig Brewer) the ban happens in response to a great tragedy, when five promising high school teenagers are killed in a head-on collision after a dance. In other words, this movie is about the Patriot Act. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Craig Brewer, dancing, Dennis Quaid, good remakes, Kim Dickens, remakes
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Monday, March 5th, 2007
Some people might say, just because Christina Ricci spends a good third of BLACK SNAKE MOAN wearing only panties and a half shirt, chained up like a dog to control her bestial urge to fuck anything with a dick, that it’s degrading to women. Well, okay, if I put it that way. But as cool as Samuel L. Jackson’s backsliding bluesman Lazarus is, it’s Ricci’s coughing town slut Rae that you sympathize with most. The weird thing is this ends up being a sweet movie, a cute movie. Like a really subdued KILL BILL, BLACK SNAKE takes ridiculous notions that don’t have to make sense in an exploitation* picture (a man chaining up a young girl to cure her nymphomania, her forgiving him for it) but then treats the characters’ emotions so seriously that I actually start to care about them.
I’m not gonna complain about seeing Ricci half naked or the lurid pulpy advertising campaign revolving around Lazarus having her on a chain like a pet, or something worse. But honestly, swear to God, cross my eye with a needle, etc., I was excited for this movie because it’s from the writer-director of HUSTLE & FLOW. If you have to compare the two I’d say this one isn’t quite as compelling, although some would disagree due to the panties and boobs. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blues, Christina Ricci, Craig Brewer, Justin Timberlake, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Drama, Reviews | No Comments »
Monday, January 23rd, 2006
I had a good feeling about this movie from right about the time the title came on the screen. It was a shot of a pimp (Terence Howard) and a ho (Taryn Manning) driving in a car, and it freeze frames to write the title in yellow ’70s style lettering.
I always like Terence Howard but I’ve never seen him in a lead role before. He’s always the supporting role that steals the movie. Here he has a lead role that steals the movie. I haven’t seen GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN but I would be surprised if Terence Howard’s performance in this movie doesn’t run a hundred circles around his co-star in that movie, both as an actor and as a rapper. True, he does mumble alot in this movie (you almost need subtitles) but I still feel his enunciation is better than Fifty Cents. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Anderson, Craig Brewer, DJ Qualls, Elise Neal, hip hop, Isaac Hayes, pimps, Screen Actor's Guild Award Winner Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Taraji P. Henson, Terence Howard
Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »