Posts Tagged ‘Jada Pinkett Smith’
Tuesday, April 30th, 2024
April 22, 1994
When we first met director Matty Rich (in my summer of ’91 retrospective) he was the 19 year old who made STRAIGHT OUT OF BROOKLYN on $450K of credit card debt and donations, and won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature over fellow nominees Wendell B. Harris Jr., Todd Haynes, Michael Tolkin and Richard Linklater. By 1992 he was name-dropped in Ice Cube’s “Who Got the Camera”,” in which Cube has a run-in with cops and says “I’m looking for John, Matty or Spike Lee.”
And in 1994, when he was still only 22, he made his big sophomore followup THE INKWELL, an $8 million movie distributed by Buena Vista Pictures. That’s a bigger budget than SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, SCHOOL DAZE or BOYZ N THE HOOD, but smaller than POETIC JUSTICE. John and Matty (considered gen-xers since they were born in 1968 and 1971) were the new younger guys coming in after the success of Spike Lee (who, like Robert Townsend and Mario Van Peebles, was born in 1957). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adrienne-Joi Johnson, Bicentennial, Duane Martin, Glynn Turman, Jada Pinkett Smith, Joe Morton, Larenz Tate, Mary Alice, Matty Rich, Morris Chestnut, Paris Qualles, Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, Suzzanne Douglass, Trey Ellis, Vanessa Bell Calloway
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Drama | 13 Comments »
Wednesday, December 29th, 2021
“I’m sorry. How could I know this would happen?”
“We didn’t understand all of it back then. No more than we do now.”
(you have entered THE SPOILERTRIX)
When I saw the first trailer for THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS, it wasn’t what I expected. That is to say that it seemed like the sort of thing you would expect from a normal 2020s “legacy sequel” to an old series: bringing back some of the original stars, addressing that they are older now, stripping away some of the excesses of previous sequels, visually and otherwise referencing famous scenes specifically from the first movie. Which is all fine and good, but I figured they must be hiding something, because I didn’t believe Lana Wachowski (working without Lilly, who wanted to take time away from the industry) would come back to THE MATRIX after 18 years just to do something normal. I was betting on her having come up with some weird approach that even if I didn’t like it very much I would respect, as was the case with CLOUD ATLAS and JUPITER ASCENDING.
RESURRECTIONS might be the most accessible movie a Wachowski has made since the original MATRIX, but I don’t think I was wrong. This is a filmmaker making the movie she wants to and not what she thinks anyone else wants, therefore ending up with something no one else would’ve made. And I’m happy to say that I more than respected it. I kind of loved it. Though I wasn’t sure at first. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Caldwell, Carrie-Anne Moss, Chad Stahelski, Christina Ricci, Daniele Massaccesi, Erendira Ibarra, Jada Pinkett Smith, Jessica Henwick, John Toll, Jonathan Eusebio, Jonathan Groff, Joshua Grothe, Keanue Reeves, meta, Neil Patrick Harris, Scott Rogers, Tiger Hu Chen, video games, Wachowskis, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II
Posted in Action, Reviews, Romance, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 68 Comments »
Wednesday, December 15th, 2021
THE MATRIX RELOADED may have been the most highly anticipated but immediately rejected sequel of my lifetime. I’m not just excluding PHANTOM MENACE for being a prequel – whatever happened in the rest of the world, I honestly didn’t experience many people hating it until months later, at least. With RELOADED it was pretty instant.
It was the only MATRIX movie I reviewed upon release, so you can click here to see my kinda dumb, mostly still applicable 2003 thoughts on the matter. I seemed to be fielding a backlash against the original MATRIX movie as well as people hating RELOADED, but it was only the latter I found myself feeling I had to defend over the years.
I do think I partly understand why people were disappointed. THE MATRIX ends on a perfect note of letting us imagine what’s next in the “world where anything is possible.” Any definitive answer of what happens next has a hard time competing with the electric feeling of not knowing. Especially when part 1 was a carefully constructed machine of concept, explanation and payoff, while part 2 kind of wanders through a labyrinth of tangential notions and questions before it gets to the battle it’s been promising. And it cuts off in a cliffhanger well before said battle. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Zerbe, Carrie-Anne Moss, Cornel West, Daniel Bernhardt, Gina Torres, Gloria Foster, Harold Perrineau, Harry Lennix, Helmut Bakaitis, Hugo Weaving, Ian Bliss, Jada Pinkett Smith, Keanu Reeves, Lambert Wilson, Laurence Fishburne, Monica Belluci, Nathaniel Lees, Nona Gaye, Randall Duk Kim, Tiger Hu Chen, Wachowskis, Yuen Woo-Ping
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 31 Comments »
Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019
If you enjoy the HAS FALLEN saga, now in its third chapter, you don’t need to read me disrespecting it in this review. I have no quarrel with you. But as much as I appreciate the existence of any ongoing theatrically released rated-R action series in this day and age, I have never achieved a worthwhile level of enjoyment from these fucking things.
What I remember from the first one, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, is that the action was messy enough to inspire me to invent the action comprehensibility rating (ACR) system, but there was one part where Melissa Leo defiantly recited the Pledge of Allegiance to terrorists about to execute her, and I liked that. What I remember about the second one, LONDON HAS FALLEN, is that the action scene that people claim was good made no impression on me and I was disgusted by its moronic jingoism and casual murder of civilians (which some tried to convince me was supposed to be sarcastic, but I couldn’t see it).
The first two were location-based premises (the White House is attacked, London is attacked), this one makes the fair assumption that if we’re still watching these we’re okay just following legendarily amazing Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler, DRACULA 2000) whether he goes to a new city that gets attacked or not. “ANGEL” refers to him, a “guardian angel” who has “fallen” by being blamed for an attempted assassination of the president and having to go on one of those old fashioned fugitive runs to prove his innocence. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Gerard Butler, Jada Pinkett Smith, Lance Reddick, Morgan Freeman, Nick Nolte, Piper Perabo, Ric Roman Waugh, Robert Mark Kamen, Tim Blake Nelson
Posted in Action, Reviews | 49 Comments »
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2015
MAGIC MIKE XXL is a movie about a group of musclebound dudes going on a road trip together to enter a big competition. Along the way they pick up girls, get drunk, get high, meet new friends, reunite with old ones, repair old wounds, learn lessons, fall in love, get laid, confess vulnerabilities, get in a wreck, go to a hospital, all the things you would expect. And yet it feels one-of-a-kind in its attitude.
Like the first MAGIC MIKE this stars and was produced by Channing Tatum, inspired by his past as a “male entertainer,” or stripper, and written by his friend Reid Carolin. People don’t seem to remember this, but Tatum was kind of the co-lead of that first movie, trying to get out of the game while showing the ropes to The Kid (Alex Pettyfur), who ends up becoming a drug addict, turning the fun times into a cautionary bummer. I liked the movie but the sequel is significantly better for ditching The Kid and focusing on Mike taking a vacation from his designer furniture company to get in a food truck with the boys and take One Last Ride to Myrtle Beach.
The team is no longer led by Matthew McConaughey as Dallas. That sounded like a problem when the news first got out, but it’s actually an asset. With his character no longer there to absorb all your attention the movie gives way more shine to the other dancers, especially Joe Manganiello (SABOTAGE) as the towering, abrasive but large-hearted doofus Big Dick Richie, and Matt Bomer as the eyebrow plucking pretty boy Ken, who reveals a funny New Agey side. Like all of their eccentricities they tease him about it but also accept it. True friendship. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Rodriguez, Amber Heard, Andie MacDowell, Channing Tatum, Donald Glover, Elizabeth Banks, Gabriel Iglesias, Greg Jacobs, Jada Pinkett Smith, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, Matt Bomer, road trip, Stephen "Twitch" Boss, Steven Soderbergh, strippers
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 24 Comments »
Monday, October 5th, 2015
SCREAM 2 is a slasher sequel that had a rare level of difficulty. The fringe nature of the subgenre normally allows part 2s some leeway as exploitational cash grabs, making room for everything from an okay continuation (HALLOWEEN II) to an experimental misstep (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE) to a perfection of the formula (FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2) to a re-inventing masterpiece-in-its-own-right (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2). But SCREAM was such a mainstream smash hit, and it created such a new interest in horror among non-horror people, that it had different expectations to live up to.
Also, its horror-movie-where-the-characters-know-about-horror-movies gimmick positioned it as sort of above horror movies, so they couldn’t get away with a normal sequel, they had to also say something about sequels. At the same time, it couldn’t really follow the template of the sequels it was supposed to be commenting on because it’s a series where the bad guys die and the good guys come back in sequels, so it’s a totally different type of story from most popular slashers.
As if all that wasn’t a tall enough hurdle to jump over, this was maybe the first movie production to get screwed by internet spoilers. A first draft of the script got leaked online, so they changed the twist ending during filming. (I bet Elise Neal was bummed she didn’t get to do her killer reveal speech.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Elise Neal, Jada Pinkett Smith, Jamie Kennedy, Jerry O'Connell, Kevin Williamson, Laurie Metcalf, Liev Schrieber, meta-slashers, Neve Campbell, Omar Epps, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Timothy Olyphant, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 64 Comments »
Thursday, August 20th, 2015
MENACE II SOCIETY is generally considered the best and most hardcore of the ’90s “hood movies.” BOYZ N THE HOOD (released almost 2 years earlier) was already controversial and blamed for violence near theaters despite its unmistakable Increase the Peace preachiness. Now here comes this lower budget movie with more violence, more anti-social behavior, more expectation of the audience to know right from wrong, and no Huxtable sweaters, football or Stanley Clarke fusion to help the medicine go down. The “nice kid” in this one is a drug dealer who, when he gets a call from a girl telling him she’s pregnant with his baby, says “Look, I ain’t got time for this. Peace.”
It’s narrated by that kid from Watts, Caine (Tyrin Turner, PANTHER), telling the story of his summer after graduating from high school. It starts with him and his friend O-Dog (Larenz Tate, WAIST DEEP) going into a mini-mart for 40s and getting into an argument with the Asian couple who run it (June Kyoto Lu [who was in CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER!] and Toshi Toda [LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA]). Caine and O-Dog are being jerks, opening the bottles before paying for them, even though they’re under 21 and oughta be grateful that these people are gonna sell it to them in the first place. Caine is kinda laughing it off but then fuckin O-Dog decides to shoot and kill the couple. He takes the security tape and spends the summer showing it to all his buddies like it’s a funny Jackass video or something.
This shows you the relationship between these two. Caine knows it’s stupid to be showing it to people, and he complains about it every time, but he never makes him stop. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charles S. Dutton, Glenn Plummer, Hughes Brothers, Jada Pinkett Smith, June Kyoto Lu, Khandi Alexander, Larenz Tate, Saafir, Samuel L. Jackson, Toshi Toda, Tyger Williams, Tyrin Turner, Vonte Sweet, Yo-Yo
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 23 Comments »
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…)
Tags: Blair Underwood, Dr. Dre, F. Gary Gray, Jada Pinkett Smith, John C. McGinley, Kimberly Elise, Queen Latifah, Thomas Jefferson Byrd, Vivica A. Fox, WC
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 29 Comments »
Monday, October 11th, 2010
Well boils and ghouls, I’m glad I took a stab at reviewing THE PHANTOM recently and got you squealing about Billy Zane, because you were dead right to recommend this movie in the, uh, corpse-ments. (the comments is what I mean. I’m not sure that one works.) This movie is an absolute scream! Sometimes my throat gets really dry and I can’t stop coffin. something about rigor mortis, etc.
TALES FROM THE CRYPT PRESENTS: DEMON KNIGHT is another enjoyable studio B-movie of the ’90s that held up better than I thought it would. Directed by Ernest Dickerson (cinematographer of DO THE RIGHT THING, director of BONES, and that about sums him up) it’s a pulpy supernatural hotel-siege tale with a game Billy Zane as the (SPOILER) demon that the knight fights with. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy Zane, CCH Pounder, Charles Fleischer, Dick Miller, Ernest Dickerson, Jada Pinkett Smith, Thomas Haden Church, William Sadler
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 64 Comments »
Saturday, May 24th, 2003
This might bother some of you but I just want to say it up front: put me in the camp of people who say the original MATRIX really is “the shit” as the kids say when they mean that it is not shit but actually the opposite of shit, which is I guess in this case THE MATRIX. Because what these boys the Wachowski Brothers did was an extremely well executed twilight zone concept for the post William Gibson days which also happened to be the perfect vehicle to combine over the top Hong Kong martial arts traditions with american actors and computer effects AND an appropriate metaphor for our times.
I love the idea that somebody like Jackie Chan or Michael Jordan who has extraordinary physical skills could actually just be a smart dude who figured out loopholes in the laws of reality. If you can understand the program well enough you can cheat and do things that a person isn’t supposed to be able to do. In the old shaw brothers movies it was just magic or shaolin wisdom but here we put those same spectacular moves in a sci-fi context and we get a whole different spin where even some jackass like Keanu Reeves can fly through the air and be so convincing that most of American can watch him as the iconic badass Neo and not even think of him as Keanu anymore. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Carrie-Anne Moss, Harold Perrineau, Harry Lennix, Hugo Weaving, Jada Pinkett Smith, Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Monica Bellucci, Randall Duk Kim, Wachowskis
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 13 Comments »
