Posts Tagged ‘Kadeem Hardison’
Thursday, June 6th, 2024
June 3rd, 1994
RENAISSANCE MAN is a really-not-that-bad inspirational teacher movie directed by Penny Marshall (A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN) and written by Jim Burnstein (a rookie who later did D3: THE MIGHTY DUCKS). It’s corny in the usual ways but also benefits from the simple appeal of the formula and a more-subtle-than-usual performance by Danny DeVito (ROMANCING THE STONE, THE JEWEL OF THE NILE, BATMAN RETURNS).
He plays Bill Rago, a fuck up in the world of advertising who gets fired after missing an important meeting with out-of-town VIPs. Ed Begley Jr. (last seen two weeks ago in EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES) appears briefly as his friend Jack who hired him and still cares about him but has run out of jobs for him. While defending him to the boss Jack says “the man’s had a few personal setbacks the last couple years,” and we can infer that one of them is a divorce, but I like that they never elaborate. Maybe it was some weird shit too. We don’t know. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alanna Ubach, Cliff Robertson, Danny DeVito, Ed Begley Jr., Greg Sporleder, Gregory Hines, inspirational teacher movie, Isabella Hoffmann, James Remar, Jenifer Lewis, Jim Burnstein, Kadeem Hardison, Khalil Kain, Lillo Brancato Jr., Mark Wahlberg, Penny Marshall, Peter Simmons, Richard T. Jones, Shakespeare, Stacey Dash
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 23 Comments »
Thursday, May 21st, 2020
May 10, 1985
As I might’ve told you before, I’ve got a soft spot for the hip hop movies of the ‘80s. None are exactly great films, and most are made by people who could’ve just as easily been doing one about BMX or video game competitions or something. WILD STYLE is one of the few that could be argued to genuinely come out of the hip hop culture, and I never saw that until I was older. But BREAKIN’, BREAKIN’ 2 and the more legit BEAT STREET (all released in 1984) were formative for me, softening me up for Raising Hell and Licensed to Ill to come along and change my life.
For me, enough time has passed to forgive any lacking in authenticity and enjoy these movies as time capsules of a time when exploitation filmmakers valiantly tried to straddle the zeitgeist, grab the horns of a movement they didn’t understand, and somehow wrestle it to the ground.
I must’ve known the word “rap” in ’85 – as in “a rap,” because everyone knew about “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” and I was obsessed with the Grandmaster Melle Mel song “Vice” from the Miami Vice soundtrack. But I also called it “breakdancing music.” I was learning. It might be for the best that I didn’t learn from RAPPIN’, a movie I didn’t know about back then even though it was from the same studio and director as BREAKIN’, and supposedly released as BREAKDANCE 3: ELECTRIC BOOGALEE somewhere, though I haven’t been able to find any advertising art to support that claim. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cannon Films, Eriq La Salle, hip hop, Ice-T, Joel Silberg, Kadeem Hardison, Mario Van Peebles, Pittsburgh, Summer of 1985
Posted in Music, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Thursday, April 25th, 2019
Unless you count an IMDb listing for an unreleased movie called SIRENS OF THE DEEP (2000), the final (so far) feature film directed by Steve Wang is the 1997 under-the-radar Mark Dacascos action romp DRIVE. Dacascos (ONLY THE STRONG) plays Toby Wong (a RESERVOIR DOGS reference?), reformed Chinese assassin on the run from a corporation trying to reclaim the advanced strength-and-acrobatics-enhancing implant they put in him. Attacked in a bar, he commandeers lonely divorcee Malik (Kadeem Hardison, DEF BY TEMPTATION) and his car, and the two end up becoming buddies, driving around the L.A. area trying to avoid a team of mercenaries led by redneck Vic Madison (John Pyper-Ferguson, who’s also in the Nicolas Winding-Refn movie called DRIVE) and his personal Bob the Goon, Hedgehog (Tracey Walter, CYBORG 2), who when not shooting at them hang out in a mobile home like Justified villains. Vic has long hair, wears a bolo tie and sunglasses seems too proud of his rock ‘n roll cowboy look. I was so relieved when he switched to pony tail and tactical gear. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brittany Murphy, DTV, John Pyper-Ferguson, Kadeem Hardison, Koichi Sakamoto, Mark Dacascos, Masaya Kato, Ron Yuan, Scott Phillips, Steve Wang, Tracey Walter
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 28 Comments »
Wednesday, November 21st, 2018
I don’t know why there was a Wes Craven movie that I didn’t bother to see in the theater and then didn’t bother to see on home video for over 20 years. Granted, everyone said it was terrible, and it seemed to be an Eddie Murphy comedy vehicle, not a real horror movie, and he started wearing fat suits and shit right around that time.
But these days you can’t take fresh Wes Craven movies for granted, so I decided the moment had come to watch VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN. The verdict: it’s not an unheralded gem. But it’s also not what I had pictured. It’s a mildly interesting failure.
Murphy (DOLEMITE IS MY NAME) plays Maximillian, the only survivor of a tribe of Egyptian vampire who “traveled south through Africa and over the Atlantic to a beautiful island hidden deep in the Bermuda Triangle,” where they lived for centuries before the vampire hunters found them. There’s a certain parallel to COMING TO AMERICA, because he’s this confident, exotic visitor from another culture, looking for a woman. In this case it’s a specific woman, Rita (Angela Bassett, PANTHER, BLACK PANTHER), a rookie NYPD detective who doesn’t know there are vampires, or that her dad was one, or that she’s the last descendent and only hope to revive the race. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Allen Payne, Angela Bassett, Charlie Murphy, Eddie Murphy, Joanna Cassidy, John Witherspoon, Kadeem Hardison, Simbi Khali, vampires, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 34 Comments »
Wednesday, October 10th, 2018
I remember DEF BY TEMPTATION (1990) seeming like an important indie movie at the time. Robert Townsend and then Spike Lee had created this excitement around the new black cinema in the late ’80s. This one predates Matty Rich’s STRAIGHT OUT OF BROOKLYN by a month and John Singleton’s BOYZ N THE HOOD by a year, and represents the movement extending into the horror genre half a decade before Rusty Cundieff’s TALES FROM THE HOOD.
Writer-director-producer-actor James Bond III made his low budget story of a vampire in the dating scene in New York, with Troma coming in to give him finishing funds. So Lloyd Kaufman provides an introduction with some fun trivia on the crappily transferred 20th Anniversary Edition DVD, including that he had to take over as cinematographer for one of the climactic scenes. That’s notable because the rest of the movie is, as the credits say, “shot by Ernest Dickerson,” who was definitely hot shit because he’d already done THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET, KRUSH GROOVE, SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, SCHOOL DAZE and DO THE RIGHT THING. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Nunn, Cynthia Bond, Ernest Dickerson, James Bond III, Kadeem Hardison, Melba Moore, Michael Michele, Minnie Gentry, Samuel L. Jackson, Troma, vampires
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Monday, June 29th, 2015
SCHOOL DAZE is Spike Lee’s sophomore jointational work, and was never one of my favorites from him. But man, looking back at it now I love its youthful exuberance. Here’s 30 year old Spike having access to the studio’s resources for the first time – he goes from a few actors in apartments in black and white to a huge cast on a college campus. He even has a full-on song and dance number. It’s the first example of what I think is one of his weaknesses: his overreach in tackling too many things at once, creating an unfocused and overstuffed narrative. But in this context that’s kinda charming. He’s really goin for it.
Since DO THE RIGHT THING and MALCOLM X were Lee’s most culturally recognized movies, certain white people pigeonholed him as a guy who only makes movies about white people being racist. Of course that’s not even a complete description of the content of those two movies, let alone applicable to most of his filmography. And joint #2, just like joint #1, I’m pretty sure doesn’t show a single white person in it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Art Evans, Bill Nunn, Branford Marsalis, college, Darryl Bell, Erik Dellums, fraternities, Giancarlo Esposito, James Bond III, Jasmine Guy, Kadeem Hardison, Kasi Lemmons, Laurence Fishburne, Ossie Davis, Roger Guenveur Smith, Rusty Cundieff, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Tisha Campbell, Toni Ann Johnson
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Musical, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, January 14th, 2015
PANTHER, directed by Mario Van Peebles, written by his dad Melvin Van Peebles based on his own novel, shows the formation and rise and dissolution of the Black Panther Party For Self Defense. That last part of the name is usually left off, which makes sense because it sounds a little awkward. But if they left it on it would make it a little harder to pretend they’re the Kill Whitey Committee.
This is a ’60s period piece made 20 years ago and never even released on DVD in the U.S. as far as I can tell, but it’s timely and provocative because it’s about a community that gets fed up with the shit end of the stick and tries to figure out a better way to deal with it. It opens with a boy riding his bike, taking in the sights of his Oakland neighborhood. He and an older man both watch in delight as a bus blasts by a dressed up lady at a bus stop, blowing her skirt up like Marilyn Monroe. They love that they get to see her garters, and don’t seem to notice that some racist bus driver didn’t stop to pick her up. The innocence of childhood. Nostalgic first person narration is telling us this is where it all started, so it’s a bit of a shock when that kids gets nailed by a car.
He’s not the narrator as a child, it turns out. He’s the dead kid who convinced everybody that they could no longer take “No, you don’t need a stop light at that intersection” for an answer. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Angela Bassett, Anthony Griffith, Bobby Brown, Bokeem Woodbine, Chris Rock, Chris Tucker, Courtney B. Vance, Dick Gregory, James Le Gros, Joe Don Baker, Kadeem Hardison, M. Emmet Walsh, Marcus Chong, Mario Van Peebles, Melvin Van Peebles, Michael Wincott, Robert Culp, Roger Guenveur Smith, Wesley Jonathan
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 3 Comments »
