"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Laurence Fishburne’

Deep Cover

Thursday, June 10th, 2004

This one’s from ’92 and I guess it’s most famous as the movie that introduced the world to Snoop Dogg. Not as an actor, but the young Snoop is “introduced” on a Dr. Dre song that plays on a stereo in the movie and then on the end credits. But this is a pretty good one, a serious undercover cop movie directed by Bill Duke, made memorable by a great performance by Mr. Laurence Fishburne.

Laurence plays one of those straightlaced cops whose dad was a junkie shot in front of his eyes and ever since he’s walked the straight path, stayed 110% clean and fought to clean up his community, stop the drugs, etc. Against his better judgment he signs up to become an undercover cop, working for a sleazy white fuck, looking the other way when people are murdered and selling drugs to kids and pregnant mothers – all because of the carrot at the end of the stick, the chance to bust a guy near the top of the pyramid bringing drugs into the country. But not the guy at the very top, a politician, because that guy’s off limits. (read the rest of this shit…)

Mystic River

Sunday, January 18th, 2004

When I saw the first trailer for MYSTIC RIVER I practically flipped out. I guess not like one of those “geek-gasms” my bud Harold Knowles talks about but more like getting goose-shivers or the hair standing up on your balls or whatever the saying is. I already knew it had cleaned up at the Whatsisdick Film Festival over there in wherever it was, and that it was directed by my man Clint, who actually did the narration for this trailer. There was no scenes from the movie, just a helicopter shot of the town with the narration and then the credits start telling me, okay: Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney… and then it says, “A Film by Clint Eastwood.” It gives you no clue what it’s about really, just shows you the setting and tells you the players and figures that if that’s not enough for you then you must be an asshole. “That’s all I need to know,” I said, but really I already knew more – that it was written by oscar winner Brian Helgeland, director of outlaw award winner PAYBACK. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Matrix Reloaded

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…)

Osmosis Jones

Friday, August 10th, 2001

This here is one of these live action/cartoon action combos. The live action portion is a story about Bill Murray gets sick from eating a dirty egg. The cartoons is represented by a story about a white blood cell cop (with the voice of Chris Rock) who teams up with Buzz Lightyear to fight off a virus in a city inside Bill Murray.

This is one of those clever ideas where it woulda took a normal person about five minutes to realize that wait a minute, this ain’t clever enough for hundreds of people to spend a year of their lives working on it. And it DEFINITELY ain’t clever enough for millions of innocents to sit through for 90 minutes. But the people of Warner Brothers Studio, Hollywood USA, they are not normal people. So they spent millions on this loser of an idea.

Okay, so the stomach is an airport, and the mouth is kind of like the docks, and viruses are criminals, and a flu shot is an informant, etc. They put some good thought into figuring out all this cleverness but then how are we supposed to invest ourselves in the characters of a cell and a pill? You have to because there’s not much humor in the cartoon parts except for puns like on the flinstones, except instead of having to do with rocks they have to do with bodily functions. Like the mayor is named Mayor Phlegming, etc. (read the rest of this shit…)