Posts Tagged ‘Michael B. Jordan’
Wednesday, March 8th, 2023
You know I love the CREED movies and the ROCKY movies. ROCKY V is easily the weakest of all of them, and I even like that one. I don’t expect there ever to be another one as impressive as CREED, a miraculous rebirth by a brilliant director who deeply loved Stallone’s movies and evolved them into something new, so I enjoyed CREED II for what it was. I was thrilled that it brought back Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago and let us care about him the way I always wanted to. As I wrote in my review at the time, “He was a human specimen in ROCKY IV, and now he’s a human.”
CREED II is a solid sequel, but CREED III is a truly great one. It’s the directorial debut of Michael B. Jordan, and being populated only by characters from the CREED part of the series it stands more on its own, less on our nostalgia and good will. It follows the ROCKY sequel template in that it checks in with Adonis Creed (Jordan) at a new stage of his career and life, catches up with his family, introduces a new rival, and builds up a conflict that will result in a big match wrapped up in personal meaning. To his credit, Jordan also introduces a bit of stylization in the fight scenes that stands out from the others in the series. But most importantly he tells a story that genuinely has things to say about life and relationships that to me is as exciting as any of the boxing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron D. Alexander, boxing, Florian Munteanu, Jonathan Majors, Joseph Shirley, Keenan Coogler, Michael B. Jordan, Phylicia Rashad, Ryan Coogler, Tessa Thompson, Thaddeus J. Mixson, Wood Harris, Zach Baylin
Posted in Reviews, Drama, Sport | 46 Comments »
Wednesday, November 16th, 2022
BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER has so much more to live up to than just being the next Marvel movie. As the first sequel to a genuine cultural phenomenon, meeting everybody’s expectations would’ve been a high bar. Then its beloved star Chadwick Boseman died unexpectedly and the whole story was reworked to make supporting character Shuri (Letitia Wright, THE COMMUTER) the lead, while the cast and crew mourned, and also dealt with a pandemic. And they kept it on the down low how the fuck it was even gonna work; I will of course be discussing how the fuck it works, so this will be a HEAVY SPOILER review.
Luckily it was Ryan Coogler at the helm. His best movie CREED shows that he’s a not only a highly skilled filmmaker, but one capable of investing a franchise type movie with deep personal meaning. And I think he’s done about as good as anyone could have in his situation, creating a sequel that I don’t think flows as well his first one, but that builds off of it, reminds us of what we loved about it, introduces new worlds and yes, turns mourning into commercial art. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Angela Bassett, Danai Gurira, Dominique Thorne, Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong'o, Martin Freeman, Michael B. Jordan, Ruth E. Carter, Ryan Coogler, Tenoch Huerta Mejia, Winston Duke
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 59 Comments »
Wednesday, May 5th, 2021
TOM CLANCY is simply WITHOUT REMORSE is a new loosely-based-on-a-Tom-Clancy-book action movie starring Michael B. Jordan (RED TAILS) as John Kelly, the character who I guess is later played by Willem Dafoe in CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER and Liev Schreiber in THE SUM OF ALL FEARS. It was meant to be a major theatrical release, but after, you know – all this – Amazon bought it, so you gotta watch it on Prime. But you should do that if you can. This is a good one.
I am absolutely not a Tom Clancy guy, not even in movie form. One reason this is more my shit: less military hardware. It’s a more Seagal-ian premise: Navy SEAL’s wife is murdered, he goes out to avenge those responsible whether the agency will help him or not. In the book I guess that meant he killed a bunch of drug dealers, here it’s reimagined as a conspiracy related to a mission he went on, and I think it makes a statement against nationalism and even militarism. Kelly is very matter-of-fact about the violence upon his family being an extension of the violence he committed for the government. Of course, the film’s main objective is just to work as a military thriller, but it also seems cognizant that this stuff shouldn’t be thoughtlessly glorified, and I appreciate that. (Maybe it should be called NOT WITHOUT SOME REMORSE.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: arthouse badass, Cam Gigandet, Guy Pearce, Jamie Bell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Lauren London, Michael B. Jordan, Stefano Sollima, Taylor Sheridan, Tom Clancy
Posted in Action, Reviews | 29 Comments »
Monday, November 26th, 2018
CREED was a perfect movie, a miracle that unexpectedly resurrected the ROCKY series. CREED II, coming from a different director and writers, cannot match it. But it’s a solid continuation of beloved characters from both the original series and the new one that brings them to new places in life, with some boxing, training montages and dramatic music in between. Kinda like ROCKY II.
And of course there are other parallels. Adonis (Michael B. Jordan, RED TAILS) becoming champ, getting married and becoming a father, and also being embarrassed to be seen by the media while coming out of the hospital all beat up. But he doesn’t get a tiger jacket, so it’s not a remake of ROCKY II. Mostly it’s a direct sequel to CREED and ROCKY IV.
Before they ever even announced a CREED II, you and I and everybody else were dreaming of the same thing: a sequel where Adonis meets the man who killed his father in the ring, Ivan Drago, and has to fight his son. It’s one of those things that’s so obvious that they sort of had to do it. If the sequel was about anything else, no matter how exciting, you’d just think “Yeah, but why not Ivan Drago?” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: boxing, Dolph Lundgren, Floyd Munteanu, Ludwig Goransson, Michael B. Jordan, Phylicia Rashad, Russell Hornsby, Steven Caple Jr., Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Wood Harris
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Sport | 81 Comments »
Monday, February 19th, 2018
(SPOILERS)
BLACK PANTHER is the first Marvel movie I was anticipating mainly because of the director. FRUITVALE STATION was very good, but of course it was CREED that made me think Ryan Coogler is one of the most promising young directors we have. Best and most miraculous movie of 2015 that didn’t star Charlize Theron with a robot arm. I’d be up for whatever Coogler wanted to do next, but this seemed like a particularly good match for him after CREED’s mix of moving personal drama, immaculate filmatistic style and 21st century pop mythmaking.
#2 reason: Chadwick Boseman. The guy playing the title character shot to the top of my most exciting actors list when I saw his incredible performance as James Brown in GET ON UP. I didn’t know how anybody could pull off playing The Godfather and here is this actor I barely heard of before transforming himself into crazy old man James Brown, young James Brown, all kinds of James Browns. And dancing and strutting and grunting and referring to himself in the third person and pulling it off. He didn’t get all that much acclaim for it, definitely not any awards – somehow he got to skip that step before becoming a super hero.
If you want to call him that. T’Challa isn’t a vigilante or anything, he’s the King of Wakanda, a culture where part of the job is getting supernatural strength and wearing a panther costume to defend the kingdom. It’s like if the president also had to be Superman. What’s cool about this is that Black Panther has to think about things none of his peers do. He has to be a symbol much like Captain America, but with the responsibilities that Thor skipped out of when he turned down the throne. Here he’s challenged to not only defend his rule from a dangerous usurper, but convince his people to shift the direction of the country in order to make a better world. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andy Serkis, Angela Bassett, Chadwick Boseman, Danai Gurira, Daniel Kaluuya, Forest Whitaker, Isaach De Bankolé, Joe Robert Cole, Kendrick Lamar, Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong'o, Marrese Crump, Martin Freeman, Marvel Comics, Michael B. Jordan, Ruth E. Carter, Ryan Coogler, Sterling K. Brown, Winston Duke
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 116 Comments »
Wednesday, August 10th, 2016
What you gotta do with some of these movies, you gotta wait a year, so it’s after it already came out and the director publicly disowned it and it flopped and everyone said it was a piece of shit and dissected how the studio reshoots ruined or failed to save it. That’s what I did and then FANTASTIC FOUR didn’t seem as bad. I’d go so far as to say I kind of enjoyed watching it.
The opening threatens to be GREEN LANTERN, with its kid versions of two of the four. But it’s okay, it just establishes that Reed Richards (Miles Teller, FOOTLOOSE) is a genius inventor prodigy and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell, SNOWPIERCER) is his working class buddy who helps. When their high school science project actually warps matter to another dimension, Reed gets a scholarship to The Baxter Institute, where Sue Storm (Kate Mara, TRANSSIBERIAN) and her dad Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey, THE MACHINIST) plus grouchy ex-student Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell, DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES) are working on a similar project. With Baxter’s son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan, CREED) taking Ben’s assistant role, they build a dimensional portal to be used by NASA.
That’s when they make a poor decision: they get drunk and call Ben and try the thing out themselves. (Not “The Thing.” The dimensional portal thing.) That’s pretty original, actually. I believe Ultron is the only other comic book movie character with a scientists-had-a-few-too-many-beers origin. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Jamie Bell, Josh Trank, Kate Mara, Marvel Comics, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller, Reg E. Cathey, Simon Kinberg, Toby Kebbell
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 37 Comments »
Wednesday, February 17th, 2016
A great historical epic could be made about the Tuskegee airmen, the all black squadron of American fighter pilots in WWII. That’s what George Lucas thought back in ’88 when he started developing RED TAILS. He put together a script that he compared to LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (or NED OF ARABIA to Young Indiana Jones), a three-parter about their training, then their heroic battles, and then coming home to a racist country and Jim Crow laws that don’t give a shit that they’re heroes.
Eventually he decided that was too much for one movie and, like with STAR WARS, chose the middle chapter to focus on. But he also decided that he didn’t want it to be serious grown up drama. He thought it could be a fun movie for black teenagers. It’s an approach he had trouble selling to director Anthony Hemingway (The Wire), but even more to critics, who rejected the movie wholesale, often with some shaming about the movie they thought it should’ve been. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron McGruder, Andre Royo, Anthony Hemingway, Bryan Cranston, Cuba Gooding Jr., David Oyelowo, Elijah Kelley, George Lucas, John Ridley, Lucas Minus Star Wars, Method Man, Michael B. Jordan, Nate Parker, Ne-Yo, Terrence Howard, Tristan Wilds, WWII
Posted in Action, Reviews, War | 6 Comments »
Monday, November 30th, 2015
The world is hard and shitty sometimes, but also sometimes it’s beautiful, and with some luck, some talent and some very hard work, unlikely things can happen. For example, what are the chances that director Ryan Coogler, after his true story police shooting drama FRUITVALE STATION won awards at Sundance and Cannes, would want to use his window of opportunity to pitch a movie about Apollo Creed’s son? And then what are the chances he’d convince Sylvester Stallone to play Rocky Balboa in it and a studio to make it? And finally what are the chances that it would both honor the history of the ROCKY movies and chart its own path to be something new? I don’t know what the odds are, but CREED beat ’em.
Michael B. Jordan (who also starred in FRUITVALE) plays Adonis “Donnie” Johnson who, as an orphaned teenager in and out of group homes, discovered he was the son of the most famous boxer in the world. Moving to the Creed mansion with his father’s wife Mary Anne (now played by Phylicia Rashad instead of Lavelle Roby or Sylvia Meals) takes his life straight from ROCKY to ROCKY III. Hungry to comfortable. As an adult he’s successful in a corporate job, but sneaks off to Tijuana for small time fights.
At his dad’s home gym Delphi in Los Angeles (who must’ve inherited some money from him if that’s supposed to be the same gym from III) nobody will train Adonis. It may be at Mrs. Creed’s request or maybe they just don’t believe in him, but they think it’s too dangerous. His father died in the ring. I love how much of this film’s drama comes specifically from what happened in the most ridiculous sequel. Maybe this will redeem IV for those who think it ruined the series by removing Apollo from it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Maryse Alberti, Michael B. Jordan, Ryan Coogler, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Sport | 91 Comments »
Monday, June 18th, 2012
Yeah, CHRONICLE. I just shouldn’t watch these found footage movies, I guess. It doesn’t matter how good they are for their genre, I always think they pale in comparison to actual movies. But technically this isn’t a found footage movie, because they never claim that anybody found the footage, and they sometimes switch POVs from the one character’s camera to another character’s, or to security cameras. So it’s a footage movie.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: another fucking found footage movie, Dane DeHaan, fake Seattle, Michael B. Jordan
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 52 Comments »
