Posts Tagged ‘Samuel L. Jackson’
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024
Well, my friends, it’s after Labor Day. Time to stop wearing white shoes according to Serial Mom, and time to wrap up the summer retrospective according to me. Some interesting movies that were released at the end of the summer include Richard Rush’s COLOR OF NIGHT (yet another legendarily hated movie at the time time, I thought it was kind of interestingly crazy when I watched it years later) and Roger Avary’s KILLING ZOE (which I’ve always sort of liked but never nearly as much as I wanted to), both released on the 19th. The 26th gave us another Tarantino-connected movie that was a huge deal at the time, Oliver Stone’s NATURAL BORN KILLERS.
I previously reviewed that one so thoroughly that I not only covered the movie, but the earlier script and the making of book, so I’m not going to rehash it much here. I do want to note that Oliver Stone was one of the directors most associated with boomer self analysis – rightly or wrongly, his movies were a big part of the way people my age conceived of the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination, and of course The Doors. But here in the summer of GUMP he was more interested in being contemporary, cutting edge, of-the-moment. I found the movie’s hyperactive collage style annoying at the time, but I can respect it more now, and it was obviously influential for other movies I initially and/or still find annoying like DOMINO and CRANK. His choice to recruit Trent Reznor to produce the soundtrack album proves that the movie is more Lollapalooza than Woodstock. It was also an early foray into cinema for the future Academy Award winning composer (though of course we all know he was in Paul Schrader’s LIGHT OF DAY in 1987, plus “Head Like a Hole” was in CLASS OF 1999 and PRAYER OF THE ROLLERBOYS and “Dead Souls” was in THE CROW).
This finale to the Summer of ’94 series will focus on a triptych of movies with this sort of generational torch passing as part of their plot. They are stories about young people and the lessons they learn from older mentors. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Boaz Yakin, Casey Siemaszko, Chris Conrad, Constance Towers, Ed Harris, Giancarlo Esposito, Hilary Swank, Malcolm McDowell, Melanie Griffith, Michael Cavalieri, Michael Ironside, N'Bushe Wright, Pat Morita, Richard Benjamin, Samuel L. Jackson, Sean Nelson, Walton Goggins
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Drama | 9 Comments »
Tuesday, April 25th, 2023
“THE 51ST STATE is very dear to me, because it was the first time in Hollywood that I didn’t have to deal with dolls.” –Ronny Yu, 2004
Three years after the unlikely career milestone of BRIDE OF CHUCKY, Ronny Yu made easily the weakest of his English-language films – a UK-Canada co-production called THE 51ST STATE, but we call it FORMULA 51 here so people don’t think it refers to DC statehood. (Actually I’m not totally clear what it does refer to. But the number 51 is in the name of a super-drug that’s central to the plot.)
Under any name it’s a thoroughly 2001 film, with wall-to-wall dated music (score by somebody called Headrillaz), annoying whooshes and flash cuts, character names and descriptions written on screen as they’re introduced, a long scene at a rave type dance club, and two stars – Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Carlyle – who had ridden the ‘90s indie wave to the specific level of commercial viability where they could be cast in stuff like this. It’s one of a handful of movies, along with THE NEGOTIATOR and SHAFT, that could arguably be considered a straight up Samuel L. Jackson vehicle. But even though it starts and ends with him he’s kind of a mysterious, unexplained character, while co-star Carlyle gets to have the love story and sex scene. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anna Keaveney, designer drugs, Emily Mortimer, Hang-Sang Poon, Meat Loaf, Rhys Ifans, Robert Carlyle, Ronny Yu, Samuel L. Jackson, Sean Pertwee, Stel Pavlou, Stephen Walters
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs, Crime | 11 Comments »
Tuesday, September 20th, 2022
I’ve been trying to put my finger on the specific vibe I sense in early ‘90s (pre-Tarantino) indie-cinema. We hit on the topic with GAS FOOD LODGING, RUBIN & ED and NIGHT ON EARTH (though the latter is almost too accomplished a version of it to feel like the same category). These are movies that are very different from each other in most respects, but they share a lack of interest in traditional Hollywood storytelling or narrative structure. They’re a little more like dreams, or real life, or poems, or at least meandering novellas than tightly woven tales of adventure. You’re following a story, picking up on themes, wondering what it’s building to, or what it’s saying. But often you have to face that it’s more stream-of-consciousness than that. It’s not about that. It’s more about spending some time with some odd characters, in a specific place, with a distinct tone. What you get out of the experience is up to interpretation.
My instinct is to want a tighter narrative, but there’s something appealing about movies like this too. Some freedom in letting go of any expectation that it’s gonna make itself clear.
I was thinking about it last month on my vacation/Covid isolation in Knoxville, Tennessee. My aunt-in-law showed us writer/director Tom DiCillo’s third film, BOX OF MOONLIGHT (1996), because it was filmed around there. And now, coincidentally, here I am watching his debut, JOHNNY SUEDE, in the final stretch of my summer of ’92 retrospective. It was released August 14, 1992, but DiCillo says on the DVD commentary that it played for a week and a half in New York and then a week and a half in L.A. and that’s it. Somehow we all knew about it when it was on video, though. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alison Moir, Brad Pitt, Calvin Levels, Catherine Keener, Link Wray, Nick Cave, Samuel L. Jackson, Tina Louise, Tom DiCillo
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Thursday, September 23rd, 2021
I don’t know if Maggie Q thinks of herself as an action star. She’s a good actress, and in recent years she’s been in horror movies and thrillers and on Designated Survivor, and she has a new sitcom coming soon. Maybe one of her best known roles was the title character in Nikita, where I assume she kicked a multitude of asses every week, but it’s not like anybody puts the original TV Nikita Peta Wilson or the original movie Nikita Anne Parillaud or the second movie version Bridget Fonda in a category with Jean-Claude Van Damme and those guys. They’re just actors without much association to the genre.
But I respect that Q specifically came out of Hong Kong martial arts films. She’s American, but as a young woman she worked as a model in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong, where she was discovered and trained by Jackie Chan. Some of her Hong Kong films were Benny Chan’s GEN-X COPS 2, Ching Siu Tung’s NAKED WEAPON and Daniel Lee’s Seagal-produced DRAGON SQUAD, before coming to Hollywood for cool supporting parts in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III and LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. She’s been in a bunch of stuff since then, including the DIVERGENT series. A lesser known one I thought she was cool in was PRIEST. But I kinda thought she’d moved on from that, so as an action fan I was so thrilled when I first saw the trailer for THE PROTÉGÉ and realized she not only had a legit starring role action vehicle, but one that was made to be released in theaters! And it really happened! I saw it in one!
This was a few weeks ago, many of the reviews I saw were negative, and it’s probly pretty much gone already, but it’s on VOD now and on disc soon. So I want to put in a good word for it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Maggie Q, Martin Campbell, Michael Keaton, Richard Wenk, Robert Patrick, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Action, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Monday, June 7th, 2021
June 7, 1991
JUNGLE FEVER is five films and five years into the career of Spike Lee. You have the financed-on-credit-cards debut SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, the polished studio debut SCHOOL DAZE, the explosion of DO THE RIGHT THING, the follow up MO’ BETTER BLUES, and then this. Like all of his movies it’s interesting and bold and full of greatness but in my opinion, especially in retrospect, it’s his first fumble. That’s fine. He did MALCOLM X next.
It is the story of possibly the most only-Spike-Lee-would-ever-name-a-character-this character of all time, Flipper Purify, played by Wesley Snipes, who had been in Lee’s MO’ BETTER BLUES and was coming off of the success of NEW JACK CITY. He’s an upper class architect, living in Harlem with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee, BREWSTER’S MILLIONS, ‘ROUND MIDNIGHT), and things seem to be going well from the hot morning sex that opens the movie (the sounds of which greatly amuse their daughter Ming [Veronica Timbers]). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Annabella Sciorra, Brad Dourif, Charlie Murphy, Debi Mazar, Frank Vincent, Halle Berry, John Turturro, Lonette McKee, Michael Badalucco, Michael Imperioli, Ossie Davis, Queen Latifah, Ruby Dee, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Stevie Wonder, Summer of 1991, Terence Blanchard, Tim Robbins, Tyra Ferrell, Veronica Webb, Wesley Snipes
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 21 Comments »
Wednesday, July 10th, 2019
SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME continues the charming “teen comedy, but in the Marvel Universe” vibe of 2017’s SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING, but instead of situating it on the outskirts of the MCU it’s more in the middle this time. It’s pretty much an epilogue to the whole story that culminated in AVENGERS: ENDGAME, or a bridge to the next one. It starts by making light of the fictional tragedies of that movie (a hilariously awful teen-made video tribute to fallen heroes) and pretty much addressing everything I wondered about after ENDGAME (AVENGERS that is, not HIGHLANDER) pertaining to a world where half of all teens are five years younger than their ID says.
And then it’s kind of like it should be called SPIDER-MAN IS… IRON MAN 4. Peter Parker (Tom Holland, BILLY ELLIOT THE MUSICAL LIVE) is on a school trip to Europe, and his mind is on a plan to tell M.J. (Zendaya, SUPER BUDDIES) he has a crush on her, though she seems to be spending her time with Brad (Remy Hii, CRAZY RICH ASIANS), who is somebody’s little brother who grew big and handsome while the rest of them were dusted. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Angourie Rice, Cobie Smulders, J.B. Smoove, Jacob Batalon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jon Favreau, Jon Watts, Marisa Tomei, Martin Starr, Marvel Comics, Numan Acar, Remy Hii, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Holland, Tony Revolori, Zendaya
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 168 Comments »
Wednesday, March 13th, 2019
Marvel has been on a roll for a while now. I guess it’s inevitable that when you release extra colorful and ambitious movies like GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2, SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING, THOR: RAGNAROK, BLACK PANTHER, and AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR all within two or three years then some of the other stuff you put out is gonna seem less impressive. Like, DOCTOR STRANGE was pretty good fun and ANT-MAN AND THE WASP has plenty of laughs and now we have CAPTAIN MARVEL, a perfectly fine movie I enjoyed watching similar to how I enjoyed watching the first THOR. Like that one it’s a pretty cool, well-cast new character who comes to our world from sort of an iffy fantastical one, has some pretty cool, sometimes funny fish-out-of-water interactions with humans, and fights some bad guys from her world in a small town without many people around.
Not bad, but how are you gonna get ’em back on THOR once they’ve seen RAGNAROK? We take the cool characters for granted now and we expect better style, better jokes, better spectacle. At least that’s how I feel. It’s worth mentioning that most of the women I’ve talked to about it liked CAPTAIN MARVEL better than most of the men I’ve talked to, so there may be things we’re not appreciating. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anna Boden, Annette Bening, Ben Mendelsohn, Brie Larson, Clark Gregg, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Jude Law, Marvel Comics, Meg LeFauve, Nicole Perlman, Ryan Fleck, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 313 Comments »
Monday, January 21st, 2019
Like many of you I was a pretty big fan of M. Night Shyamalan’s UNBREAKABLE when it came out in 2000. It was a different time. One year after THE SIXTH SENSE, the idea of Shyamalan as a master of suspense was not a punchline, and quiet, sad Bruce Willis characters were fairly new territory. It had only been about a month since the very first X-MEN movie came out, and would be years before Batman began and the Marvel Cinematic Universe followed, so when we were blindsided by the opening title card of oddly useless comic book statistics
, and Samuel L. Jackson (THE SPIRIT)’s character proceeded to make grandiose generalized proclamations about the comic book mythology, it was semi-forgivable. The ads gave no hint of this, but the movie took the idea of super powers and put them in a grounded suspense thriller context that felt like a pretty new combination of flavors at the time.
Sixteen years later Shyamalan had been a laughing stock far longer than he’d been a respected auteur, and the popularity of SPLIT counted as a comeback. Though I found the “oh, this was actually a super villain origin story” ending a little anti-climactic, I thought most of the movie was effectively creepy and I was really impressed by James McAvoy’s playful turn as the many personalities of “The Horde.” And of course I enjoyed the wacko reveal at the end that it was I DON’T THINK THIS IS A SPOILER ANYMORE taking place in the same universe as UNBREAKABLE.
Now, finally, Samuel L. Jackson is… GLASS. Except he gets a “with” credit. McAvoy gets top billing, because he does the most acting, by many different meanings. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anya-Taylor Joy, Bruce, Bruce Willis, Charlayne Woodard, James McAvoy, M. Night Shyamalan, Samuel L. Jackson, Sarah Paulson, Spencer Treat Clark
Posted in Bruce, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews, Thriller | 32 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 »
Thursday, August 30th, 2018
July 29, 1998
THE NEGOTIATOR is a monument to that too-brief window of time when there were big budget Samuel L. Jackson vehicles. He’d been acclaimed in supporting roles including JUNGLE FEVER, then said that line in JURASSIC PARK, then became a superstar with PULP FICTION. I always thought it was unfair that Travolta was nominated for best actor and Jackson for supporting, but that’s mostly where he stayed. He was still kind of a sidekick in 
DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE or THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT or a scene-stealer in JACKIE BROWN. And technically even this one is a two-hander with another star, but it starts on Jackson and keeps the two separated for most of the movie so I’d put it in a rare Samuel-L.-Jackson-vehicle category along with SHAFT, THE 51st STATE and SNAKES ON A PLANE.
Also going on in the late ’90s: Kevin Spacey. Like Jackson, he was a veteran character actor who suddenly caught the world’s eye with an indelible performance in a breakout indie crime drama. And he actually won his Oscar. After SE7EN and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL he was one of the most respected dramatic actors in Hollywood.
So THE NEGOTIATOR had a pretty catchy thriller hook (hostage negotiator gets framed by crooked cops, takes hostages in a desperate ploy to find out the truth and prove his innocence), but it was definitely that heavyweight actor showdown that lured us in. Two enormously respected actors, also known for hip movies, actoring the shit off each other in a studio thriller. That had appeal back then. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Morse, F. Gary Gray, Graeme Revell, J.T. Walsh, Kevin Spacey, Michael Cudlitz, Paul Giamatti, Paul Guilfoyle, Regina Taylor, Ron Rifkin, Samuel L. Jackson, Siobhan Fallon, Summer of '98
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 17 Comments »
