As you can see I’m lagging behind on this summer retrospective, struggling to catch up. But it doesn’t feel like it while watching FLED, because this is the kind of mediocre movie they used to dump off in August. Perfectly competent, nothing more. A lesser work from two actors I was excited to see in anything back then. But also Stephen Baldwin.
It’s an action movie directed by Kevin Hooks, the child star turned TV director turned guy who did STRICTLY BUSINESS and PASSENGER 57, and it’s written by Preston A. Whitmore (THE WALKING DEAD [1995]). So we can at least give it credit as one of the ’90s movies by Black filmmakers that’s just allowed to be commercial and not under pressure to represent a culture or stop the violence and increase the peace or anything (even though it features Furious Styles himself).
When I saw the credit for producer Frank Mancuso Jr. (FRIDAY THE 13TH 2–7) and some flashy camera moves (cinematographer: Matthew F. Leonetti, HARD TO KILL, STRANGE DAYS) and then I heard composer Graeme Revell (THE CROW, THE CRAFT, MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE) playing DIE-HARD-type orchestral bombast over a hip hop beat on the opening credits, I wondered if maybe this was gonna be more pulpy fun than I remembered. Not really. But I can see, in retrospect, that they’re trying to do a bit of a John Woo thing with some flying through the air shooting and slow motion and vicious squibs. It was neither stylish or emotional enough to register at the time, but now it’s such a time capsule I guess I can appreciate that a little more, at least. (read the rest of this shit…)
I know prequels are always divisive, but I’m usually willing to give them a shot. When I revisited THE FLINTSTONES for my summer of ’94 retrospective, I decided it was time to finally found out how it all began. Then I waited two years. But now I have watched it.
THE FLINTSTONES IN VIVA ROCK VEGAS comes from the same director as the original, Brian Levant (PROBLEM CHILD 2), but not until six years later, with almost an entirely new cast. According to a 2024 SyFy.com article, Universal wanted to film two sequels back-to-back, but John Goodman didn’t want to do another one. Levant theorized, “I think it came down to one thing: people coming up to him in airports and going ‘Yabba-dabba-doo!’ He didn’t like it.”
So they made it a prequel about the characters entering adulthood, but oddly they didn’t cast people who look that age, so it doesn’t really feel like a good explanation for the recast. These actors are in fact younger, but I’m afraid the main difference between John Goodman at 42 and Mark Addy (JACK FROST) at 36 is not their ages. Addy does fine, and Kristen Johnston (AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME) is pretty good as Wilma (is it weird that she reminded me of Emma Stone here?). Stephen Baldwin (POSSE) is definitely not as good as Rick Moranis at playing Barney, but honestly the problem is mainly just that we know he’s Stephen Baldwin and that they let him have ‘90s hair. I can’t honestly say he’s bad in it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Do you guys know about these “Usual Suspects”? They’re this group of criminals who get rounded up one day for a line up for some crime none of them had anything to do with, and it pisses them off so much that they decide to pool their resources for a job that will get them some diamonds and humiliate the police by exposing their corruption. As a bonus it will also allow them to terrorize an uptight Paul Bartel and blow up his car. But when they go to fence the jewels they realize they’ve been pulled into this whole other thing with an infamous boogie man super-criminal who now says they owe him and have to do a job for him or their loved ones will be assaulted and killed. Or at least that’s what this lawyer Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite, INCEPTION) tells them. Or at least that’s the story that Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey, MOON, The Equalizer) tells Customs Agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri, BERRY GORDY’S THE LAST DRAGON) when he wants to know what led up to the burning ship full of dead bodies discovered last night.
Yeah, actually this movie is pretty complicated, and that’s just the basics there. There’s also the whole thing about a Hungarian burn victim survivor of the boat fire and the FBI agent (Giancarlo Esposito, DO THE RIGHT THING, The Equalizer) bringing in a translator and sketch artist before surgery to try to get him to tell what he knows about the mysterious Keyser Soze and trying to get the information to Agent Kujan in time and etc. (read the rest of this shit…)
“You talkin bout a black KKK raid on a white town? That’s crazy!”
Recently I wrote about the Mario Van Peebles movie PANTHER, and talked a little bit about that time in the ’90s after Spike Lee hit it big and other black directors were starting to get a shot. At the same time hip hop had bled into pop music, and therefore rappers were starting to appear in movies. In the few preceding years the most respected rappers had been political or pseudo-political. Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions struck revolutionary poses, and even the so-called gangsta rappers like N.W.A. and Ice-T considered themselves rebels against the establishment (mainly the police, then the politicians above them). There had been a high commodity put on “dropping science” or “reality” and/or “positivity,” consciousness was encouraged, people had temporarily traded their gold chains for Africa medallions, were interested in reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and knowing the names of the Black Panther founders and shit like that. For a time it was at least as important to act smart and enlightened as it was to be tough. And that’s why Van Peebles was able to make PANTHER and before that, in 1993, POSSE.
About six months before POSSE was released, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic came out, and it was so undeniably good that, you know, that was the end of that. But before Van Peebles knew that visions of blunts would be bouncing on hydraulics in our heads he made a western for theKnowledge Reigns Supreme era.
There’s a couple reasons why this fits into the trend. One of them is that about a quarter of the cowboys in the old west were black. TV and movies make it seem like it was a hundred white guys for every Cowboy Curtis or Lord Bowler, and Van Peebles wanted to correct that. (read the rest of this shit…)
How’s this for a pitch: it’s POINT BREAK meets DROP ZONE and TERMINAL VELOCITY! Stephen Baldwin plays an over-the-edge customs agent who, like Keanu Reeves’s FBI agent in POINT BREAK, goes undercover with a group of (non-surfing this time) skydivers who he suspects of being involved in drug smuggling. And like DROP ZONE and TERMINAL VELOCITY it’s about this whole subculture of skydivers who live like a family or a tribe with their own stupid lingo and traditions that they’re real proud of. For example “cutaway” is their term for somebody (for example a hot shot lawyer) leaving behind their previous life to just be one of these parachute gypsies for now on. And of course that takes on extra meaning for Baldwin’s character, who is here with a secret agenda that he’s gonna be tempted to cutaway from as he becomes accepted by the group. (read the rest of this shit…)
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July 19, 1996
It’s an action movie directed by Kevin Hooks, the child star turned TV director turned guy who did STRICTLY BUSINESS and PASSENGER 57, and it’s written by Preston A. Whitmore (THE WALKING DEAD [1995]). So we can at least give it credit as one of the ’90s movies by Black filmmakers that’s just allowed to be commercial and not under pressure to represent a culture or stop the violence and increase the peace or anything (even though it features Furious Styles himself).
I know prequels are always divisive, but I’m usually willing to give them a shot. When I 
“You talkin bout a black KKK raid on a white town? That’s crazy!”
How’s this for a pitch: it’s 
