Posts Tagged ‘Whoopi Goldberg’
Thursday, August 22nd, 2024
August 12, 1994
CORRINA, CORRINA is a nice comedy-drama that deals with grief, love and some heavy race and class issues in a very light, warm-hearted sort of way. Is that bad? We can talk about it later.
Manny Singer (Ray Liotta between NO ESCAPE and OPERATION DUMBO DROP) is a recently widowed jingle writer in suburban Los Angeles, 1959. His 9-year-old daughter Molly (Tina Majorino, also in the seal movie ANDRE this summer – sorry, I had to skip a few things) is so not-over-it she refuses to speak, but he’s gonna be screwed if he doesn’t return to work, so he looks for a housekeeper/nanny to stay home with her. After some misfires he ends up with Corrina Washington (Whoopi Goldberg, also in THE LION KING and [briefly] THE LITTLE RASCALS this summer), who seems cynical at first but of course forms an adorable bond with the kid.
In 1994 I wasn’t interested in things this cutesy, and never considered watching it. Now I’m a middle-aged cornball, so I found it moving to see Whoopi turn that little girl’s cartoonish pout into a giggle. Majorino has a pitch perfect deadpan for the non-speaking portions and then a timid little mouse voice when she does talk (spoiler). She breaks your heart when she lays in the grass with her dead mom’s dress laid out next to her, one hand in its pocket, or when Manny lies to a deliveryman that Mrs. Singer is in the bath tub and she lights up and runs to the bathroom to see her. Damn, Manny. What a fuck up. So then you’re primed for the opposite emotion when she notices her dad slipping and referring to Corrina as “your mother” and she doesn’t point it out but breaks into a huge, toothy grin. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brent Spiner, Bruce Surtrees, Courtland Mead, Don Ameche, Erica Yohn, Jessie Nelson, Joan Cusack, Larry Miller, Lin Shaye, Patrika Darbo, Ray Liotta, Steven Williams, Tina Majorino, Wendy Crewson, Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Romance | 2 Comments »
Monday, August 12th, 2024
August 5th, 1994
My friends, I hope you know me well enough to understand that I’m being sincere here, I’m not trying to show off with a wild take. The truth is I recently watched and enjoyed the movie THE LITTLE RASCALS. It kind of rules.
This was not an outcome I expected, or even considered. For the 30 years this movie has existed I’ve scoffed at it, assumed it was crap. Yes, it comes from director Penelope Spheeris, she of excellent punk rock documentaries. But I’m gonna have to pull out the Shaquille O’Neal “I wasn’t familiar with your game” quote here. I wasn’t showing the proper respect. I had some idea she lost it after WAYNE’S WORLD, because I thought BLACK SHEEP was kinda cheesy and all the rest seemed like things I wouldn’t like. I assumed this was some pablum for kids from an era where pablum for kids was extra bad. (See: 3 NINJAS KICK BACK.)
But here I am trying to watch most of the major movies of summer ’94, it was about the only situation where I was gonna give THE LITTLE RASCALS a shot, and almost immediately I realized I was probly gonna like it. It’s silly, it’s for kids, it might creep some people out by having children woo each other like they’re Popeye and Olive. But it made me laugh a whole bunch, it’s daring in the way it straight up does old Hal Roach shit and doesn’t try to conform to ‘90s expectations, it actually makes sense as part of the Spheeris filmography, and (most surprising to me) it’s artfully crafted. I guess mostly in the way that she could piece together a sensible movie with 95% of the cast being 5-7 year old non-actors, but also it’s a great looking movie! Credit to the transfer, which has a good level of film grain. I did not expect to watch THE LITTLE RASCALS 1994 and think “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore!” But here we are.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amblin, Bug Hall, Chris Pederson, Courtland Mead, Daryl Hannah, Eric Edwards, Flea, George Wendt, Lea Thompson, Mel Brooks, Penelope Spheeris, punk, Reba McEntire, Roger Corman, Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Family | 21 Comments »
Thursday, December 1st, 2022
Here’s a story I may or may not have told before. It takes place on February 28, 2001. A few minutes before 11 am there was a 6.8 earthquake epicentered in the southern Puget Sound. I was at work and I saw some shelves wobble and a few things fall down, but nothing serious. Downtown there was some damage – some vehicles got crushed by falling bricks, and I remember a couple clubs where bands used to play in Pioneer Square (OK Hotel and Fenix Underground) were wrecked enough they went out of business. I called my roommate at home to make sure none of my stuff broke, and he made fun of me.
After work I went to Pacific Place to see this movie MONKEYBONE. All the advertising looked cheesy, but I was hoping it might be interesting because it was from Henry Selick, the director of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Unfortunately the advertising was pretty accurate. I remember a couple times during the movie something playing on a bordering screen made a loud rumble that vibrated the whole row I was sitting in. I thought about the three escalators I took up through the mall to get to the theater, and the fourth escalator inside the theater that goes up to the floor where this one was showing, and I thought, “That’s an aftershock, and the building is gonna collapse, and I’m gonna die watching fucking MONKEYBONE.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bob Odenkirk, Brendan Fraser, Bridget Fonda, Chris Columbus, Chris Kattan, Dave Foley, Doug Jones, Giancarlo Esposito, Harper Roisman, Henry Selick, John Turturro, Lisa Zane, Mark Ryden, Megan Mullally, Sam Hamm, Sandra Thigpen, stop motion animation, Thomas Haden Church, Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Fantasy/Swords | 21 Comments »
Friday, June 24th, 2022
SISTER ACT was released on May 29, 1992 and is of course the Golden Globe nominated feel-good fish-out-of-water comedy smash hit starring Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in THE PLAYER) as a lounge singer who witnesses a murder is put into witness protection pretending to be a nun in a convent and then ends up leading and reworking their choir. It’s not the type of movie I usually review, and I don’t really know how to dig as deep into it as I do on some of these, but I want to write about it if only to make this point: this, the most mainstream middle-of-the-road normal movie in this summer of ’92 retrospective so far, has kind of the same story as the (no pun intended) most alienating one, ALIEN 3, which came out the week before.
Think about it. Deloris is trying to escape from an unpleasant situation (dating mobster Vince LaRocca [Harvey Keitel in the same year as RESERVOIR DOGS and BAD LIEUTENANT]) when catastrophe forces her to seek shelter and live primitively within a tight knit community of same-gendered (female in this case) devout Christians. She’s made to look like them (wearing a nun’s habit rather than having her head shaven) and is unwelcome to some, particularly the person in charge (the Reverend Mother [Maggie Smith between HOOK and THE SECRET GARDEN] rather than the warden). But she ends up using her unique skills to lead them all in accomplishing the seemingly impossible (in this case making their choir sing well rather than killing a xenomorph without weapons). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Greenberg, Bill Nun, Carrie Fisher, Emile Ardolino, Harvey Keitel, Kathy Najimy, Maggie Smith, Nancy Meyers, Paul Rudnick, Reno, Robert Harling, Wendy Makkena, Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010
HOUSE PARTY 2 has that typical sequel problem: holy shit, the first time we were just doing what we wanted to do, now we gotta live up to people’s expectations. So in the beginning they kinda redo the beginning of the first one. It’s another fog machined dream of people dancing, but this time they got recent Academy Award winner Whoopi Goldberg to do a cameo as an evil professor. And there’s lightning and stuff. Spooky.
They also had a less typical sequel problem: holy shit, the best part of part 1 died right after it came out. So they dedicate the movie to Robin Harris, have Kid say a little prayer to Pop, have photos of him around that sometimes come to life in brief clips from part 1. At the very beginning of the movie Kid says, “About that party – you were right to whoop my ass,” referring to the beating he was about to get as the credits rolled. Weird that that’s what his mind jumps to when he remembers his dad. Only way I can explain it is either Kid knows he’s in a movie about that house party, or Pop died while administering that beating.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: hip hop, Kid 'n Play, Martin Lawrence, Queen Latifah, Tisha Campbell, Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 69 Comments »
Saturday, July 17th, 2004
See, the few of you out there who read this shit, you say I should write these things more often. And I like to write them, to get all this out of my system, but at the same time I feel like a broken record. (For you kids, a record is a large black double sided CD used for hip hop scratching, and when it is “broken” or badly scratched it plays the same part over and over. That’s what it means, saying the same thing over and over, it’s an analogy.) Because it’s always the same themes, just the details are different.
I just looked a few columns back, and I was complaining about how ludicrous it is that, with all the blood on the hands of the Bush administration (and let’s be honest, it’s not just on the hands anymore, these fuckers are dipped head to toe like the dance club vampires at the beginning of BLADE), that the media matrix would really try to convince us that we should set that all aside, get over it, and focus our outrage on JANET JACKSON’S NAKED TITTY and THE NIGHTMARISH HORROR OF TWO MEN WHO LOVE EACH OTHER HOLDING HANDS. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Vern Tells It Like It Is | 1 Comment »
