BIG IDEAS

Went to see Michael Jackson “This is It” this weekend. More on that some other time. But Precious was showing at the same theater, as was Disney’s “A Christmas Carol”.  At 3pm on a Saturday the place was packed to the rafters with multiple showings already sold out.

I sometimes make a game of guessing which movie people in the popcorn line are there to see, and it was in the midst of that game that I noticed an extraordinary number of seriously obese women (both black and white, but mostly black) who seemed to have come to the theater together to see Precious. When I say an extraordinary number, I mean traveling in packs of five or six going up and down escalators, waiting for hot dogs, exiting the restroom, coming in the front door. It was like a Big Girls pilgrimage.

I say all this with no judgment in my mind, it’s just an observation and reflective of something I clearly missed in the run-up to the release of Precious. I had always considered it a story of poverty and abuse, and obviously some degree of triumph from tragedy. But I also saw it as a fairly individualized character piece. Certainly something that could resonate with a lot of people, but still a singular character within a singular framework.

I guess somewhere in there I missed that this was being seen also a story of empowerment for large women in general. That of course speaks to my maleness and my relative (but fading) thin-ness but also to the fact that the debate about the movie has focused squarely on images and black movie-making and the stories we tell, but never deeply focused on the subject matters at hand and their impact on real people and real communities.

Maybe I was missing something that was obvious, but miss it I did. Glad to have been educated in that observation.

Yeah, I know this a true story (of Michael Oher of the Baltimore Ravens), but still, can we be done with this narrative already?

If you know a bit about South Africa, and particularly the history of Cape Town, you’re more than familiar with the tale of District Six - a part of town populated by “Coloreds” and revered by that community for its rich history and culture. Like many communities, District Six was unceremoniously bulldozed into oblivion in the apartheid regime’s version of urban renewal.

Now comes the movie, District 9, exec produced by director Peter Jackson that plays interesting on the District Six story - but 500 years into the future and now the Colored are Aliens. Immensely interesting set up.

From the movie, Friday Foster. Whats’ amazing here is how this movie starred every C-list Black actor in Hollywood who ever played a police chief, pimp or sidekick in every detective show that ever came on television during the 70s & 80s. I mean, Thalmus Rasulala AND Yaphet Kotto in the same flick? (Hat tip to Invisible Woman for the clip.)

On the other hand, I can probably wait for this one.

One of the things I love about Turner Classic Movies is that I can always reliably get my black and white movie fix. Luxury for me is a Sunday with the wife and kids at church or out shopping, and me at home with the New York Times, a good bottle of wine and a great film noir or other 1930s style movie with great overacting and all the guys in tuxedos no matter what time of day. Bliss.

Unfortunately, those times only come around midnite these days and I’m too tired to enjoy it. But the other day, TCM showed Cecil B. DeMille’s 1929 film, The Godless Girl, and I was riveted.

If you don’t know this film (and I did not) the story centers around a California high school and the battle for dominance between Christian students and a secret society of young atheists, and the terrible consequences that result from their strident proselytizing.

But it all ends in a very different way, with the initial point getting buried and the whole movie switching to a screed against juvenile detention. What’s fascinating is the amazing way it’s shot - brilliant action, expert lighting, and the story line that so relates so remarkably to current conflicts between the Christian right and the liberal orthodoxy. It’s yet another in a long line of works documenting the reality that the more things change the more things stay the same.

Here’s a longer film description with pictures.

What’s amazing when legends like Issac Hayes die is not how old they were but how young. Hayes dies Sunday at age 65. Counting back, that would have made him in his early twenties at the height of his musical prowess, which, given the impact of his early music on the direction of soul, is an amazing fact.

There are many great young songwriters in te history of music, of course, but each has to be put within the context of what music styles came before them, and how innovative their own stylings were given what they had to work with. Prince was and is innovative, but was also clearly an outgrowth of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Funkadelic, Joni Mitchell.

But Hayes and the rest of his Stax cohorts changed the game, twisting R&B and blues in a new direction. He was also the godfather of the modern soundtrack, breaking the genre open for popular artists instead of just formal composers and arrangers. Too bad a whole generation only have memories of him as “Chef” on South Park, though even that was pretty revolutionary.

I did this a few posts ago and it turned out to be fun, so here’s the test again. Your challenge: Without the trailer and without the starrting actors named, which of these movies would you see if all you had to go were these real fairly poorly constructed summaries of movies coming out this summer?

Read the list after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Not to offend anyone, certainly, but this picture is about how I’m feeling about the presidential race about now. No matter how you try to kill it, it just won’t die. And at this point, we’re on Nightmare on Election Day Part 7. First round, great. Second round, good. Third round, OK. Fourth go-round - enough already.

Get ready for Summer Movie Season - Speed Racer, Batman, The Hulk. Loads of big things with big explosions. And then there are the rest.

Making movie trailers is an art, and Hollywood has that art pretty much down to a science at this point, roping us in again and again into crap films by butting their best lines and best scenes forward in trailers that are something akin to marketing genius. But seeing a trailer and reader a movie’s description is different.

Here are some of the worst descriptions I’ve ever seen for movies that are coming out this summer. I’ve provided the link to the actual trailers for the heck of it, but it you had only the written description to go on, which one would you go to see?

Mister Lonely: Only Harmony Korine (writer of KIDS, auteur of GUMMO, JULIEN DONKEY-BOY) could weave Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, her daughter Shirley Temple and flying nuns into a hypnotically funny and truly poignant tale of the instability behind fanaticism and the redemption we can hope to find in one another. The film follows a lonely Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who is invited by a beautiful Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) to a commune full of other impersonators including the Queen of England, Madonna, Sammy Davis Junior and James Dean, in the Scottish Highlands. In a parallel story line, the incomparable Werner Herzog plays a Latin American priest who learns his missionary of nuns can literally fly.

Who’s Your Monkey: BOBBY STORK, a beer guzzling widower, runs into his old friend MARK VAN HOUTEN, an out of work doctor who has resorted to making crystal meth to pay the bills. Bobby discusses Mark’s problem with their mutual friends LAITH RUKKAB, an uptight guy who’s packed on a few pounds but somehow lucked into landing a pretty girl friend and HUTTO, a soon-to-be father and the most together out of the four. The friends decide to give Mark the throwing stars they played with as kids to bring him back to reality. The throwing stars that were meant to bring Mark back to reality end up leading each member of the group to realizations about their own lives.

Zombie Strippers: Worldwide media sensation JENNA JAMESON and Nightmare on Elm Street’s ROBERT ENGLUND star in ZOMBIE STRIPPERS. When a secret government agency lets out a deadly chemo virus causing the reanimation of the dead, the first place to get hit is Rhino’s, a hot underground strip club. As one of the strippers gets the virus, she turns into a supernatural, flesh-eating zombie stripper, making her the hit of the club. Do the rest of the girls fight the temptation to be like the star stripper, even if there is no turning back? Also featuring ROXY SAINT (of the Goth band Roxy Saint and the Blackouts) and Ultimate Fighting Champion TITO ORTIZ, ZOMBIE STRIPPERS is a sexy, bloody, hilarious good time!

Now that I think of it, the whole Zombie Stripper thing doesn’t sound half bad.