by ·Comments Off on Bones (2001, Ernest R. Dickerson)

Demon Knight director returns with a gang of (mostly) lower-tier actors. Patrick buys a spooky murder house to turn it into a club with buddies Tia and The Resurrection Brothers. This makes Patrick’s rich realtor dad J-Bird and neighbor Pam Grier very nervous. Movie is boring and bad for 45 minutes, then they get to resurrecting Snoop Dogg and it turns crazy.

It seems Snoop was the local mensch until crack dealer Eddie Mack murdered him along with corrupt cop Loopy Lupovich, Snoop’s friend J-Bird and gf Grier betraying him out of fear. Resurrection bro Maurice finds Snoop’s skeleton and steals his ring, then Snoop reconstitutes a la Frank in Hellraiser and a ghost dog eats Maurice then vomits maggots all over Patrick and the club (also very Hellraiser). Undead Snoop proceeds to burn the place down then goes on a revenge spree until he and Grier self-immolate together. All this has already been covered in Biosalong.

Patrick had costarred with Tupac in Juice, and his girl / Grier’s daughter had recently played Diana Ross in a biopic. The corrupt cop costarred in Howling IV, realtor dad is from Dead Presidents, and the crack dealer was in Tales from the Hood, which is what Katy keeps calling this movie. Tia (the girl who gives the ghost dog a burger) is horror royalty, having starred in Ginger Snaps the year before.

Baddies:

Come die with us:

by ·Comments Off on Ghosts of Mars (2001, John Carpenter)

I had rewatched O Brother and La Samourai the same week I saw a Rohmer movie and two by Claire Denis, so needed to counterbalance all that good art somehow. Between the hokey miniatures, the CG projectiles, instru-metal soundtrack, Star Trek-caliber fight scenes, the dodgy editing and cliche dialogue it does have all the marks of a Bad Movie, but the lead baddie’s babytalk gibberish barking has stuck with me over the years, and “Hellraiser In Space” is one of my favorite genres, and it’s a John Carpenter movie about a group of cops and criminals who come under assault in a precinct, so perhaps it’s actually good? I’m here to tell you that it’s not good.

Natasha “Species” Henstridge becomes team leader after Pam Grier is beheaded, assisted by rookie Jason Statham. The team’s mission before getting derailed by alien assault was to escort dangerous prisoner Ice Cube to a different facility, but of course it becomes necessary for cops and crooks to team up for survival against the invaders – who are not aliens really, but self-mutilating zombie humans a la Return of the Living Dead 3 led by the Marilyn Mansonesque Richard Cetrone (the merman in Cabin in the Woods), possessed by the spirits of the planet’s native inhabitants as a defense against colonizers.

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:

Carpenter goes for an ambitious but not entirely successful mash-up of his earlier works … The film’s otherwise standard action template is given weirdly dreamlike shape through flashback-within-flashback narration and surreal superimpositions, to the point that it feels like a dirge for a type of filmmaking gone out of fashion. Even the KISS-style monster makeup confirms that nothing has changed since the ’80s, the red hell of Martian future just an apocalyptic projection of the capitalist wasteland we’ve been speeding into since the days of Reaganomics.

by ·Comments Off on Coffy (1973, Jack Hill)

Pam Grier’s cop friend William Elliott (of mutant rabbit horror Night of the Lepus) gets beaten half to death for not selling out to the drug lords, who are secretly supporting the senate campaign of Pam’s boyfriend Booker Bradshaw (of missing link comedy Skullduggery). Pam is flaming mad, goes on a revenge campaign against drug boss King George (Robert DoQui, the only decent all-human cop of RoboCop).

Sig Haig gets involved, there’s a one-eyed assassin, I dunno, felt much like Foxy Brown, Pam’s charisma being wasted on a crappy movie. This was a random 1973 pick – here’s hoping Black Caesar is better.

by ·Comments Off on Jackie Brown (1997, Quentin Tarantino)

Haven’t seen this in 18 years, so I’d forgotten most of it, and didn’t realize it contains The Definitive Samuel L. Jackson Performance.

Sam Goody:

Shot by Tarantino buddy Robert Rodriguez’s cinematographer Guillermo Navarro – close-ups galore and terrific acting. Part of a mid-90’s cinematic Elmore Leonard craze, between Get Shorty and Out of Sight. Grier, Forster and Jackson got various awards and nominations. Only Forster made it to the oscars, though… jeez, it was an all-white year at the oscars except for a 4 Little Girls documentary nomination.

Keaton, the year after Multiplicity. De Niro shortly before he turned to self-mocking comedy in Analyze This and never looked back. Bridget Fonda apparently retired after 2002. Jackson would continue the 1970’s references with his Shaft remakquel. Chris Tucker’s Fifth Element costar Tiny Lister appears as Forster’s employee at the bail-bond place.

Unfortunately Pam Grier’s follow-ups don’t look so good: Chris Elliott comedy Snow Day, Fortress 2, Snoop Dogg’s Bones, Ghosts of Mars, and finally the career-killing Adventures of Pluto Nash. I assumed Jackie Brown was a comeback for her, but it looks like the movies she made the year before were better than any that came after: Mars Attacks, Escape From L.A. and Larry Cohen’s Original Gangstas.

by ·Comments Off on Foxy Brown (1974, Jack Hill)

What a cheap-ass movie. The fights are clumsy, the acting seems first-take, the overall look is made-for-TV and the audio always sounds like there’s a photocopier running nearby. It’s a fun time though, if you overlook the unpleasant bit where Foxy is drugged and raped by rednecks. At least she reserves her harshest revenge for these two guys – one gets his face torn off then they both get set on fire. Can’t you just picture a twelve-year-old Quentin Tarantino sitting alone in a broken-down movie theater burning this movie into his brain?

Foxy and “Michael”:

Pam Grier (who’d already starred in Coffy and a couple others) is in love with her undercover boyfriend “Michael” (Terry Carter of Battlestar Galactica), who is killed by drug-dealer enforcers the day he’s released from the hospital post-plastic-surgery, because Foxy’s own brother Link rats on him for quick cash.

Link in trouble:

The movie shows us repeatedly that Foxy is a total badass, and Pam Grier is up to the task, but Antonio Fargas (best known as “Huggy Bear” on Starsky & Hutch) as Link is the one actor with enough energy to transcend his low-rent surroundings. On the other end of the spectrum are white crime lords Kathryn Loder and Peter Brown (a teen delinquent in Kitten with a Whip) who at least seem to be having a good time delivering their awkwardly terrible performances. Foxy masquerades as a prostitute, a dumb broad and a revolutionary, and kills pretty much everybody.

by ·Comments Off on Larry Crowne (2011, Tom Hanks)

Seems like an extremely low-effort movie, managing to coast by on charisma. So I’m not putting in much effort either – stealing the AV Club’s plot description:

Hanks plays the title character, a divorced Navy veteran and longtime employee of a Walmart-like chain who’s fired because he never went to college, thus can’t advance any further in the company. Rather than filing what seemingly should be an extremely lucrative wrongful-dismissal suit, Hanks follows the advice of the quirky next-door neighbors (Cedric The Entertainer, Taraji P. Henson) and enrolls in a community college. There, he strikes up a friendship with even-quirkier fellow student Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who takes on the duties of a strictly platonic Manic Pixie Dream Girl, giving Hanks a makeover, enlisting him into her “gang” of moped enthusiasts, and encouraging his interest in one of his teachers, a bitter, perpetually hungover English instructor played by Julia Roberts.

This is Hanks the lovable everyman, not Hanks the serious oscar nominee. In fact, if this was the first thing you’d seen with him or Julia Roberts, you’d assume they’re on the same bland caliber as Aston Kutcher and Anne Hathaway. Not much of a comedy, just a lightly entertaining drama – watching the trailer to get screen shots, it contains most of the movie’s jokes. Certainly not offensively bad, but I’m slightly offended at its total lack of rough edges.

Pam Grier is looking good. Grace Gummer looks distractingly like her mother Meryl Streep (it’s weird to see a 24-year-old Streep sitting next to 55-year-old Hanks, like one of those commercials featuring dead movie stars looking young again and trying to sell you a car). Economics professor George Takei was the highlight of the film by a long shot. I already forget who Holmes Osbourne (of The Box) played. And Bryan Cranston (Little Miss Sunshine) was convincing as Roberts’s loser husband.

When I look back on Larry Crowne, I want to think of Wilmer Valderrama on a scooter:

Katy liked it. Glad you liked it, Katy! Sorry if I was grouchy about your movie, and also for what I said about Anne Hathaway.