Archive for May, 2009


Another Sports Commentary – Kind Of…

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May 27, 2009

 

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If you’ve been keeping up with (sports) news lately, you know there’s been quite a bit of juicy news off the field as of late.  Former superstar quarterback Michael Vick was finally released from prison.  On top of most likely ruining his football career, his finances are in complete ruin.  Tens of millions of dollars gone, through bad investments (obviously), legal fees, and living a liquid lifestyle (cars, clothes, things that don’t appreciate in value).  A common element of Vick’s financial and legal problems was he kept on taking the advice of the wrong people.  In both circumstances, his ‘boys’ weren’t looking out for his best interest.

Then there’s the sordid story of Dirk Nowitski’s personal life.  The story first broke when the Mavs were still playing: ‘Woman arrested at Nowitski’s home.’  Well…OK.  Now a few weeks later, the ‘facts’ of the case are this woman is still in jail, she’s had at least eight other aliases, and Dirk’s not the first pro athlete (QB Tony Banks) that she’s targeted.  She claims to be his fiancee and carrying Dirk’s baby; time will tell if either or both of those are true.  As was the case with Dikembe Mutombo, in the long run it’s for the best that he backed out before he reached a point of no return but there’s still a little bit of a sense of ‘how did you get in so deep?’

Finally and most tragically, there’s the latest chapter in the life of Mike Tyson.  As you’ve probably heard, his youngest daughter died earlier today after a tragic accident at home.  I’ve previously expressed my feelings for Mike on this blog; we all agree the man was no saint, but at what point do you stop paying for your sins?  Especially if you no longer live your life in that fashion?

My overall point in mentioning the lives of Dirk, Vick, and Tyson is to take a step back and look at how important making good judgment is in all our lives.  Not something we ever learn in school.  Good or bad, it usually starts with how our parents taught us (or didn’t).  When we leave home, it’s represented in who we bring into our lives as friends.  And we come full circle when we pick our mates and bring our own kids in this world. 

I honestly don’t have a nice, tidy conclusion to this one.  I still feel really bad for Tyson (I wouldn’t wish the death of a child on my worst enemy), and I’m constantly questioning my own ability to judge people (I’ve been very lucky at the right times, I won’t deny that’s a big part of it.)

Anyway, food for thought.

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Most Important Black Films – #17 What’s Love Got to Do With It

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May 16, 2009

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One of the most emotionally powerful movies of its era, What’s Love Got to Do With It? follows the true life rise of superstar Tina Turner and her notoriously explosive marriage to Ike.   A black biopic made at least ten years before the  musical biopic became one of the genre’s du jour in Hollywood.  On to the tale of the tape…

Relevance:  Tina Turner was already a global star before this movie (a large part of why it got made no doubt).  We can debate whether the nature of Ike and Tina’s relationship helped the film get made, but the bottom line is What’s is a film with two strong black lead characters.

Legacy:  Betty Shabazz, Katherine Jackson, Voletta Wallace…is it safe to say that this is the single role that Angela Bassett will be remembered for?  Hasn’t every brother playfully called his woman ‘Anna Mae’ at some point since this movie came out?  Was that too much information?

Craft:  Fishburne evidently kept turning down the role of Ike until he heard Angela Bassett won the role of Tina.  I highly doubt this will be the role Fish will be most remembered for (Morpheous and Furious Styles immediately come to mind), but was Ike his best acting performance?  Possibly…possibly.  One thing we can say for certain…

Crossover:  the Academy sure liked it, as both Fishburne and Bassett were nominated for Academy Awards for their performances in this movie.   Neither won, but Bassett did win the Golden Globe for her performance.

Apollo:  Do I even need to say it?  For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, there’s a powerful rape/abuse scene in the second act that’s still as emotionally powerful as any rape scene I’ve ever seen.  On a lighter note, I have a personal Ike Turner story (this is true).  About ten years ago, I was on a plane in Houston flying back to L.A.  I’m walking through first class and see this gorgeous, amazonian black woman sitting in the middle row.  One of those situations where no matter how smooth you are, you can’t help but look for a few seconds at least.  Who’s sitting next to her but Ike Turner.  And this cat gave me one of the hardest mean mugs I’ve ever gotten in my life!  I’m not joking when I say I slept with one eye open the whole flight home.  That’s a little bit reputation, and a little bit of the power of movies.

The hits keep coming as the next one should be up by the end of the month…

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Most Important Black TV Shows – #17 The Jeffersons

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May 16, 2009

 

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One of the most popular shows of the late 70s and early 80s, The Jeffersons revolved around the day to day life of dry cleaner George Jefferson and his wife Louise (Weezy).  The show left a lasting impression on not just black culture, but the mainstream as well.  Let’s examine the ways, shall we?

Relevance: With a ten year run (1975-85), The Jeffersons is the longest running sitcom starring African-Americans in television history.  There’s a fun fact for you.

Legacy: “Fish don’t fry in the kitchen, Beans don’t burn on the grill!  Took a whole lot of tryin’, just to get up that hill, but we’re movin on up!  To the East Side!  To a deluxe apartment in the sky!  Well, we’re moving on up!  To the East Side!  We finally got our piece of the pi-iii-iiiiie!”

Craft: A classic Norman Lear production.  I give a lot of credit to the entire cast here.  Even the best comedians will tell you that doing comedy is hit or miss.  Knowing how to let a joke play, knowing when and how to deliver a setup and a punchline.  Watching the interactions of the characters on this show, in nearly any episode, you’ll see some great comedic timing at play.

Crossover:  The Jeffersons is a spinoff of the definitive 70s sitcom, All in the Family.  The Jeffersons started as neighbors of the Bunkers before ‘moving on up’.  Never far off the mainstream radar, the show was consistently nominated for Emmys, with Isabel Sanford actually winning the Emmy one year for her performance as Weezy. 

Apollo:  You can pick your spots here; George slamming the door in someone’s face, Florence’s short jokes at George.  This may be considered a cheat, but my personally favorite Wow moment involving George and Louise happened when the showed up on the final episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air…

Another one down, back at the end of the month with another favorite from the 70s…

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Inspirations – The Batman

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May 11, 2009

 

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The Batman is well known to be my favorite fictional character.  Popular for 70 years and running, I’m going to assume you know the basics either through regular pop culture or the massive success of the Chris Nolan movies.  So the angle I’m taking here is to talk about my five favorite Batman stories from the comics.  I’m nowhere near a hardcore comic guy, but I have friends who are, and knowing how much I enjoy Bruce Wayne, over the years they’ve pointed me to a lot of the great graphic novels…

Batman: Year One – written by Frank Miller, this story is the essential starting point for the current incarnation of the Dark Knight.  Young handsome socialite Bruce Wayne has returned to his hometown of Gotham after spending many years abroad.  Around the same time, Detective James Gordon transfers into the Gotham Police Department, but is quickly disgusted by the level of corruption, and does what he can to remain one of the city’s good cops.  Starting on opposite sides, by the end the vigilante and the hero cop form an alliance to bring hope back to a hopeless city.  A major, major influence on Batman Begins.

The Long Halloween – widely regarded as ‘Year Two’ in the Batman universe, this old school murder mystery has the Batman trying to track down a mysterious serial killer who’s taking out members of Gotham’s underworld on holidays.  Batman and Det. Gordon are joined on their crusade by young charismatic District Attorney Harvey Dent, but a tragic accident turns their friend into a very dangerous enemy.  Yep, a major influence on The Dark Knight.

Dark Victory – Set a year after the events of the Long Halloween, a new serial killer is on the loose, with all signs pointing toward Harvey ‘Two Face’ Dent.  In the early stages of the Batman’s crusade, a tragic accident at the circus leaves a young acrobat orphaned.  Feeling a kinship with the kid, Bruce takes him under his wing, eventually as a partner.  The modern day introduction of the Dynamic Duo.

The Killing Joke – simply stated, the greatest Joker story ever told.  Taking over an amusement park, the Joker decides to use Commissioner Gordon to prove his theory, ‘all it takes is one really bad day to make anyone go insane.’  Through flashback, we get one ‘possible’ origin of the Joker, where he was a struggling comedian who got mixed in with the wrong crowd, lost his wife and child through a freak accident, and just…snapped.  To get to Gordon, he shoots his daughter Barbara (paralyzing her for life), rapes her, then kidnaps Gordon and shows him the pictures of the rape blown up to IMAX size.  Gordon refuses to snap, and when Batman finally catches up to him, the Joker (correctly) theorizes that somewhere in the past it was ‘one really bad day’ that made a grown man dress up like a flying rat.  The Batman tries to talk sense to the Joker, knowing their mano e mano is leading toward a fatal resolution, but the Joker, in a rare moment of clarity, tells him it’s too late for that, before telling a joke that points out (correctly again) that Batman is just as insane, he just happens to be fighting on the right side of the law.  A great story all around, and um, not for the kiddies…

Knightfall – my single favorite Batman story.  I actually prefer the novelization to the year long comic version.  This is the story that introduces the villain Bane, who comes up with one of the best plans ever:  break out all the arch villains in Arkham Asylum, let Batman chase them down, and when he’s exhausted, then make your move.  Even as Batman senses Bane’s plan, he has to push forward and capture all the master criminals.  He’s no match for Bane, who breaks the Batman’s back, leaving him for dead.  Bruce chooses newcomer Jean Paul Valley to take up the cowl; the kid has all the physical attributes, but is much more brutal than Bruce ever was under the cowl.  The ‘new’ Batman defeats Bane, but doesn’t give up the cowl when Bruce makes a full recovery.  Bruce eventually defeats his wayward apprentice of course, who becomes Azrael, an ally in present Batman stories.

Honorable mention goes to the song, The Dark Knight, the final track on Hans Zimmer’s score for the last movie.  Over 15 minutes long, the theme creates the mood for the final scene of the movie, and in my humble opinion, makes great ‘speeding down the 101 at three in the morning’ music for wannabe Caped Crusaders.

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Marriage

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May 6, 2009

 

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Among my college crew, there were three sets of guys.  The first set were the guys who fit the Midwestern mold: meet your wife as a teenager or early 20s, get married, have a couple kids, the white picket fence, etc., all by your early 30s.  The middle set were the guys who would probably get married but they’d settle in whatever town they ended up in first, then it would happen in their mid to late 20s.  The final group of us, well…back in the day, if you would have asked us, “Don’t you want to get married?”, you might as well have been asking, “Don’t you want to get the swine flu?”  You would have gotten the exact same facial expression.

The Ones have fulfilled their destiny, most of them are working on having children (multiple).  The Twos are enjoying the early stages of their marriages.  And today I got the call that the first of my brethren in the Three Club is walking down that aisle.  We’ve all matured some, so there was no questioning why he wanted to get married, or who he’s marrying.  We’re all happy for him.  I’ve already been pegged twice now as being Next, we’ll get to that at the end of this post…

I can recall when the concept of marriage hit me hard for the first time.  My last spring break in Kansas, the Three Musketeers had our bonding trip by traveling to Myrtle Beach, with a pit stop in Atlanta.  We got to Atlanta about midnight; we were staying with some Deltas who were friends of my boy’s cousin.  They asked us if we wanted to go to the club; we told them all our clothes were wrinkled up and packed in the trunk.  So you know what happened?  These girls ironed our clothes for us, so we could all roll to the club together.  The next night, unannounced, they had their girls come over and cook us some Chicken Parmigian with vegetables while we hung out at the pad.  By the third day, when we went to hang out at Lenox Square, I was glaring down every brother in a throwback Dominque Wilkins jersey who even looked like he wanted to step to ‘my girl.’  Even now, the film geek in me wonders if my life is really just Vanilla Sky:  we drove off a bridge on the way to Atlanta, suffered horrific injuries, and now I’m really cryogenically frozen somewhere, trapped in a lucid dream where me and my boys had the time of our lives with these gorgeous sisters showing us Southern Hospitality.  I’m half-joking, but I fell head over heels in love for the first time that weekend.

Back to the present.  I’m certainly not the guy seeking out this material, but I seemingly now can’t avoid getting on the Internet or turning on the radio and hearing a debate about whether marriage is ‘dead’, or ‘how hard it is to find a quality mate’.  I’ve thrown my two cents into these convos when the mood hits me, I’ll admit.  I mean, we all need a little guidance or advice from time to time, but that said, I am still very much against overdoing it.  Becoming a husband and a father is very important to me, but not to the point of forcing a situation to happen.  Like my Atlanta trip, I tend to think the best things in life are often the things you don’t plan for.  I’m a man, of course I like having female friends, but I never imagined it would grow into the number and variety I have.  I knew there’d be a few guys who became my ‘Board of Directors’, but it’s not the guys I imagined it would be even 10 years ago.  Me writing this out makes me recognize why I despise micromanaging:  I think it’s essential to have a general plan, I think it’s suicide to try to plan every detail.  Good and bad, things always happen.

I don’t think it breaks my ‘Code’ to reveal where my head is at mentally right now.  Not long ago, my Captain became engaged.  When I asked him about it, he said he just started praying to God to bring the right woman in his life.  For me personally, it was like a light went off in my own heart.  My faith is such a central part of my identity, in my opinion, this will be the defining decision of my life: why wasn’t I doing this?  So at some point each day, I get on my knees and begin “I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, but I know what I want…” and go from there.  Sometimes it’s a few minutes, sometimes it’s a lot longer depending on what happened that day.  If nothing else, it’s cathartic, I’ll tell you that.  Most important of all, when I’m done, I get up and go back to just living and enjoying my life.

Like I said, nothing to gain from overthinking it…

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The Soloist

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May 3, 2009

 

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He’s a clown, he’s one of the funniest fools in Hollywood, but movies like The Soloist remind you that Jamie Foxx can really, really act.  This film was originally supposed to come out during awards season; we got a long way to go to get to award season 09 but Jamie’s performance here could easily be one of the better ones I’ll see all year.  It’s always a tricky thing in film to portray someone who is ‘mentally ill’; the medium gives you a lot of leeway in how you portray it, but at the same time if it comes off too cute it can feel patronizing.  I won’t spoil the device used here; I will say I thought they handled it well.

Part of the ‘point’ of the movie seems to be to highlight the plight of the homeless (especially here in Los Angeles).  My second apartment in LA was downtown, so I have my fair share of stories, some funny, some not.  Growing up in the Midwest, homelessness wasn’t something I really had any experience with.  At least not on a mass scale.   I’ve always been sensitive to how delicate life is though; you just don’t know what God has planned for you.

I have a feeling this movie got pushed back because the studio didn’t feel Downey or Foxx had a snowball’s chance in hell of mixing it up with Heath Ledger and Sean Penn last year during the awards push.  And they were probably right.  That doesn’t mean this isn’t an interesting movie about a very real, modern day issue though.

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Most Important Black TV Shows – #18 Martin

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May 1, 2009

 

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This one makes me reminisce how good we had it in the 90s.  I can pick up the phone right now and start quoting from this show to put my people into a laughing fit.  For the uninitiated, Martin told the story of a Detroit DJ (Martin Payne) and his comical relationships with his girl (Gina) and their friends (Pam, Cole, Tommy).

Alright, on to the tale of the tape…

Relevance:  The show was set in Detroit, with five black principal characters.  As my militant partner in crime likes to point out, there was a Do the Right Thing poster hanging in Martin’s apartment.  We’ll stop there.

Craft:  I might be a little biased since this show is also a personal favorite, but in my opinion if you want to do laugh out loud comedy that doesn’t get stale with time, you could do a LOT worse than watching Martin. 

Legacy: Everyone who watched Def Comedy Jam knew how funny Martin Lawrence was.  Among other things, this show proved Martin could still be hilarious without ever cussing.  Which opened the door for Big Momma’s House! 

Crossover:  I’m not sure how much Martin’s career hit the mainstream because of this show.  Martin was always up against NBC’s ‘Must See TV’ lineup (Seinfeld, Friends) so I imagine that the ‘mainstream’ people watching Martin were the same types who were watching him on Def Jam anyway.

Apollo:  This could SO easily be its own post.  I’ll list my own personal top five while you reminisce on yours…

5. In the first season, Martin introduced the character of Jerome: a permed out, gaudy jewelry wearing brother with a thick goatee, straight playa.  What made this character so funny to me was I have a second uncle in Louisiana who looked AND acted exactly like Jerome.  One of my cousins picked up on this at a funeral when we were kids and I felt so guilty for busting out laughing in the middle of church.

4. Among Martin’s other characters was a white guy named Bob.  His most notorious moment was probably when he started wilding out a party with Gina and Pam.  “Gina’s outta control, Pam’s outta control, THIS WHOLE FREAKING PARTY’S OUT OF CONTROLLLLLL!!!!”

3. Later in that same episode, Martin (who thinks Gina’s creeping on him) hides under the bed when Gina has the maintenance man fix her ‘clogged vent’.  By the time the maintenance cat says, “When I finally pull this out, you are going to LOVE me!”, I was dying laughing without Martin’s facial expressions.  This is immediately followed by one of the five worst ‘fake beatdowns’ you will ever see.  Martin was a clown!

2. Maybe the greatest ‘little man paranoia’ story ever, had Martin having to stand up to Tommy ‘Hitman’ Hearns.  The whole episode is classic, but when Martin feels slighted and calls out Hearns with the line.  “Hey Tommy, I talked to Sugar (Ray).  He says you’re the Get Hit Man!”  Then he turns around and says ‘What?’ trying to punk some random dude out; that still kills me.

1. Martin’s CD player is missing.  This leads to what to this day is still probably the best New Jack City parody you’ll ever see.  Having everyone dressed in black, Martin plays the Nino role, threatening his friends with a toy Doberman.  This was a taped television show, and you can still clearly see damn near the whole cast bust out laughing throughout the scene.  Oh, and for story purposes, ‘Bruh Man’ borrowed Martin’s CD player.  Remember Bruh Man?

Alright, as I debate whether my need to be objective is preventing me from ranking this show higher, I can tell you another classic sitcom awaits next month…

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