A lot of movie talk among friends this week – I thought I’d post my thoughts on three different castings… Willow Smith in a remake of Annie – I mean, did this even have to get ‘sold’? Little Jada has a hit song under her belt, her brother had a nice hit (and respectable remake) […]
Like most black kids of my generation, I had the idea that Dr. King was ‘somebody’ before I had any real concept of who that ‘somebody’ was. It was his picture and Jesus on the back of our church fans. At my grandfather’s house, there were two pictures in the house that weren’t family: […]
With The Fighter being a possible exception, the best cast film I’ve seen from top to bottom to come out in the past 12 months has been Mother and Child. The film’s story is centered around three strong female performances: Annette Bening as a middle aged woman who gave up a child at 14 […]
I was flipping through the channels last night when I came across Tropic Thunder again. I remember before the film came out and I saw stills like the one above and I thought, “Man…..” It was a bold move, but in context it’s a sharp satire – a (white) Method actor so committed to […]
I’ve gone on record in saying I’m a fan of the writing of Bill Simmons (ESPN’s the Sports Guy). A friend of mine who I converted to the ‘Church of Simmons’ got me ‘The Book of Basketball’, the Sports Guy take on the history of the NBA. The book is 700 plus pages, but […]
A couple weeks into 2010, the last film I wrote and directed was being introduced to a national audience by a movie star. With a couple of weeks to go in 2010, I got to host a show where I gave an up and coming rapper/producer his first television experience. I love the harmony […]
To paraphrase the Sports Guy, the ‘underdog boxer’ genre has probably been worn dry. Like the gangster genre, boxing has created some of the greatest films ever made (with the Rocky series and Raging Bull immediately coming to mind). The standard is ridiculously high. I go with that lead in to say The Fighter is […]
The opinions I’ve heard about The Kids Are All Right have run the gamut from ‘great indie film’ to ‘whatever word is the opposite of misogyny.’ It got a Globe nomination for Best Screenplay and on the whole I’ve heard good things so I had to check it out. I don’t know whether this is […]
I’ll start by saying this: Westerns aren’t my genre. I ‘respect’ the Coen Brothers films while not necessarily calling myself a fan of every film they’ve done. Now all that said, I liked this remake of True Grit. I caught myself laughing in the first 30 minutes at Jeff Bridges going into the “alcoholic Dutch […]
The Town is one of the movies that’s been hanging around all year and has a shot at a Best Picture nomination next year now that they’ve expanded the field to 10 films. A friend on Twitter referred to this flick as Set It Off for white folks, and I get where they got that […]
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