MovieComment

Baadasssss!

Posted by Player under Drama

Back in 1991, one of the most controversial movies debuted to packed theatres and in major cities, theatre owners hired armed security guards for show times. That movie was Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City, a film about the reality of drugs in the ghetto and the people who live in it. But before my time, there was another movie that shook the foundations of race relations in this country and that movie was: Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song. In Baadasssss!, director and main star, Mario Van Peebles recounts the struggle of his father, Mel Van Peebles, to make the most controversial movie of his time.

How to Get the Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass!

Mel has a vision to make a movie that blacks can be proud to walk out of, a movie where the black character is not only true to life, but he also lives in the end. To make the film, Mel sacrifices everything, from his son’s innocence, to his physical vision, to hitting rock bottom, all because the movie is bigger than him, bigger than his misfit crew, bigger than all of them.

Mario Van Peebles not only looks like his father, but he also captures the feel and look of his father’s time. Baadasssss! is a no compromise depiction of the story. From the casual sex and nudity of the time, to the vary assorted characters that made Sweetback the movie possible… I was literally amazed by Mario Van Peebles acting, directing, and the sheer look of the movie. This is one of the best dramatic films I have seen all year! And without a doubt Peebles best film ever!

Besides Mario, the rest of the cast is made up some well known actors like: Adam West and David Alan Grier, there is also a good supporting cast of lesser known actors, and interview appearances by the real people who helped Mel make Sweetback, like Bill Cosby and Earth,Wind, & Fire!

This is one independent film you probably missed, but should consider.

Even if in the end there’s a happy ending, the film still keeps you in suspense until the very last scenes.

American History X

Posted by Player under Drama

A long time ago, Edward James Almost, made a very interesting film about Latino gang culture, the film was American Me, and it explains a lot about how Latino gangs formed and how the problems persist to this day. American History X reminded me of that film.

AHX is really about how one white family is torn apart by white hate culture. It tells the story of Derek and Dani. Two brothers who turn to white hate propaganda for answers to their own questions. The film confronts some of the things which white culture does not publicly admit, like fear of blacks and hatred of what some people call the un-americanizing of America, as more immigrant cultures change the status quo of everyday American life.

Derek is played by Edward Norton (of Fight Club fame). Derek is your average smart kid in high school, when his firefighter father is shot and killed in a black neighborhood. Derek blames blacks for killing his father and leaving a family of four white kids alone with a single mother. It is at this point that Derek turns to the supremicist talk of a local man who quickly uses Derek to recruit other poor white kids to start a skinhead movement. Derek is exceptional on all fields, he is smart, athletic, and most of all gullible. He quickly takes on the role of his father at home and kicks out his mother’s jewish boyfriend, but what changes his life the most is when he starts a turf war with blacks on the basketball court. This leads to stand off outside his house where he kills black teenagers, partly in self-defense, except for the last victim. For this Derek is sent to prison for three years where he learns the truth of white-hate culture and the committement which skinheads in prison have to the movement.

In the mean time his younger brother Dani is learning to live in ever more popular black world, where whites take a second place to blacks, latinos, and asians. He fully embraces the rhetoric of Derek’s skinhead friends and is given up on by his teachers except for one black teacher who knows the family and who was Derek’s favorite teacher many years ago. He refuses to give up on Dani and asks him to rewrite a paper he did on Hitler. Instead he asks Dani to write him a paper on his brother Derek, and what effect did his brother Derek have on him especially. He tells Dani to name the paper AMERICAN HISTORY X.

At this time, Derek is released from prison and he is a changed man. He has hit rock bottom and has seen that the skinhead movement was bullshit rhetoric and he wants to save his family and keep Dani away from the movement. Like American Me, AHX has an unhappy ending, but that is to be expected.

Norton’s performance is good throughout the film and while the film does make strong arguments for hate culture with comments about how white Europeans came to this country and prospered while blacks were freed over a hundred years ago and they still can’t prosper, and how suburb white kids (protestants) are stupid for embracing black culture and wanting to be black themselves, and so on…. I could not help thinking that the film holds back still. The film does not go far enough in portraying minorities correctly, I get the feeling that that the director did not want to portray blacks and latinos as violent or as drug users, and so what we see are only a few negatives for minorities in general, while for whites, we get a much more negative picture. Dani’s world is racist, it is perhaps racist against him for being white, but we only see some of this. Derek’s world is brutal and is the main point of the story.

In the end we get the moral. As a person we have all this anger, which causes hate, which makes us a violent people, which leads to our own personal decline.

Cold Mountain

Posted by Player under Drama

Miramax had big hopes for Cold Mountain, it was suppose to be a classic love story, a classic drama, with the usual cast of big name stars, but it’s late release dashed some of its chances for more academy awards. The DVD release of the film boasts an excellent 2-disc treatment, as well as a superb DTS 5.1 soundtrack.

Cold Mountain is the story of two people, Inman and Ada, who would have courted normally and entered into marriage if it had not been for the Civil War. When the two meet in the remote mountain community of Cold Mountain, Ada is the young schooled daughter of the new preacher. She has no mother and so her “woman” skills are severely lacking. Inman is a self-educated young man who becomes attracted to Ada right away. The two barely have time to even hold hands when Inman is sent off to war, but as a parting gift Ada gives him a book and a photograph of herself to remind him of her. He then rushes off to war, and the story line splits between a man who has lost himself in the madness that is war and an educated woman with no survival skills who finds herself alone for the first time after her father dies. While Inman’s story seems reminicent of Odysses return to his family, Ada’s story is the more interesting as she is forced to kindle new relationships with women. She is soon joined by a sparkly and no-man needing Ruby who is poor but know how to kill a chicken and cook it. Together the two rebuild the farm which has fallen from lack of care, and share the occasional moment in which they admit they miss the company of men. Meanwhile Inman is coming back to Ada as best he can and having adventures along the way.

The film tries to show the very real hardships of war off and on the battlefield, from battle fatigue to women left alone with children to feed when there is no food. There is even a bit of mysticism which is most often associated with mountain people narrative, but it is not too overly drawn, which to me felt disappointing as it makes for a better story I think.

Jude Law’s performance as Inman was adequate but not spectacular. His accent never quite believeable and let’s face it, the man’s too pretty to play the part of a tough American soldier. Nicole Kidman was more convincing as the delicate flower Ada, but here too the accent did not quite make it, especially compared to Renée Zellweger’s very southern Ruby.

At the end the digitized crows in the forest scene looked fake and ruined the look of the scene. It would have been better to use real crows.

Overall, this was a love story that was interesting, had some cheesy lines in it here and there, and the drama was good, the dvd presentation is superb, but it just did not strike me as a great film. Others may disagree, especially if you’re a fan of romance movies.

Blood Diamond

Posted by Player under Drama

Blood Diamond is another film with a political message. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, and Djimon Hounsou. The story takes place in the midst of a civil war in Sierra Leone. DiCaprio plays Danny Archer, a mercenary and smuggler who is African born and who is trying to get out of Africa. His luck takes a turn for the worst when on his last job he gets caught and loses his bounty. Luckily he meets Solomon Vandy, a poor fisherman who was separated from his family and who knows the whereabouts of a large diamond he found while being a slave for the guerrilla army. At the same time he meets Maddy Bowen, an American reporter with a nose for finding the real story. Archer and Bowen exchange in witty banter, and a love story is suppose to be inferred. However the film never really explores the love story, but instead focuses on Solomon who is trying to rescue his son from the rebel army.

While the film paints Solomon as the victim, caught between a diamond trade and rebel forces who exploit his people, it also tries to show Archer as the centrist. Archer is also an exploiter of Africa, but since he is also a product of Africa, it is his choices that matter in the film. If he chooses to use Solomon or if he helps Solomon is what the dramatic point of the movie is about. The rest of us including Maddy Bowen, get off easy because the moral of the film tells us that all we have to do is help when asked. The film tries to guilt the audience into changing political views once you see the horrors that both Solomon and Archer see on an everyday basis.

Overall, DiCaprio and Hounsou deliver good performances, while Connelly’s role in the film diminishes and becomes almost unimportant. The violence portrayed in the film is accurate and just as good as any war film of recent date. You get the sense that life is cheap in Africa and how hopelessness can so easily be succumbed to. What the film doesn’t do is try to push the audience. Yes, some scenes are shocking, and yes there are some lines that allude to the Modern World’s forgotten responsibilities, but a story like this could have been much harsher, much more precise and penetrating with its message. Instead it tends to hold back, not letting Danny Archer hold the world accountable for the terrible crimes that are occurring in Africa. You instead can leave the theater saying, “Wow,” or “Okay,” instead of truly breathless and perhaps heart broken that any father should have to see his son this way.