The Screengrab : boyz n the hood

LazyVision: Week Ending Feb. 14th

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

We know that fans of the Screengrab want the dish on what's happening now in Hollywood (hence the Weekend Box Office Report) and what's yet to come (hence the Morning Deal Report). We know you want to be aware of what's coming to home video, hence DVD Digest. And we know that sometimes, you just want to park yourselves in front of the tube to catch a good flick, hence Set Your DVRs!.

We also know that some of you are deeply, deeply lazy individuals. And, beyond that, you're cheap, and you can't figure out anything more technologically complicated than a light switch. (We say this in the most loving way possible, for we count ourselves in your number.) You want to be able to turn on the TV -- not the computer -- and watch a good movie, anytime you want, without having to program anything -- for free. After all, wasn't that the promise of the new modern era? Wasn't that the allure of the digital age -- any movie you want, any time you want, no waiting, no fees?

Well, assuming you have digital cable, Video On Demand was made for lazy gasbags like you. Most of the stuff shown on VOD is either pay-per-view or, to put it mildly, dire, but occasionally, a gem will pop up on the "Free Movies" feature as a reward for infinitely patient cheapskates like yours truly. So, once a week, we'll bring you a handful of not-completely terrible movies you can watch whenever you want, for zero dollars and change. (Check your local provider for channel details.)

- FEARnet this week is featuring Night of the Creeps as one of its free movies on demand. This underrated 1986 camp-horror classic from cult director Fred Dekker is a real winner -- it never takes its zombies-from-out-space-plot too seriously, and plays around with the conventions of the genre years before the Scream franchise got the idea. The characters are all named after cult directors (Raimi, Carpenter, Cronenberg, etc.), and best of all, it's held together by a swell performance from beloved tough-guy character actor Tom Atkins.

- The Sundance Channel's on-demand service is offering a look at John Huston's The Dead, gratis. The final film Huston ever made, it's also one of his finest and most personal; adapted from a very fine James Joyce short story, it features some astonishing performances (including by his daughter, Anjelica) in a story involving a woman's memories of her long-dead first love, and how it stirs emotions in her husband during an Epiphany gathering. Best of all, The Dead isn't currently available in a U.S. DVD release, so this opportunity is even more special.

- Turner Classic Movies also has an on-demand service, and free this week is the classic 1948 noir flick Naked City. Somewhere between solid post-war noir, hardboiled police procedural, and ripe pre-war crime drama, Naked City is a tightly wound look at every step of a brutal murder investigation in New York. Directed by legendary noir specialist Jules Dassin, Naked City features a terrific villain in Ted DeCorsia, a gritty semi-documentary filming style, and an absolutely gripping extended chase scene through the city. It was later made into a popular TV crime show in the 1950s .

- FEARnet's on-demand service coughs up another great free offering this week in Escape from New York. Made during the period when a new John Carpenter movie was cause for excitment, this cult classic takes place in a near-future dystopia where New York City is a maximum-security prison. When President Donald Pleasance's plane crashes there with the nuclear football on board, it's up to Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, one of the all-time great screen bad-asses, to bail him out. Russell gamely waltzes with a swell cast that includes Adrienne Barbeau, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton -- and good ol' Tom Atkins.

- Finally, TNT's on-demand service this week offers the chance to see John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood. The 1991 film set off a wave of west coast gangsta dramas, but Boyz was the first and is still one of the best, as Singleton (whose filmmaking skills are raw and exciting here) takes a look at a group of childhood friends who struggle in different ways against the rough life of gang-ridden south central Los Angeles. Larry Fishburne's performance is a standout, and this was one of the first movies in which evidence was presented that Ice Cube was a good actor -- evidence which has been sorely lacking in recent years.

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Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Dead

Set Your DVR!: February 6 - 8, 2009

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The Dead, playing on the Sundance Channel on Saturday, February 7 at 9 PM central/10 PM eastern, with a repeat at 2 AM central/3 AM eastern. This was the last movie directed by John Huston--a Christmas story, it was released in December of 1987, less than two months after his death--and he went out in glory. It represented a stretch for Huston, reaching confidently into areas that he'd never explored in his previous films, and it's also different from other movies based on the works of James Joyce, which tend to moisten and fall apart from the directors' accumulated flop sweat as they realize they have no idea how to get the material to play. Huston gave the story a deceptively simple staging, assembling a fine cast of actors--Donal McCann as the hero Gabriel, Donal Donnelly, Dan O'Herlihy, Marie Kean, Cathleen Delany, Helena Carroll, and Anjelica Huston as Gabriel's wife--and using them to demonstrate what the right voices can do for Joyce's dialogue. (The members of this ensemble are uncanny at acting as if they'd been getting together for these ritual holiday dinners for so many years that they all know each other's weak spots and points of pride.) Then, at the very end, after Anjelica Huston's big monologue, he just steps back and closes on Donal McCann reciting the closing passages of the story, as if he were handing it back to its creator. Inexplicably, this movie is not currently available on DVD, so its reappearance on Sundance after a prolonged drop off the cable radar screen counts as a rare and wondrous thing.

Incidentally, Sundance's weekend schedule also includes multiple showings of Jeff Nichols's white trash tragedy Shotgun Stories, starting on Sunday, February 8 at 5:15 AM central/6:15 AM eastern and with a couple of repeats throughout the day. This information is provided as a public service in light of all the complaints we've been getting from people who haven't been able to find the movie on DVD. It's available on DVD, but there's been a terrific run on the damn things since Paul Clark bestowed upon it the honor of reviewing it by request.

Turner Classic Movies spends February sunk in its annual "31 Days of Oscar" programming, with the schedule decorated wall-to-wall with films that were nominated for Academy Awards. This is not traditionally TCM's most exciting time of the year, but they do generally pull out some oddball titles that have since lapsed into total obscurity, or at least general unavailability. Late tonight, at 2:30 AM central/ 3:30 AM eastern, the channel is showing 1952's The Atomic City, a B-movie thriller with an atomic-age plot gimmick--the villains are Commie spies who kidnap the son of a Los Alamos nuclear scientist in an attempt to get their hands on the formula for the A-bomb--that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. (It was written by Sidney Boehm, whose other credits include The Big Heat.) Then, on Sunday, 7 PM central/ 8 PM eastern, TCM premieres Elia Kazan's directorial debut, the 1945 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, based on Betty Smith's popular novel about family life in the Brooklyn tenements at the start of the the twentieth century. (James Dunn, who plays the ineffectual, drink-damaged patriarch, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.) There's another TCM premiere later that night, 1 AM central/ 2 AM eastern: John Singleton's 1991 Boyz N the Hood. Unique among these movies, it's currently available on DVD, but how many chances are you going to have in this life to see Robert Osborne introduce an Ice Cube movie?

The Hollywood Pull List

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:45:00 GMT

There's nothing like getting what you want to make you wish you'd never wanted it in the first place. Many years ago, comic book geeks like myself used to wish for one...just one...decent big-screen adaptation of the adventures of our favorite superheroes; now, capes and cowls are so prevalent on the big screen that we're getting good and sick of them. The give-and-take we used to long for between the comic book industry and the motion picture business has become alarmingly one-sided; the funnybook biz is in one of the most precarious financial states it's ever seen, even as superhero adaptations teeter on the brink of billion-dollar box office business.

Things aren't likely to change, either. Even dedicated comics-to-film watchers like us were a bit shocked when we stumbled across this post at Den of Geek: it lists no less than seventy-five film adaptations of comic books that are said to be coming down the pike. Even if their definition of "comic book movie" is a little elastic (Sherlock Holmes and Conan villain Thulsa Doom are both referred to as comics properties), that's a hell of a lot of four-color heroes headed to the big screen. Even if as little as a third of them actually end up getting made, this is what is technically referred to as a "glut".

Of the seventy-five listed, how many will actually be worth watching, assuming they're actually completed? That remains to be seen. A lot of these look pretty dismal (bad juju already surrounds the Green Arrow prison flick Super Max, the Flash movie is probably permanently stalled, and the success of the Luke Cage picture depends entirely on whether it's directed by the John Singleton who did Boyz n tha Hood or the John Singleton who did 2 Fast 2 Furious), but we'd be lying if we said that the prospect of a movie version of The Hands of Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu -- directed by Yuen Woo-Ping and produced by Ang Lee -- didn't get our nerd juices flowing.

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That Guy!: Laurence Fishburne

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:30:00 GMT

February is Black History Month, and since we enjoyed combing through the stacks in preparation for last week's featured That Guy!, Yaphet Kotto, we figured we'd continue on in that vein and take a look at some of Hollywood's finest African-American character actors. We've discussed before how it's much harder for a woman to make a reputation playing character roles; actresses tend to be valued more for their looks than their acting skills, and women who aren't traditionally beautiful have far fewer opportunities to build a career based on their chops and personalities than do men who aren't conventionally handsome. Similarly, it may actually be easier for African-Americans to become character actors, for no other reason than for a very long time, leading man roles were generally denied to them. With his commanding demeanor, strong and handsome face and forceful personality, there's no reason that Larry Fishburne shouldn't have become one of Hollywood's biggest stars, and for a brief period in the early 1990s, it seemed like he would be — but for various reasons, it became clear that even at that late date, the movie business had only one opening for Serious Black Superstar, and it was already being filled by Denzel Washington. (It still is, for that matter.) So Fishburne — a rare black child star who became an even rarer black actor who never fell into stereotypical action or comedy roles — had to settle for nabbing some of the highest-profile second-banana roles available. Fishburne has always been a remarkably gifted actor, even as a child, and despite often being cast as a militant, a prophet, or some other variety of visionary, he's willing to take the piss on occasion (witness his almost satirically self-important voicing of the Silver Surfer in the recent Fantastic Four sequel), and is actually a lot more fun in light comic roles than anyone gives him credit for, as he showed when he played Cowboy Curtis on Pee Wee's Playhouse. Still not yet fifty years old, Fishburne has a lot of good roles ahead of him, if he doesn't give up acting altogether and move into writing, directing or producing — all areas at which he's shown talent. And if he never became America's next black superstar, he did get to marry the luscious Gina Torres, and that ain't bad as a second prize.

Where to see Laurence Fishburne at his best:

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

It wasn't his first movie — the former child star had already impressed audiences with his teenage turn in Cornbread, Earl and Me — but Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam nightmare was certainly the film that put young Laurence Fishburne on the map. As Mr. Clean, he gives the purest and most human performance in the movie, and his death is the most touching and tragic. It's all the more astonishing that Larry (as he called himself at the time) was only fourteen years old when filming began, having fudged his age to get the part. Of course, the filming of Apocalypse Now took so long, he was approximately thirty-eight years old when it wrapped.

BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991)

This was the movie that seemed to predict superstardom for Fishburne; so successful and influential was it at the time of its release that it's also the film that inspired him to start going by Laurence instead of Larry. John Singleton's directorial debut, Boyz N the Hood is one of the first, and undoubtedly the best, of a mini-wave of ghetto-realist gangsta films, and despite heavy competition from pre-living-joke-status Cuba Gooding and Ice Cube (and Angela Bassett, with whom he would later shine as Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It?), Fishburne anchors the cast as the morally complex, conflicted Furious Styles.

THE MATRIX (1999)

The Wachowski Brothers' high-toned blend of wire-fu, gunplay and slapdash philosophy holds up less well with each year that passes by. But at the time of its release, it perfectly synthesized a number of elements of the zeitgeist into an action movie that, if it wasn't as smart as it thought it was, at least wasn't dumb. Fishburne landed the role of a lifetime as the mystical hacker Morpheus, and it's a testament to his acting skills and more or less permanent sense of gravitas that he managed to avoid magical Negritude in a role that pretty much defines the magical Negro. It probably also managed to buy him a pretty nice house, so who's complaining?