Expelled Grey Matter

There is always a reluctance to watch a movie that doesn't have a resolution.  I don't feel the same about books for some reason; in fact, I have read books where the author died in the middle of writing them, so they just end.  It's a bit frustrating, but if it's known ahead of time, then the truth is that it was the reader that made the choice to invest however much time it was into reading the book to get out of it what they could. Movies are different thing.  It doesn't take anywhere near as long to watch a movie as it does to read a book, but then again a book an be picked up at any time.  A movie is, on average, two hours out of a person's life that they have to plan to sit down and pay attention to what is going on and hope that the experience is worth it.  It's two hours of leisure in a world where we get little time to ourselves, and to have it ruined by everything proceeding leading up to nothing feels like a personal affront.   I wonder how many p

The Parks family, Gordon and Gordon Jr., were two of the most important figures in African-American cinema in the early 1970s.  Melvin Van Peebles may have proven a market for black film makers existed with Watermelon Man and Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song, but the senior and junior parks truly developed what would be called blaxploitation cinema with Shaft and Super Fly , respectively. While the former showed us a new perspective on action movies with an independent black gaze, Super Fly presented us the opposite side of the law.  Gordon Parks Jr. filmed, often guerilla style, on the streets of Harlem, as well as in its tenements, bars, restaurants and even high-class apartment buildings.  It stirred up its share of controversy, particularly with the NAACP, for at times seemingly glorifying street violence and drug use, while at the same time showing the effects it had on everyone involved and pointing the finger directly back on the powers that be for flooding lower income area

I wouldn't say that The Usual Suspects set the world on fire in 1995, but it was a slow burn and soon found its audience.  It does wear its influences on its sleeve, from classic heist films to the the non-linear story telling of Pulp Fiction , but it was a time when an independent director could find a distributor and eventually get a movie like this on the big screen.  There was also even the chance that it could stay there long enough to find its audience, and The Usual Suspects did. This was the second movie with Bryan Singer directing and Christopher McQuarrie writing, with their first collaboration being the low-budget Public Access .  It also must be remembered that Kevin Spacey was not yet a household name.  Se7en came out the same year, but before that the biggest role he had was in The Ref .  The biggest names in the movie at this point were Gabriel Byrne and Chazz Palminteri.  Despite this, Spacey's role was written for him, as was Byrne's, and although there wer

Among the most legendary films there are those that achieved their fame in a different way.  Those movies go by names like Heaven's Gate , Ishtar , Battlefield Earth and, rather famously because it was produced by George Lucas and featured a fringe Marvel Comics property, Howard the Duck .  Sure, there are plenty of terrible (or so bad they're good) films, but many of those were made on a budget that was barely above that of a school play.  To truly fail in a legendary way takes a lot of money. George Lucas was rolling in cash by the middle of the 1980s, so much that he built his own place to make movies, edit and do post production called Skywalker Ranch.  The endeavor, located in a remote area of Marin County in California, cost $50 million.  In today's dollars this would be just shy of $120 million and, keep in mind, this was one guy who was an independent film maker who, among other things, had founded his own special effects company (Industrial Light and Magic) and had

Charles Bronson was one of cinema's consummate tough guys long before he made Death Wish in 1974.  He starred in a number of westerns, including some of the best from Sergio Leone, as well as a number of war, crime and action films.  By the 1980s, although it had been eight years and a number of movies later, he was largely known for Death Wish , and the low-budget film studio Cannon was able to channel America's fear of rising urban crime into producing a hit sequel in 1982.  Though hated by critics, the movie was a hit with audiences, who were more than happy to see Bronson blow a bunch of criminals away. Also with Cannon was director J. Lee Thompson, famous for making hit films in the 1960s like The Guns of Navarone and Cape Fear.   By the time he and Bronson started working together he had been making a string of b-movies, including famous slasher film Happy Birthday to Me .  10 to Midnight happened to be the first movie the two would work on together, and both Bronson and

Where does one go after doing a Star Wars movie ?  I will admit that, unless it's George Lucas or J. J. Abrams, the Star Wars series is a bit of a curse.  Even Lucas removed himself from officially directing anything for over two decades after the first Star Wars film, while Irving Kirshner only managed two more feature films and Richard Marquand only a handful before his death.  Gareth Edwards, the director of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story , has not done anything since, and Ron Howard, like Kirshner before him, is near the tail end of his career.   That brings us to Rian Johnson.  I was excited about The Last Jedi  because of Johnson's previous film Looper , which dealt realistically with aspects of time travel - especially when used by organized crime.  He had a couple of other well-regarded films before that one, but he couldn't really be considered a household name.  One problem with a lot of the big, cinematic universe films has been that studios have taken independent

In 1982 Eddie Murphy was riding high on success from his time on Saturday Night Live and released a hit comedy album.  He was appearing on stage, had a novelty hit with "Boogie in Your Butt" and was the most popular young African-American comedian in the country.  The world was more than ready to see what he could do on screen when he was cast in 48 Hrs. , a Walter Hill film of a script that had been floating around since the late 1970s and suddenly got the go-ahead. Despite his success the producers of the movie still didn't know who he was.  Afterwards that would all change.  Eddie Murphy had his ups and downs, even in the 1980s, but by the time Another 48 Hrs. came out in 1990 he was top billed instead of Nick Nolte.  And this is where it started: a low-budget, violent crime drama in which Murphy injected his charisma and his comic timing to not only make him a star but also to start an entire '80s genre of cop movies. Jack Cates (Nolte) is a disheveled, alcoholic

After Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace we were constantly promised that the series would get betterif we just stuck with it; trust in the Lucas, so to speak.  There was enough good will left over from the original trilogy that we did, and we were rewarded by Attack of the Clones .  By rewarded what I mean is a reduced role for Jar Jar Binks.  Otherwise, we got emotionless monologues about sand from a sad, emo version of Anakin Skywalker and Natalie Portman bringing the sort of enthusiasm one does to a dental appointment.  Everything forced into the movie to give us a tragic romantic story for Anakin and Padmé just took away from parts that were good, many of them involving Obi-Wan Kenobi uncovering a series of plots that lead to the beginning of the Clone Wars.  Now that we had the beginning of the Clone Wars out of the way, it was time that we got the rest of it - but, in all honesty, that is not what we got for the final film.  That all happened off screen, and Revenge of t

Adam Sandler is not a name that makes me look forward to a new movie.  I don't think it's that strange to say that I did like a lot of his comedies when he first started his film career - Billy Madison , Happy Gilmore , even Little Nicky  - but he became tiresome rather quickly.  The problem is that he relies on stupid voices and gives us characters that we had no reason to root for.  It sometimes works, and it sometimes doesn't, but usually when it does he is playing a role that requires him to be an actual person.   The Wedding Singer is a good example.  In 2002 there was a strange movie called Punch-Drunk Love.  Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, it featured Sandler in what was still marginally a comedic role as a man with psychological and anger issues dealing with a both a sudden interruption in his life combined with romantic entanglements.  Like all of Anderson's films it was strange, but Sandler suddenly proved there was more to him than just a guy grabbing the f

The blaxploitation genre did what it could to incorporate as many different classic movie styles as possible, from westerns to horror.  I'm quite sure that this was not originally intended to be, as Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song was more of an art film, while Shaft and Superfly were typical cop and gangster films, respectively, but produced to where they were more relevant to the African-American community.  Once things got going, and the demand for these pictures from both black and white audiences increased, it became like any other genre where getting new product out, no matter what the quality, was what mattered.  Also what mattered in most cases is getting a star, and Fred Williamson was one of the biggest, thanks to the Larry Cohen films Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem .  Being a former football player he had the physicality to be a convincing tough guy, but he also had the look of any normal guy one might meet on the street.  This everyday quality, especially when

Sam Spade is among the most famous fictional private detectives despite being featured in only one full-length book: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon .  He popped up in some short stories and a radio program that had Hammett's involvement, but everything one needed to know about the detective was contained within the one story.  Despite not being described to look anything like Humphrey Bogart, it is Bogart that one pictures when the name is said.  While he had a number of roles in crime films and Westerns under his belt, including some memorable ones, it was as Sam Spade that he finally got his belated star turn.  This was also a first for John Huston, who had been a scriptwriter for a while and got sick of actors deciding they knew better than him and having his work rewritten.  He also was not happy with either of the two adaptations of Hammett's novel that had been produced in the 1930s, and felt that he could do a lot better.  Warner Bros. wasn't so sure, so H

I have gone over it before in my reviews of James Bond films, but there was a fly in the ointment when it came to bringing many popular elements of Ian Fleming's books to film.  That fly went by the name of Kevin McClory, who decided that he owned the character Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the concept of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and anything having to do with Thunderball since he contributed when he and Fleming did a film treatment prior to the latter novelizing the script.  Because of that he got a producer mention for  Thunderball   and, after On Her Majesty's Secret Service , he decided that neither EON Productions nor anyone else besides him would be able to do another movie with Blofeld as the main villain.  He picked up his toys and went home, intending make his own series of Bond films, and only managing to push out one: Never Say Never Again , which was a remake of Thunderball .  The current series of films starring Daniel Craig managed to start off with a story that had hung around in