Expelled Grey Matter

Jordan Peele has become one of the best new horror directors.  Until recently he hosted the latest reboot of The Twilight Zone , he has two critically acclaimed hits with Get Out and Us , and has reached the pinnacle of any famous director - having his production credit boldly featured at the top of movies that are not as good as his to try and trick people into seeing them.  Long before that, however, he was in the comedy duo Key and Peele, who had one of the many shows on Comedy Central that tried to make up for the void left by Dave Chapelle's early departure.  Their show was one of the more successful, with many of the skits released on YouTube during the show's run and earning a cult following even from those who didn't watch the television show.  Peele had frequently voiced his desire to go into movie making, and before his acclaimed horror films he co-wrote the script for Keanu with Alex Rubens. Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) and Rell (Peele) are cousins living two s

Watching The Emperor Jones these days, far removed from the impact that it had both as a play by Eugene O'Neill and as a starring vehicle for Paul Robeson, can be a bit shocking.  The movie is loosely based on the play, which itself used a certain pejorative throughout, and which is used in the movie as well.  It was released before the Hays Code went into effect, but still many of the scenes that would have elevated it from seeming like an exploitation film were cut, as were many of O'Neill's original intentions, much to the displeasure of Robeson. What it did, however, was make Robeson a star at a time when black actors simply did not get leading roles.  He had replaced Charles Gilpin in the stage play, which had debuted in 1920, and thus was the natural choice for the role in the movie adaptation.  No matter what the opinion of the quality of the finished movie may be there is no doubt that Robeson gives it his all, and it was an important milestone. Brutus Jones (Robeso

It is as inevitable that the sun will rise that, if a movie makes a studio a ton of money, there will be a sequel.  Such as it was with Shaft .  Ernest Tidyman's black private dick (who was hit with all the chicks) was brought to life by director Gordon Parks and embodied by Richard Roundtree, and the soundtrack by Isaac Hayes sold enough to keep MGM once again from the jaws of bankruptcy.  Not to mention that Tidyman had just won an Academy Award for his screenplay of The French Connection . Tidyman had only written one novel with Shaft, so this time around he had to base his script on the movie version, with some characters reappearing.  The major influence, as it was also a major influence a number of action movies in the early 1970s, was The French Connection , which featured one of the most iconic car chase scenes in movie history.  Pressure was on for every movie, big or small, to at least try to equal it or, if possible, surpass it.   The good news for Parks was that, since

  Quentin Tarantino's movies often receive some hipster hate these days, as former fans try to earn cool points by taking him down a notch for stealing large chunks of other movies for his films.  Notably, they like to go after Kill Bill Vol. I and Vol. II.  While I am not a big fan of the second, I quite like the first one.  What confuses me, however, is that the hate comes now .  From using miniature sets of Tokyo that were later used in one of the 2000s Godzilla films, to stealing little details from other Toho monster and martial arts films, Tarantino never hid a thing.  He was sampling movies like a hip-hop producer samples old records for beats.   One of the movies he heavily sampled for the first half of Kill Bill was Lady Snowblood, right down to including its theme song in the soundtrack.  Luckily he changed a number of the circumstances of why the female lead wants revenge, or else Kill Bill might have looked more like a remake than an homage.  Still it is obvious that th

Zombies have been a movie staple for some time, but Night of the Living Dead completely changed the whole idea of what a zombie is.  In the movies of the 1930s, and even through the 1960s, being a zombie was a living death rather than being part of the living dead.  It was based off of the idea that a certain mixture of chemicals could render a person into a catatonic state to where they were obedient and could work, but could do little else.  The horror of this was portrayed in movies like The Walking Dead and White Zombie and countless others of varying qualities. George Romero's debut film specifically never mentions zombies, and that is for good reason.  Zombies were still human and, in most cases, removing them from their drugged state returned them to their normal selves.  Romero's creatures are actual corpses, risen from the dead and imbued with an overwhelming urge to consume living creatures - largely human beings.  Not only that, but a mere bite could cause an infecti

While Melinda definitely falls into the blaxploitation realm, it is still early enough in the run of these films where, though trading on gangster and revenge tales, the protagonists were something other than pimps or drug pushers.  The trend, in large part, was against what were seen as diseases in the Black community.  Many of the movies, even ones that followed the escapades of those on the wrong side of the law, included subplots where white authority figures were helping to mastermind the distribution of narcotics and encouraged crime to keep the communities down.   The early black-produced films tended to portray more positive role models - John Shaft as a private detective, Cleopatra Jones as a special agent with the FBI and, in this one, Calvin Lockhart as a popular disc jockey on a Los Angeles soul station.  The difference with Melinda is that instead of trying to go over the same ground as some of the first batch, writers Lonne Elder III and Raymond Cistheri, along with direc

Allen and Albert Hughes, credited on their movies as the Hughes Brothers, are a pair of black writers, directors and producers that I had high hopes for over the years.  Despite some criticisms of their first film, Menace II Society , taking the "hood" movie formula too far, what I saw in them when it came to the movie was a pair of young men that could easily follow in the steps of Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola.  Their follow-up Dead Presidents had a lot of flaws, but it still had enough raw energy behind it to be encouraging.  What they were really doing was making movies that had been popular in Hollywood for awhile, but doing it with a black gaze. Then they seemed to disappear.  Besides directing a few music videos, they didn't return again until 1999, and this time with a documentary called American Pimp , followed two years later with a mediocre horror film, From Hell , starring Johnny Depp and based on the Jack the Ripper case.  For the m

Star Trek had enough of a fan base that, given the success of Star Wars , it was decided that it was worth it to take a chance on a full-length movie.  This resulted in Star Trek: The Motion Picture , which expanded an episode that was originally meant for a new unproduced television show, Star Trek: Phase II , and which itself borrowed from an Original Series episode called The Changeling .  The movie cost 46 million dollars, featured dazzling special effects, got the main crew back together again and pondered such questions as what sentience truly is and what our place in the universe should be.  It was also overlong and too reliant on looking pretty.  The Enterprise did not look anything like the original, much of the dynamic between the characters was gone and it seemed it wanted to be 2001: A Space Odyssey rather than Star Trek .  It may have been a solid science fiction film, but it was far from what fans wanted, and the profits were far from what the studio wanted.  Still, it m

Unlike a lot of blaxploitation stars that wanted to be martial arts experts (Rudy Ray Moore especially comes to mind), Jim Kelly was the real thing.  Although his role in the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon was rather small, it was memorable, and Kelly was able to build on that and make a career for himself.  Unfortunately, most of the movies he made were not up to the same level as Enter the Dragon or even his first starring role in Black Belt Jones .  Black Belt Jones (Kelly) is a martial arts expert that trained with Papa Byrd (Scatman Crothers) at his karate school.  Still loyal to Byrd and the school, he finds himself having to defend it when the mafia decides they want to buy out the area, as it is planned for redevelopment and they stand to make money from the sale of the land.  In order to do this they have local gangster Pinky (Malik Carter) and his thugs put pressure on Byrd.  Unfortunately, they accidentally kill him, gaining the ire of Jones and Byrd's estranged daught

Eddie Murphy seemed like he was unstoppable in the 1980s.  48 Hrs. , Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop  were all major hits.  They were also strong R-rated films, playing off of Murphy's stand-up persona of telling hilarious, vulgar jokes.  It turned out as an actor he knew how to regulate himself rather well, letting out the wild side when needed and reigning it in when necessary.  At the time he was big enough to even weather some bad ideas - like an album where he sang, rather than performing comedy.   He was also able to get past his first movie misstep.  The Golden Child  wasn't a financial disaster, however it was not well-liked by critics, and probably would have gone the way of Howard the Duck without Murphy being in the lead role.  His name put the butts in the seats, but the movie had no lasting legacy other than as a punchline when telling jokes about Eddie Murphy's career.  As always with a number of films that fell to the wayside after the '80s were over

With all the visual references to Sergio Leone in Inglourious Basterds , it was only a matter of time before Quentin Tarantino decided to go ahead and make a western.  Of course, with his interest in '70s b-films, including the blaxploitation genre, it is no surprise that the two would be combined on his first foray into the 19th century.   It's not like this hasn't been attempted before.  In fact, I've recently reviewed one starring Fred Williamson that came out during the height of the blaxploitation craze.  The difference is, while that one was intended to be more in line with the typical Hollywood Western, Tarantino decided to tip his hat to the Italian movies of the 1960s, right down to lifting the name of his main character and theme song directly from the 1966 movie Django .  There is even a cameo from that movie's star, Franco Nero.   I am not surprised he pulled it off, even if The Hateful Eight ended up being the better of his two movies that focus on th

Strangely, since this prominently features a 1950s drive-in movie theater for Marty's trip back to 1885, I originally saw Back to the Future III at a drive-in.  Happily it still exists, and has actually flourished a bit due to recent events.  Even at the time I saw it that theater was one of maybe two or three left in the Phoenix area - a place that used to have them so plentiful that one could literally see movies on the screens while driving on the freeway.   What I remembered most was not the movie in detail, since I was quite bored with it.  What I remember is that I didn't know resting my foot on the brake pedal, even with the engine off, still made the brake lights come on.  So, as usual, instead of enjoying a special outing with my girlfriend at the time, I committed some  faux pas that stuck in my head longer than the movie did.  Over the years I've seen bits and parts of it as it has shown up on television, but never sat through it completely in all that time.  As

Whenever I hear that a movie is one of Quentin Tarantino's favorites I don't exactly jump for joy.  I have a love of bad films, but I often think that many of the movies Tarantino watched while sitting in rundown grindhouse theaters just convinced him that he could do better when he got his chance.  One of the movies he was right about, The Street Fighter , I didn't even believe was a real movie when I first saw the scene of Christian Slater and Rosanna Arquette going to a theater to watch it in True Romance .  It looked like one of those made-up movies, such as  Angels with Filthy Souls or See You Next Wednesday.  If there was anything Tarantino did, other than make me quite a happy theater-goer in the early 1990s, it was turn me on to how much more that was out there that I hadn't seen. But, again, his reasons for liking movies is not because they are particularly good.  I am glad that he is aware they are bad - he happens to be a big fan of Manos: The Hands of Fate,