Showing posts with label Laurence Fishburne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Laurence Fishburne. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 14, 2021

BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991)

"They want us to kill ourselves."

1984. Ten-year-old Tre Styles lives with his single mother (Angela Bassett) n Los Angeles.  She can't handle his shit and sends him to live with his father, Jason "Furious" Styles (Laurence Fishburne) n the hood. Some STAND BY ME shit happens and suddenly it's 1991 and 17-year-old Tre is now 23-year-old Cuba Gooding Jr. who looks like he's 30 and hasn't slept n 4 days.  He also has a shirt with two random dots on it. N order to show off his shirt, he goes to a neighborhood BBQ party where we're introduced to the important characters n the film.  Namely, half-brothers Darren 'Doughboy' Baker (Ice Cube) and Ricky Baker (Morris Chestnut).  Doughboy and Ricky might be brothers, but they are very different.  Ricky is a football start who hopes to get a football scholarship while Doughboy is a drug dealing gang member.

What can I say about BOYZ N THE HOOD that hasn't already been said a billion times by people who actually get paid to write about such things?  Probably nothing. It's definitely a product of it's time and dated as fook, but it's still a great film and historically important.  It's also unfair to carelessly lump BOYZ N THE HOOD nto the "hood film" genre thinking that it's nothing but endless drive-bys and people randomly yelling "motherfucker", because BNTH is more of coming-of-age than anything else.  It just happens to take place n the hood.

Good pace, hit or miss acting, less violence than some might expect, Duck Hunt, awesome early 1990's Los Angeles scenery, uneven direction (that kinda adds to the film n a weird way), dude getting hit with a garbage can, so many loose ends n the script that is seems like the movie is more a fable than an actual story, multiple now iconic scenes and characters, actors that all (distractingly) look 5 years older than their characters (example: 22-year-old high school footballer applying for college), badass dated fashions, vintage cars, a Freddy Krueger reference, director cameo (Mailman), an Eazy-E dis, dated slang that I still use, male dominate story, interesting soundtrack that features everything from 2 Live Crew to The Five Stairsteps.

BOYZ N THE HOOD is mandatory viewing for anybody interesting n American Cinema or just good films n general, but for me personally the single greatest thing about BNTH isn't anything to do with the film itself, but instead its obvious influence on one of my favorite films: the 91-minute cut of 1995's FRIDAY.  Watch them back-to-back and you'll see what I'm talking about.  Hell...Cube's even wearing the same exact clothes n the opening scene of FRIDAY that he was wearing n the last scene of BOYZ N THE HOOD!  Half-dead motherfucker. Come on, sister!

If you need me, I'll be outside raking leaves n a yard with no trees.

[Fun fact: I remember going to Wal-Mart right after this film came out (and before I saw it) and being confused as to why so many people were walking around with baby pacifiers n their mouths.]

Saturday, May 7, 2016

RED HEAT (1988)

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Russian cop sent to America to accompany a wanted drug runner (Ed O'Ross), who was arrested in Chicago, back to Russia. Shit happens, the bad guy escapes and now it's up to Arnold and his wise-cracking American partner Jim Belushi to catch this asshole.

As far as buddy cop movies go, RED HEAT is disappointingly straightforward.  Arnold's character is too silent and Terminator-ish and Belushi's character, while he does get a few small laughs, is way too serious and jaded.  The whole thing would have been better if their partnership dynamic was more like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold in TRUE LIES.

Slow pace, needlessly complicated story, lackluster action scenes, boring ending, unfunny jokes about human rights violations, very little onscreen chemistry between Belushi and Arnold, limp topless scenes.

I wanted to like this film but it just wasn't my cup of vodka. Still, it's worth watching, just nothing to get overly excited about.
In the picture above (and below) the glass breaks before being touched.