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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 17, 2017 5:40:16 GMT
Discussion, reviews, news, pics, etc.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 8, 2017 23:25:49 GMT
From Elvis Mitchell's NYtimes review: - Despite its being an assemblage of retro and contemporary cliches, the movie works as empty-headed entertainment-
- This may be the first movie that runs under two hours and yet has no attention span. Characters are abandoned and picked up; narrative threads dissolve before your very eyes, no doubt because of the backstage battles along racial lines, including Mr. Jackson's refusal to deliver lines by Mr. Price.
- It's hard to remember so unapologetically flamboyant a movie, with two major villains and a star who welds its mismatched pieces through sheer presence. Mr. Jackson uses the intense, deliberate concentration of a Baptist preacher, even on a laugh line. Every dialogue exchange is a baptism by fire, and the hero is as much fun to watch as the villain.
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Post by RhodoraO on Jan 29, 2021 18:46:03 GMT
A pleasantly positive review from WSJ: www.wsj.com/articles/SB961118458784008517He's Not a Sex Machine, But This Updated 'Shaft' Sure Is Politically Correct By Debra Jo Immergut June 16, 2000 11:59 pm ET When you're the best-dressed cop on the planet, you better be on the good side of a bad-ass dry cleaner. Punching out criminals, scampering down filthy hallways with bullets flying -- that's rough stuff for an Armani jacket. In John Singleton's new version of the 1971 film "Shaft ," we have no doubt that, along with the wacky Rastafarian livery driver and the comely female detective, John Shaft's crime-fighting crew includes a guy who's a genius at removing blood stains from fine Italian calfskin. And just how does a clean cop in New York City afford to outfit himself in the latest threads from Milan? Easy. In the title role, Samuel L. Jackson is so deliciously cool, so sleekly charismatic, we're convinced that, like Gwyneth and Nicole, Det. Shaft gets his clothes from the designers for free simply because he wears them so damn well. This "Shaft," is more than the man's wardrobe, though. In updating Gordon Parks's blaxploitation classic, Mr. Singleton has fashioned an urban thriller that, for all its zillions of gun blasts, has a pleasingly understated quality, with an almost quaint preference for character over ultraviolence. Sure, bodies crash through windows and cars flip over in a hail of machine-gun fire, but we meet some memorable guys, too. Foremost among them is Shaft himself. Mr. Jackson's performance as the police-force hothead ripples with nuance. We know almost nothing of his back story, but, watching Shaft's face flicker between humor and rage, we understand that, as Isaac Hayes's original title track (which returns here in all its deeply funky glory) puts it, "he's a complicated man." And, for most of the movie anyway, that's enough. As good as he is, Mr. Jackson nearly has the film stolen away from him by Jeffrey Wright, best known for his work as the title character of the biopic "Basquiat." Here, playing Dominican druglord Peoples Hernandez, Mr. Wright turns in a performance that's so vivid, so wildly colorful, it teeters on the brink of bad taste. With his soupy accent, a baby drooling on his shoulder, the handsome Latin king is master of his uptown domain but also a prisoner of it. Downtown, he complains, he's a nobody. His [Jeffery Wright's] scenes with Christian Bale, surprisingly menacing as a rich-kid race-murderer, are fun to watch -- tough guys from different sides of the tracks dancing a delicate mambo of contempt and envy.
The story, a straightforward tale of the search for the missing witness who can put Bale's character behind bars, is most alive when these two tasty baddies are onscreen; it dithers a bit when Shaft is off in the boroughs chasing down his reluctant witness (a jittery Toni Colette), and, in the end, we do wish we knew more about the guy's personal life. His love life, for example. "Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine for all the chicks?" asks the Hayes tune. Not this Shaft. He's strangely neutered. And that's one place, perhaps, where this film shows its cynical heart. Mr. Parks's "Shaft" was an inside look at the inner city, made with its African-American target audience always in mind. But this version feels straight out of Hollywood, carefully calibrated for crossover appeal. You can't help noticing that every group of characters seems to have been painstakingly assembled by skin color -- bad blacks, good blacks, bad whites, good whites, shifting yet always balanced, like some complicated game of race-based chess. So when the film passes without a sex scene for sexy Shaft (he sleeps with a foxy bartender, but way offscreen), you can't help wondering why. Would black-on-black loving have been too black for the whites this film longs to attract? You hope you're wrong. You hope that Mr. Singleton, who made his name with the excellent "Boyz N the Hood," wouldn't give in to studio pressures that way. You hope it was just a question of plot, pacing and time. Or maybe that our hero couldn't bear to part ways with his Armani.
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