Friday, 16 June 2000

WEEKEND PREVIEW

Well, the release date is finally here. The movie series is a classic. The music grooves. If you aren't entering the trivia contest every day, you are a fool, because the prizes are tremendous. Just one side note…Shaft sucks.

I wish it weren't so. I'm sure that my friends at TNT wish it weren't so or that I could embargo this review into August. But this column is this column and the Website does do fun promotions and the network did have on all three Shaft movies on Tuesday, which were really fun to watch again. But the new movie…it sucks.

Samuel L. Jackson is a great actor and his Shaft is a tough, scary guy. John Singleton can be a fine director. I personally think that Higher Learning was one of the most worthy, relatively overlooked films of its time. And I like Richard Price's writing, even if he is a white guy. But in the end, the problem with Shaft is not that Sam isn't sexy enough or that Singleton didn't provide pretty images or that the dialogue is junk. This movie isn't about anything. I sat there in the theater and watched as the constant gunplay and a number of uses of a nasty curse word that describes what your father did to your mother to get you here that rivals Tarantino and I waited to feel something…anything. When it was over, I went home and called Kozmo.com and rented the original Shaft. And it was very light on gunplay by today's standards. There was more sex than in the new version, in which there is virtually none. And I saw a movie about a black man who owned the streets he walked in the late '60s/early '70s. (There is virtually no walking in the new Shaft, all cars. And Jackson has the power to own the streets he walks, too.) The original was about a man who knew the score and wouldn't be restrained by anyone's opinion or attitude or racism. The new movie is about a bad a** who runs up against the most overt, obnoxious, evil, black & white racist idiots you would ever wish to avoid seeing on screen. There is no one who isn't a card carrying Klan member who won't have the Christian Bale character within seconds of his arrival. Where's the fun in that? A villain with no gray is not a good villain. A hero with no flaws is not a good hero. And a movie about race has to be dangerous to be interesting. The new Shaft is the worst kind of race movie…all the "odd" characters are virtually color blind and all the bad guys are racist morons with too much power.

The only redeeming feature in the film is the occasional cameo moments from Richard Roundtree and the return cameo of Gordon Parks, the man who knew what Shaft was about when he made the originals. Roundtree tells a great story about making the original, when Parks told him that he had to walk across a busy New York street as though he'd been doing it all his life. He almost got hit by a car. But he made it. And it was a magic beat because it showed his power. The defining moment of the new Shaft is that shot you've seen in the ads when Jackson flings his badge across a room in a bit of CG magic and it sticks in the judge's wall. It's a lie. We all know it's a lie. Couldn't happen. Wouldn't happen. Brassy and loud. Not smart. Not emotional. Not powerful. Shaft could have been so much more…even with the team that Scott Rudin assembled. (P.S. Rudin made a genius move in putting sex into the opening credits. The immediate rush of seeing nudity keeps the audience from wondering why Jackson doesn't have a single sex scene in a film about virility.)

Also opening is Boys and Girls, which I kind of covered out of the junket. It's not much of a movie. I want to marry Claire Forlani, but not because of this movie. Amanda Detmer is the name to watch of the year so far. And Freddie Prinze Jr. is a good-looking guy. Biggs is wasted in a piece that isn't as good as he is. We'll have to wait for Loser.

Fantasia 2000 is also reopening wide…boo hiss. Why must Disney pick on Fox so? This is the second time they've pulled this maneuver. I actually defended them the first time, as it was Anastasia and November, when they regularly released animated classics a few weeks before their Thanksgiving family event film. But this summer, it's almost as though them maneuvered Dinosaur and F2K for this effect. It's not dirty pool, because bid'ness is bid'ness. But I wish they hadn't done it. Success breeds success and the entire animation category needs a boost these days.

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"The Good, The Bad & The Ugly"