Tag Archives: Martin Lawrence

Bad Boys for Life

Will Smith is 51 years old; costar Martin Lawrence is 55. Their characters, Mike Lowry and Marcus Burnett, are feeling every bit of their age on the Miami police department where they haven’t been boys for quite some time, and are maybe looking to be a little less bad. But ‘Good Men’ just doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it?

Like always, Marcus is trying to talk himself into quitting – or in this case, 25 years after the first installment – retire. And as always, Mike pshaws his excuses and presses him into further recklessness. Age hasn’t mellowed Mike nearly enough. He’s still the guy scorching through the streets in his Porsche, shooting first and asking questions never, still giving his Captain (Joe Pantoliano) heart palpitations which are increasingly risky now that they’re all AARP eligible.

Currently Miami is being terrorized by the systematic assassination of every member of law enforcement who worked a case a quarter century ago. A mother-son pair of drug lords (Kate del Castillo, Jacob Scipio) are behind the bloody vengeance but they’ve proved virtually untouchable thus far. Mike has every reason to sit this one out, which inevitably means he’s going to barge right in, invited or not, so he gets assigned to the AMMO team headed by his ex Rita (Paola Nuñez) which will now have to solve the case while babysitting the legendary detective who acts more like a toddler with an assault rifle.

Bad Boys for Life is the third in the franchise and the first that isn’t directed by Michael Bay. Don’t worry though, directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (Adil & Bilall) are adept at mimicking his style, recreating several iconic shots from the previous films, making fans feel right at home. As if that wasn’t enough, they even worked Bay in with a cameo, both as a very minor character in the film, and as the director of that particular scene, which features his signature 360 degree shot.

There may be a little more gray in their beards and a little less spring in their steps, but Smith and Lawrence recapture their dynamic and deliver an exciting and fun addition to the franchise. This movie has everything you’ve come to expect from the trilogy and manages to deliver it in a way that doesn’t feel derivative. While no one will ever call it a ‘good film,’ it is every bit the film that fans deserve, and I can’t imagine anyone being disappointed by it. Ludicrous car chases, improbable explosions, random impalement, a menacing helicopter and a blacked out motorcycle – Bad Boys for Life is a high octane delivery system for all the ‘Bayhem’ the original helped make industry standard. Yes, it’s junk food, but as far as greasy take-out goes, this burger is top notch.

The Beach Bum

14 Replies

so, interesting story: a couple of weeks ago, Sean and I were at a wedding that got hit by a tornado. Don’t worry, everyone was fine. The same cannot be said for tents and glassware and flowers and cake, but those are but details with hefty deposits. They were already legally wed, and that’s the main thing. Anyway, Sean and I cleared out before we even got fed, but Sean had certainly been watered. With lots and lots of beer. Which means I was driving. I always volunteer to be the DD, though I don’t usually count on having to navigate roads blocked by fallen trees. Anyway, it was a long-ish drive back home, during which time Sean’s jobs were to keep Spotify thumping, and to read my sisters’ Snapchat updates aloud. Even with hindsight, it’s impossible to say how we got on to the topic of 90s music, but we eventually landed on Creed (believe it or not), which I’d forgotten was a thing. And even with the reminder, I couldn’t quite name a song, though I knew that knowledge must be buried deep. So Sean took it upon himself to sing (remember all the beers). Anyway, you do not need to remember that Creed exists because this movie is here to remind you, if briefly. And that’s about all I have to say about the movie The Beach Bum.

Moondog (Matthew McConaughey) has a very rich and very beautiful wife, Minnie (Isla Fisher), with whom he does not live, and a newlywed daughter whose life he flits in and out of. Moondog lives by no rules. He barely lives in this world. “He’s from another dimension,” explains his indulgent wife, who finds his spotty record very convenient for doing what she wants with whom she wants – mostly, a man named Lingerie (Snoop Dogg).

With straggly, unwashed hair, and volcano-orange thongs, Moondog isn’t just a beach bum, he looks and lives like a bum, period. Except for some reason fake-titted women still line up to be with him. It makes no sense and is exactly the kind of nonsense that completely derails a movie for me. Not that this movie was ever on the rails. Or even has rails.

Anyway, Moondog is apparently a talented poet, which is also completely unbelievable, and his wife figures out how to give him a little motivation to do some writing.

In some ways this is the role Matthew McConaughey was born to play: a merry, aimless stoner. It’s not that hard to imagine that this might have been his fate had he not caught some lucky breaks in Hollywood. Jonah Hill, however, turns in a performance I find nonredeemable; it’s not that hard to imagine that to be MY fate were I being punished in hell for some hella unforgivable sin. Still, it’s mostly writer-director Harmony Karine with whom I take issue. While it may not be unusual to be forgiving of one’s anti-hero, Moondog is undeniably reckless and Karine is infuriatingly nonjudgmental. There’s an outside chance that the message he’s intending is that the pursuit of happiness is attained through pure and selfish hedonism. At the end of the day, its worst crime is that it is boring. Had I not paid to rent it, I would have turned it off. Spare yourself Zac Efron’s douchy beard.

Cop Movies!

32 Replies

Sean

There’s nothing like cop week to get the dirty taste of dance movies out of your mouth! Thanks Wandering Through the Shelves for sponsoring yet another thoughtful Thursday theme, and for giving me the perfect excuse for subjecting my wife to all the explodey movies she normally turns her cute little nose up at.

Bad Boys: Mike & Marcus (Will Smith & Martin Lawrence) are two “loose cannon” cops, not to mention best friends, who spend so much time together they sound like an old married couple – the kind constantly threatening to get a divorce. But damn if they don’t pull together in times of trouble! Legend has it that this script was originally intended for Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey – now just imagine that movie for a minute, if you will.

Heat: Bank robbers start to feel “the heat” from cops when their latest robbery turns out to be a little sloppy. Lieutenant Al Pacino is on to them but Robert De Niro needs one last heist before he can retire (isn’t that always the way?). Then of course De Niro makes his fatal mistake – he goes against the golden rule ‘Never have anything in your life that you can’t walk out on in thirty seconds flat, if you spot the heat coming around the corner.’

Die Hard: It’s Die Hard, what else do you have to say? It’s Christmas AND he’s off duty (plus he’s NYPD visiting LA), but John McClane (Bruce Willis) is still a bad-ass motherfucker who will single-handedly END YOU.

Jay

I watched a lot of cop movies this week and it turns out that a lot of my favourite jams just happen to have cops in them. Actually, if you look hard enough, probably there’s a cop or two in nearly every movie. There were cops in dance movie Billy Elliot, and cops in teen comedy Superbad, and more cops than you can shake a stick at in the black and white movies we watched a while back. They’re everywhere, even in outer space, but above all, they’re immediately below 🙂
Fargo Marge Gunderson is probably my favourite cop-hero of all time. She doesn’t do the ass-slide over the hoods of cars, she doesn’t use karate to subdue perps twice her size, and she doesn’t cause millions of dollars in damage as she careens her car wildly through populated city streets. She’s just a quiet woman getting er done – you know, kind of like a real cop would do. Frances McDormand is crazy-talented, and I love watching her waddle through this movie with her quaint sense of humour, her helmet hair, the meals she shares with her husband. She doesn’t thump her chest or swing her dick around but she’s persistent and dogged and we enjoy watching her unravel this case – poor used car salesman Jerry (William H. Macy); he never really stood a chance against such a humbly formidable opponent.

The Departed This one is kind of on the other end of the spectrum, isn’t it? Two young cops join the force – one, Matt Damon, has a pristine record but works as a mole for mob boss Jack Nicholson. The other, Leonardo DiCaprio, comes from a rough background which helps him go deep under cover, infiltrating the gang, and feeding information back to the only two cops who know he’s actually a good guy – Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg. What ends up happening is that these two chase each other, relentlessly trying to uncover the mole while staying hidden themselves. It’s tense, degrading work, and losing means you pay with your life. Honestly, my favourite cop is probably the one played by Mark Wahlberg. He just goes so off the hook, unpredictable, balls to the wall, you have to admire it. The ending leads me to believe that he’s not clean. But is he a disgruntled ex-cop gone rogue or is he somebody’s rat? Either way, “If a gun is pointed at you, it doesn’t matter if you’re a cop or a criminal.”

21 Jump Street Aaaaaand switching gears again, one of my favourite cop buddy movies of recent years, and probably ever (although, for the record, I also super love Hot Fuzz, and if Matt hadn’t jumped on it, I’d have tried my best to beat Sean to it). This movie is self-referential and mocks the very genre it masters, but it’s never a mere homage. It’s smarter than a spoof, much like Hot Fuzz I suppose, and isn’t afraid to pay respect to its roots, embracing them even, and making them part of the fun. There’s never a moment when the film stops winking at us, trading in the cop movie clichés for cops in bike shorts doing slow-speed chases through grass, having cases thrown out on sad technicalities (“You have the right to remain an attorney.” – “Well, you DO have the right to be an attorney if you want to.”), bullet-riddled tankers that somehow fail to explode. I didn’t like Channing Tatum before this, and I still only like him in this (and I believe that includes the sequel) but for some reason the chemistry between he and Jonah Hill just really works.

Matt

As long as I can rembmer, I wanted to be a cop. I used to play cops and robbers in the schoolyard- usually with people who didn’t even know they were playing. When I was about to 12 I had to rethink my career goals when I realized that my eyesight wasn’t nearly good enough and would never be able to drive a car or see who I’m shooting at but the dream was fun while it lasted. I didn’t know much about police work back then but I did watch a lot of cop movies. Thanks to Wandering Through the Shelves for giving me an excuse to revisit them this week.

In the Heat of the Night (1967)- In the Heat of the Night is nearly 50 years old but its oepning scenes couldn’t be timelier. There’s been a murder in Sparta, Mississippi and the police go out and arrest the first black man they see. Of course, the suspect turns out to be an off-duty Philadelphia homicide detective who they call Mr. Tibbs. If Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger’s characters ever managed to become buddies, this would have been a contender for the best cop buddy movie of all time. Instead, What we get instead is much more interesting- a classic that manages to say a lot about race relations in the deep South in a time where you had to pretty careful what you said about race in the deep South. Best of all, it never forgets to deliver an engaging murder mystery

Hot Fuzz (2007)– According to TV ads, Hot Fuzz is “from the guys who have watched every action movie ever made”. Satire works best when a writer understands its subject so Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg were smart enough to take aim at a genre that they clearly knew well- and loved! Pegg plays a big city cop witha love of police work who is paired with a smalltown cop with a love of police movies (espeically Bad Boys 2). You can feel the love for buddy movies in almost every scene as Wright does his best to recreate the look and feel of a mainstream action movie and filling it with unexpected laugh-out loud moments throughout. To me, this is still pegg and Wright’s funniest movie.

Se7en (1995)– Between Sean and I, we have three picks from 1995 – a year that seems to have been a golden age for cop movies. Unlike most movies about serial killers, the cops (played of course by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt)- not the killings- are the focus. Freeman, days away from retirement, has lost faith in humanity long before John Doe’s first killing and Pitton his first week on the job, still believes he can make a difference. Over the course of one week and seven brutal killings, both men will have to examine their beliefs. Se7en also has the distinction of being the first film in director David Fincher’s twenty-year winning streak. The final “What’s in the box?” scene is so powerful that even Pitt’s overacting couldn’t derail it.

Thursday Movie Picks: Dance Movies That Aren’t Musicals

26 Replies

Matt

As usual, Wandering Through the Shelves has given me an excuse to catch up on movies you probably wouldn’t believe that I have missed- movies that I probably never would have sought out without this weekly challenge. The most crucial check off of my bucket list this week was Footloose, which until this week all I knew of was the Kenny Loggins song of the same name and Chris Pratt’s summary of the plot in Guardians of the Galaxy. I now know that Kevin Bacon understood what no one else in Beaumont did; that dancing has a way of helping you blow off steam like nothing else can. Not even Tractor Chicken.

Footloose may not be my favourite movie about dancing but it shares a philosophy of dance with some that are. My first pick is Billy Elliot (2000), whose main character is an 11 year-old boy with lots of reasons to want to blow off steam. His mother is dead, his father is distracted by the 1984 Miner’s Strike, and boxing doesn’t seem to be working out for him. It’s only when a no-nonsense ballet teacher (Julie Walters) takes him under her wing that he finds his voice, confidence, and an outlet for his frustration. (Like Kevin Bacon, he does a lot of angry dancing). It’s touching and very funny.

Taking a page from Billy Elliot, inner city New York fifth graders learn several styles of ballroom dancing in the 2005 documentary Mad Hot Ballroom. The film follows a pilot project with the NYC Department of Education that aims to expose students to dances from around the world including the tango, foxtrot, and merengue. Like Billy Elliot, it’s surprisingly funny, with lots of Kids Say the Darndest Things Moments. Plus, it’s hard not to crack up seeing the discomfort of 10 year-old boys having to dance with a girl for the first time. Just as importantly though, the documentary lets us bear witness to a program that gives these kids a unique opportunity to learn about the arts, other cultures, and the opposite It may just make you want to dance too. At the screening I attended ten years ago, I passed a couple swing dancing right there in the theater.

Not every movie about dancing will make you want to get up and dance though. My third pick is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008), which to me follows two kindred spirits who whose bodies are exploited in one way or another for the entertainment of others. As the title suggests, Marisa Tomei’s aging stripper is not the central character in The Wrestler but it’s a memorable one, especially when contrasted with Mickey Rourke’s aging wrestler. Both characters are seeing signs that it’s time to make a clean break. She manages to walk away by the end, getting a chance to see what else life has in store for her, even if the wrestler isn’t so lucky.

Sean

Footloose – My favourite scene in this movie is and will always be the tractor scene, which is one of the few in this movie not involving any dancing or head-bobbing at all. Even before I saw the movie the soundtrack was part of my life – a kid on my bus had the soundtrack and insisted that the driver play it every single day. Which would have been fine except that every day I heard the same two songs before my stop so it got a little bit repetitive. But the movie and especially the tractor scene are still great.

Black Swan – this movie is creepy and crazy and awesome. I don’t even know how to describe it or do it justice. It’s a must see and it’s about dancing so that works out really well.

House Party – it is because of this movie that I knew in 1990 who Kid ‘N Play were even though I had never heard any of their songs. It was everything a white kid needed to know about house parties and rap battles and b-boy dancing. And everything I needed to hold a (brief) conversation with all the white kids in my high school rocking fades and Raiders hats and jackets. We watched it recently and I really didn’t remember any of it but it’s fun and it has a few recognizable faces in addition to Kid ‘N Play, including both Martin Lawrence and Tisha Campbell, pre-Martin.

Jay

Sean doesn’t know how to describe why he likes Black Swan? Let me give it a try, and I only need two words: Lesbian sex. But sure, let’s call it “dancing.” I prefer “dancing” to dancing myself, but I am quite partial to Billy Elliot, that little scamp! I was a bit of a mean little knock-kneed ballerina myself, once upon a time, and I relate to the toe-tapping need to dance although admittedly I’m not much of an angry dancer these days. Angry baking? Sure. Angry showering? All the time. But dancing I save for the happy times.
Cuban Fury – Bruce (Nick Frost) was a child salsa prodigy but gave up the swivelling hips when bullies tore the sequins from his chest and taught him a valuable lesson in humility: salsa’s for pussies. He hasn’t danced in 25 years. He lives a lonely life, bullied at work by his manager Drew (Chris O’Dowd). But then the office gets a new boss, Julie (Rashida Jones), who happens to be a dancer herself and suddenly his passion is reignited. All three of these people are comic heroes of mine, and the movie works purely on that level alone. But I also really love the atypical-dancer motif, which is only acknowledged by others in the film. Salsa may have you thinking more Antonio Banderas than Nick Frost (are you picturing Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley doing their Chippendales act right now?) but Frost does the legwork (and the foot work!) to make the dance come alive. Although I’m not sure I needed to see him wearing quite so many silk blouses, I’m a sucker for Latin music (and Latin music mixed tapes!), and I go absolute batshit crazy for a dance-off.

Waiting for Guffman – One of Christopher Guest’s genius mockumentaries, this one tells the tale of Corky St. Clair, a fabulous wannabe-Broadway director trapped in small-town Missouri, where he gets to put on a low-budget historical musical for the town’s anniversary. As usual, his talented cast mostly ad-lib their way through the movie, which makes for crazy good times, but my favourite is when Christopher Guest is attempting to teach choreography to a bunch of bozos. Corky’s patented dance moves are irresistible and I dare you not to smile. Eugene Levy couldn’t do it – he had to be hidden way in the back during filming because every time Guest danced it would set him off into a fit of giggles that took too long to recover from. It’s so earnest and deadpan I don’t know how any of them ever make it through a scene – I know I never do.

Gotta Dance – This documentary follows a for-true-real experiment by the New Jersey Nets – one year they put together the NBA’s first-ever all-senior (as in citizens! 60+ and creaking hips all the way) hip-hop dance troupe. I suppose this is a pretty good counter-point to Matt’s documentary with the kids since this one introduces us to a crowd of people who thought their ship had sailed. Some are discovering dance for the first time, others have enjoyed a little soft shoe in the kitchen for so many years the linoleum’s worn out. Two of the troupe’s over-80 members are grandmothers of Nets cheerleaders, and their stories are among my favourites. We get to know all of them, including one dowdy school teacher who develops a Beyonce-like Sacha Fierce alternate ego for performing. They’re fun to watch, even as some let their 15 minutes go to their heads, but they’ve all got commendable energy and spirit…but when they’re out on the court at half-time with thousands of people half-paying attention as they pee and get hot dogs, will they even remember the moves? Or will the racy Jay-Z lyrics trigger seizures? Anything can happen, folks!