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Joke of the day: Bobby Brown, Ryan Phillipe and K-Fedex in a boat….

That’s it.

More Reviews:

I’ve not seen as much stuff as I wanted to at AFI Film Fest this year but this is what I did see:

Somebodies

The Shoot The Shit Review:

I tried in my head to sum up what this movie was about. I went, “Let’s see, in the beginning this guy leaves a party drunk, gets pulled over and has to be indebted to the cop that pulled him over by doing various community services. But that’s not what it’s about. His drunken weed smoking friends think he drinks too much and try to stage an intervention but they all get high and shitfaced while waiting on him to come home so they’re loaded by the time it’s time to intervene. No, then there’s the story line about him and the crazy girl he thinks he falls for who wants to be celibate after being a freak. Hmmm….that’s really not just it.”

What did I come up with? This movie is funny and it has no plot. It’s like “Clerks” really where everything and nothing happens except this movie won’t explode on the indie scene like “Clerks” did because the jokes are quite possibly TOO ghetto for the mainstream to get. It’s like obvious ghetto. Like I was sooo mad at myself for finding some of it funny. To top that, Hadjii, the writer/director is also the lead. And I have tremendously mixed feelings like that. One cup of “don’t do that.” One cup of “please don’t do that.” And a final cup of “don’t ever do that again.” Mix well.

Hadjii isn’t awful. It’s just that he explained he decided to “go ahead and do the character” because it was based on his brother and it would take a lot of time to explain that to an actor. Hadjii, you were really cool and mellow and “ON” during the Q&A after the movie but please don’t disrespect actors by telling them what they can’t do. I would’ve preferred you come clean and say you wanted to either a) see what acting was like b) wanted to see how hard it was to write/direct/star c) liked putting yourself through the meet grinder of filmmaking triple fold because you have to bleed to know you’re alive. I would have respected either of those more.

The Professional Review:

Scottie is a 22 year-old laid back college student who likes to drink, smoke, flirt and stumble through life the old fashioned way: just barely. It doesn’t help that his friends, a group of slacker merry men, are content to be just the same. But things change when Scottie gets pulled over for drunk driving and become indebted to an officer who will put Scottie through a series of “paybacks” like taking a bunch of wayward kids to a horrorifically hysterical jailhouse visit and a literary tutoring session what would make “Sesame Street” cry. In between that, Scottie meets the craziest of crazy women, a descendent of Anne-Marie Johnson’s “Cherry” character in “I’m Gonna Get You Sucka.” The only difference is that this girl’s handicap is her mind and her conflicted religious responsibilities that lead Scottie to a garage church with a rapping minister (best line – “There’s no water in Hell! No agua in the hell-io!”—I guess you had to be there) and an all white college Christian group that has decided that Jesus is the stapler to your ripped up dreams.

“Somebodies” is a bunch of laughs and not much more unfortunately. Writer/director/star Hadjii’s portrayal of Scottie is sometimes too laid back to the point where Scottie doesn’t ever really change in a major way. The movie itself is really all about the caricatures in the movie. The comedians that play Scottie’s family are side splitting in their “stand up” routines. In hindsight though, there really is no movie per se, rather a series of very funny scenes thrown on the back of a character who doesn’t really seem like he needs to be there for us to laugh.

Bottomline: If you smoke a spliff and watch this movie, you might think it was Oscar worthy. If you don’t, you laugh a lot and then later on forget what it was all about like I did.

Shoot The Messenger

The Shoot The Shit Review:

I knew I was gonna like this movie when the dark skinned, metro sexual, proper speaking, Essence Man of The Year like lead character put his hand on the camera so it could pan to capture the all white teacher’s lounge behind him. I love when director’s break the wall! Plus, I’m loving his luxury sweater style while he’s explaining why he’s decided to give up his career in computer programming to teach young black boys. Never mind that he’s kind of sounding like a missionary and then we see these young black boys are like hormone riddled demon seeds like we all were back then. Only this combination of holier than thou and demon seed takes an awful turn for the worst.

One of the most memorable occurrences of a child lying going horribly wrong is Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” where one mean little son of a bitch girl gets jealous over one of her boarding school teachers and decides to say the teacher and her best friend/headmistress are lovers. Forget Guiding Light when see this play. And what joy I felt by finding that the same dramatic device still rings true today! Joe, our lead character teacher man, spirals under the accusation that he beat one of the black boys in his class (a lie). And it’s not so much that the class bully has decided he can take down a teacher. It’s more that once it hits the news, the whole black community has decided that he is an Uncle Tom racist who hates black children even though he’s black.

From there it becomes a quirky journey worthy of Ionesco! Joe is fired, found guilty of assault, becomes homeless, becomes the target of some super religious zealot (one of whom is a Caribbean grandma who takes him into her home where he gets to witness sweet grandma’s subconscious self loathing disguised under the belief that God has cursed us black folks as evidenced by the Curse of Cain in the book of Genesis), declares his hate of black people, falls in love with a black woman which he manages to infect with his issues and becomes convinced that his accuser is following him.

Phew.

The movies is very good. I don’t like using all of those labels that say “question racial identity” or “examines race globally” because if I were a layman that wouldn’t sound as much fun as say “The Matrix.” Nobody ever used hard labels on “The Matrix” movies to begin with. They just told us “Red pill or green pill?” and we ran with it. So, to prevent people from staying away from a MESSAGE MOVIE, I think the tagline should be like “Do you hate black people? So does Joe. And he’s black.” Wouldn’t you see that movie? I would.

There is no Professional Review of this one because I didn’t need my DuBois “Double Consciousness” to watch this movie at all. Me, myself and I enjoyed the movie. And I think Yaze did too which isn’t always an easy feat.

Song I can’t get out of my head:

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