Tag: Corey Hawkins

We were supposed to get In The Heights last June, but, you know what happened. Sad things happened. We all know that. But the only good news about it is that they ended up releasing Hamilton 15 months early or so, straight to Disney Plus, to make up for the fact that In The Heights would be pushed back. It is not a compromise I knew I would have to accept, but one I did gladly accept overall.

In The Heights the musical hit Broadway in 2008, and earned quite a few Tony nominations, putting Lin-Manuel Miranda, lyricist and main actor, on the map. That lead to other things as we all know.

I had only knew one song from this musical really well, called It Won’t Be Long Now, because it showed up on my Musical Pandora and no other songs from the whole show. I did give the sound track a good listen before hand the day before this screening, to get familiar with the tunes and lyrics, since I know they can sometimes be hard to hear on the screen. It made me cry once or twice on its own, so I knew there was no hope for my tears to see the whole thing in front of my eyes.

These people are all happy, but I know I’ll end up sappy. 

We are going to check out Washington Heights, a small area in New York City, or Neuva York if you want to call it that, I won’t stop you. This is where will meet Usnavy (Anthony Ramos), owner of a bodega in this area, where almost all of the citizens stop by for his coffee that they have grown attached to. He runs it with his younger cousin Sunny (Gregory Diaz IV) who is still in high school, but politically motivated. Usnavy came from the Dominican Republic before he was 10 with his parents, but the best days of his life were back then, living on the beaches, while his dad ran a bar. Every day was paradise. And he has the chance to go back finally, buy his father’s shop (now in need of repair) and location, and start the final chapters of his life, at home.

It is also about a few other characters. Like Vanessa (Melissa Barrera) who works at the local salon (run by Daphne Rubin-Vega), but has dreams of getting out of this area as well. Not as far as another country, but deeper into the city, to work as a fashion designer. We have Nina (Leslie Grace), the “one who got out”, a girl who was so smart and full of learning wonder that she went to Stanford! But this is the summer after getting back and she has to tell her dad (Jimmy Smits) some not great news. And there is also Benny (Corey Hawkins), who works for her dad, is into Nina a whole lot, and wants to become a big money maker in the future.

And of course there is the Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), who never had her own kids but is like an Abuela to a lot of our characters, who wants to help everyone in the block and be a great person overall. So sweet.

In The Heights is about the dreams and aspirations of a few characters who live there, hoping to eventually find a home. And it takes place in the summer, before the hottest day and a blackout that will change all of their lives forever.

Also starring Ariana Greenblatt, Stephanie Beatriz, Chris Jackson, Dascha Polanco, Marc Anthony, Noah Catala, Olivia Perez, and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Piragua Guy.

A man who can wear shorts to work is a man I inspire to be. 

Jon M. Chu, director of In The Heights the movie, was the perfect choice for this musical, and frankly, all musicals going forward. His name really came into my eyes when he did Crazy Rich Asians, which was gorgeously shot, and every frame seemed to pop out of the screen. From the trailers of In The Heights, you can tell a similar story. Hell, he did mostly music videos before this, some Step Up films, and even Jem and the Holograms. Say one thing about all of these, you can say they at least look nice. Fuck. He is even doing Wicked once it eventually comes out. Can not fucking wait.

This movie is a goddamn spectacle. It is the first film I saw in theaters, since things started to shut down. I went 421 days without seeing a movie in theaters, and watched 440 films in that time, on my screens at home for the most part. And at the start of the film, in the “welcome to our theater” videos, I found myself already tearing up.

Because cry I did this film, early and often. Usually for just such heartbreaking soul crushing numbers, so well sung and choreographed. I wanted to help everyone. I cried from sadness and from happiness. It will give you that full range of emotions. I did not have any rage crying though. That would be hard to pull off.

Ramos, a few years out after starring in Hamilton, has to play the role Miranda made and feels like a great passing of the torch. He oozes charisma in this role, and having this musical be told through stories from him to children brings a lot of bonus personality to it. I wanted everything to work out for his character just mere minutes into the film.

There were awkward moments of the musical too. Don’t worry. I don’t think the film did a great job of fully giving a good reason for the arguments that occurred during the song Blackout. Except for some reason our lead character maybe has higher levels of anxiety and fear, with a little bit of alcoholism, that don’t go fully explained or fleshed out, to make it make much sense. But in musicals, life can move fast through a song, so that also plays an element in it.

I honestly didn’t know how I would feel about In The Heights, knowing the music stylings and lyrics were not my usual fair. Maybe I liked it more because of Hamilton’s existence and getting used to the rhyming and rapping in musical fair, and the speed of the lyrics coming at me. Maybe I liked it on its own merits.

Oh, and for Hamilton fans, outside of actor cameos (of which we have just the three?), there is one other sneaky Hamilton reference that should be easy to see. Well, hear. And one other note. The Broadway songs have a reference to Donald Trump, which makes sense in there lyrically, but they definitely replaced that line in this film version. A good change overall.

I find it very odd to see a lot of hype for the movie Kong: Skull Island. King Kong has happened over and over in film’s history, and given everything I know about the internet, they hate reboots, reimaginings, and remakes of other films, so they shouldn’t care about this one.

But alas, here we are. I don’t have too many fucks to give about it of course, after King Kong 11 years ago. Overly long and it didn’t really do anything different.

I guess this one is bringing in some hardcore CGI and bigger acting names. Maybe that is it. Or people are freaking out over the potential of a Godzilla and Kong showdown in the future. Needless to say, if this film doesn’t do anything different, I will probably be mostly annoyed.

I don’t care about context, these two people are not dirty enough.

Kong: Skull Island makes sure you get to see a giant ape really early in the film, when two crashed World War II pilots land on the island, start to fight, and then he shows up. But this isn’t set during that war, this is actually set in 1973, during the end of the Vietnam war.

Bill Randa (John Goodman) is some sort of scientist, who believes there is a lot to discover on this skull island they have found in the South Pacific. Ancient civilizations have talked about it, there are constant storms that surround it, but he wants a mission to explore what has never been explored. Let’s call it a geologic mapping mission. With a military escort.

He is able to gather a team. He has his own crew, a geologist (Corey Hawkins) and a biologist (Tian Jing), along with some extra scientists from another company (John Ortiz, Marc Evan Jackson). They have a legendary British explorer to help explore the jungles, James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston), who is in it for some money. A prize winning photojournalist, Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), who helped show the truth about Vietnam to the public. And of course a helicopter team lead by LTC Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) and Captain Jack Chapman (Toby Kebbell), straight out of ‘Nam.

Most of them assume it is just a real exploratory mission. But really, Randa has an agenda and believes to be giant monsters on this island, and he wants to bring an end to them. They’ve got weapons of many sizes. Unfortunately, when setting off seismic blasts to detect the crust, they wake up these beasts on the island, and they do not like having explosions all over the place. Spread out over the island, the crew has three days to make it to the north side before they can be rescued.

Also featuring John C. Reilly, and a whole lot of soldiers: Jason Mitchell, Shea Whigham, Thomas Mann, and Eugene Cordero.

Turns out this Kong film has a lot of Japanese influence.

At its heart, Kong: Skull Island is an action adventure flick that wants to show us giant animals fighting some dudes with bombs. Which on its own could be enough for most of the people who want to see it. I will say there are some scenes that look a bit awkward based on CGI usage. It doesn’t always mesh well. But the more pure CGI scenes like Kong fighting with the giant lizards look amazing.

The film also doesn’t pussy foot around Kong. We get to see him in the first few minutes. Within 15 more we are on the island and Kong totally fucks up the helicopters putting our characters in a perilous situation. We get a lot of Kong and they don’t tease him out.

You know what we don’t get a lot of? Character development. Basically every character in this movie is weak on that level. There is no gain. They don’t change. Well, some of them die. We have exactly one character who people will care about and does change and that man is played by John C. Reilly. His character is wonderful, an amazing addition to the film, and worthy of praise.

But Kong: Skull Island is just going to be a interesting film that could have been a lot better. With its post credit scene trying its best to imitate The Avengers it leaves some hope for the future. But have to hope they improve the scripts first.

I started talking about Straight Outta Compton with my review of Dope, because I am super white and ignorant.

Basically, I don’t know jack shit about this album, nor do I know a lot about the artists who made up N.W.A. I do know the phrase before the internet meme sensation came out, but that is probably only due to the fact that Weird Al made a similar joke almost ten years ago. Weird Al continues to give me most of my music knowledge about what is hip and cool in the world.

Despite not being able to name even one song from the album, I would probably consider myself an expert on late 80’s and early 90’s rap music. As you already know, I have seen and reviewed the movie Notorious! Yeah, because rap on the west coast and rap on the east coast were basically the same thing. That sounds like something I heard once.

They find my joke hilarious, because I am so white and don’t know any better.

Lives used to suck for black people back in the day. I can keep that sentence vague, because in America is has basically always been true. Back in the day could be yesterday, technically. But in this case I mean 1980’s, where apparently everyone was free and equal under the law, and the law wanted to put the black youth in their place. Arrested for being black was a common occurrence, but also drugs, gang violence, and more. N.W.A. was a rap super group from Compton, California, composed of five members with various talent.

We had Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), who was just in high school but a great lyricist. He wasn’t a thug, but he sure got harassed by the police. Dr. Dre, or Andre (Corey Hawkins) was hoping to be a DJ and produce music, not sit in a cubicle all day. There was Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), who had money and some clout in the music business and would help set them up if they had a good idea. But then he was forced to rap, and hey, he could do it well. And then there was MC Ren (Aldis Hodge) and Dj Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) were also in the group, but this film was a lot less about them and more about the other three. They wrote some rhymes and DJ’d too, I guess. I don’t know shit about them.

They are the two on the left so they don’t complain to me about under-representation. Now I can ignore them the rest of this review.

Either way, their first single Boyz-N-The-Hood was an instant success. Their whole city and area loved it, and it spread like wildfire. They weren’t being soft with their words and they were telling the street truth about their lives. It was gangster rap. They were quickly signed by Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) as their manager, because he does sleazy well, and he was able to get them to produce a few more hits to create their first album. Straight Outta Compton! They were signed by the same record company who was getting big off of the California Raisins and wanted to branch out, and next thing you know, they are touring around the United States to sold our concert arenas carrying a strong message. You know, Fuck The Police and all that.

This of course led to the arrest for being black and speaking out, and other shenanigans. The group was now super famous, but thanks to contract disputes and managers screwing people over, they also had to go their separate ways. First Ice Cube left, causing a big rift and song battles, then Dr. Dre founded his own company with Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor) (Don’t fuck with Suge Knight. He will secretly give you aids, kill Tupac and Biggie and get away with it all).

And uhh. More stuff happens I guess. Shit. I can’t tell you about everything. I can’t tell you about Rodney King. I should let something be a surprise.

Other artists name dropped in the film include The D.O.C., Tupac, and Snoop Dogg. Actors aren’t even important in there. However, some of the women who would go on to be wives and lovers of the big three are played by Carra Patterson, Alexandra Shipp, and Elena Goode.

You can tell the band members apart by what their favorite teams are: All from California, surprisingly!

Not many people get to play their own dad in a movie about their life. First you need a famous father. Then you have to be the right age at the right time. You also need to look a lot like him. So O’Shea Jackson Jr. got to play his dad, Ice Cube, which is awesome. He is like the kid in Notorious, who played his dad for like one small age group in that film.

In particular, I thought Jackson Jr. and Hawkins did a phenomenal job playing Cube and Dre, which also happen to be the people I know more about thanks to how big they both got. But their stories, and Eazy-E’s story was a fantastic thing for almost anyone to hear and , despite it being over 20 years ago, oddly relevant to today still. Things don’t change that quickly, regardless of the size of computer chips. However, nothing made me cry! There were three scenes where they were going to attempt to bring out the tears, but I was able to resist them all. The last two would have totally gotten me if they just made those scenes a little bit longer, but when your film is already pushing 2.5 hours, it is understandable to make a few cuts.

Seriously, this movie was intense, dramatic, entertaining, a bit funny, extremely informative, and an all around fantastic film for just about everybody. Maybe not your kids, leave them at home for awhile. Honestly, this is now my second favorite music group biographical film, and I don’t even care about most of the music in this one! It will be hard for something to beat The Temptations, honestly, unless we eventually get a gritty Weird Al movie. Two references in one review, solid.

Oooh, Non-Stop, a Liam Neeson action movie where he uses his wit and tactical efficiency to solve a crisis!

I don’t promise a lot about this review of Non-Stop I just promise to make zero Taken jokes. Even if the vague outline I just made sounds like it could easily be used for that movie. It is becoming old-hat to do Taken jokes for just because the movie stars Neeson, so I will let Zach Braff take care of that for me.

Neeson is texting here, to show us he still is up with the times.

Bill Marks (Liam Neeson) is a Federal Air Marshal. He is a quiet man who has had some problems in his life recently, including alcoholism! But that is okay, it is not like he ever has to do anything on his job.

Just kidding! On a flight to London, someone wants to hijack the plane. They have hacked into the local network and are sending text messages to Bill, threatening that someone will die every twenty minutes on the plane unless they get $150 million sent to a bank account. Even more troubling news is that bank account is in Bill’s name, so the TSA and other governmental agencies have assumed that Bill has gone rogue and is hijacking the plane until he gets paid.

Oh no!

Bill will have to use the people he can trust on the plane. Nancy (Michelle Dockerty), a flight attendant who he has worked with before. Jack Hammond (Anson Mount), an off duty Air Marshal also on the flight. And of course, Jen Summers (Julianne Moore), the woman he just met who was sitting next to him in first class.

So, who is the terrorist?! Well here is a list of actors also on the plane to take a pick from, assuming it actually isn’t an inside job and isn’t one of the people already listed in the review: Corey Stoll, Nate Parker, Scoot McNairy, Lupita Nyong’o, Omar Metwally (who has a turban!), Corey Hawkins, and Frank Deal.

Their hands are in the air, yes, but I assure you right now they all care.

I know I might have made the plot of Non-Stop seem cliche/not exciting, but it turned out to be the opposite of that. First off, it wasn’t a mindless action movie. The only big action sequence happens near the end, which you could tell from the trailers. Everything else is based on suspense and tiny clues along the way.

Outside of the first 8 or so minutes, I found myself watching Non-Stop on the edge of my seat. The parts of the movie before boarding the plane were a bit slow, but that can be expected in a movie like this.

Was it believable? No, not really. There are a lot of coincidences and lucky breaks that make the entire evil mastermind plan work. Kind of annoying, but I can get over it.

Somehow, despite the coincidences and questionable plot, I was just really entertained by this movie. It wasn’t obvious who the bad guy was, plenty of red herrings thrown our way throughout the film. In fact, I think knowing “who did it” wouldn’t even ruin future viewings for me, which is a rarity for these types of movies.

Neeson might have actually been the perfect pick for this role as well. He has that aged scruffiness, perfect for a guy who has “seen some shit” in his days.

Check out Non-Stop, which ended up being (surprisingly) one of the better movies for the month of February.