Tag: D.B. Sweeney

I may be the only one excited about this film.

I heard about Chi-Raq a few months ago, and like most people, I assumed it would be some sort of Iraq spiritual movie. Chi. Get it?

No, it is Chicago. Okay, a movie comparing the violence and unrest in Chicago to Iraq. After all, Spike Lee is directing it, and that sounds like something right up his alley.

But nothing I have said should make me excited about the film. I hate Chicago (Hockey reasons), and I’ve only seen like three of his films: He Got Game, Inside Man, and of course, the shitty Oldboy remake. However, it is also a modern retelling of the Greek play Lysistrata. As an Ancient History major on my spare time, and lover of Greek plays, the idea became immediately intriguing and something I knew I had to see.

SLJ wearing snazzy suits was reason number 2.

Chicago, the land of death. More people have been murdered in that one city than the American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan since the wars have started. That should be a big deal, but it is ignored. That is why residents of the South Side have started to call it Chi-Raq, because it is a war zone out there and every body is dying.

In this fictionalized version of the city, the war is between two main gangs, the Spartans (purple) and the Trojans (orange). The leader of the Spartans is a rapper, whose stage name also happens to be Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon, don’t get lost on me yet), who people love. The leader is of the Trojans is a guy nicknamed Cyclops (Wesley Snipes), who only has one eye of course and a sexy studded eye patch.

But they aren’t the stars. No. Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), the most attractive woman in Chi-Raq who also happens to be dating Chi-Raq. They will make beautiful babies some day. But Lysistrata starts to get tired of all the gang violence. She has to watch a mother grieve (Jennifer Hudson) over her dead 6 year old daughter who was accidentally hit during a drive by. She has to live with the fact that her boyfriend might have done it. And thanks to the same sage advice from a neighbor, Miss Helen (Angela Bassett), she realizes she has her own weapon that she can use to sway public opinion.

Yeah. We are talking about her body. No peace? No pussy. Lysistrata gathers her friends (Anya Engel-Adams, and more) and gets with Indigo (Michelle Mitchenor), the main lady friend of Cyclops. She wants them to put their differences aside and fight for change. They don’t allow any sex until the gang violence is over. They will get all the women in Chi-Raq involved. They will even get the prostitutes. They are doing it to protect the babies and their future. And hell, fuck it. They want World Peace, while they are it. And to prove their point, they also will take over a national guard armory in their city to show they fucking mean business. By not fucking.

Sex.

Also starring a lot more dudes. Harry Lennis is the police chief, D.B. Sweeney the mayor, David Patrick Kelly a general, John Cusack the main local priest, Steve Harris the leader of the Knights of Euphrates, Dave Chappelle a strip club owner, and Samuel L. Jackson our narrator and in the “Chorus” role.

Booty booty booty booty rockin’ nowhere.

Spike Lee might have out Spike Lee’d himself, as Chi-Raq is potentially the Spike Lee-iest thing he has ever created. It is so out there and original while being a modern retelling of a Greek play. It is amazing that I can say something like that and it totally make sense in the context in the film.

A majority of the dialogue in this film flows like poetry, complete with rhyming words and just being so fucking smooth. It was full of music and full of style. I want to have a copy of the script immediately, just to read some of the word again. I will buy this movie in the future and always watch it with subtitles, just to get the full impact and appreciate the cleverness of it all.

I hope beyond everything that Teyonah Parris gets nominated for a Best Actress award for this film. She owned the shit out of it, her presence on camera made you always focus on her and she nailed it. Some people might write off this film as just some “Sex movie” but it is a sex appeal film and not just one giant soft core porno. Parris is not afraid of anything from this film, tackling the hard subject matter in all the different ways.

Chi-Raq has all the same messages from Dear White People, but in a way that strangely makes it more relatable (not on a college campus). It is also incredibly modern, including references to every Black male shot that made political news, but also the Charleston shootings (which was in June this year) and Sandra Bland (July this year). Typing it makes me realize how long ago that was technically, I could have swore they were only two months ago. But eh, still modern as shit.

Original. Fun. Serious. Spike Lee.

Ruining child classics is one of Hollywood’s favorite past times.

But this is not one of those examples. Because Hollywood is not behind this movie, just some low budget independent company. That’s right. The Boxcar Children, a book made in the 1920s and repopularized in the 1940s, it then spawned 159 follow up books and specials. WHAT. More impressively, they are are still making more. Four of them came out this year and a few are scheduled for 2015 already.

Of course, that series after the first book decided to go completely boring and make it a strange good-natured mystery series.

But hey, I read The Boxcar Children in like, second grade. In fact, it is the first legit book I have read. It had zero pictures, something called chapters and I didn’t read like 8 of them in one reading session.

So bring on the kids who do good things and live in the woods.

And who are as happy at winning as that one spelling bee kid.

Four kids. All brothers and sisters. And no parents. Wandering around, sleeping in bakeries, paying for bread with money they presumably earned by helping old ladies cross the street.

We got Henry (Zachary Gordon) 14 and technically the leader because he is oldest. Next is Jessie (Joey King), 12 year old girl, who is the mom figure and thus the cook. She runs things when Henry is out earning change for a living. After that is Violet (Mackenzie Foy) who I have nothing of note to say outside of the color purple and she is kind of weak and useless. But not as weak and useless as Benny (Jadon Sand) who is six and has no redeeming qualities outside of being cared for by others.

They are wandering around because their mom died or something and they don’t want to go to their mean old grandparents home. So they literally ran away, walking from town to town, being runaways with a 6 year old kid.

They are afraid of getting put in orphanages so they run into the woods afraid of some baker couple. And hey look, a box car from a train on an abandoned track for some reason. K. So they live there.

And story. Also with voice talents from Martin Sheen, J.K. Simmons, D.B. Sweeney, and Audrey Wasilewski.

They literally have to drag that kid along it looks like.

And now, my analysis where I talk mostly about how creepy the movie looks.

Man, this animated film is super creepy. Not like, uncanny valley creepy, like it is so close to human just a slight step away. No, it is just creepy because the animation is really really bad. Like, worse than video game bad. Like worse than Hoodwinked Too!. Like beyond terrible. Like before PSX graphics bad. I just don’t get it. The Snow Queen was an independent movie from like Russia and they had better animation than this one.

Watching characters eat or grab things, but having that object floating next to their hand and not holding it. And the animation was especially bad with water. And unfortunately they seem to awkwardly interact with it throughout the movie.

Gah. The animation. Gah gah gah.

The story itself? Well, it follows the book pretty darn closely. That is good for your purists. But it also turns out that the book doesn’t have a whole lot going on for it. It is a pretty boring story. But if you liked and remembered the books, then you might enjoy this not completely shit animated film version of it. But I am disappointed in that a nice live action version is something I might enjoy more. Then it won’t feel so damn creepy.

Holy shit, they made the movie.

I watched Atlas Shrugged Part I, the first part of a planned trilogy, and got almost nothing out of it. It was weird and confusing, a bunch of business stuff, all of it over my head. It also made about zero dollars.

What I do know about Atlas Shrugged is that its end message is that Capitalism is the best, and the Freer the Marker, the better the world. Right? Well, sticking true to that point, the creator of the film said they would only make Atlas Shrugged Part II: The Strike if Part I made enough money to cover the cost of Part II. Well, the free market said no to that, and that we did not want this trilogy to happen.

But here we are, with Part II out and in our faces. Not only did they make it anyways, they replaced THE ENTIRE ORIGINAL CAST WITH NEW PEOPLE. That is completely unheard of. Everyone character who is in both movies has a new actor or actress. I guess it makes sense. The first one bombed, replace all the people. Still an odd circumstance to happen for a movie.

Something sexist about cleavage and laying down rails.

At the end of the first movie, more laws and taxes were put in place in Colorado, so an oil tycoon decided to set fire to his fields, saying he left it as he found it, and now he is on strike. Oooh, guess where the subtitle came from? Well, he disappeared, but no one cares.

Dagny Taggart (Samantha Mathis) is kicking ass. Her John Galt line was a success, and her knew partnership with Henry Rearden (Jason Beghe) lead to a new metal that is lighter and cheaper than steel. BIG SUCCESS. Despite government interference, every thing is great for them.

Too bad the people aren’t having fun. The 99.97% or whatever are protesting in New York, times never change. Well, famous people keep missing. Nice pianists, for example. Dagny’s brother, James (Patrick Fabian) is running the company now, so he is rolling in the cash. Getting dates with random clerks (Larisa Oleynik, most famous for being Alex Mack from The Secret World Of Alex Mack, woo!) and stuff.

Well, long story short, Dagny finds some weird engine thing, somewhere. Most of the scientists are now disappearing, so she finds the last one available (Diedrich Bader) to figure out how to make it work. It could be even better for the future of energy, since gas is $40 a gallon! Maybe.

Longer story short, government hates everything happening. They make it so corporations can never change ever again. They have to sell to everyone. They cannot sell their business. They cannot change their CEOs. They must remain stagnant, and nothing will change, and no more patents. This is pretty intense. Dagny throws a fit, is losing her scientist, and really wants to find out who the hell John Galt is.

Ray Wise plays the Head of State, Esai Morales is Francisco d’Anconia, and D.B. Sweeney plays John Galt. Ah, that’s who he is!

When Diedrich Bader is your last hope to figuring out science stuff, you are totally going to get fucked over.

Here is one benefit of Part II over Part I. I actually could understand (mostly) what the fuck was going on in Part II. Part I I watched, read the synopsis of, and still found myself pretty dang lost. That’s a problem, and I would say Part II is a better movie because of that reason.

But it is bad. The CGI shows that the movie was made on an extremely low budget.

I also think it was probably too detailed and close to the book, but thats without knowing the book. I am sure this didn’t have to be a trilogy, and because it is split up into parts, it is “okay” to leave you with a cliffhanger ending like they do. Really it just annoys me.

Despite all this, I still want to see the trilogy get finished. First, I wont read the book ever. Or the plot synopsis. Second, I am excited to see the entire cast replaced again, which looks entirely likely. Third, there is a chance part III will be a musical. It is an old source, but fuck it, its the same guy in charge.

Come on. Shit on Ayn Rand’s grave and make her book’s movie (against the will of the free market) into a musical. Do it.