Landscape with Invisible Hand

Year 17, Day 109 - 4/19/25 - Movie #5,001

BEFORE: How the hell do I follow up Big Movie #5G?  Well, I better get started on the next 5,000 movies, because Big Movie 10G is only about 16 years away - if there even ARE that many movies left to watch. I don't even know if I'll live that long, not with these knees of mine anyway - maybe I can get some replacements in the far-off future. Today's film is all about the future, one that happens after contact with an alien species. It hasn't been on my list for all that long, but it's been on my radar since I first saw the trailer and wondered how I was ever going to link to it. Well, now I know that much, anyway.  

Just stick it between two other films with Tiffany Haddish, who carries over from "Bad Boys: Ride or Die" and if I'm late posting, that means I've been playing GTA: Vice City all day long, rocking it old school - but it's been that kind of week, where I really need to blow some things up and it's probably better if I blow up pretend cars and NPCs rather than things in the real world. 

THE PLOT: When an occupying species' bureaucratic rule and advanced technology leaves most of Earth impoverished and unemployed, two teenagers hatch a risky plan to ensure their families' futures. 

AFTER: Movie #101 last year was "Attack the Block", which was another alien invasion film, fairly standard in that a bunch of humans had to come together and protect their neighborhood from the invading aliens, because they don't belong here, and they're probably here because they need our water or our land or they want to eat us or put us in an intergalactic zoo or something.  But tonight's film is not a typical alien invasion film at all - for starters, we never see the aliens landing or making first contact or anything like that, when the story starts, they're already in charge of human society, so either we didn't put up much of a fight, or it was somehow to our benefit to welcome our new alien masters, and we established that they don't want to eat us - we're much too fatty, anyway. Hard to digest. 

The Vuvv have created giant cities that float around the earth, several hundred feet above ground I guess.  They have allowed certain humans to live in those cities, creating a class divide on Earth between the chosen few who get to interact with (serve?) the aliens and those down below who are suffering through a depression (both kinds) and the knowledge that they're in the lower class, where poverty is commonplace, very few people have jobs and they scavenge what they can from the trash that gets thrown off those floating cities.  One can only imagine what they do with their sewage, too, they probably just dump it whereever they want on Earth. 

The Campbells are a normal family down below with a house (Dad ran off a few years ago, though - so just a mother and two kids) and teenager Adam is a wanna-be artist who meets another girl, Chloe Marsh, in art class. When he finds out she and her father and brother live out of their car, he asks his mother if the Marsh family could move into their basement, it's very charitable but also Adam's probably got a crush on Chloe.  Meanwhile at school the Vuvv have taken over the curriculum and they use these brain-nodes to teach the kids virtual lessons, making the teachers redundant, and we see one commit suicide after his job was eliminated. 

After Adam and Chloe decide on being more than friends, maybe, Chloe suggest that they start broadcasting their relationship from their learning nodes - it seems that a number of the aliens in the floating cities are fascinated by stories about love, because they don't have that emotion wherever it is they come from.  So gradually more and more aliens tune in to see the "Adam and Chloe in Love" show, and they start earning money for their broadcasts, enough for their families to start eating real meat again, not just synthesized meat substitutes. (Well, it is the future - we can assume the trend started with Impossible burgers and just kept going.). This is where I thought maybe the aliens were an allegory for social media followers, and Adam and Chloe symbolized today's internet stars, people who present a certain facade to their followers, which may or may not be reality.

When tensions run high between the two families trying to live under the same roof, getting in each other's way and eating each other's snacks and such, it affects the relationship between Adam and Chloe - and the aliens might be new to learning about love, but they are very good at reading facial expressions, and they can tell that something is not right in the relationship they're being sold as "In Love". Since that phrase is in the title of the transmissions, the Vuvv sue Adam Campbell, because lying is a violation of the terms of service that they agreed to. So now they not only can't make money from their broadcasts, but they now owe so much money to the aliens that it would take six generations for their families to pay it off.  

Adam's mother, who happens to be a lawyer, goes to visit the alien that's suing her son, to see if she can work something out.  She explains about another kind of love, the love a mother has for her child, and suggests that the Vuvv might be interested in learning about this, too.  So the Vuvv with the lawsuit decides to send on of its offspring (they reproduce asexually, by budding) to live with the Campbells as a social experiment, taking the role of the family's missing "father".  The alien sleeps in the same bed as Mrs. Campbell, then sets out to learn about human society by watching old sitcoms from the 1950's. (What could POSSIBLY go wrong there?)

They did a pretty good job of NOT showing the audience what the aliens looked like, for maybe the first third of the movie, at least. But you can see one on the poster above - they look a bit like if you took a crab out of its shell, only with paddles in place of claws. Their main body looks squarish like a block of spam right out of the can, or sometimes like a Thanksgiving turkey that's been plucked already but not cooked.  Well, not every alien race can be humanoid, I guess.  The Vuvv language is a combination of clicking noises and movements made by those front paddles, thankfully there are translation devices because we can't expect humans to learn how to make those sounds. 

I'm not sure how far that social media symbolism was going to go - eventually this film becomes a study on class warfare and/or economics, with humans who were once doctors being put out of work, they take high-paying jobs as chauffeurs or personal aides for the Vuvv, so I guess at times the aliens are symbolic of our current ruling class, the one-percenters and the oligarchs who secretly control everything our government does, either directly or indirectly.  And the humans who live down below represent the middle and lower class, they can try to get ahead and maybe save a little money here and there, but the long-term prospects for them to really flourish economically are few and far between - so for most people, it's just never going to happen.  Meanwhile other middle-class people seem to be doing well, if they work in an industry that has very rich clients.  

After school for the below-ly people stuck on Earth gets permanently replaced by home hologram schooling, Adam decides to paint a giant mural on the wall of his school, since nobody's using it for anything else.  The aliens, for whatever reason, are fascinated by his version of "human art" and suddenly he's got another shot at the big-time, provided he's willing to go on tour to a few other galaxies and talk about what his art means, and how it relates to the Vuvv being really groovy overlords and not terrible tyrannical rulers in any way.  Well, it seems like a small price to pay to get his family back out of poverty, I guess.  

There's probably another metaphor there at the end about what it means to be creative and have the ability to produce art, and whether that comes about through talent, luck or just being the right artist at the right time.  But it's a lot more nebulous and I wasn't really sure what the moral of the story was at that point.  There's a lot to work with here, and if somebody else said this was an allegory for slavery or communism or socialism or Russia vs. Ukraine or Republicans vs. Democrats, I'd be willing to listen.  Maybe, like most art, it was meant to be open to interpretation so we can all see what we need to see in it. But it sure is weird.  I'd nominate this as probably one of the weirdest movies I've seen EVER, and I've seen a lot of weird movies. 

Just a thought here, maybe because the Vuvv look a little like crabs and a little like spam, did the humans ever entertain the idea of, you know, eating them?  I bet if they did that then most of the Vuvv would clear out and leave humanity alone - or then again, maybe they'd blow up the whole planet in retaliation, it's tough to say.  Whenever the day arrives that aliens finally visit Earth, I just hope they don't look like giant shrimp or have hamburger-looking heads, because that's just not going to go well, maybe it depends where they land.  If they looked like giant snails and land in France first, they'd probably also be in a spot of trouble.  If they're smart, they'll bring food from their own planet, and offer it up, just to be on the safe side.  

Directed by Cory Finley (director of "Thoroughbreds" and "Bad Education")

Also starring Asante Blackk, Kylie Rogers (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), Michael Gandolfini (ditto), Brooklynn MacKinzie, Josh Hamilton (last seen in "Maestro"), John Newberg (last seen in "Dark Waters"), William Jackson Harper (ditto), Dev H. Patel, Geanna Funes, Christian Adam (last seen in "Irresistible"), Nickolas Wolf (ditto), Whitney Goin (last seen in "The Spectacular Now"), Vishwas, Tony Vogel, Thea Camara, Larry Herring, Melanie Kiran, Joe Knezevich (last seen in "Allegiant"), David E. Collier, Amar, Triston Dye

with archive footage of James Dean (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All that Heaven Allowed"), Natalie Wood (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Sherman Hemsley, Isabel Sanford

RATING: 6 out of 10 smeat cubes

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

Year 17, Day 108 - 4/18/25 - Movie #5,000

BEFORE: WE DID IT! We made it to Big Movie #5,000!  And it only took - well, 16 years and few months. It's been 5,952 days since I started doing this, to be precise. Wow, I took 952 days off?  That almost seems weirder than watching 5,000 movies. 17 years is a LONG time, sure, but I have no plans to stop. It's bittersweet because I just got out of a long-term job that I worked for 31 years, which seems even longer, hell, that's more than half my life.  17 years is less than a third of my life but still, I feel very old. And tired. Let me celebrate tonight with some beers and cupcakes and sleep in tomorrow, that's all I ask.

Jason Davis carries over from "Runaway Jury", and any time that a name is that common I have to double-check to make sure it's the RIGHT Jason Davis, there are tons of them listed in the IMDB - this Jason Davis is indicated by a roman numeral for 8 in the IMDB, so I'm sure it's the same one in both films.  Sadly, I missed Martin Lawrence's birthday by two days, so no SHOUT-out to him, sorry.  But with this film tonight I'm perfectly set up for my Easter film in just two days, so I'm right on track. 

THE PLOT: When their late police captain gets linked to drug cartels, wisecracking Miami cops Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett embark on a dangerous mission to clear his name.  

AFTER: Sure, I might have preferred "Gladiator II" or something maybe a bit more meaningful to land on the big number, but it's fine. It's a big Hollywood blockbuster, it's relatively current - not new, but OK, a year old, that's fine.  Really, what could measure up to such a big milestone and not leave me wondering if there was a better way to program the chain?  Almost every chain of movies I devise, I end up wondering if there could have been a better way.  It doesn't matter, as long as I get to the next holiday or milestone, it's fine. I've got Easter and Mother's Day in the bag, and this is also the 100th film this year, so this Movie Year is already 1/3 over, and in a way, it feels like it just started!  It's fine, really.

The fourth film in the "Bad Boys" franchise has Mike dealing with his adult son, seen in the last film, and trying to be a good dad to someone who's in prison for being a drug cartel terrorist or something. Who can remember?  Mike also gets married at the start of this film, because if he doesn't, who are the bad guys going to hold hostage, later in the movie?  Meanwhile Marcus has a heart attack or something at Mike's wedding, which leads him to have visions of an afterlife where he sees their old captain, and also flashes of the many lives he's had over the centuries - so we're going deep on reincarnation on this one. But as a result Marcus also believes that he cannot die, that he's got some mystic purpose in life, and also he learns that he needs to cut back on snacks.  It's possible that belief in reincarnation is tied to eating too much refined sugar, I guess. Eat too many Skittles and you, too, will believe that you've lived and died many times?

Yeah, this installment maybe takes these two characters in some very weird directions, but what else should they do, keep telling the same story, over and over again?  Hell, Captain Howard died in the last film, but he ends up getting a lot of screen time here, via flashbacks, dreams and video messages he recorded on his computer which get sent out to Mike and Marcus at crucial moments, and reveal important plot points as needed. Well, he's certainly very helpful from beyond the grave!  It's almost like he never died at all...  The whole point of this film is to clear Captain Howard's name, after evidence comes to light that he was working with the drug cartels over the years - and this casts a shadow on Mike and Marcus, who were under his command for a long time. 

If only they had access to someone who worked for the drug cartels, who could confirm the new information - why, they do! Mike's son Armando worked for the cartels for years, the problem is that nobody believes him because he's also an assassin and Captain Howard's killer.  But Mike and Marcus trust him, and they believe he could identify the true criminal mastermind behind everything, if only they could find a picture of him. Well, they can't, not without knowing his name, because that's how Google works, so they're kind of stuck, until the mastermind attacks during the helicopter ride bringing Armando to Miami, disabling the aircraft and then escaping via parachute.  Mike, Marcus and Armando survive the helicopter crash but then disappear for their own safety, leaving the Miami PD and federal agents to assume they're all criminals on the run, working together. By coincidence, Capt. Howard's daughter is a U.S. Marshal assigned to track them down.  

They get back to Miami in time to figure out the identity of the criminal conspirators, just before assassins strike at their families and homes.  Marcus's son-in-law is a Marine that protects his family, but Mike's wife and Capt. Howard's granddaughter get kidnapped and taken to the most ridiculous crime cartel hide-out ever, but I suppose such a place is easily found in Florida, the location of most of the world's ridiculous theme parks. The last third of the film is the big, giant, action-packed assault on a hide-out that honestly, Big Movie 5,000 really deserved.  The good guys prevail and most of the bad guys die, and really, isn't that all we can really ask for?  Plus there are so many cool acronyms, with the FBI, the DEA and AMMO (Advanced Miami Metro Operations) all coming together!  

Directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (directors of "Bad Boys for Life")

Also starring Will Smith (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Martin Lawrence (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2010)), Vanessa Hudgens (last seen in "Second Act"), Alexander Ludwig (last seen in "Midway"), Paola Nuñez (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), Eric Dane (last seen in "Burlesque"), Ioan Gruffudd (last seen in "Ava"), Jacob Scipio (last seen in "The Expend4bles"), Levy Tran (ditto), Melanie Liburd, Tasha Smith (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Rhea Seehorn, Tiffany Haddish (also last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Joe Pantoliano (last seen in "Just Getting Started"), John Salley (last seen in "Bad Boys II"), DJ Khaled (last heard in "Spies in Disguise"), Bianca Bethune (also last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), Dennis Greene (ditto), Jasmin Lawrence (ditto), Michael Bay (ditto), Quinn Hemphill, Derek Russo (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Karter Reese Newsome, Jay DeVon Johnson (last seen in "Den of Thieves"), Jeff J.J. Authors (last seen in "Angel Eyes"), Nicholas Verdi, Steven Sean Garland, Jerri Tubbs (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Jewelianna Ramos Ortiz (last seen in "Jackpot!"), Enoch King (last seen in "Till"), James Lee Thomas, Jay Shetty, Ahmed Lucan (last seen in "The Leisure Seeker"), Bria Brimmer (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Alex Joseph Pires, Nathan Hesse (last seen in "Brothers"), Jesse Malinowski, Blanca Goodfriend, Adriana Sheri, Joyner Lucas, Marybel Rodriguez, Austin Carter, Dwight Turner, Jenna Kanell (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Rob Mars, Bobby Hernandez (last seen in "Creed III"), Jacob Lee Bereson, Khaby Lame

RATING: 7 out of 10 hot dogs on the convenience store roller grill

Runaway Jury

Year 17, Day 107 - 4/17/25 - Movie #4,999

BEFORE: Let's talk about things happening at the right time - even tragic things can appear to do so. Gene Hackman died a couple of months ago and he was retired, he hadn't made a movie in quite some time. Suddenly this film (his next-to-last) started popping up on several of the streaming services AND cable at the same time, which is unusual - but he was in the news or channels wanted to pay homage to him or whatever.  And it's one of those films with an enormous cast, so as soon as I put it on my list it created new linking opportunities, across the board - so it wasn't long at all before I was able to schedule it, as it proved to be JUST the thing I needed to get to something big for Movie #5,000, which will be here tomorrow. 

It's not just big actors, it's about character actors, the "Hey, it's THAT guy" guys. And gals. I've gotten to know many of them over the last almost-5,000 films, and I've used them as reliable links, again and again.  Take a peek down below at the cast here, they went DEEP on character actors from the early 00's - Celia Weston, sure, and Cliff Curtis and Bruce McGill, but also Joe Chrest and Douglas M. Griffin and Gary Grubbs!  Bill Nunn and Luis Guzman, Mike Pniewski and Rhoda Griffis!  Leland Orser!  Rusty Schwimmer!  David Jensen!  Orlando Jones!  I can't wait to figure out where I've seen everyone in this cast before, again and again!  

Carol Sutton carries over from "Eve's Bayou".

THE PLOT: A juror, a lawyer and a mysterious woman stand in the way of a man trying to manipulate an explosive trial. 

AFTER: Well, I suppose when you start a year with "Anatomy of a Fall", you should probably expect a bunch of films about trials, right?  Then in the last week of January came "Dark Waters", "The Burial" and "Pain Hustlers", which were all about trials, and hell, even the Joker got put on trial in "Folie a Deux" that same month.  In February there was even a rom-com that involved a lawsuit against a dating app company, it was called "Love, Guaranteed".  Then March and April brought "Gotti", "Rules of Engagement" (with a court-martial) and "Till", and now we find ourselves here. 

In the Grisham novel this legal thriller is based on, the lawsuit was against the tobacco industry, representing how the tide kind of turned against the cigarette companies after they enjoyed several decades of selling a deadly product.  But then the movie "The Insider" came out in 1999, so when someone then tried to adapt this book into a movie, it made sense to change the target of the lawsuit to a gun manufacturer.  Another industry which has been allowed to slide by in the U.S. for too long without being held responsible for its product. 

And as you might imagine, the gun (or tobacco) manufacturers don't exactly play fairly - they've both got enough money to stack the deck by hiring jury selection experts to figure out which jurors might be more sympathetic to them.  "Runaway Jury" kind of takes this to the extreme, depicting an armada of photographers and detectives to somehow start researching the potential jurors on the DAY they get their jury duty notices in the mail. Is this even possible?  Did we even have this kind of computing power in 2003, to immediately start databases on the hundreds (?) of people who would be on the juror rolls in New Orleans?  (Yes, we're still in Louisiana tonight, the locale also carries over from "Eve's Bayou"...)

Right, I forgot about jury selection - each lawyer at a trial gets a certain number of "challenges" to allow jurors to be removed from the pool, and they don't usually have to give a reason - in fact it's probably better that they don't - based on what they observe about each juror and a couple of quick questions they get to ask. But why wait for jury selection?  Why not start the process sooner, so the staff of 30 (?) people working out of a warehouse somewhere has enough time to research the public records of each possible juror, search the public records for any scandals in their past, how they voted, whether they're married or divorced, employed or not, with kids or without kids. So the better-funded team of lawyers here with the staff to somehow do all this research clearly has an advantage here, they already KNOW which people they want to accept or exclude. Again, this seems to be exaggerated here to ridiculous proportions, but that's not to say this COULDN'T happen, but at the same time, I'd imagine that it doesn't IRL. 

In the middle of all of this, with the prosecution selecting jurors via the combination of one lawyer's gut reactions and his assistant's ability to profile people on the spot, and the defense employing a team of detectives to use weeks of research to build profiles of the jurors and hidden cameras in the courtroom to track their behavior, we have one potential juror who seems to be trying very hard to get OUT of jury duty.  Nick Easter talks to his friends and co-workers about finding a loophole (they have bad ideas, though, like "commit a felony") and even goes out in public to a candle store to find one with St. Catherine on it, the patron saint of jurists, to try to  increase his odds of not being chosen.  He even tells the judge it would be a "hardship" for him to serve on the jury because the new Madden NFL game is coming out in a week, and there's a esports league he wants to compete in order to try to win $100,000.  The judge does not like this and puts him directly on the jury to teach him a lesson in civics, however - PSYCH! - this is what Nick wanted all along, or something.  

My first thought was that Nick was setting up some kind of "12 Angry Men" scenario, if he could get himself on the jury he could buckle down and sway 11 other jurors to get the verdict he alone wanted - but why?  Maybe in New Orleans jury duty pays a little better than the job he has at the video game trade-in store?  Well, this apparently wasn't the case because he did get on the jury intentionally to influence the other jurors, however it's more like a scheme he's running with his girlfriend, who contacts the attorneys on both sides and convinces them she can exert control over the jury and bring about the verdict that the highest bidder wants.  

Really, this should be cause for a mistrial, even if one lawyer takes her offer, then the other one would be free to alert the judge that SOMEONE contacted them about jury tampering for a price, and suddenly there's a chance to start over, with a fresh jury.  This happened to me once when I was on jury duty, on the third day somebody on the stand got very angry and said the name of a famous insurance provider out loud (it rhymes with "Eight Harm") and both parties has agreed to NOT mention that company or its findings out loud in court, so it wasn't exactly a mistrial, but they decided to clear the current jury and replace it with another one. I got paid and I got to go home very early and get on with my life!  There's an incident here where an anti-gun advocate gets close to being on the jury, but after not getting chosen, he rips off his outer shirt to reveal an anti-gun t-shirt that he stars smearing with fake blood. The bailiff and guards drag him out of the courtroom, but that ALONE should have been grounds for a mistrial.  But then the movie would end too early and we'd never get to find out what Nick Easter (not his real name) was up to.  

Nick does disrupt the normal methods of a sequestered jury, he does win over several of his fellow jurors with his personality, he even manages to get the judge to take the jury out to lunch with him at Café Dumond - that's got to be another violation right there, I'm sure.  Both attorneys didn't seem happy about the judge eating beignets with the jury, but hey, they could all be impartial together for the duration of one lunch, right?  As long as they didn't discuss the case...

Nick's actions also lead to a couple of jurors getting dismissed, but this was done to show the lawyers he was blackmailing that he could control the jury, and knock out the ones sympathetic to their side if they didn't pony up the $10 million price.  

We do eventually find out Nick's real name, and his hometown, and his reasons for wanting to influence the jury in this case.  Does it make sense?  Perhaps. Is it legal?  Absolutely not.  Believable?  Well, that's the question of the day, isn't it?  Now I'm all set up, I'm going to go watch Big Movie 5,000 - while we all keep waiting for the gun manufacturers to take some damn responsibility for mass shootings. 

Directed by Gary Fleder (director of "Don't Say a Word" and "Impostor")

Also starring John Cusack (last seen in "Arsenal"), Gene Hackman (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Rachel Weisz (last seen in "Disobedience"), Bruce Davison (last seen in "Grace of My Heart"), Bruce McGill (last seen in "Belushi"), Jeremy Piven (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Nick Searcy (last seen in "The Last Song"), Stanley Anderson (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Cliff Curtis (last seen in "Meg 2: The Trench"), Nestor Serrano (last seen in "City by the Sea"), Leland Orser (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Jennifer Beals (last seen in "The Anniversary Party"), Gerry Bamman (last seen in "Great Expectations"), Joanna Going (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Bill Nunn (last seen in "Bulletproof"), Juanita Jennings (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Marguerite Moreau (last seen in "Paddleton"), Nora Dunn (last seen in "LOL"), Guy Torry (last seen in "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge"), Rusty Schwimmer (last seen in "North Country"), Margo Moorer (last seen in "Brothers"), David Dwyer (last seen in "Dear John"), Michael Arata (last seen in "Love, Wedding, Marriage"), Douglas M. Griffin (ditto), Rhoda Griffis (last seen in "Blockers"), Fahnlohnee R. Harris (last seen in "Ray"), Corri English (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain"), Jason Davis (last seen in "Irresistible"), Xuan Van Nguyen, Deneen Tyler (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Zach Hanner (last seen in "Tammy"), Andrea Powell (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Ted Manson (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), David Jensen (last seen in "Welcome to the Rileys"), Lori Heuring (last seen in "Mulholland Drive"), Adella Gautier (last seen in "Now You See Me"), Afemo Omilami (last seen in "Poms"), Celia Weston (ditto), Barret O'Brien, Ned Bellamy (last seen in "Father Stu"), Orlando Jones (last seen in "Say It Isn't So"), Gary Grubbs (last seen in "Project Almanac"), Lark Marie Fall, Marco St. John (last seen in "Fantastic Four" (2015)), Henry Darrow (last seen in "Maverick"), Don Henderson Baker (last seen in "Lizzie"), Danny Kamin (last seen in "The Newton Boys"), Lance E. Nichols (last seen in "The Burial"), Deacon Dawson (last seen in "Identity Thief"), Elliott Street (last seen in "Last Vegas"), Mike Pniewski (last seen in "Safe Haven"), Joe Chrest (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), David Ramsey, Marcus Hester (last seen in "American Made"), Lara Grice (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Loren Kinsella, Mark Jeffrey Miller (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Wayne Roberts, Harvey Reaves, Wayne Ferrara (last seen in "Waiting..."), Peter Jurasik (last seen in "42"), Shannon Eubanks (last seen in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"), Irene Ziegler (last seen in "Safe Haven"), Ed Nelson (last seen in "Midway"), Bernard Hocke (last seen in "The Dirt"), Mark Krasnoff, Christopher Mankiewicz (last seen in "Eraser"), Cedric Pendleton, Sally Ann Roberts, Stuart Greer (last seen in "The Mechanic"), Kathey Seiden, Jack Massey, with cameos from Dylan McDermott (last seen in "Destiny Turns on the Radio"), Luis Guzman (last seen in "Welcome to Collinwood")

RATING: 5 out of 10 broken car windows

Eve's Bayou

Year 17, Day 106 - 4/16/25 - Movie #4,998

BEFORE: I can't remember exactly when, but there was a special screening of this film at the theater where I work, maybe a year ago or a bit longer.  Some of the stars held a Q&A panel after, though I really didn't pay too much attention since I hadn't ever seen the film.  However, it did put the film on my radar and therefore my watchlist - I figured I'd get around to it eventually, and today's the day. It's been bouncing around on different streaming services, but I'm going to catch up to it thanks to the Peacock app. I tried Roku first, but it's already left that one. 

Roger Guenveur Smith carries over again from "Deep Cover" and Samuel L. Jackson's here one more time, so now he'll be tied with Liam Neeson for the most appearances so far this year. 

THE PLOT: What did little Eve see - and how will it haunt her? Husband, father and womanizer, Louis Batiste is the head of an affluent family, but it's the women who rule this gothic world of secrets, lies and mystic forces. 

AFTER: Yeah, I don't think I'm in any of the target audiences for this film - I probably would have gone on never seeing this film and being pretty OK with that, if I hadn't sat in on that panel with the actors from the film talking about it, some 26 or 27 years later.  It's about a prominent black family in Louisiana, and that's not really my world, not even the family part, since I don't have any kids. The father is a doctor, and his sister (the kids' aunt) has the gift of being able to read people's futures, but not in a voodoo kind of way - although there is some voodoo stuff in the latter part of the film. Family life, not my thing, Louisiana, not my thing (though I've been to New Orleans once) and voodoo, DEFINITELY not my thing.  

There's plenty of family dysfunction, though - after a party at their house, young Eve Batiste falls asleep in the carriage house and wakes up to see her father having sex with a family friend, Matty Meraux. He stops when he realizes his daughter is watching, and he puts young Eve to bed. Later Eve tells her sister, Cisely, what she saw, but Cisely explains it away and tells Eve that she didn't see what she thought she saw.  

But over the next few months, Eve sees more signs of her father's infidelity when she goes with him to visit patients, and when the patients ask for the "special" medication treatments, he sends his daughter to play outside. Hmm-hmm.  Meanwhile Cisely reaches the age of puberty and becomes more sullen and withdrawn, while Eve's mother, Roz, slowly starts to suspect that her husband is not being faithful. Aunt Mozelle, whose third husband died shortly after that party, has a dream about a kid getting hit by a vehicle, so just to be on the safe side, Roz won't let any of her three kids leave the house, for fear of Mozelle's dream coming true.  

While Roz and Mozelle are out at the market, they visit another fortune-teller, as people do, I guess, and they test out her abilities. Elzora can sense Roz's marital trouble, but tells her that in three years a solution to her problems will arise, and in the meantime she needs to "look to her children", which Roz takes as a sign that keeping them cooped up inside and basically smothering them is the right track to be on.  Elzora tells Mozelle, though, that she is cursed and that the next man she marries will also die tragically.  This isn't really much of a grand leap in fortune-telling to me, as everyone will die at some point, and most likely it will be regarded as tragic, at least by someone's point of view.  Predicting that at some point some kid in town will be hit by a car or train is another really easy prediction to make, I mean it's the 1960s and most intersections don't even have stoplights, and kids are likely to run around in the street and not look where they're going.  

Things come to a head, though, when Cisely confides in Eve the reason that she's been so moody and sullen, and it's not just because she's a teenager. It seems that one night, after her parents were fighting (probably over his infidelity), Cisely went to comfort her father, and he was drunk and tried to molest her.  This leads Eve to want to kill her own father for hurting her sister, and she chooses to try the voodoo thing by visiting Elzora herself.  While Eve was expecting to be given a voodoo doll, apparently that's not the way it works, and Elzora only needed a sample of his hair to cast a curse on him.  Again, it's very easy to say that you've cast a curse on someone, and then when something bad inevitably happens to them, you can just point to that and say that the curse is working.  

Eve hedges her bets and helps to seal her father's fate by speaking to Lenny Mereaux, the husband of the woman her father is sleeping with on the regular, and Lenny's got a teaching job that keeps him traveling, which may have led to her infidelity in the first place, it's tough to say though. But Eve points out that both her father and Lenny's wife don't like to be alone, and suggests that maybe they're both out at night at the same time, and Lenny starts to figure this one out.  He finds Eve's father and his wife Matty together at a bar one night, and after he pulls his wife away, threatens Eve's father with a gun. 

Later Eve finds a letter that her father wrote to Mozelle, disputing the accusation that he molested his daughter.  His version of the event is quite different than Cisely's, but unfortunately we in the audience can't be sure whose account is more accurate.  Yeah, that's a problem because we don't know whether he's a daughter-raper in addition to being a cheating husband. I guess maybe they're both bad, but one is so much worse than the other.  I mean, he enjoyed a certain amount of local attention as an African-American doctor, and he seemed to have his pick of women around town, that to me suggests he didn't need to molest his own daughter, unless he was just completely out of control. But I suppose it's best left ambiguous here, and then each viewer can decide for themselves if he deserved his terrible fate. 

BTW, it's pretty naive to think that only ONE kid could be hit by a vehicle in a particular city over a particular summer. There could be two or more, so just because another kid got hit by a truck, that does NOT mean the same thing won't happen to one of the Baptiste children. Take it from someone who gets a message on his phone every time someone gets hit by an L train on the NYC subway line. It seems to happen a lot, and that's just on ONE line - is there someone in Brooklyn actively throwing people off the platforms and on to the tracks? 

Directed by Kasi Lemmons (director of "Harriet")

Also starring Jurnee Smollett (last seen in "The Burial"), Debbi Morgan (last seen in "Coach Carter"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Deep Blue Sea"), Lynn Whitfield (last seen in "Head of State"), Diahann Carroll (last seen in "Sammy Davis, Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Lisa Nicole Carson (last seen in "Devil in a Blue Dress"), Meagan Good (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Vondie Curtis-Hall (last seen in "The Night House"), Branford Marsalis, Carol Sutton (last seen in "Love, Wedding, Marriage"), Ethel Ayler (last seen in "The Bodyguard"), Jake Smollett, Victoria Rowell (last seen in "Dumb and Dumber"), Afonda Colbert, Lola Dalferes, Marcus Lyle Brown (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Alverta Perkins Dunigan, Sharon K. London (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Leonard L. Thomas (also last seen in "Coach Carter"), Allen Toussaint, Billie Neal (last seen in "A Kiss Before Dying"), with the voice of Tamara Tunie (last seen in "The Peacemaker").

RATING: 4 out of 10 pins stuck in a toy monkey's face

Deep Cover

Year 17, Day 105 - 4/15/25 - Movie #4,997

BEFORE: I'm getting super close to Big Movie #5,000 and I suppose it was inevitable in a way, I mean if you do anything long enough or often enough you may do that thing 5,000 times, whatever it is, but you just may not be aware of it when you reach that number. I've been numbering from the start of this project in 2009, so I'm super aware it's coming up this Friday. 

But it's funny because I'm finally seeing some kind of shift now that I have SO many movies watched, like I went through the lists IMDB posts every month about which movies are new to each streaming platform, and for April I have to say that there were VERY few adds, mostly the bigger ones like AmazonPrime and Netflix are now mostly adding movies that I've already seen, which suggests to me that it's either a slow time of year for them, or they're circling back to movies that were available on other platforms already, or just maybe, I've already seen the majority of everything that's out there.  I mean, I still have 600 movies on deck, at all times, but it's weird that now that I've already seen the majority of what each platform is promoting each month as "new". 

I was doing a word search puzzle in a magazine, and the hidden words were all 1-word movie titles that began with the letter "B". B-Movies, get it?  But after I'd found all the words in the grid, I counted up how many of them I'd seen, and it was 44 out of 51, or 86% - it was a random sampling of movies, of course, but could it possibly be that I've seen over 80% of all movies everywhere? That probably can't be right. 

Roger Guenveur Smith carries over from "Till". And I think these will be the links for the rest of April: Carol Sutton, Jason Davis, Tiffany Haddish, Jo Koy, Dee Bradley Baker, John Lithgow, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, James Franco, Giancarlo Esposito and Winona Ryder. This is probably going to be a VERY weird second half of April...

THE PLOT: A uniformed police officer is recruited by the DEA to infiltrate a drug smuggling ring looking to expand its operation. 

AFTER: We're going all the way to 1992 for tonight's film, it wasn't really a top priority for me, but rather it's the middle of three films with Roger Guenveur Smith, kind of just filler to place the Easter movie on the right date. Sorry, but as I always say, some films are bricks and other films are mortar. Something similar happened today when I was looking for a path to Mother's Day last night, I had marked a number of films centered around motherhood ("All About My Mother", "Mixtape", "When You Finish Saving the World") and the goal was to get from my Easter film to something mother-based in 20 or 21 steps, because this year there will be 21 days between those two holidays. I linked a bunch of films together, but I kept getting there too early, like in 11 steps or 14 steps. Sure, I could take a bunch of free days, but that's not as much fun - although that would allow me to watch more films in December. 

What I ended up doing today was just looking for films NOT already on my list that featured actors from my Easter film, just to see if anything else out there looked good - and I found two animated films on IMDB that I'd never heard of before, and I struck out from there.  Sometimes I have to link in a completely random new direction to get where I want to go - and then in a few steps I got to "Conclave", and in a few more steps I got to a film that linked back to the chain I made last night, and now I'm good to go, the chain's good until Mother's Day, with at least three maternal-based movies in it leading up to the holiday.  I've been trying to watch "Norma Rae" for years, and I think saving it for Labor Day just isn't working out, but since it is a film about a single mother, I'm going to try and reclassify it. 

My top priority should really be figuring out which films have been on my list the longest, and trying to get to those. If I re-order my watchlist by "Date Added", I can see that the films that have been on it the longest are "The Grand Illusion", "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" from 1941, "No Time for Sergeants", and "The Prisoner of Zenda". Man, it's going to be hard to link back to films from the 1930's to 1950's, so who knows, I may never get to these.  "The Red Turtle" from 2016 has been on the list for quite some time, but that's an animated film with a French voice cast, again, not in the cards for the foreseeable future. "Holiday Inn" and "White Christmas", I don't see how I'm going to get to these either, unless there's a more modern Christmas film that uses archive footage from one of these. Then come "The Butterfly Effect 2" and the "Cube" sequels, no real excuse there except that the casts are full of obscure actors, all of those are very hard to link to.  

But let's get back to "Deep Cover". It's from 1992 so cocaine is king, and a black police officer is recruited by the DEA to go, well, deep undercover for months or maybe even years, to work the streets, sell drugs and set up busts of key figures in the drug cartel who are several levels up. Putting drug dealers in jail apparently does nothing to stop the flow of cocaine, so the DEA guy wants someone to work their way up the chain and do whatever it takes to gain the trust of the mid-level dealers so they can then get access to the men on top, the importers. 

The problem that the DEA did not foresee, however, was that by putting a police officer in a position to buy drugs, sell drugs, commit crimes up to murder, they would by putting him a position where he would come to question his very essence.  Is he a cop pretending to be a drug dealer, or a drug dealer pretending to be a cop?  You'd think he might be able to keep that straight, but here he goes by another name for so long, pretends to be someone else for so long, apparently he's no longer capable of remembering where he started?

OK, so maybe some of that's a bit weird - but then things get weirder because the drug dealer who's also a cop and the drug supplier who's also a lawyer can't really make a move on the top guys like they really want to - because they saw what he did to the other drug dealer who talked to the cops, the drug kingpin beat his whole face in. And when they do manage to get one drug kingpin killed, then an even worse one moves in on his territory and he says the other guy owed him $1,800,000 so since he can't collect it, the guys who killed that guy now owe him that money.  Well, OK, I guess that's how things work in that world, but that dead guy did NOT owe him a million eight, he owed him just a million.  Besides, where are our central characters going to come up with that kind of money?  The D.E.A. doesn't have that kind of cash lying around, so now since they can't pay the new drug kingpin, do they have to kill him too?  Wouldn't it be easier just to have him arrested? 

Then the drug dealer who's also a cop and the drug supplier who's also a lawyer come up with a really crazy idea, they want to come up with a new form of cocaine, but one without all the side effects like addiction, and without all the fun of getting high, you know, something that just makes you feel all good and energetic, but also able to really focus on stuff.  So, umm, ritalin?  Adderall?  We already HAVE drugs that will do this, plus the addictive nature of cocaine is what keeps your customers coming back, time and again, so this is probably a really bad idea. Was this some screenwriter's weird fantasy about the way to end the cocaine wars of the 1990's?  It's just wishful thinking, right?  I mean, if there had been New Coke in the 1990's I'm sure we would have heard about it - unless people just didn't like New Coke and it was marketed poorly and everybody just decided to go back to selling Coke Classic. Is that what happened? 

Well, like I said, it was the 1990's, a lot of crazy stuff happened, in L.A. probably doubly so. People pretended to collect African tribal masks in order to launder all their drug money, and dealers had beautiful women driving them around the hood, like they were in a music video or something. People stored their money in vans that they kept on ships in the harbor, because nobody trusted banks, I guess. And don't even get me started about leaving your kid in the car while robbing a liquor store on Christmas. Oh, I guess that last part happened in 1972, not the 1990's. Still, it was a crazy time. 

Directed by Bill Duke (director of "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit")

Also starring Lawrence Fishburne (last seen in "Ride Along"), Jeff Goldblum (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Yvette Heyden, Charles Martin Smith (last seen in "Lucky You"), Victoria Dillard (last seen in "Ricochet"), Gregory Sierra (last seen in "The Other Side of the Wind"), David Weixelbaum, Glynn Turman (last seen in "Rustin"), Arthur Mendoza, Clarence Williams III (last seen in "52 Pick-Up"), James T. Morris, Alisa Christensen (last seen in "Mulholland Falls"), Roberto Luis Santana (last seen in "Coach Carter"), Kamala Lopez (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Lira Angel, Rene Assa (last seen in "Postcards from the Edge"), Alex Colon (last seen in "The Mighty Quinn"), Jaime Cardriche (last seen in "Freaked"), Sandra Gould (last seen in "Airport"), Sydney Lassick (last seen in "The Rage: Carrie 2"), John Boyd West, Julio Oscar Mechoso (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Paunita Nichols, Clifton Powell (last seen in "Street Kings"), Lionel Matthews, Bilal Bashir, Anna Berger (last seen in "You Don't Mess with the Zohan"), Donald Bishop (last seen in "The China Syndrome"), Cory Curtis, Joseph Ferro, Def Jef, Harry Frazier (last seen in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"), Revalyn T. Golde, Nick LaTour (Last seen in "Don Juan DeMarco"), Shannon Macpherson, Tony Perez, Vicellous Shannon (last seen in "The Humanity Bureau"), Lisa Thayer, Ron Thompson

RATING: 5 out of 10 briefcases full of money

Till

Year 17, Day 104 - 4/14/25 - Movie #4,996

BEFORE: Well, since I'm always busy in February watching romance films, I never have slots to schedule anything for Black History Month - well, better late than never, right?  Once March and April roll around, I can finally devote some time to that topic.  "The Piano Lesson" was one example, and here comes another one. I'll have to see if I can fit anything else on this topic that counts in between Easter and Mother's Day.

Kevin Carroll carries over from "Paper Soldiers". 

THE PLOT: In 1955, after Emmett Till is murdered in a brutal lynching, his mother vows to expose the racism behind the attack while working to have those involved brought to justice. 

AFTER: This is another film that got heavily promoted during the Oscar campaign race in 2022, they had at least one guild screening in the theater where I work. But then no Oscar nominations came calling, I wonder why that is. Was this just really obvious "Oscar bait", because sometimes voters don't respond well to the hard sell, or what can be perceived as pandering. I mean, OF COURSE this is an important subject matter, what happened to Emmett Till was absolutely deplorable, and his mother's actions afterward had an effect on the civil rights movement and struck a blow, however big or small, against racism and inequality in general.

But this film is just SO heavy-handed, there's absolutely nothing subtle about it. Why tap people on the shoulder when you can hit them in the head with a brick?  So to speak.  Right from the very start, they kind of overplay everything when Emmett is getting dressed for his trip to Mississippi. His mother is clearly concerned about him being aware that Chicago and Mississippi are two very different places, and he needs to be aware that there is racism in the South, and that sometimes it can be a dangerous place, etc. etc. She brings this up SEVERAL times in the first few minutes of the film, so it's almost overkill, when in truth we probably have no idea how many times she brought up this subject while he was preparing for his trip. Then they discuss whether he should wear his father's cufflinks or his ring (umm, why can't he wear both?) and you just KNOW this is going to be important somehow later in the film. 

They tipped their hand - I mean, it's right there in the synopsis, what's going to happen to Emmett in Mississippi, and it's fine for a mother to be worried about her son, but here she's SO overly worried about him that even if you don't already know what's going to happen, you still sort of know what's going to happen.  I mean, there's concern, and then there's genuine over-protectiveness - and I know, from personal experience, that you can't spell "smother" without the word "mother". Sure, sometimes moms get a "bad feeling" about things and their concerns are unwarranted, but we just know that's not the case here. But again, we weren't there in Chicago in 1955, so we really don't know WHAT was said, or HOW worried she was in advance, that's really all just speculation. Right? 

It's not that long ago that there were TWO Americas, that lived by different rules. This is highlighted by seeing a train traveling from north to south and at some point, the black people were forced to move to a separate car, because the train was about to cross some imaginary line into another state where the rules were not the same. And you can impart on someone traveling that their behavior needs to be changed, but still there are some lessons that need to be learned the hard way.  When I was a teenager I went to Germany on an exchange program, and at that point there were TWO Germanys, east and west. And we were told that the rules were different in the two countries, because one was communist and the other was a republic. We were nowhere near Berlin, but I think at one point we were close to the border between the two countries. There was nothing that drove the message home more than seeing East German soldiers, then it all became very real.  Wouldn't you know it, we were there when President Reagan made some terrible joke on a hot mic about bombing Russia in 5 minutes. Let's just say that the German people didn't really find that very funny, and they took it out on any Americans that happened to be in the vicinity.  OK, so my experience doesn't come close to what happened to Emmett Till, but I know some small thing about having to act differently while in hostile territory. 

If I give this film a low score, please don't take that as a condemnation of Till's story or civil rights in general or the struggle of African-Americans, I support that cause but I decided long ago to make my scores based on my level of enjoyment, primarily.  And of course this story was meant to be disturbing foremost, over enjoyable.  Till's mother also wanted her dead son's body to be openly photographed and for that picture to gain attention in order to highlight the disturbing nature of the injustice and violence that her son suffered. So in my defense, nobody's really going around saying that this was their favorite movie, because it just wasn't designed to be. 

OK, can my conscience be clear now?  Moving on...

Directed by Chinonye Chukwu

Also starring Danielle Deadwyler (last seen in "The Piano Lesson"), Jalyn Hall (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Frankie Faison (last seen in "Fatherhood"), Haley Bennett (last seen in "Cyrano"), Jayme Lawson (last seen in "The Woman King"), Tosin Cole (last seen in "Unlocked"), Sean Patrick Thomas (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), John Douglas Thompson (last seen in "The 355"), Roger Guenveur Smith (last seen in "Dope"), Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Butterfly in the Sky"), Keisha Tillis, Marc Collins, Diallo Thompson (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Tyrik Johnson, Keith Arthur Bolden (last seen in "Bandit"), Darian Rolle, Sean Michael Weber (last seen in "The Leisure Seeker"), Eric Whitten, Enoch King, Carol J. Mckenith, Elizabeth Youman (last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Njema Williams (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Destin Freeman, E. Roger Mitchell (last seen in "Selma"), Al Mitchell (last seen in "Greenland"), Brandon Bell, Leland L. Jones (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Euseph Messiah, Jackson Beals (last seen in "Contraband"), Princess Elmore, Brendan Patrick Connor (last seen in "Joker"), Jonathan D. Williams (last seen in "The Peanut Butter Falcon"), Lowrey Brown (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Ed Amatrudo (ditto), Tim Ware (last seen in "Transporter 2"), David Caprita (last seen in "The Specialist"), Josh Ventura (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Leon Lamar (last seen in "Poms"), Ed Sturdivant, Jaylin Webb (last seen in "Armageddon Time")

RATING: 4 out of 10 white jurors

Paper Soldiers

Year 17, Day 103 - 4/13/25 - Movie #4,995

BEFORE: Last Movie Year was a big year for Kevin Hart, he was tied for third with 9 appearances, this year I just don't have as many films on my list with him in it - but that allows me to use it as a link to get where I'm going in time for Easter. This is a film from very early in his career, before "Fool's Gold" or "The 40-Year Old Virgin" or "Scary Movie 3" even.  I never even heard of it before, I think I was just looking for a film to put on a DVD with "The Man from Toronto" to make a double-film disc. 

Michael Rapaport carries over from "Deep Blue Sea".

THE PLOT: Under guidance from experienced thief Will, rookie burglar Shawn navigates relationships with girlfriend Mo'Nique, bumbling friends Birdie and Johnny, his parole officer, and volatile neighborhood sociopath Stu while committing robberies.

AFTER: It's a real letdown of a movie, almost a complete nothing-burger unless you're really interested in seeing what Kevin Hart was like before he broke big. Sure, he talked fast and got loud, which is kind of his thing, but he's not particular funny here.  So it feels like he hadn't really figured out the winning formula yet, or else maybe the filmmakers just didn't know what to do with him. I can't really point to specific things to say what's wrong with the film, except that it just fails to be funny, mostly, it's more of a slice of life thing, a peek into the lives of some wanna-be burglars in New Jersey, but nobody really knows what they're doing when it comes to burglary, or even life, really.  

Who thought "Scared Straight" would make a good movie?  Did we need this? If the point of the film is to point out that stealing is wrong, and that people who steal often go to prison, well, we didn't really need that, we kind of all know that already.  So what is the point here?  Well, it's really hard to say because mostly it's just people yelling at each other for almost 90 minutes straight, and often they're very hard to understand, because they're yelling. It's not helpful if you're trying to watch a movie late at night downstairs and not wake up your wife, who is sleeping upstairs. I had to constantly be dialing the volume down when people (not just Kevin Hart) got loud, and then of course since I was watching this on DVD with no subtitles, it was even harder for me to figure out what people were saying.  

They kind of kept going back to the same jokes over and over, too, and I'm being kind of polite in calling them "jokes" - more like plot points, really, jokes that aren't funny.  Twice the gang breaks into houses belonging to rappers, one time it's Jay-Z and another time it's a fictional rapper named "Gallon" or something. Is that supposed to be a weird reference to 50 Cent, like he's 50 Gallon?  If not, I don't get it. They steal some stuff from Jay-Z's house, which isn't cool, especially if you respect his music, you should probably just drop what you took and leave right away, just out of an appreciation for his career, which is a big one, from what I've heard. Sure, go ahead, rob Gallon, though, I don't really care.  Who knew so many rappers lived in houses in south Jersey?  

Also, if you keep getting caught stealing, maybe at some point you have to admit that you're no good at it and try another career.  Shawn has another job working at a beeper store, but when his focus is on robbing houses he never really shows up on time, or at all, so he gets fired. Eh, it's OK, in a couple years nobody will have a beeper anymore, the whole industry is dying. I'd say get into cel phones, but it's 2002 and he won't realize they're the wave of the future just yet. By all means, keep robbing houses and almost getting caught.  

Shawn also has to deal with his baby mama, who knows he's doing something wrong when he shows up with money and she demands that he stop whatever it is, and his parole officer, who keeps threatening to send him to jail if he can't stop smoking weed and start giving negative drug tests. It should be simple enough to do this, I can't quite understand why he can't, especially since we never see him smoking weed in any scene.  Things here are generally somewhat confusing.  

What was most confusing to me was knowing that Michael Rapaport would show up at some point, and then I saw an actor who looked like a younger Michael Rapaport, so since this was released 23 years ago, naturally I assumed that was him.  But it wasn't, it was Paul Sado, who looks like Rapaport's younger brother or something - when the real Michael Rapaport did show up as a different character, it was quite confounding indeed.  Maybe these two actors should not be cast in the same film, unless they're playing brothers. Just saying.   

Pretty much a waste of 90 minutes of everyone's time, unless I'm missing the point it was trying to make, other than "stealing is wrong". 

Directed by David Daniel & Damon Dash

Also starring Kevin Hart (last seen in "Die Hart"), Beanie Sigel (last seen in "Hustle"), Stacey Dash (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Jason Cerbone (last seen in "Cloverfield"), Kamal Ahmed, Jacob “The Jeweler” Arabo, Kevin Carroll (last seen in "The Object of My Affection"), Harold “Stumpy” Cromer (last seen in "The Cotton Club"), Mylika Davis (last seen in "Far from Heaven"), James Dickson, Derron “Smokey” Edington, Venida Evans (last seen in "Just a Kiss"), Shane Franklin, Cam'ron, Jim Jones (last seen in "Righteous Kill"), Ross Haines (last seen in "3000 Miles to Graceland"), Ken Harris, Kiam "Capone" Holley, Tarsha Nicole Jones, Derrick "Capone" Lee, Lil' Cease, Angie Martinez, Charlie Murphy (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Patrice O'Neal (last seen in "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only"), Ryan Paden, Christine Rothholz, Paul Sado (last seen in 'Hubie Halloween"), N.O.R.E., Derrick Simmons (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Tamika Talbot, Greg Travis (last seen in "Lost Highway"), MIchelle Valdes, Yolanda "Yo-Yo" Whittaker (last seen in "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit"), Chris Eric Williams, Robert Wise, Tiffany Withers, 

with cameos from Damon Dash, Jay-Z (last seen in "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only"), Memphis Bleek, 

RATING: 4 out of 10 broken windows