Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fortunately, James fans can relax a little. Apart from the opening and a few surrealistic dream sequences (which are, of course, creations of the director) this new film adaptation is surprisingly faithful to the novel--at least on the surface level of plot and dialogue...
Then, of course, the reality sank in. Bill Cosby, the father who works as an actor whose specialty is playing fathers, had lost a blood, not a visual, relation. And had lost him not to a plot turn but to a bullet. Still, the whole thing didn't quite compute for me. Gunfire was never a part of The Cosby Show. Roadside homicide didn't figure in. According to the same dramatic logic that ruled out rape on Gilligan's Island and domestic violence among the Brady Bunch, murder on Cosby just wasn't possible...
...issued a regulation villain (Michael Wincott, whose menacing baritone was used to better effect in the recent Jim Jarmusch corpse opera Dead Man) and a girlfriend in peril (British stunner Carmen Ejogo). A shame the star wasn't given a character to play, witty dialogue to speak or clever plot twists to unravel. But though Roper is often at gunpoint, Murphy wasn't when he agreed to make Metro. In his bumpy tryst with filmgoers, how long will he make us wait for another Nutty Professor? How long until we can love Eddie again...
...MOVIES . . . GRIDLOCK'D: An ambitious first film as writer-director by actor Vondie Curtis Hall, starring Tupac Shakur. Shakur plays Spoon, a musician who resolves to say aloha to heroin after his singer girlfriend Cookie (radiant Thandie Newton) nearly dies from a drug overdose. The plot has Spoon and his nutsy pal Stretch (Tim Roth) fleeing a Detroit drug lord (Curtis Hall) who's peeved that the lads stole his stash. But the real story is of the runaround Spoon and Stretch get from social-service employees, who can't be bothered to help addicts get into rehab programs. This...
...Mosley's other novels, the plot is mostly incidental, a prop for his rich characterizations and astute social observations. In Fishin', Easy emerges as an Everyman of the segregated pre-World War II rural South: semiliterate, marginally employed, the victim of numerous acts of offhand racism. He inhabits a blues-toned, all-black world of juke joints, odd jobs and broken people wrestling with the same dilemma: "If all you got is two po'k chops an' ten chirren, what you gonna do?" The answer: improvise and live with the consequences...