Word: singleton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Which, of course, is standard fare for the cookie-cutter action movies Hollywood cranks out by the dozen. But I had hoped that a director as noted as John Singleton and an actor with Jackson's talent would produce something more challenging than a cinematic gangsta-rap song. The original Shaft--one of the first black movie heroes to talk back to the Man and get away with it--meant something special to blacks like me who came of age during the '70s. We could use another hero like that now. Instead we got the shaft...
...least had an attitude, and that's what director John Singleton's Shaft lacks. It begins by focusing on an upper-class racist murderer (Christian Bale) whose motives we don't quite believe. So the movie quickly shifts its attention to a sly, brutal, self-regarding Latino drug dealer (Jeffrey Wright). You can understand only about one in three words he speaks, but you catch his very scary drift...
...wonder, playing a role that was--deservedly--built up during production. But that leaves a lot of other actors--among them Vanessa Williams, Toni Collette and Roundtree himself (as Shaft's beamish uncle)--shortchanged. It also leaves Jackson to play yet another cop rebelliously disgusted with the system and Singleton with yet another urban action piece, well enough made but not essentially different from a hundred other movies just like...
NAME: JOHN SINGLETON AGE: 32 OCCUPATION: Shaft director BEST DODGE: "Sam is opinionated, but I respect that." The real cause of on-set tension? "It was our producer, Scott Rudin, that was the big problem...
Shut your mouth! Hide your eyes! In fact, erase your memories! There's nothing "bad" about John Shaft in John Singleton's nephew-of remake of Gordon Parks's 1971 breakthrough movie that defined the blaxploitation genre. Gone is the hard-living, hard-loving vigilante avenger banging on Hollywood's door with the butt of a .45 and challenging its whitewashing of American reality. In his stead we have his focus-group tested nephew, designed to appeal to a much wider audience but stripped, in the process, of his ability to thrill...