Word: singleton
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WRITER-DIRECTOR: JOHN SINGLETON...
...questions now arise: Was John Singleton's first film, Boyz N the Hood, a lucky accident? Or is his second, Poetic Justice, an unlucky one? Too soon to say, of course, since Singleton, the youngest person (and only black) to receive simultaneous Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, is still in his 20s, with most of his career ahead...
What must be said is that the new movie is simply awful: poorly structured, vulgarly written, insipidly directed, monotonously performed. This, of course, is not the contrast to his taut, persuasively realistic earlier work that Singleton wanted to strike...
This situation and this relationship are both rooted in traditional romantic comedy, and it would have been interesting (to say the least) if Singleton could have imposed its generic conventions on this unlikely milieu. But that's beyond him. He doesn't offer any scene that convincingly suggests the kind of authentic mutual attraction that might overcome the couple's superficial differences. He doesn't know how to coax a performance out of Jackson, who relates to the camera lens as if it were a mirror. He never finds a way either to put an interesting spin on the incidents...
Almost everything about this movie feels like a first draft -- unfelt, unformed, unfinished. And it's not entirely Singleton's fault. As it so often does, Hollywood has mistaken bright promise for full-fledged talent, rushing in to indulge a young artist's self-indulgences, giving him everything he wants but withholding the one thing he needs most: firm but sympathetic challenges to his assumptions, an insistence on rethinking and rewriting until he knows what he wants to say and how to say it right...