Love and Basketball Scores At Being Well-Made Entertainment

Long-time next-door neighbors Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) have always harbored ambitions related to basketball. For Monica, those dreams entailed making history as the first woman to play in the NBA. For Quincy, it was all about living up to the legendary reputation of his basketball father Zeke McCall (Dennis Haysbert). Their shared passions eventually take them both to the University of Southern California, where they become a romantic couple. Every relationship has its ups and downs, and this one's no different. Most notably, problems arise once Quincy learns a devastating secret about his dad, all while Monica is busy trying to get any time on the basketball court.

13 Days of First-Time Frights: American Psycho

13 Days of First-Time Frights is a series of reviews for October 2019 where Douglas Laman, in the spirit of Halloween, watches and writes about thirteen horror movies he's never seen before. These reviews will be posted each Tuesday and Thursday as well as the last three Wednesdays of October 2019.

Entry #12: American Psycho

Christian Bale flew up to the status of super-stardom with portraying the titular superhero in Batman Begins, but much like future Batman performer Robert Pattinson, Bale spent his pre-Batman days doing a variety of bold smaller-scale films working with acclaimed filmmakers. For Bale, this meant getting to act under the guidance of names like Todd Haynes, Lisa Cholodenko and Jane Campion and also included the 2000 Mary Harron directorial effort American Psycho. This grisly social satire, adapted by a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, showed off the kind of acting chops that Bale would become famous for while also demonstrating Hanlon's knack for an insightful skewering of toxic masculinity.

All Hail The Visually Stunning Comedy But I'm A Cheerleader

The only real downside to watching But I'm a Cheerleader for the first time is stumbling onto the initial reviews for the film where seemingly everyone but Roger Ebert (God bless him) just seemed to totally miss the point of the film. Most aggravating among these reviews is a common refrain from primarily heterosexual reviewers about how the film is just "preaching to the choir" and doesn't do enough to appeal to viewers who are against the LGBTQA+ community. The idea that art about members of an oppressed community of human beings is obligated to make an effort to reach out to privileged populations suppressing said oppressed communities is staggeringly stupid. The humanity of LGBTQA+ people is not some debate where "both sides have a point" like a debate over Star Wars movies, a film like But I'm A Cheerleader is not lesser than because it decides to exclusively focus on queer characters and their struggles.

Lynne Ramsay Kicked Off Her Directorial Career In A Masterful Fashion With Ratcatcher

Sometimes, a director debuts with a film that manages to totally capture the elements that would come to define their work as a filmmaker. In the case of Lynne Ramsay, her recurring exploration of the internal mental perspectives of her lead characters is evident not just somewhere within her first feature film, Ratcatcher, but in its very first opening scene! Ratcatcher opens with its lead characters, James Gillespie (William Eadie), twirling round and round with a curtain covering his face. Noises of idyllic sounds of children laughing and playing emanating from within the mind of James are heard as he continues to play with the curtain until they're abruptly cut off by his mother ripping the curtain off of James and warning him of the dangers of wrapping his head up in a curtain.

Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon Is Full of Surprises and Beautifully-Realized Fight Scenes

You know what's nifty about Ang Lee as a filmmaker? Just how many different genres he's explored in his directorial efforts! Much like fellow eclectic director Steven Soderbergh, Ang Lee has spent his twenty-plus years as a filmmaker transversing across several different genres from superhero fare (Hulk) to period piece romantic dramas (Sense & Sensibility) and even to a martial arts motion picture entitled Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that defies easy genre categorization. It's a mixture of an action movie, a romantic feature, a character-driven drama and so much more. Lee's flexibility as a filmmaker in terms of what genres he explores seeps into Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon and allows this particular singular story to inhabit all sorts of different genres much to the betterment of the movie as a whole!

Year of the Month: Was The Original X-Men Really A Game-Changer For Superhero Movies?

This essay was written for The-Solute's monthly Year of the Month column, with January 2019 being dedicated to pop culture from 2000. 

At the dawn of the 21st century, movies based on Marvel Comics were not a recurring fixture of American cinema. Though now it's like saying that the sky was once colored green, it was true at the very start of 2000, with Marvel Comics having about as many box office hits based on one of their properties (the 1997 sleeper hit Blade) as Image Comics. That all changed in July 2000 when the very first live-action X-Men movie made its way to the silver screen courtesy of 20th Century Fox and director Bryan Singer. The feature managed to gross $157.2 million domestically, a sum that put it ahead of all superhero movies sans the first three post-1988 live-action Batman movies. In an era where Batman & Robin seemingly killed off the comic book movie, and the likes of Spawn and Steel weren't making the case for the subgenre's revival, X-Men proved not only did comic book movies still have life left in them but that movies based on Marvel Comics characters could make big bucks.

Gladiator Is Straightforward To A Fault

Aside from them both being Best Picture winners, it's doubtful anyone would ever think to compare Gladiator and Driving Miss Daisy, but that's just what I'm going to be doing today. Obviously, both films differ greatly in terms of story, tone and types of characters they explore, but both are feature films that I've watched for the first time recently that are amiable endeavors that also can't help but feel like they're a little basic, they stick to tried-and-true storytelling & characters too heavily and in the process feel like they're eschewing the chance to carve out their own identity, though at least Gladiator does have the distinction of reviving the swords-and-sandals genre in a big way at the dawn of the 21st century.

Requiem For A Dream Is An Uncompromising Slow-Burn Look At Addiction

Director Darren Aronofsky loves to put the characters in his movies through pain. Not just through conflict, he loves to toss the assorted individuals in his stories through a meat grinder of agony and then proceeds to hold the audience's eyes wide open as they witness these characters being incinerated. Keeping that in your mind, it should be no shocker that that Aronofsy's 2000 effort Requiem For A Dream (his first film to garner any sort of Oscar recognition) is entirely oriented around the process of destruction that, for varying reasons, consumes the lives of four different people in drastic ways.

The Inconsistent Miss Congeniality Has Glimmers Of Real Creativity And Laughs

To follow the trajectory of Sandra Bullock's career is to see a fascinating career path that, with the benefit of hindsight, really does just exemplify longevity. Bullock garnered large amounts of fame in the 90's, thanks to Speed and While You Were Sleeping kicking her career into overdrive and she maintained that star wattage through the next two decades of her career, with the only real bump in her career coming in the 2006-2007 era where she just had some mild box office underperformers. Right after that though, the 2009 double-whammy of The Proposal and The Blind Side took her to the next level of stardom that she's been riding ever since. Nine years prior to those two movies though, Bullock starred in one of her most famous motion pictures, the comedy Miss Congeniality.

Check Out Douglas Laman On This Week's Episode Of We Love To Watch!

I've never ever been on a podcast before but that's all changed forever now that I've made a special appearance on this week's episode of We Love To Watch, a podcast started by two super snazzy film geeks, Aaron Armstrong and Peter Moran, allowed me and fellow film writer Michael Guarnieri onto their podcast to discuss Red Planet and Mission To Mars, two dueling Mars movies released in the year 2000! You can find the podcast below, in which the four of us discuss the acting abilities of Gary Sinise and Val Kilmer, why many grounded space movies struggle to create compelling drama and Michael's pizza woes! It's an absolute hoot and it was a privilege to lend my thoughts and distinctive in all the wrong ways cackle to the proceedings! Be sure to listen to the can't miss episode below and be sure to check out the numerous other episodes the We Love To Watch podcast has created, there's so much comedic brilliance in there y'all!

Your Mission To Mars, Should You Choose To Accept It....

Brian De Palma was one of the most influential filmmakers of the final three decades of the 20th century, with films like Scarface, Carrie and the 1981 masterpiece Blow Out cultivating praise from general moviegoers and film geeks alike. It's a pity then that he's been mostly M.I.A. in the 21st century, with only his divisive 2002 movie Femme Fatale scoring much in the way of praise, though a documentary all about the man himself entitled De Palma was released last year and ended up being widely praised. Hopefully a studio like Amazon Studios, Annapurna or A24 gives Brian De Palma a chance to make a truly great movie again.

Red Planet Is The Most Boring Movie Ever Made About Astronauts Evading A Robot On Mars

If you want a fantastic high-quality motion picture all about a human being looking to survive on Mars and get back home to Earth, complete with thoughtful cinematography, a tremendous lead performance and loads of edge-of-your-set fun, then go check out Ridley Scott's The Martian, that's a sublime piece of cinema. If you want the super boring Asylum knock-off of The Martian that somehow got made 15 years before that Ridley Scott movie even came out, well, why would you want such a movie? That being said, if that's what you crave, the 2000 sci-fi "thriller" Red Planet should scratch that itch you shouldn't even have in the first place!

Snatch Me If You Can

Before he was making big blockbusters like the Sherlock Holmes movies and that new King Arthur film that just opened this weekend (the latter feature is why I'm covering the subject of this review today), Guy Ritchie was a bloke from England looking to make crime movies with a distinct air to them. He's carried over his unique editing and directing sensibilities over to some of his blockbuster work, but if you want pure unfiltered Guy Ritchie, you can most certainly find it in his 2000 crime movie Snatch, which is packed to the gills with energy as well as characters in its gargantuan ensemble cast.

What Lies Beneath Review

What Lies Beneath is a departure for Robert Zemeckis, a director whose inhabited many different genres in his multiple decades as a filmmaker, but only delved into the world of horror two other times in his career, with the 1992 horror/comedy Death Becomes Her and the feature that traumatized me as a youth, The Polar Express. What Lies Beneath may not be as terrifying as his 2004 Christmas-themed motion picture, but hey, it works on its own merits as a spooky ghost story with some appropriately bombastic twists that feel like they should be told around a campfire via an adult holding a flashlight under their face.

In The Mood For Love Has Style To Spare, But Its Character Don't Quite Sparkle

Love makes people do crazy things, it's as simple as that. You'll buy expensive things for those you're infatuated with, you'll go eat at places you never would have gone to for the sake of going on a unique date, all that jazz. Movies, just like any other avenue of artistic storytelling, have been able to wring plenty of storytelling mileage out of depicting the lengths to which people will go to for the sake of romance, sometimes for drama, sometimes for comedy, but always as a way to tap into the universal notion of how powerful romance can be.

Film On The Television (4/15/2016): Titan A.E. On Starz Kids And Family

Where oh where has Don Bluth gone? A man who was once the protege of Spielberg at Universal (doing such box office this An American Tale and a personal childhood favorite of mine The Land Before Time under the supervision of Spielberg) has all but vanished in the 21st century, with his only film in this new millennium being a big enough box office bomb to torpedo not only his own career but also led to Fox Animation Studios being shut down.

It's a pity that such negative events succeeded the abysmal box office showing of Titan A.E., because it's actually a pretty good movie in its own right. While the film sometimes gets too wrapped up in its own little world (to the point where certain things in the plot, like our main hero escaping from an enemy prison, just sort of happen for reasons the writers seem to know about but don't let the audience in on), it's that sort of devotion to the kooky sci-fi world that they've created that gives the motion picture an endearing quality. To boot, the various sci-fi creatures and environmentz are a treat on a visual level, while there are also some great vocal performances from the likes of Nathan Lane and John Leguizamo. It's also worth noting, for the sake of context and history, that after a decade of American family animation being dominated by fantasy musicals (most of which were subpar Disney knock-offs like Quest For Camelot), Titan A.E. ushered in a brief epoch of PG-rated animation with a bit more edge to it. Some (like Titan A.E. and the similarly undervalued box office dud Treasure Planet) were diamonds in the rough, while others (such as Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas and Atlantis: The Lost Empire) got the middling box office they deserved.

Of course, Shrek came along in May 2001 to radically change the face of American family animation, transitioning the default status of those films to computer-animated comedies, a format of storytelling that's still going strong 15 years later. Both as an examination of a peculiar time of transition in American family animation, as well as a strong film with a clear confidence in its own crazy story and mythology, Titan A.E. most certainly fits the bill.

Titan A.E. starts on Starz Kids And Family at 6:23 PM Eastern time.

X-Men Is Far Far From Perfect, But It Forever Changed the Superhero Movie Game

This Friday brings a project to the big screen few thought would ever truly exist...a live-action Deadpool movie. The eighth feature film in the live-action X-Men feature film series in 16 years, it's one of a number of project Fox has in the pipeline for this universe of mutants, most of which are movies (X-Men: Apocalypse of course arrives in May, and next year will bring the final solo Hugh Jackman as Wolverine movie and will likely unleash a solo Gambit film unto the Earth) and a few of which are TV shows (such as the Dan Stevens FX program Legion). With all of these mutant projects on the horizon, it's easy to forget this whole shindig started with one little 2000 feature film called (what else?) X-Men.

Unbreakable Review (Classic Write-Up)

Break Away

When I saw Unfriended this past weekend, I was shocked to see a trailer I (GASP) hadn't seen seen on the internet beforehand. The trailer was for The Visit, a found-footage(?) horror film from M. Night Shaymalan that was chock full of stupidity and terrible dialogue (the best bad line is easily "Would get into the oven to clean it?", which is delivered in a way that briefly makes it seem like the sentence will conclude with the word over) and reminded me of how far M. Night Shyamalan had fallen in recent years.

A Look At The Highest Grossing Movies Of The 21st Century

In the first 14 years of the 21st century, a wide variety of films have come around to arise as champions, in that they became the biggest movies of their respective years of release. Looking over the movies that have managed to achieve such a feat, I was surprised to see high quality features usually (emphasis on usually) top the years box office. The Avengers, Toy Story 3, The Dark Knight, The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King and Avatar (yes, I know I lost respect from many of you right there) are all excellent films that managed to make untold amounts of moolah.

Which Grinch Is Best? (The Answer Is Obvious)

Here's another exciting entry in this Holiday themed column, 25 Days Of Christmas Pop Culture! From now until Christmas Eve, I'll be tackling one piece of Christmas pop culture! It could be a book, movie, TV special, song....so long as it's festive for this time of the year, it'll be checked out in this daily column!

I've gotten really addicted to Patton Oswalts standup this week, the dudes just hilarious in his comedy. One great bit is where he talks about how a primary flaw with the Star Wars prequels is that they feel compelled to talk about the origins of beloved characters like Boba Fett and Darth Vader, which Oswalt likens to someone give you the starting ingredients for Ice Cream and saying it's just delicious as that confection.