The Writer's Poke

Tupac. I've heard of him, as I'm sure everyone has, but I've never listened to his stuff, and I've never watched any film he's starred in. Turns out, he was a pretty good actor. Janet Jackson is an okay actor, too, but I can understand why she hasn't done a lot of film work.  It's neat to see Maya Angelou make an appearance as one of the Aunts at a random family reunion. And let's talk about this: The film somehow morphs into a road trip picture, with Lucky (and his partner) plus Justice (Jackson) and another woman driving from L.A. to Oakland. Keep in mind, they are in a post office truck -- a medium size one -- and I assume they are doing a mail delivery, which means they would be on the clock. Nevertheless, they end up stopping, as I mentioned, at a random family reunion, as well as some sort of African carnival in the middle of nowhere. They're seemingly somewhere in central or even west-central California before they end up taking the costal sce...

School Daze (1988) and Higher Learning (1995). Both are about life on an American college campus. Daze uses the HBCU setting, and Learning uses a traditional "state school" sort of campus.  The link between the two films is Laurence Fishburne. In Daze, he plays a student activist named Dap. This character wants the university to devest from South Africa. In Learning, he plays Professor Phipps, a seemingly humorless Political Science teacher who is eager to teach his students harsh life lessons.  Fishburne plays Phipps with an accent, but we never learn anything about this character. Where's he from? Where did he go to school? Why is he always on campus during crucial moments? The guy doesn't seem to have any sort of life or existence off campus. And although the two films are only seven years apart, Professor Phipps doesn't come across as especially young. (Fishburne would have be 34 during filming, which would be a little on the young side for a full professor. A...

I try to write a review immediately after watching a film, but for this one, I wanted to wait a few days. We got to the theater the second week of its release, and I had managed to stay ignorant of how everything in the movie would play out. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by who showed up in this film. I certainly wouldn't have predicted it.  Okay, so there's a 5-year window between this and the last movie, but Aunt May's (Marisa Tormei) gravestone listed 2024 as her year of death. That means Peter (Tom Holland) has been keeping the secret of his identity from MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) for less than 2 years -- which still feels like a crazy amount of time.  Going back to the last movie: Why does Peter not tell Zendaya who he is when he entered the coffeeshop? Is he trying to protect her, which is probably what he would say he's doing, or is he afraid that he will be rejected -- that she will tell him that the MJ he loved is not the MJ she is now? W...

If Far From Home missed a step, then No Way Home tried to overwhelm us with three franchises and a glimpse into the multiverse.  No, this movie isn't perfect. It would be easy to pick on this or that different plot point. But I'm not going to do that here. Topping all that is just how cool it was to see old friends from the earlier Spider-Mans. I wasn't expecting it, and I'm not sure if anything quite like that's ever been done before. Just imagine a bunch of James Bonds standing around together. Wouldn't that be cool? I noticed that a lot of reviewers in my friend group have watched this film multiple times. It always interests me to see that, because not every film gets that wide-ranging repeat viewing treatment. Star Wars, sure, but even the reviewers offering criticism on this one found some reason to keep re-watching it again and again.  This is one of those films that I don't remember watching when it was originally released in theaters. It's possi...

Far From Home is the follow-up to Homecoming (2017), and that's how I watched them on this re-watch. But a lot has happened between these two Spiderman movies that's "explained" in more detail in other Marvel movies. Not that you need to watch every Marvel movie released in order to understand what's going on, but "the blip" and the death of Tony Stark are pretty big deals that this film mentions but doesn't address in any detail.  I re-watched Homecoming and loved it from beginning to end. It was well-paced, focused, funny. Far from Home isn't horrible; it's still funny, but I wasn't as into the humor this time as I was for Homecoming.  I'm also not sure how I feel about the European setting, and the completely lack of any supporting superheroes for Spider-Man. When Peter Parker is living his normal life in New York, who has the responsibility to protect Europe? If the world was really facing an apocalyptical event, would it really b...

How many Marvel movies have they made now? Maybe 40? And this is the 3rd Spiderman franchise made this century... I'm not complaining, but I did take a little break from watching superhero movies. I still watch all of them, but it did become a little much to watch each as it came out in theaters.  On this re-watch, I found myself appreciating the humor. A good superhero movie usually benefits from the humor. To me, that's probably what makes Spider-Man: Homecoming a Top 5 Marvel movie. I mean, that's a big claim, but the movie hummed the entire time without one flat note.  Watching it this time with my daughter, I loved seeing her cringe at all the awkwardness of high school it depicted. That tells me that the script writers got it right.  Michael Keaton as Vulture: Keaton is one of my favorites, and he played his part here perfectly. Makes me want to go back and watch Birdman.  Out of all the dudes to recently play Spider-Man, Tom Holland might be the only one I don...

These humans. Maybe they are the weird ones. Maybe they are the zombies -- a term that's never actually used in the film. Instead of "zombies," the undead are called "ghouls." They are also called "mass murderers." We will eventually see them eating the flesh of human beings.  But the humans are not so noble, either. They bicker and argue. They complain. They stab each other in the back. And, they walk across the landscape, killing anything in their way without much thought. What's maybe the most interesting aspect of the film is the casting of Duane Jones (Ben). I don't know how 1960s audiences reacted to him, but he's the lead of the film, and he's black. The only other lead black actor of the period that I can think of is Sidney Portier, and Jones is not Portier. Which is not to say he's a horrible actor -- he's just not a known quantity. In a film featuring mainly horrible actors, he's actually not too shabby.  My guess ...