Michael Jai White is best known to the world of movie-going geeks as the title hero in 1997’s Spawn, and as the gangster overlord Gambol in The Dark Knight. However, after this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it’s going to be hard for him to dodge calls of “Black Dynamite!” in public. This homage to classic 1970s blaxploitation films surpasses movies like I’m Gonna Get You Sucka, and is definitely worth seeing.
White and director Scott Sanders sat down to discuss the Obama presidency, how James Brown inspired the movie, the future of action films, and what the future plans are for a Spawn sequel.
Fox Searchlight, the distributor that tends to get the most bang for its Sundance buck, has picked up worldwide rights to Max Mayer’s romantic film Adam with intent for a 2009 theatrical release. Other big deals of the past 24 hours include Sony Classics’ acquisition of North American rights to the blaxploitation tribute Black Dynamite and Magnolia’s pickup of worldwide rights to Lynn Shelton’s comedy Humpday, which will get a VOD release a month prior to its debut in theaters this summer.
Check out our Sundance Deals chart for the full scoop on these three deals and the rest of the acquisitions as of this morning.
Do you ever wish that an actor would drop their own persona and just adopt the life/career plan of one of their fictional characters? That’s were I am right now with Tracy Morgan, who is SO good––and SO underrated––on 30 Rock, but who spends his time off from the show making films like First Sunday. There’s a clip from that slice of modern blaxploitation floating around; I like the way FilmDrunk sums it up:
The clip gives us a hilarious taste of what black church is like. It’s great, because I’ve often said that the differences between how white people do things and how black people do things too often goes unaddressed in comedy.
I totally understand that Morgan has a mortgage to pay and base audience that he wants to play to, but it just seems like the caricature of himself that he plays on TV is doing both with a little bit more style.
On 30 Rock, Morgan plays Tracy Jordan, a huge movie star known for films like Samurai I Am Awry and Honky Grandma Be Trippin’, in which he employs all manner of costuming and prosthetics in order to play multiple parts. Last season, Tracy took a DNA test which revealed that he was a distant descendant of Thomas Jefferson, and became inspired to make a Jefferson biopic, in which he would, of course, play every part. He took the idea to the president of NBC/Universal (which, on 30 Rock, is a subsidiary of the Sheinhardt Wig Corporation), who thought Tracy should make a movie version of The Jeffersons instead. Tracy then made the above trailer, in hopes that a visual aid would change the suit’s mind. It didn’t, but it’s hilarious.
Brandon Harris sent me a note about his stylish short film, Happiness is No Fun, which purports to be “a short blaxploitation tinged remake of Godard’s seminal Breathless.” It’s not as jokey or spoofy as that logline might lead you to believe–which might lead to some initial disappointments. On the whole, I thought it’s refusal to go to the genre+genre=joke route was refreshing, if at times it gets a little didactic and speechy in its insertion of racial politics. Watch it above, and check out Brandon’s blog here.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Fox Searchlight, the distributor that tends to get the most bang for its Sundance buck, has picked up worldwide rights to Max Mayer’s romantic film Adam with intent for a 2009 theatrical release. Other big deals of the past 24 hours include Sony Classics’ acquisition of North American rights to the blaxploitation tribute Black Dynamite and Magnolia’s pickup of worldwide rights to Lynn Shelton’s comedy Humpday, which will get a VOD release a month prior to its debut in theaters this summer.
