In response to Karina’s post from yesterday about plot songs, I feel it is necessary and timely to pay tribute today to the best plot song writer since Huey Lewis: Will Smith. From the ’80s on, Smith has provided the world with songs serving as storytelling supplements to his TV show, his movies and even other people’s movies. At times he has even prematurely released songs that could later be applied to movies for which he failed to attach an official plot song. Uh huh.
To get us started, here’s one for Hancock. It’s a song released three years ago, but it’s much more relevant now:
The above video is the closest thing I can find to a video for the song, which applies to Smith’s latest movie in three ways. (1) The title is close to the former title of the movie, “Tonight He Comes.” (2) It samples the theme to the Spider-Man TV series, fitting it in with the superhero plot. (3) It works as a big defense against all of the naysayers thinking he’s finally struck out with Hancock.
Erin at Steady Diet of Film alerts us to the news (which we might have figured out for ourselves, except that we have a bad habit of being in bars at 11pm on weeknights––we swear, we’re working on cutting back on that) that Medicine for Melancholy star Wyatt Cenac is now a correspondent for The Daily Show. His first segment, in which he attempts to understand primary season through the rubrick of plot developments on Lost, is embedded above. We’ll give you a preview: “A polar bear on a tropical island? There are so many reasons why that’s AMAZING!”
Stacy Peralta’s was reproached for his lackadaisical sense of style by the gang member subjects of his doc Made in America. He tells Vulture: “These guys don’t step out the house unless they’re dressed really well. In fact, a couple of our subjects took me to task for how I looked. I’d be wearing a pair of Levis and a T-shirt, and they’d ask me, ‘Do you dress like that every day? You oughta think about how you dress more often.’”
The MPAA be damned, Ridley Scott might make an uncensored film based on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and the very prospect has filmdrunk oversharing. Concludes a post headlined “BONER ALERT”: “Like all really violent things, it makes me slightly sexually excited. That’s healthy, right?”
Stacy Peralta’s Made in America is an effective and selectively comprehensive, fascinating and frustrating examination of the history of gangs in South Los Angeles. The documentary does an excellent job of demonstrating how the mutation of social and economic conditions in black America from the Civil War to World War II created a climate that birthed and nurtured the gang wars between the Watts Riots and the Rodney King verdict, but it almost completely fails to consider what happened after South Central became associated with a pop culture myth, consumed by white rural and suburban kids via NWA records and John Singleton movies. For a film that makes a convincing and valuable case that gang warfare is, at its root, an economic problem, it’s baffling how little attention is paid to how the rise of the superstar gangster in pop culture has impacted the real people living this life.
Yesterday, I made a list of five films amongst Sundance’s four competition slates that I’m particularly excited to see. Today, here’s a look at another film films that I’m looking forward to, culled from the Spectrum, New Frontier, and Park City at Midnight sidebars. This list was MUCH harder to weed down to five, and as you’ll see, I had to cheat a bit. Here we go…
Excerpt From the Official Synopsis: “Humorous and poignant, Momma’s Man wrestles with universal themes, but its strength lies in its deeply personal details. Writer/director Azazel Jacobs cast his own parents and shot the film in their apartment, where he grew up.”
Why I’m Interested: Jacobs “own parents” are Flo Jacobs and experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs; in the film’s press notes, he says he cast his own family because he “couldn’t picture anyone else in their bed, in their kitchen, or in their place (although Peter Falk and Shelly Duval would be in my movie-movie version of it).” If the notion of the guy who made Star Spangled to Death channeling Columbo isn’t enough for you, I don’t know what would be.
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.
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