Category: 2000s

Based on the true story of the Jasmine Plummer, the first female to play in the Pop Warner Super Bowl, former local football star Ice Cube is asked to provide after school care for his niece Keke Palmer. With little in common, he introduces her to his favorite sport, only to be surprised to find she has a natural ability to throw the ball. It’s a simple, family-friendly film, but Cube and Palmer have a natural chemistry together and they both elevate their rather predictable individual roles to make it quite watchable. 

An homage to Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, the titular character is an ex-CIA agent and Vietnam vet who must avenge his brother’s death while also combating the drugs that are littering the streets. Meticulously made to look like a film of the era it is honoring, even filming in Super 16 format, it is obvious that the creators had done their homework and were fans of the original genre. Michael Jai White as Black Dynamite is as bad ass as any of the well known heroes and anti-heroes from those films. He’s incredibly committed to the performance and is well supported by a cast that is a revolving door of well-known actors. I really hope a sequel is on its way. 

After he catches his new wife Naomi Watts cheating on him with Liev Schreiber, bacteriologist Edward Norton forces her to accompany him to the Chinese interior during a cholera epidemic. Watts’s character is a flighty, spoiled, rich girl while Norton is reserved, stoic, and often uncaring but somehow neither of them are completely unlikable. Romances where the couple finds attraction for each other over time, particularly when they previous had none, are some of my favorites and even if it’s somewhat predictable, the leads make it work. It’s a beautifully filmed picture with some rather breathtaking Chinese scenery throughout. 

Burned-out NYPD cop Bruce Willis is assigned the thankless task of escorting Yasiin Bey to testify at a courthouse sixteen blocks away. Unfortunately there are some on the street who will do anything to prevent that from happening. It’s a mostly forgettable, clichéd film that feels a lot like it would belong in the Die Hard franchise if they had ever allowed John McClane to grow older and more jaded. I like checking out Bey’s acting roles and have never been disappointed by his work. The same holds true for David Morse who here is unsurprisingly one of Willis’s NYPD colleagues.    

Many times in Hollywood, two films come out at around the same time with a very similar theme. In 2000, that was the case with Red Planet and Mission to Mars. I know I had seen at least one of them in the theaters at the time, but even after watching this, I’m not sure if Red Planet was the one or not. In 2056, Earth is in crisis and scientists seeding Mars with algae in the hope of making it inhabitable. When the algae mysteriously begins producing less oxygen, a crew is sent to the planet to investigate. It has a pretty decent cast with Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Tom Sizemore, but other than being unmemorable, it also makes the egregious errors of relegating the one female crew member to stay ship-side and forcing her into an unnecessary romance. Apparently things haven’t improved much from 1959’s The Angry Red Planet . 

When detective writer Robert Downey Jr. is hospitalized with a crippling skin disease, he hallucinates musical numbers performed by the people he encounters mixed into the world of his novel and memories of his childhood. I watched, and kept watching, this because of its cast which also includes Alfre Woodard, Katie Holmes, and an almost unrecognizable Mel Gibson. The grotesque makeup used for the writer’s lesions made it difficult. The plot is strange and often challenging to follow, but the psychological aspects as the film progressed kept me interested.