Tag: Samuel L. Jackson

Samuel L. Jackson: Did I Stutter?

Posted on by victorfraga

Creating a meticulous portrait of prolific actor Samuel L. Jackson is no small feat, especially when you have less than a full hour to do so. Samuel L. Jackson: Did I Stutter is an overambitious project by a seasoned editor in the field of biography documentaries, Ben Sempey, who has previously delivered bios of eminent figures in the world of arts, sports, as well as painted the picture of prominent historical figures like the dictators Mussolini and Hitler. The narration, which is chiefly conveyed to the audience through snippets of interviews by Jackson himself and other artists whose career, in one way or another, intersected with that of Jackson’s during his more than 30 years working in the American film industry, is dense and this is a necessity as the runtime limitation (51 minutes) forbids any kind of extensive or thorough study on Jackson’s persona, personal history, and body of work.

Sempey chooses some hallmarks of his subject’s career, for example his initial transition from the theatre stage into the silver screen productions that began in the late 1980s, his first breakthrough roles in films directed by the onscreen poet of Black America, Spike Lee, the first roles besides mammoth actors like Al Pacino and more. The documentary ends with Jackson’s entrance into the box-office hit movies and his collaboration with George Lucas in the Star Wars franchise. Jackson is one of the few contemporary actors who can boast a catalogue of more than 150 films, and a more detailed account of his body of work would be expected by a documentary filmmaker who respects his subject and desires to provide the audience with information and minutiae never before aired on film or television.

The director focuses on Jackson’s collaboration with Quentin Tarantino in movies such as Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown (1997) in which the veteran American actor incarnated a badass character – remember what was written on Jules Winfield’s wallet. This contributed to a stereotyped image: the tough-as-nails guy who swear and kills a lot. Nobody knows how many times Jackson has uttered the word “motherfucker” in his films. It is a mistake to think of Jackson as a one-dimensional performer. The sheer volume of his movies indicates that he can be versatile and adaptable, sometimes portraying rigid men in uniform (mainly cops or government officials), or quirky, eccentric characters who are not entirely likeable.

There are some very brief mentions of Jackson’s private life that is marked by substance addiction as a young man. The years as a beginner in cinema that were spent mainly in New York were experienced in a haze fuelled by heroin, crack cocaine and alcohol. Jackson eventually went to rehab, much he abhorred the idea. Today, he has been clean for more than 15 years. There is little or no mention of the actor’s childhood, that was also tough for another set of reasons. The stuttering of the title refers to the problem that Jackson had as a child and which was “cured” by acting alone. When he was in character, he stopped stuttering, thus winning the battle with the irritating issue.

All in all, Samuel L. Jackson: Did I Stutter fails to fulfil its mission due to the runtime restrictions and the lack of a clear narrative focus. Sempey should have focused on a single aspect of Jackson’s life instead. For example, his personal struggles, and put everything else aside. Fans might feel a little let down, as there is hardly anything new about their man.

Samuel L. Jackson: Did I Stutter? is available on Prime Video.

Captain Marvel

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This immediately plunges the audience into confusion: you really don’t know where you are. The viewer is overwhelmed by a barrage of chaotic images the sense of which will only become clear during the course of the narrative. It’s also one of those movies which starts off in an alien, parallel or mythological universe only for that to give way to Earth about 10 minutes in to the proceedings.

So, a landscape littered with debris of wrecked craft. Characters in strange costumes bearing weapons. And star Brie Larson’s character Vers in the middle of it all, trying to comprehend as are we what’s going on as she takes part in a commando style raid to rescue a spy on an alien planet, is captured and subjected to a machine which probes the deep recesses of her brain in the form of her memories, escapes and crashes to Earth (i.e. the US) in the 1990s straight through the ceiling of a Blockbuster Video store.

Overall, the plot is punctuated by the requisite, thrilling intermittent fight scenes and augmented with state of the art special effects technology. It involves Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) regular Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. agents including Coulson (Clark Gregg) and Keller (Ben Mendelsohn), a hero warrior race called the Kree of whom Vers is a member, at least to start with, and their sworn shapeshifting, terrorist enemies the Skrull. The Kree are led by Yon-Rogg (Jude Law).

The film has been pitched at the public as the first MCU film to have a super-heroine rather than a hero as its central character. In the comics, there have been several different Captain Marvels of whom the Carol Danvers (Vers’ name on Earth) is one of the later ones. To make that work on the screen, you need an actress with some considerable presence. Ever since seeing Larson in Short Term 12 (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2013), where she plays a counsellor in a short stay home for difficult teenagers, I’ve thought she was extremely gifted and her work in Captain Marvel mostly confirms that.

“Mostly” because there are moments where Vers/Carol Danvers is fighting men (or at least male aliens) and giving as good as she gets somehow doesn’t quite work on the screen. I accept that the plot gives her a superpower derived from being in the path of an explosive blast involving an experimental aircraft drive, so she should be more powerful than everyone else around her, but there’s part of my brain that just won’t accept that. And it’s something about this particular film: I never had this problem with, for example, Scarlett Johansson playing Black Widow in the Avengers movies.

More convincing is the idea of Carol Danvers and her African American work colleague and friend Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) being female test pilots in a man’s world. Likewise, when the Kree take her to commune with their Supreme Intelligence, the AI which helps them make all their decisions, that entity appears to her in the form of someone she’ll readily accept – a grey-haired Annette Bening who later appears as a darker-haired mentor from way back in Carol’s life. This is very clever. The film plays on the notion that women are generally much better than men at networking. The little girls who play Maria’s 11-year-old daughter Monica (Akira Akbar) and the briefly seen young Carol at 13 (Mckenna Grace) and six (London Fuller) years of age also impress.

That said, we’ve only come so far – Fury is (obviously) male and both the groups of Kree and Skrulls represented here are led by males. The Kree at least have one more operative besides Larson’s Vers in the form of sharp shooting Minn-Erva (Gemma Chan) although the Skrull womenfolk and children are kept out of harm’s way while the men do all the fighting.

The shapeshifting Skrulls allow for them to appear as anyone at anytime – always a great plot device – here giving rise to a number of scenes where someone isn’t who the appear to be. It also gives rise to the film’s one serious misstep, when and old lady on a train is identified as a Skrull and battles violently with Brie Larson in the carriage. An enthralling surprise and a gripping action sequence indeed, but hardly appropriate as an image of older people who are generally more vulnerable than most.

Otherwise, while the action sequences are enjoyable and the plot strong enough to satisfy the MCU audience and profit margins, the film’s real pleasures are to be found elsewhere, in the relationships of the characters in the parts where the action slows or pauses enough to explore them. Doubtless this is not why most of the audience are there, but it makes for an altogether more convincing film.

For a while Captain Marvel even manages to pull off the trick of Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) whereby a good portion of the audience are wondering whether the friendly cat tagging along with sympathetic human characters is in fact an alien. And for true MCU geeks, there are not one but two little expository scenes at the end. Although Captain Marvel is a standalone film, these scenes link it to the upcoming Avengers: Endgame (2019).

Finally, curiously, no-one in the film ever refers to the central character as Captain Marvel. Although that’s clearly who Vers/Carol Danvers is.

Captain Marvel is out in the UK on Friday, March 8th. Watch the film trailers below:

Trailer 1:

Trailer 2:

Glass

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

There’s an arguably gratuitous sequence at the end of Split (M. Night Shyamalan, 2016) linking it to the seemingly unrelated Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000). Split is about Kevin Wendell Crumb a.k.a. the Horde (James McAvoy), a man with multiple personalities who abducts and kills teenage girls. Unbreakable is about David Dunn (Bruce Willis), sole survivor of a train crash, and obsessive comic books fan with brittle as glass bones Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) who engineered the crash to unearth a superhero. Dunn, it transpires, has superhuman strength and the ability to read people’s thoughts by bumping into them.

Glass makes considerably more sense if viewed as a third film of a trilogy. It relates to Split and Unbreakable in different ways. It starts off with split personality Crumb tormenting four kidnapped girls (from Split) while Dunn (from Unbreakable) goes out walking every day, hoping to bump into the kidnapper and save the girls. Well-meaning psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) catches the pair fighting and incarcerates them in a maximum security, psychiatric facility where Price, the self-styled Mr. Glass (again from Unbreakable), is also held.

The stage is now set for Mr. Glass to engineer a confrontation between superhero Dunn and supervillain Crumb. But for the fact that he’s constantly being administered medicine to keep his highly active and brilliant mind out of mischief.

SAMUEL L. JACKSON in Glass. M. Night Shyamalan brings together the narratives of two of his standout originals—2000’s Unbreakable, from Touchstone, and 2016’s Split, from Universal—in one explosive, all-new comic-book thriller.

Jackson is nothing less than superb at keeping you guessing: is this patient really sedated? Or is he playing some kind of trick and just faking it? Similarly, there’s a pleasure watching Willis reprise one of his classic roles from the period of the nineties and early two thousands when from Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) onwards, he seemed to be in every other Hollywood action movie on the screen.

McAvoy, although of a much younger generation, is by no means second fiddle to these two. As with Split, his performance, traversing many of Crumb’s 23 alternate personalities including the terrifying, wall-climbing Beast, is breathtaking. This time round, the Beast gets considerably more onscreen time than he did in Split.

Writer Shyamalan throws in lots of highly effective plot devices to keep the audience on the edge of its seat. It’s very much a ‘dangerous characters contained in a holding environment’ type of movie, with each of the three main protagonists restrained in different ways. Glass is sedated and locked up in a building with almost as many security cameras as you find in the average high street in Britain. Dunn’s room can be quickly flooded with water which robs him of his immense strength. And Crumb’s cell is equipped with flashbulbs triggered whenever one of his more violent and threatening comes out, instantly transforming it into another of his inner personalities.

As producer/director, Shyamalan brings back a host of characters (played by the same actors) from the two earlier films. While Anya Taylor-Joy again does an excellent job pretty much taking up where she left off in Split as the final girl who survived the monster, there’s an even greater pleasure in seeing not only Charlayne Woodard play Jackson/Mr.Glass’ mother 19 years after she played the role in Unbreakable, but also and arguably more significantly the 28-year-old Spencer Treat Clark revisit the role of Willis/David Dunn’s son Joshua which he last played as a nine-year-old, complete with flashbacks to Joshua and his dad made up from outtakes that were never used in Unbreakable.

When the nerdy Mr. Glass starts explaining the twists and terms of the plot in terms of comic book narrative and lore, you’d be forgiven for wondering if the world really needs another movie on the subject after the quantity of superhero movies from Marvel and D.C. in recent years. That said, this is more inventive than most superhero movies although you’ll like it more if you watch the two movies which spawned it beforehand. It works well enough as either a third instalment of a trilogy or a post-modern take on the superhero genre.

Glass is out in the UK on Friday, January 18th. Watch the film trailer below: