Cinema Basement

A review by Brooks Rich I was going to write this up for Friday but I'm not sure it's as forgotten as Fallen and Inside Man . But I want to write about this because this is one of my all time favorite films so I'll just do it as a normal review. I put this right up there with classic mob films like Goodfellas and The Godfather . It's as good as those. Yeah I said it. American Gangster is a masterpiece and some of the strongest performances from both Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. It is shocking to me this film was shafted at the Academy Awards. Only two nominations, best supporting actress for Ruby Dee, who is terrific in the film, and best art direction. Washington and Crowe were both snubbed as was director Ridley Scott and the film as a whole for best picture. One of the many reasons the Oscars is irrelevant. Films like this are ignored. I love No Country for Old Men , which won best picture that year, but American Gangster is the best film of 2007. Ame...

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman It's so serendipitous that I would be running ragged this week and be writing this up literally ON FRIDAY. Especially in a week with the Jussie Smollett news breaking. You see if for whatever reason you are reading this and live outside of the U.S, race relations here are not exactly in a good place. I find it strange that we are living in a time where no one wants to talk about it but it reminded me of what makes Inside Man a surprisingly important film. Heist films are normally face value films that talk about the filmmaking process or are a reflection of human desperation. Inside Man is a film about race relations and race revenge. But you wouldn’t know that at its onset. If you are unaware of Inside Man the film is about a bank robbery and the hostage negotiations that take place during the robbery. It never shows its full hand and if I were to give anymore of a description it would definitely ruin the film. A film that has more twists and ...

In my opinion Denzel Washington is one of the best working actors right now and honestly one of the greatest actors of all time. The man just owns the screen no matter what he is doing. Look at his stunning performance as Malcolm X or anyone of his performances with Tony Scott for proof of this. So doing Denzel for Forgotten Film Friday is tricky. There are very few forgotten Denzel films that are worth your time. I mean if you'd like to watch the movie where Denzel's ghost haunts a racist cop played by Bob Hoskins be my guest. His unseen early work sometimes leaves a lot to be desired. So we're going back to 1998 for the deeply underrated supernatural thriller Fallen . Denzel plays John Hobbs, a Philadelphia detective who is investigating copycat killings linked to a recently executed serial killer, Edgar Reese. Hobbs soon begins to suspect that it might be more than just a copycat killer. That's all I'm going to say. I don't want to spoil one plot point of t...

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman I started this Black History Month discussing how important Undercover Brother was for me. It helped me find myself in in a world where blackness often comes with deft cliches and stereotypes that as a society it asks us to wear as truth. As I got older my love for that film never stopped but it found it did not relate to my confusion at the world I was in now. But in 2008 a film stumbled into my life thanks to the Daily Show called Medicine for Melancholy and it saved my confused heart. The premise for Medicine for Melancholy is that two black twenty something hipsters have a one-night stand. They awake the next day and instead of never speaking to each other again they share a day where they discuss issues facing African Americans in an ever gentrifying San Francisco. The plot is loose and really works based on the charms of the leads. Wyatt Cenac of The Daily Show at the time is what got me to watch this film. His comedy was often reflective of my...

A review by Brooks Rich I don't have much to say about this one because I am worried I will have trouble coming up with coherent points. Velvet Buzzsaw is one of the worst films I've ever seen. I am stunned that a film can be this bad and attract such a large and impressive cast. I am beyond disappointed because I loved Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy and Jake Gyllenhall's other collaboration. That film is one of my favorites of the 2010s'. But this thing, that for some reason Netflix decided to release upon the world, is almost unwatchable. Nothing works here. I didn't like a single frame of this film. The characters are unlikeable, the story is ludicrous and never fully explains itself, and the violence is never brutal or absurd enough to be interesting. It's weird because it's too much on screen at one point and just kind of dull at others. It's ambitious and fails in it's ambition. I do admire ambition but not when nothing works. The plot, what litt...

A review by Brooks Rich February is a bit of a dump month for film. Save for romantic comedies and dramas doing well for Valentine's Day, it's not the strong month for the film business. I usually worry if a horror movie is released at this time because those should usually be saved for the fall where most horror films will do fairly well. I thought The Prodigy looked intriguing from it's trailers, if not familiar, but was worried about the early year release date. I was genuinely surprised when I saw this. I love this film. The Prodigy tells the story of Miles, an eight-year-old boy developing beyond his years but with major social problems. That's all I want to say without giving away spoilers. Let's just say it's more than just bad behavior on Miles part. The tagline of this movie is "What's Wrong with Miles?" This film does feel familiar. We've seen the evil child in movies countless times. The big one of course is The Omen but there...

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman Blaxploitation films are a strange pop culture artifact. In the 1970’s it was the only representation many African Americans had to look to and the only starring roles for upstarts. Without these films we would have never been graced with incredible music, the talents of Richard Roundtree and Pam Grier, or the stories of Superfly and Shaft but they are kind of silly in retrospect. Being B-Movies they were rife with cliches, bad writing, and shotty production. A few people keyed in on this as time passed but in 2002 what I would argue is the best film of faux blaxploitation came to be. That film is Undercover Brother! To talk about Undercover Brother is to talk the three things that make it so incredible, its cast it’s writers and its director. Movies where the stars all really aline and talent that would later be incredibly expensive is all cheap and available rarely happen in Hollywood. I put the sheer volume of talent in this film at the same level ...

A review by Chris Lee Alex Garland is an auteur. I mean that in the very basic definition of the word. The man has control of his films. They are his voice, his ideas, his images, his characters. Alex Garland is now also a proven and great auteur. After only two movies. That’s incredible. His first film as writer/director, Ex Machina, is a slow and plodding exercise in thought. Like all sci-fi filmmakers, he started with the basics. What does it mean to be human? What is the soul? What about our creations, our desire to fashion false imagery, is directly reflective of us? Is it what is good in us? What is bad? A mixture of both? Some may have found Ex Machina boring, as it uses a singular, claustrophobic location for the entirety of its runtime. Its actors speak less, and when they do, they are asking questions that they either will, or will not get a philosophical answer to. I considered it a fine work, but nothing that measured up to the fantastical brilliance of his scree...

A review by Brooks Rich In 2017, I had a two way tie for my favorite film of the year with Blade Runner 2049 and John Wick 2. I usually don't have ties when I do my top ten best films of a yea,r but I couldn't help it. Both films are perfect for what they are in my opinion. This year I have a clear winner. A film that just completely blew me away when I saw it. That film is Alfonzo Cuaron's Roma.  I'll be honest…this is not a film for everyone. I'm not saying that to sound snobbish or pretentious. But some people are going to find a black and white, two hour and fifteen minute film about a family and their nanny living in 1969 Mexico City a little slow paced and boring. I get that. But this is a film that has just completely grabbed hold of me. I haven't stopped thinking about it since seeing back near the end of 2018 and I have seen it a handful of times more. It never gets old for me. It did take about two viewings for me to fully appreciate it, but now...

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman I don’t wanna get racial in this piece but it’s hard not to when discussing what may be the best film in the MCU. Black Panther stands among films that have been dumb fun for my nerd brain for 10 years. They have taken me from a wide-eyed idiot to a man who is going to be married soon. Black Panther feels like the first film that had something really important to say. I know it’s hard to imagine how powerful it is with was with all of the memes and people showing up in full African regalia but it maybe the first time in many young African and African-Americans lives where they were shown on screen as more than just a church goer, a uneducated fixer-upper, or a token friend but as kings and leaders, as men and women of fault and as people beyond what skin tone has said we could be.  That’s a weight for a movie about a dude in a catsuit but director Ryan Coogler spoke from a place of truth. Yes, the action is great. Yes, the jokes are solid. Mo...

A review by Brooks Rich Let's go all the way back to 1972. Film is in a weird place. The '70s always struggled to have it's own identity in film and is a very transitional decade for film. The fifties and sixties faded out to make way for the seventies, which would throw some curveballs into the industry before the insanity of the '80s and the path to modern film as we know it. There are some major game changers in the decade, like Jaws, Rocky , and Star Wars . Jaws and Star Wars created the summer blockbuster. Genres like the western and science fiction became more thoughtful and a lot darker. Film got grittier. Crime films went onto the streets, showing the dirty lives of the less reputable. Blaxploitation was at its peak in the '70s, with films like Superfly , Shaft , Foxy Brown , and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song . But one that still stands out to me is 1972's Across 110th Street , starring Yaphet Kotto and Anthony Quinn. Kotto and Quinn p...

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman The first one of these I wrote I was open and candid about my depression. I didn’t intend to get that real but going back to a movie you didn’t even think about for a while always has some reasoning. Never Die Alone is a movie I have never forgotten. In my teen years films about the darkness of the human condition really spoke to me. I am something of a cynic who stares off into the great void wondering when the great hammer of death is going to drop but in recent years I have started to embrace love, joy and happiness as parts of life I need to open myself up to but Never Die Alone has stayed with me.  Never Die Alone is a hateful and angry movie about narcissism, self loathing and self destruction. It is a movie about the black experience that never paints crime as something sexy or wonderful. It paints it as a lonely life where all you cause his human suffering with every action you take when all you care about is money and power.  D...