#jeffPollack

[adamwatchesmovies]

Booty Call (1997)

There are some dumb, and I mean REALLY dumb jokes in Booty Call but I can't hold them against the film. The results are funny. Sometimes, that's all that matters.

Starring a (nearly) all-black cast, this comedy is about two buddies trying to get laid. Rushon (Tommy Davidson) has been dating Nikki (Tamala Jones) for seven weeks and still hasn’t gotten “any”. His best friend, an anti-commitment, opinionated skirt-chaser, Bunz (Jamie Foxx), accompanies Rushon and Nikki on a dinner one night as the blind date to Nikki’s friend Lysterine (Vivica A. Fox). The sparks fly, but before the boys can get what they’ve been after all night, they have to find all the necessary supplies to practice safe sex.

When the jokes in this movie are bad, you can’t believe how bad they get. I��m talking about a scene where someone confuses a dog licking them for a human's attempt at seduction. Not only that but they get really excited and aroused by the tongue-work, to the point where it gets more than a little embarrassing. I'll repeat that despite these, I laughed often.

The simplicity of this story is what saves it. Two friends. What do they want? Sex. What’s stopping them? EVERYTHING! The couples don’t get along, then they do... but the ladies aren't in the mood. Then the ladies are in the mood, but no one brought protection. Then the protection isn’t good enough and the guys have to go out and it just keeps going from there. The chain of events isn't unlike the one in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.

My favorite joke has to be a revelation between Lysterine and Rushon when they first spend an intimate moment together. She tells him what one of her biggest turn-ons are and it's a riot. It’s so outlandish and so un-sexy that I’m still laughing about how it plays out right now. Big laughs like that one make me defend the movie even though I recognize its flaws. It promotes safe sex. That's worth something too, right?

The cast members play off each other well. Everyone involved is evidently having a good time by going all the way with their material no matter how it might've seemed on paper. I don’t care who makes fun of me for it; I'm recommending the film. On the DVD cover, a quote from Leo Quinonesm of KIIS-FM perfectly summarizes Booty Call; it’s “Crazy! Sexy! Foolish!” I couldn’t have said it better myself. (Widescreen version on DVD, January 21, 2015)

[doomonfilm]

Favorites : Above the Rim (1994)

In the mid-1990s, there was an interesting era where the NBA was reaching heights of popularity it had yet to experience, and by extension, the entire basketball culture was booming, including streetball.  The first And1 Mixtape wouldn’t drop for several more years, but a slew of basketball movies hit the theaters right around that time, and of all films that dropped, the undisputed cult classic right out the gate was Above the Rim.  Although I’ve seen this movie easily twenty or thirty times, it’d been long enough that I got excited when I found it on HBOMax, so I had to jump in on a viewing purely on the strength of nostalgia.

High school basketball phenom Kyle Lee Watson (Duane Martin) has hopes of moving on to Georgetown to continue his career, but a bad attitude and a lack of patience threaten his chances.  The waters become murkier when childhood friend Bugaloo (Marlon Wayans) returns home from prison with a major opportunity : a spot on a team in the ShootOut tournament coached by local knucklehead and hustler Birdie (Tupac Shakur).  Kyle quickly finds himself fascinated by the fast life, but the presence of Birdie’s older brother (and former high school basketball star) Thomas “Shep” Sheppard (Leon Robinson) keeps Kyle tethered, even if only loosely.  The fragile trust between Shep and Kyle is fractured when Shep and Mailika Watson (Tonya Pinkins), Kyle’s mother, become romantically involved.  At the behest of Mailika, Shep and Coach Mike Rollins (David Bailey), Kyle’s coach, Kyle dives headlong into Birdie’s world, spending his spare time with Birdie, Motaw (Wood Harris) and Bugaloo, which quickly leads him down a regretfully dangerous path towards destruction.

Above the Rim does an amazing job of providing serviceable amounts of basketball and hood film without committing itself too far in either aspect.  The basketball scenes are kinetic on both the high school court and the blacktop, but are not so didactic that they become slaves to continuity.  By contrast, we are given more of a general set of highlights, with choreography given to specific sequences in order to correlate the court drama with the personal drama, but anyone with a critical eye can easily pick out repeat sequences or footage… in my mind, it seems that director Jeff Pollack was looking to capture a certain feeling more so than provide authentic basketball.  As far as the hood aspects go, there is certainly a sense of danger and despair that can be felt, but the film doesn’t exploit or dwell on those moments.  Most of the violence is either suggested or off-screen, and while we do see a number of weapons brandished, when they’re used they do not result in cinematic blood and gore.

Maybe I was too young and lacked life experience back in the day, but it wasn’t until this viewing that Shep’s post-traumatic stress disorder became recognizable to me.  To see your life transition from stardom to incarceration before you graduate high school would be an incredibly jarring life transition, and to have it be centered around the accidental death of your best friend (that you get blamed for) would be devastating.  While the relationship between Shep and Kyle is a mentorship of sorts, Shep’s true motivation for pushing Kyle is to absolve himself of the torture he puts himself through by replaying his game with Nutso on a nightly basis.  It’s funny how it works like that in film… as a young, basketball playing teenager with enough skill to back up my talk, it was Kyle’s journey through high school and the ShootOut tournament that held my attention.  As a forty year old man with a lifetime’s worth of loss behind me, however, I saw Shep’s story in an entirely new light that captivated me.

As mentioned previously, the basketball captured on-screen has enough style points to cover for the lack of continuity or authenticity, and even a casual basketball fan or layman will have no trouble understanding what is going on at any given moment.  New York is always a strong setting for a film, and seeing that a portion of the film deals with the street basketball culture, it makes the locale a proper choice.  Time has put the soundtrack choices under an interesting lens, with the proliferation of Dogg Pound songs still banging like the classics they are, despite feeling odd via their placement in a New York-based film.  Pollack keeps the story purposefully simple in order to keep the narrative momentum moving at a rate similar to the kinetic nature of the basketball scenes.  The casting was high quality, especially on the antagonist side.  

Duane Martin had a handful of television appearances under his belt, as well as an extremely memorable role in White Men Can’t Jump, but Above the Rim marked his first casting as a leading man, and he channeled every bit of youthful, wide-eyed naivety that he could to embody the fish lost in deep waters that was Kyle Watson.  Marlon Wayans kept his comedic touches, but took the first steps into the dramatic world that would later be captured in all their glory for Requiem for a Dream.  Tupac Shakur was already a household name, but his role as Birdie showed that his real life thug persona could be channeled and focused into a truly menacing character, similar to his appearance in Juice as Bishop.  Leon Robinson pulls out all of his leading man cards by being the strong, silent type with a deeply haunting past.  Wood Harris made the biggest blip on my radar with his loose cannon machismo, which he would later refine for his iconic role as Avon Barksdale.  Bernie Mac makes a couple of brief but memorable cameo appearances, serving as the emotional gut punch that drives home Birdie’s evil.  David Bailey and Tonya Pinkins step up with strong supporting roles, and appearances by Shawn Michael Howard, Henry Simmons, Michael Rispoli, James Williams and cameos by Bill Raftery and John Thompson fill things out.

It used to crack me up how much TNT would show this film after whatever slate of NBA games happened on any given night, but perhaps that is a testament to the strength that Above the Rim possesses.  Even the best masterpieces only have a certain level of return value to them, but I found myself just as captivated by my 2021 revisit to the film as I did nearly 30 years ago when it first appeared.