Boyz N The Hood (1991/Sony Blu-ray) + Be Cool
(2005/MGM Blu-ray) + Jumping The Broom
(2010/Sony Blu-ray)
Picture:
B/C+/C+ Sound: B-/C+/C+ Extras: B/D/C- Film: B/D/C-
The Black
New Wave that began in the late 1980s and thrived for a while in the early
1990s was sadly short-lived and the following three releases show us its rise
and fall.
John
Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood (1991)
was a big breakthrough film following Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It and Do
The Right Thing, remaining a landmark American Cinema drama and gaining
Singleton an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, outdoing Orson Welles
on Citizen Kane as the youngest
nominee ever. The portrait of life in
South Central Los Angeles was rich, deep, nuanced, honest and often dead on
about what was really going on.
It begins
with a pre-teen Tre testing his mother (Angela Bassett) one too many times and
deciding he should live in South Central with his father Furious (Laurence
Fishburne) as the parents separated a while ago. The move is permanent as he grows into being
a teenager (Cuba Gooding, Jr. when he still cared to act) and how his life goes
with his friends. It can be funny,
fascinating, sometimes brutal, but it is never an exploitation work and proved
Spike Lee was not a fluke, but that a healthy, honest African American
discourse was sadly lacking from feature films.
It still is and this powerful classic shows us why.
Extras
include BD Live interactive features, a new feature length audio commentary by
Singleton (not the one he did for Criterion years ago and not as good), Deleted
Scenes, two Music Videos, Friendly Fire:
Making Of An Urban Legend featurette and Audition Videos featuring Bassett,
Morris Chestnut, Tyra Ferrell and Ice Cube.
About 15
years later, you have Music Video director F. Gary Gray (a talented director of
Music Videos who is also African American) directing the very belated sequel to
the hit Get Shorty called Be Cool (2005), but it is a disaster
that it the total opposite of Boyz N The
Hood in every way possible, despite taking place in an area not far form
the other film. John Travolta returns to
playing Chili Palmer, but he is totally bored here, sleep walks through this
dud and is so many light years away from the best writing of Elmore Leonard
that this is the worst film ever made from one of his books and will likely
remain so.
It also
reunites Travolta’s with his Pulp
Fiction co-star Uma Thurman, but she cannot save this and this ties with The Avengers as her worst film. Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler shows up
for no good reason, Vince Vaughn is wasted, Andre Benjamin is wasted, Cedric
The Entertainer is bored, Harvey Keitel cannot save it and Dwayne ‘The Rock’
Johnson shows up as a stereotypical gay man so annoying and bad that if this
performance (if you can call it that) is a standout embarrassment.
Extras
include a trailer, Deleted Scenes, unfunny Gag Reel, several featurettes and
some (surprise?) Music Videos.
That
brings us to Salim Akil’s Jumping The
Broom (2010), which shows that the only positive discourse we see of
African American seems to be tied and even forcibly bundled with the Christian
religion, spearheaded by the massive success of Tyler Perry. This is an interesting imitator as far as
having Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine and Mike Epps here, involves a wedding
and is predictable all the way. That is
just too safe, which means African Americans can only have a positive film if
they are “safe”? That is bad and wrong,
as well as very tired, but that is what we get and it has problems all of its
own. It is also not quite honest,
putting the last nail in the tomb of the Black New Wave that should have
created permanent change for the better in Hollywood
filmmaking. I never bought this despite
the talent here.
Extras
include BD Live interactive features, movieIQ interactivity, Cast/Director
feature length audio commentary and two featurettes.
The 1080p
1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image on Hood
may have some grain and show its age at times, but it is the best transfer here,
looking the best the film, has since its original 35mm release. The 1080p 2.35 X 1 AVC @ 36 MBPS digital High
Definition image on Cool comes form
an older HD master and it looks more dated than it should. The 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image
on Broom is the newest shoot and the
only one here in HD, featuring problems with motion blur, detail, depth and
color range throughout.
All three
have DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mixes, but Hood sounds best despite being originally issued in Dolby advanced
analog SR (Spectral Recording) sound format.
Cool is a second generation
transfer and its digital 5.1 soundmaster is pushed towards its front channels
in a way it originally was not supposed to and Broom has lackluster location sound recording and mixing that makes
it sound weak.
- Nicholas Sheffo
