Sunday, March 7, 2010

Mo’Nique Wins The Oscar!!!




Mo'Nique started her speech saying, "First, I would like to thank the Academy for showing it can be about the performance and not the politics."

She cited Hattie McDaniel, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey, among others, and ended by saying, thank you "to my amazing husband Sidney for showing sometimes you have to forego what's popular in order to do what's right. And baby, you were so right. God bless us all."

As she walked off stage, reports USA TODAY's Anthony Breznican, she grabbed hold of stage manager of Valdez Flagg and said softly, "Can you just hold me?" And the two hugged in silence for a long time.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

HOLLYWOOD MEETS" THE HOOD ON THE DANGEREOUS STREETS OF BROWNSVILLE,BROOKLYN.

The police warning was as straight-forward as they come. If director Antoine Fuqua and the crew of “Brooklyn’s Finest” insisted on filming in Brownsville, Brooklyn, they would be on their own. The neighborhood, just east of Crown Heights, is among the city’s most crime-ridden: gang members reportedly control the streets, prostitutes work the corners, drug dealers infest the housing projects.

The neighborhood is so violent that a few years ago, the military created a training program at the local hospital because its emergency room most closely resembled that of a war zone. About half of the patients had either been stabbed or shot.

Don Cheadle (left) plays an undercover cop, while Richard Gere is an officer who’s about to retire in “Brooklyn’s Finest,” directed by Antoine Fuqua.
Don Cheadle (left) plays an undercover cop, while Richard Gere is an officer who’s about to retire in “Brooklyn’s Finest,” directed by Antoine Fuqua.

But Fuqua, who also made the Oscar-winning “Training Day,” wanted an authenticity for his police drama that could only be found in the Van Dyke projects, the run-down collection of public housing units that spawned Mike Tyson and members of the Wu-Tang Clan. So in the summer of 2008, Hollywood came to Brownsville — for what was among the first, and quite possibly one of the last, times.

“Putting actors in real environments surrounded by real people is what gets me excited,” Fuqua says. “Shooting in the buildings of the projects, not in Canada somewhere where someone says, ‘That’s not New York.’ I get passionate about being in it.”

“Brooklyn’s Finest,” opening Friday, spins out three parallel storylines that collide bloodily in the third act. Don Cheadle is an undercover cop who’s dug himself into a drug-dealing network run by Wesley Snipes. Ethan Hawke is a young narcotics detective desperate to beg, borrow or steal enough money to buy a new house for his expanding family. And Richard Gere is a weary beat cop one week from retirement who’s forced to train eager rookies.

“I know there was all this talk that Brownsville was going to be dangerous, but yeah, that’s kind of anywhere,” Cheadle says. “You just have to know where you are and treat people with respect.”

To ensure fewer problems, the production hired local gang members and the Nation of Islam for security. Money was also spread around to certain factions in the neighborhood.

“Money makes everyone feel better,” says Fuqua, who was raised in a Pittsburgh housing project. “Guys are struggling, they’re hungry, so you give them some money.”

The moves worked. Fuqua says he and the cast never felt in danger. Word is, rival gangs even called a truce for the duration of the shoot. About the worst thing that happened was someone stole one of the production’s massive air conditioners.

“Everyone was real respectful,” Fuqua says. “Anyone who came around and was possibly dangerous, they saw the Nation of Islam cats there, so they behaved a certain way. And the gang members were standing next to the Nation of Islam working, so [troublemakers] knew not to do anything stupid.”

Not only did the rougher factions of Brownsville rarely cause problems, they proved to be an asset to the filmmakers. One scene in the film, which details a drug dealer’s apartment-based operation, was the result of a tour Fuqua got from a real hustler.

The cast also received guidance.

“I had people coming up to me and saying, ‘What you’re playing? I’m that real cat,” Cheadle says. “I’m like, ‘Oh, good. Can we sit down? I’ve got this scene coming up.’” The actor consulted the man on everything from slang to whether his wristwatch was right.

During another scene in which a drug dealer is shot in a drive-by, the extras (made up mostly of neighborhood residents) were ordered to duck and scatter when the guns went off.

“This guy comes up to me and says, ‘That ain’t how it would go down,’” Cheadle says. “I said, ‘What would happen?’ He said, ‘If there’s a dude who drives by our neighborhood and shoots at us, there’s no running or ducking. I’d get my burner out, and we’d go post up.’ So I said, ‘That’s what we should do.’”

In the reworked scene, onlookers pull out guns and chase the car.

Some of the movie’s authenticity can also be credited to its writer, Michael C. Martin, a former East New York resident who sold the screenplay while working as a subway signalman.

The sale ran him afoul of his MTA bosses, who tried to have him fired for what they claimed was a second job. Martin quit about a month after pre-production began. During his MTA disciplinary hearing, however, it became clear just how powerful the allure of show business was.

“One supervisor was being all serious, following protocol. The other was going on about, ‘Did I meet Ellen Barkin? How tall is Richard Gere?’” he says.

Martin wrote the first draft over three months while recovering from injuries he got from a car accident. The impetus came from his then-roommate, a police academy student.

“He saw a woman selling porn to underage kids and made a citizen’s arrest. He thought it was the right thing to do,” Martin says. “But he got chewed out [by his superiors] and told he should mind his own business. It broke his spirit in a way.

“Every police officer thinks they’ll put a badge and uniform on and change the city. Then they face this harsh reality,” he says. “I wondered if I could make a cop movie that didn’t have that typical cop-movie thing. It was more about the cost of being a police officer.”

And as the gritty “Brooklyn’s Finest” demonstrates, the cost is high.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Brooklyn's Finest Movie Review

Not likely to go over too well with New York City Mayor Bloomberg and his tourism bureau, is the tabloid cinema crooked cop thriller and ghetto housing project horror spree looking worse than an Afghan war zone on a bad day, Brookyln's Finest. A kind of followup to the biased class trumping race lurid lowlife abyss in which Precious self-loathingly wallowed, this reverse Stockholm Syndrome crime caper intimates police corruption as basic byproduct of the bad company they keep during working hours. In other word, blame it on the inner city.

Directed with a heavy hand, as in sledgehammer, by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) and penned by transit worker turned screenwriter Michael C. Martin, Brooklyn's Finest follows three cops from the crime ridden 65th Precinct on their daily rounds, during one fateful, explosive week about to go down at a local public housing project. Narcotics detective and tattooed bad dad Sal Procida (Ethan Hawke) has just hit the confession booth after one in a series of secret executions of neighborhood drug dealers. Less into booking perps than blowing their faces off and stealing their cash, Procida tends to rationalize his behavior because he can't afford to support his seven children and a wife pregnant yet again with twins, on a cop's salary. Not clear if he stops off at the church to blame God for not helping him make ends meet, or protest the lack of divine contraceptive intervention.

Brooklyns Finest Movie

And on another side of town, jaded veteran bachelor cop Eddie Dugan (Richard Gere), about to retire in a week, can't decide whether to blow his brains out or blow some cash on a visit to a sex den and his favorite pretend girlfriend hooker. And in a too much information graphic sex scene that may have Gere's phone ringing off the hook with porn industry audition offers, he nudges his compliant sex slave for hire who draws the line at cuddling, with detailed instructions on how to satisfy his demanding libido, that are more akin to a driving school instructor announcing directions. At the same time, Dugan switches it up to itinerant knight in shining armor, on the hunt for a missing young girl possibly being held in bondage as a genuine sex slave.

Then there's Clarence 'Tango' Butler (Don Cheadle), an undercover cop who's been role playing with the street gangs in and out of prison for so long, that he's succumbing to a major identity crisis. Deeply into guy bonding with major player druglord Caz (Wesley Snipes), Butler is too conflicted to entrap Caz for good even though offered a big promotion in return, when not pressured to man up and do so by his nagging dragon lady supervisor, played as a snarling venomous viper by Ellen Barkin.

Fuqua presents a Brooklyn's Foulest portrait of ghetto life where there's plenty of sympathy to go around for bad behavior by the police, but not a single mitigating factor motivating the despised inner city underclass. So what we're left with basically, is Brooklyn as a generic macho cesspool, and where the women tend to range from brainless bimbos and breeders to brainiac bitchy bosses with advanced degrees.

Brooklyn's Finest: The borough as a hotbed of sluts, shooters, slaughter and sleaze, not necessarily in that order.

Overture Films
Rated R
1 star