Smokin’ Aces is a most rare thing: a good movie released in January. Crazy! A Universal Pictures-Working Title Films product written and directed by Joe Carnahan, who brought audiences Narc (2002), this movie kills, it’s a “gotta see, no doubt” with enough action, suspense and violence to satisfy the entertainment masochist in all of us.
The plot seriously moves. You sit down, nibble a kernel or two, and bam you’re in the middle of the movie. If you’re a fan of twisted crime dramas like Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, mafia flicks like Goodfellas or Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, one of my personal favorites, then you’re gonna love this movie.
The all-star cast is phenomenal, including Jeremy Piven (Entourage), Ray Liotta, Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Alicia Keys, Common, Taraji P. Henson (Hustle & Flow), and Ryan Reynolds (Van Wilder). The hitmen are the real stars, though, all of them, from redneck white supremacists, strapped-for-cash bounty hunters, hot vixens, and just overall psychopaths.
The storyline goes like this: Buddy “Aces” Israel (Piven), a Las Vegas performer turned certified thug, becomes an FBI informant and is placed in the witness protection program. Rival mob boss Primo Sparazza puts out a million-dollar contract for Israel’s head. A whole slew of crazy hitmen (and women) compete to be the first to get to Israel in his Lake-Tahoe casino hideout. Liotta and Reynolds, as FBI agents Donald Carruthers and Richard Messner, are on the case, trying to get to Israel before he gets whacked.
The only faults of the movie in my opinion are Common’s acting and the drawn-out but still-clever ending. Common, dear, I love you as a rapper, but please don’t ever act again.
Happy New Year from Pop and Politics!
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I feel blessed that I’m dropping the first blog of the new year (ok technically it’s not the first ever blog of the new year and it’s definitely not January 1 anymore, but something fresh nonetheless). I think 2007 is going to be a different year with many changes in store. Even the air smells different.
To reenergize you for the new year I want to start out with something positive. Common has a new music video out called “A Dream,†a single produced by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas for the new film Freedom Writers. Now to avoid this from becoming an advertisement for the movie, which I haven’t seen anyway, just check out the video above. It’s Martin Luther King’s legacy remixed for a new generation.Â
No Nas, Hip Hop ain’t dead yet.
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Hunter-gatherer bushmen who had been forced out of Botswana’s Kalahari Desert found their way onto the Web before winning back the right to return to their tribal lands.
Displaced to settlement camps over the last decade, allegedly so Botswana could preserve the land and its wildlife within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, many of the bushmen succumbed to starvation, AIDS/HIV, and alcoholism. Others banded together with activists, including the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, behind a civil rights case that went to court originally in 2002.
The bushmen also published a Website, iwant2gohome.org that hosted photos and pleas for the return of their land.
Many believe that the real reason the bushmen were forced out was corporate pressure from diamond mining giant De Beers. Several international celebs began publicizing the story of a 20,000-year-old hunter-gatherer tribe forced against their will to flee their land and assimilate. In September, the bushmen published an ad appealing to Leonardo DiCaprio to take a stand for their rights after he filmed Blood Diamond, depicting the murderous diamond trade of Sierra Leone. Later, the L.A. Times joined the De Beers-bashing.
Last week saw the launch of BoycottDeBeers.com, calling for a boycott of De Beers and their “conflict diamonds.”
For more on the Kalahari Bushmen and today’s court decision (which ruled that they can return to their land and that the government of Botswana is no longer required to provide sustenance): BBC News (w/ video and photos).
image from David!!!!!s flickr
On Nov. 30, O.J. Simpson will release a fictional account of how he would have killed Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. How’s he gonna explain that one to his kids? “Now boys, I didn’t kill your mom but if I woulda done it, here’s how I woulda sliced her up…”
I guess he had to put his quest to find the true killers on hold to write this 240-page book. I’m not saying that he did it, but this brings the murder mystery, the “trial of the century,” back to center stage and opens up the discussion again which stirred racial debate.
He must be desperate for cash because this is one sleazy way to make a buck. And according to this AP article, clever lawyering can keep his profits to himself, as he never coughed up the $33.5 mill judgement against him from the civil case, which he lost.
But then again, he did get a raw deal. He was found innocent in the murder case but found guilty of the civil case and was forced to pay the family of the guy who was sleeping with his ex-wife. Wouldn’t you be pissed? Still, this is pretty disturbing.
