Movie Review Roll Bounce

Roll Bounce (2005) 

Directed by Malcolm D. Lee 

Written by Norman Vance Jr. 

Starring Bow Wow, Chi McBride, Mike Epps, Meagan Good, Nick Cannon

Release Date September 23rd, 2005

Published September 23rd, 2005

In preparing my review of the new roller-disco flick Roll Bounce I came across an article in the New York Post about roller skating movies of the past and it mentioned a true forgotten classic, Skatetown U.S.A. This 70's gem starred Scott Baio, Patrick Swayze, Ron Palillo (Horshack from "Welcome Back Kotter") and former Brady Bunch star Maureen McCormick. The film is about rival roller disco gangs competing in a skating tournament set to disco rhythms. I thought I only dreamed of this movie.

Maybe someday someone will look back on Roll Bounce and be as nostalgic, or sarcastic take your pick, as I am for Skatetown U.S.A but without the perspective of time, Roll Bounce is a relatively relatively unmemorable 70's throwback that needed more of a sense of humor about its subject as opposed to trying to ring actual tension out of a movie about roller skating.

Rapper Bow Wow stars in Roll Bounce as Xavier or X to his crew of rolling skating friends including Junior (Brandon T. Jackson), Boo (Marcus T. Paulk), Naps (Rick Gonzalez) and Mixed Mike (Khleo Thomas). Together the boys spend every summer at the roller rink where they perform choreographed routines for fun. The fun stops, however, when the local rink is closed down and the boys are forced to go to the upscale rink on the other side of town where skating is a competition not a pastime.

The boys are harassed by the locals as they attempt their routines and get shown up pretty fierce in their first visit. However, you just know that when the time comes, as in the 500 hundred dollar cash prize skating competition, the guys will be more than ready.

Parallel to the skating story is the story of X's home life where he and his sister and his father (Chi McBride) are coping with the loss of their mother. Not only that but dad has also just lost his high paying gig as an airplane designer and has not told his son. The family drama is a tad bit cheesy in a movie as gregarious and loose as Roll Bounce and the father son tension only serves to weigh the film down when it should roll with the skating.

Roller skating is a goofy subject for a movie and the last thing any movie should try and do is take it seriously. Yet that is what director Malcolm D. Lee and writer Norman Vance Jr. try to do. They try to make you care about the outcome of this superfluous, overblown and rather ridiculous competition. Don't get me wrong, the action on skates is impressive but it's also quite goofy.

Juxtapose the roller disco of Roll Bounce with the disco of Saturday Night Fever and they may look similar in their weightlessness. However, where Fever earned its melodramatic side by delivering a complex and fascinating lead character, Roll Bounce never establishes X as either fascinating or complex. X is a nice, kind of goofy kid who's a great dancer on skates. The detail of X attempting to cope with his mother's death seems tacked on to give him a dramatic weight and works only to take us away from the more genial and fun story of the roller disco.

Malcolm Lee is a terrific director as he showed in the friendly comedy The Best Man and the awesomely funny 70's send up Undercover Brother. One is left to wonder where that sense of humor is in Roll Bounce. There are occasional funny moments but the film goes for very long stretches without laughs. Lee and writer Norman Vance too often get bogged down in trying to create a family drama and trying to make you care about roller skating that they forget that their real subjects are fun and nostalgia.

Both Lee and Vance could use a refresher in how to write female characters. None of the women in Roll Bounce are anything more than minor characters. Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Goode and "The Bernie Mac Show"'s Kellita Smith each play a different variation of a love interest for the main characters and they are defined by being the love interest and nothing more. None of the women take part in the skating and are left in another typically female role as a cheerleader.

When Roll Bounce is in its retro groove with its killer soundtrack of seventies classics, Bee Gees, Chic, Kool and The Gang and such, it's an enjoyable little throwback. However, when Malcolm Lee attempts to shoehorn in the family drama the movie becomes bogged down and the good time vibe comes to a complete halt.

Roll Bounce does manage to find entertaining moments that showcase these young actors' talent for having a good time. The skating is pure kitsch and when the actors are allowed to take part in that kitsch spirit the film comes alive. That spirit is captured by Nick Cannon's cameo as a seventies style ladies man and Wesley Johnson as the skating rink superstar called Sweetness who enters the rink with his own 70's style theme music and two female valets on his arms like some roller skating pimp.

The retro good time vibe is there in spirit in Roll Bounce but it is too often undermined by forced melodramatics. Still if you were a fan of great disco, roller skating, or high camp you may find something to really enjoy in this inoffensive retro retread.

Me? I'm going on Ebay to find a copy of Skatetown, USA.

Movie Review Love Don't Cost a Thing

Love Don't Cost A Thing (2003) 

Directed by Troy Beyer 

Written by Troy Beyer 

Starring Nick Cannon, Christina Milian, Steve Harvey, Kenan Thompson, Kal Penn

Release Date December 12th, 2003 

Published December 12th, 2003  

Of all of the movies that I thought deserved another take, the dopey Patrick Dempsey teen comedy Can’t Buy Me Love never occurred to me. Despite being an iconic 80’s film for many, to me its a slight comedy about a nerd who buys his way into high school popularity had overtones of outright prostitution. I would have preferred to welcome its fall into 80’s obscurity. The ever unoriginal Hollywood swill factory however disagreed with my assessment and thus we have Love Don’t Cost A Thing, a cynical “urban” (read black) take on the story.

Nick Cannon, star of last year’s drumming drama Drumline, stars as Alvin Johnson. Alvin is a high school nerd who spends his time with his nerdy friends rebuilding cars and dreaming of what it would be like to have access to the popular kid’s hallway of their high school. Yes, the high school has a hallway where the rich, popular bullies and their hot girlfriends are separated from the rabble, indicating that even the high school teachers are in on this anti-nerd conspiracy.

Alvin’s dream girl is a popular cheerleader named Paris Morgan (Christina Milian) whose current boyfriend is an NBA star who jumped directly from high school to the NBA. Paris has no occasion to ever speak to Alvin until one night when she borrows her mother’s car and crashes it while arguing on the phone with her boyfriend. While getting the car looked at Paris finds that her mother will find out about the accident unless the car is fixed immediately. Enter Alvin with his car expertise and just enough of his own money to pay for the parts. In exchange for fixing the car, Paris will be Alvin’s girl and in the process help him become popular.

What a shock it is then when the plan succeeds and popularity goes to young Alvin’s head. Alvin drops his nerdy friends, begins wearing trendy clothes and a new hairstyle and before long, Alvin surpasses Paris in his high school stature. Do you think he has a comeuppance in his future? For his part, Nick Cannon affects a nerdy black kid better than I expected. That said, the part as written has him changing rather unconvincingly from Urkel to Puff Daddy and only the Urkel part works. Cannon is a charisma-challenged actor who has yet to show a spark of the stardom that has seemed thrust upon him in the past year since the debut of his Nickelodeon kids show in 2002.

Pop starlet Christina Milian equates herself better than expected, though expectations place her just ahead of Britney Spears on the pop-tart-turned-actress-chart well behind the far more accomplished Mandy Moore. The part as written by director Troy Miller affects depth by having Paris write bad poetry and play the guitar. She also bemoans popularity as a job rather than a mere social status, an interesting idea that goes nowhere.

Director Troy Beyer adapted the screenplay of Can’t Buy Me Love, written by Michael Swerdlick. The word adaptation is used loosely. She essentially just traces within the lines of the original film, changing only minor plot points and the ethnicity of the characters.

Therein lies the most insidious problem of the film. The retrofitting of this unoriginal idea for African American audiences is a sad cynical attempt to capitalize on the paucity of films with African-American lead characters. Because there are so few films with black, lead characters, African-American audiences are prone to support any film that features a black face. This has caused Hollywood’s cynical mass marketing machine to continue to limit opportunities for African-Americans in order to maintain them as a niche market. Assuming they are willing to accept cheap, easy to market trash like Love Don’t Cost A Thing at the expense of more challenging, artistic films with African-American lead casts.

Such cynicism is nothing new from Hollywood but when it deals with race, it becomes far more serious. A film as slight as Love Don’t Cost A Thing doesn’t have any kind of social agenda in its creation. Rather, it has one thrust upon it because there are so few films with predominantly African American casts and even fewer good ones. That is not due to a lack of talented African-American filmmakers but rather due to cheap knock offs and shortsighted money grubbing of the kind that creates movies like Love Don't Cost A Thing. 

Movie Review: Drumline

Drumline (2002) 

Directed by Charles Stone III 

Written by Tina Gordon Chism

Starring Nick Cannon, Zoe Saldana, Orlando Jones, Jason Weaver

Release Date December 13th, 2002 

Published December 10th, 2002

Every year Grambling University plays a football game against Southern University. The game is notable because it is played in the Louisiana Superdome and airs nationwide on Black Entertainment Television. And even when Grambling was coached by the legendary Eddie Robinson, the winningest coach of a black college team in history, the huge crowds did not come for the football; they came to see the halftime show. The showdown between these two amazing talented bands is worth the price of admission--even if you're not a football fan.

At many traditionally black colleges, the halftime show, where the bands take the field for precisely choreographed musical mayhem that mixes traditional marching band music with modern hip hop and dance, is as highly anticipated as the game itself is. Yet, the movie Drumline--made as a tribute to this unique phenomenon--fails to capture the obvious spirit and emotion that drives it.

Nick Cannon, star of his own Nickelodeon TV variety show, stars in Drumlineas Devon, a cocky freshman drummer who is joining the legendary marching band at fictional Atlanta A&T; University. From the moment Devon steps on campus, his attitude starts rubbing people the wrong way--especially the upperclassman who is the leader of the bands famed drumline, Sean (played by Leonard Roberts.) Soon, the two headstrong drummers are at each other's throats and their pettiness does not go unnoticed by the schools bandleader, Dr. James Lee (former Seven-Up spokesperson, Orlando Jones.)

Soon, Devon's attitude and battle with Sean leads him to be kicked off the team. All the while, Devon has a budding relationship with a dancer named Laila (Zoe Saldana). That relationship is also affected by Devon's problems in the marching band.

It's not long before Devon is reformed and begins to work his way back into the band in time for the battle of the bands. In true sports movie fashion, Drumline comes down to a one-on-one showdown between A&T; and their crosstown rivals, Morris Brown University. (In reality, Morris Brown is a real college with one of the most sensational marching bands in the country.)

The marching band competition is staged well, despite its fictional origins. Watching the amazing choreography and skill of the bands is a treat, but the film as a whole is a pale imitation of the sports movie cliches many critics claim it defies. The fact is that this is another Rocky-esque movie where people overcome great odds to succeed on a big stage. Drumline is like a sports movie without the sports.

The film's biggest problems are its lead performances by Cannon and Jones. Cannon isn't a bad actor but his character is so intensely obnoxious and unlikable, I can't imagine wanting to watch a film about him. As for Jones, something has always bothered me about him as an actor and Drumline exposes that something. There is something in Jones' voice, an affectation that makes every word out of his mouth seem insincere. In Drumline, he is called on to deliver some very straight, very earnest dialogue, but that vocal affectation of his makes him impossible to take seriously.

Drumline is a well-crafted film and a marginally entertaining one when the action is focused on the bands performing. However, everything that happens around performances is all dull cliche and wrongheaded character development. I would recommend it only for hardcore band geeks.