Movie Review Beauty Shop

Beauty Shop 

Directed by Billie Woodruff 

Written by Elizabeth Hunter, Kate Lanier, Norman Vance Jr. 

Starring Queen Latifah 

Release Date May 30th, 2005 

Rotten Tomatoes Score 38% 

IMDB Score 5.6 out of 10 

Budget $25 million 

Box Office $37 million 

Ever since her breakthrough role and Oscar nomination with 2002's Chicago, Queen Latifah has struggled to find material worthy of her talent.  Chicago has led to a string of awful movies like Cookout, Taxi, and Bringing Down the House, the latter being the only hit of the bunch and arguably the worst of them. None of these awful films, however, has dimmed the Queen's star presence. She is still a welcome presence onscreen even if her movies do her talent injustice.The latest example of Queen Latifah's star presence, the Barbershop spinoff Beauty Shop, is yet another bad movie where Queen Latifah outshines bad material.

In Barbershop 2 Queen Latifah introduced the character of Gina, a beauty shop owner who had the guts and talent to go toe to toe with Cedric the Entertainer's cantankerous old man Eddy. In Beauty Shop Gina has packed up her talent and attitude and headed for Atlanta where she works at an upscale salon and hopes to soon open her own shop. Gina's new boss is your typically effeminate diva stylist, Jorge Christophe (a nearly unrecognizable Kevin Bacon with a faux Euro-trash accent). Jorge constantly dumps his work off on Gina who earns the trust and loyalty of his clients because of her talent. However, when Jorge criticizes Gina in front of the entire salon, saying that he "owns her ass", Gina quits.

With the help of family, friends and an especially easy to please bank loan officer, Gina buys a rundown beauty shop in a questionable part of town. The shop comes equipped with a noisy neighbor/potential love interest, play by Djimon Hounsou, bad electricity, and a staff of oddball stylists not used to Gina's more upscale tastes. Among her new employees are the former owner, the Maya Angelou quoting Miss Josephine (Alfre Woodard, looking uncomfortable in this rare comedic role), Chanel (Golden Brooks) the requisite attitude problem or more precisely the bitch, and Ida (Sherry Shepherd) the dim witted one.

Thankfully also coming along with Gina from Jorge's is a talented stylist named Lynn (Alicia Silverstone, stymied with a bad southern accent), the one white girl in an all-black shop. Lynn is at the center of much of the film's uncomfortable racial humor. Back to the plot, Gina is lucky to have brought some of the upscale clients she met while working for Jorge with her to this new shop. Among those customers is the sweet natured Terri (Andie McDowell) and the bitchy Joanne (Mena Suvari).

The film's plot centers on finances as the titular beauty shop, as it was in the Barbershop movies, is constantly in dire financial straits. Everything is falling apart; the electricity is bad, and a nasty building inspector clearly has it out for Gina. That said, though, the plot is very much secondary to the interaction of this over-the-top group of characters, the plotless nature of Beauty Shop means that scenes linger longer than they should in search of a reason to exist beyond a weak punchline or dimwitted insult.

The one thing Beauty Shop has going for it is the star presence and charisma of Queen Latifah whose common-sense straight man never really gels with the caricatures that surround her. That is certainly not Latifah's fault.  She seems prepared to connect with the material throughout, especially in her romance with Djimon Hounsou's character, Joe. Though not a natural when it comes to romantic comedy, Hounsou makes up for his lack of comic chops by being ridiculously good looking with a terrific smile.

Unfortunately, there are too many other things wrong with Beauty Shop for Queen Latifah and Djimon Hounsou to escape the orbit of this otherwise bad movie. Music video Director Bille Woodruff (Honey with Jessica Alba) is too caught up with quirky characters to give Queen Latifah the attention she deserves. Queen Latifah is radiant and funny and a director with more imagination than Billie Woodruff might have forgotten about trying to make Barbershop 3 and focused the film on Gina and her romance with Joe.

Had Beauty Shop simply been a romantic comedy about Queen Latifah and Djimon Hounsou beginning to fall in love, it might have worked. Sadly, the desire of the studio to clone a gender flipped version of the Barbershop movies, killed the chances of Beauty Shop of feeling like anything more than aq brain dead rehash eager to

Movie Review Megalopolis

 Megalopolis 

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola 

Written by Francis Ford Coppola 

Starring Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight 

Release Date September 27th, 2024 

Published September 30th, 2024 

I was very excited about Megaloopolis at the time it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. The reaction from critics and audiences at Cannes was divided to a remarkable extreme with some calling it a work of genius and others calling it a complete disaster. In my experience, movies that are that divisive tend to have value in that they are unlikely to be boring. As someone whose profession often centers around watching mainstream, cookie cutter, movies, the notion of a genuinely original and completely unpredictable movie is very exciting. 

What a disappointment it was then, to watch Megalopolis and feel nearly nothing for the movie. While I remain impressed by the intention and originality of Megalopolis, the dominant feeling I have after watching Megalopolis is apathy. Disappointment is a close second but not the disappointment of being let down by Francis Ford Coppola but rather, the disappointment that Megalopolis left me so indifferent. I wanted to feel invigorated by a feeling of either the joy of seeing a visionary epic or by seeing something so utterly incomprehensible as to cause awe. 

Neither of those feelings emerged. Instead, the lasting feeling inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s deeply personal $120 million dollar gamble is emptiness, a complete lack of any significant emotion whatsoever. And that feeling sucks. I know that isn’t the most elegant way of stating my feelings but it is honest and to the point. I hate that Megalopolis left me feeling next to nothing. Not pity for the actors stranded in Coppola’s muddled vision, none of the giddiness inspired by seeing something truly original, simply nothing whatsoever. 

Megalopolis stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catalina, a visionary architect with a dark past. Living in the country of New Rome, and functioning as the country’s chief designer, Catalina finds himself at the center of controversy over his newest creation, Megalopolis, a city of the future that may or may not displace many from the poor neighborhoods of the capital city. Catalina’s chief critic is the Mayor of New Rome, Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Cicero believes that Catalina is mortgaging the struggling present of New Rome in favor of the expensive pipedream of Megalopolis. 

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal.Media linked here. 

Classic Movie Review Manhunter

Manhunter (1986) 

Directed by Michael Mann

Written by Michael Mann

Starring William Peterson, Dennis Farina, Brian Cox, Kim Greist, Joan Allen 

Release Date August 15th, 1986 

Published July 16th, 2024 

The visual simplicity of the opening images of Michael Mann's Manhunter are sublime. We open on a flashlight falling upon a flight of stairs. It's pitch black other than the flashlight. This could be a home invader or an investigator at this point. Toys are strewn across the stairs in the haphazard way that young children carelessly like to play. The visual signs of life in a typical American home are all present. As the person with the flashlight climbs the stairs, it's light falling on more signifiers of life, we arrive at the top of the stairs. The flashlight pans into what appears to a be a child's room, seemingly empty. 

A few steps further and we arrive in a bedroom where we see our first evidence of people. A woman and a man are in bed and for a moment, it's not clear if they are alive or dead. The flashlight begins to hold steady on the woman who finally moves to signify that she's alive. The flashlight, now unmoving, continues to hold on the woman as it becomes clear that she's waking up. The fog of sleep still in her mind she finally begins to rise and just as she might be about to react to the sight of a stranger with a flashlight, we cut to the opening title of the film, Manhunter. 

The clear indication is that this person with a flashlight is about to commit a horrific murder. That Michael Mann uses a signifier as simple as a flashlight to toy with us, to give us hope that perhaps we are arriving at an investigation and not an invasion is part of the building tension, the rising suspense. The way the flashlight falls on the woman in bed and holds on her becomes the unsettling implication of a terrible crime about to be committed. Mann's direction is simple, the visual storytelling is electrifying and yet it's still just a person with a flashlight and visual context. That's pure film language. 

Over the years, Michael Mann will come to be associated with a style that is more bombastic and far less subtle. No less skilled or polished, but somehow more modern and garish for having a bigger budget, bigger stars, and bigger ambition. I'm not the biggest fan of Michael Mann's blockbuster era. I don't love the kinetic, overwrought style of Heat. I genuinely believe his movie Blackhat is one of the worst blockbusters of the last 10 years, but I still respect Michael Mann. I know that at any moment, Mann can still do what he did in Manhunter and blow my mind with his simple, straight-forward grasp of the language of film. 

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal.