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Fresh (1994) starring Samuel L. [chat]
Jacobkosh
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
(This is an essay I wrote for the Instant Watch Society a year or two ago, but the movie is still on Netflix and still rad. Read this! Watch it!)
The early 90s saw the ascent of two parallel and interdependent movements in American film. Independent movies, which had been an occasional flickering flame on the edges of the American film landscape, were becoming “indies” - a fully-viable alternate model of moviemaking, spearheaded by a few visionary producers and distributors taking advantage of new avenues to produce, market and distribute film. And some of the earliest beneficiaries of that were black filmmakers, who found new opportunities to get their voices heard in the fall of American inner cities and the rise of hip-hop as a cultural force.
Boyz in the Hood, Menace II Society, New Jack City, Juice - by 1994 the field of gritty inner-city crime dramas was becoming downright crowded. So it’s not entirely a surprise that Fresh, the debut film by a white Israeli action-movie screenwriter named Boaz Yakin, was lost in the shuffle. There were no cameo appearances by famous rappers and no tie-in songs by Snoop Dogg or Public Enemy; the soundtrack, by Police drummer Stewart Copeland, featured no hip-hop, no lyrics, and was as aggressively minimalist as Philip Glass.
Audiences ignored Fresh, but critics noticed it. That’s how I heard about it - effusive praise from Kansas City Star critic Robert Butler, and Roger Ebert on Siskel & Ebert - but I wouldn't get to see the film until years later on VHS.
It was worth the wait.
Michael (Sean Nelson) is a 12-year-old boy in the ghettos of Brooklyn. He comes from a broken home, but he's a smart kid, a, quiet, hardworking student. Everyone tells him he has a bright future. He saves his money and he takes care of his family. But Michael is also a drug runner, moving huge amounts of crack cocaine and heroin across the city, and in this world, he goes by "Fresh."
Everything that happens in Fresh depends on you, the viewer, understanding Michael and the world he moves through, so the first forty minutes very carefully and patiently show you everything you need to know. Fresh lives and bunks with 11 other children in a shelter run by his aunt. His older sister is beautiful and he loves her, but she is a heroin addict, living with whatever dealer can keep her supplied. His father (Samuel L. Jackson) is an alcoholic living in a tiny camper, but at one point was a national chess contender, and now makes his booze money hustling games in the park. Fresh isn't supposed to see his father, but he visits him anyway, once a week, and learns to play. Fresh goes to school, and his friends there talk about comic books and making money, about breeding fight dogs, about imaginary millionaire relatives - but Fresh doesn't join in very much. He keeps his own counsel, speaking only when he has to, and Nelson's quiet, impassive face invites us to try and get inside his head.
There are two drugs in the ghetto, heroin and crack cocaine, or "base," and two kingpins responsible for them. Corky, the crack dealer, isn't a world away from Avon Barksdale in The Wire; he's a hot-tempered street fighter, and runs a shabby-looking organization from the corners. Esteban, the heroin dealer, runs a largely Hispanic organization; many of his employees are members of his extended family. As played with an unwholesome sort of class by Giancarlo Esposito, Esteban prides himself on the smooth efficiency of his work:
“Smack is the way to go. This is a gentleman’s operation. The clientele is stable and peace-loving, the competition is unconfrontational, and the heat mostly let it slide.”
Both men employ Fresh as a courier, paying him to move weight across the city - as a young boy, he's almost invisible. Both men respect his scrupulous honesty and his discretion, and both promise that he will be an important wheel in their organizations when he's older, while warning him against the promises of the other.
For his part, Fresh is interested in saving his money, getting to school on time, and finding excuses to talk to a pretty girl in his class. But when a schoolyard pickup game escalates into a shooting, and his crush is caught in the crossfire, Fresh finds a new purpose - escape. Seeing how he goes about this supplies the tension of the second half of the movie, as the gears of the plot begin to turn and we realize that these characters are pieces and this world is a chessboard.
If you've seen The Wire, or Boyz in the Hood, or (particularly) Spike Lee's Clockers, the world Fresh lives and moves in will be familiar to you. What sets it apart is its twisty plot and the style with which it is told. Yakin's direction isn't flashy, it doesn't call attention to itself, but he unerringly finds telling details that help us understand a character in a single visual snap, and creates a world that feels one hundred percent tangible. The drone-y, almost avant-garde soundtrack is odd and a bit distancing at first, but after 20 years it's helped to make the movie feel timeless; a few hightop fades and giant cell phones aside, this could be one of a thousand ghettoes somewhere in 2013.
And then there's the acting. Sean Nelson has an incredibly difficult challenge as a child actor and pulls it off wonderfully, creating a character we both sympathize with but also don't fully understand until the very last shot of the movie, and he is supported in this by Samuel L. Jackson - memorable despite being in only a handful of scenes, and without relying on the habits developed over the last 15 years of B-movies - and Giancarlo Esposito's snakey charm.
Take your seat. Set up your pieces. It's time to play Fresh's game - and you'll be glad you did.
The early 90s saw the ascent of two parallel and interdependent movements in American film. Independent movies, which had been an occasional flickering flame on the edges of the American film landscape, were becoming “indies” - a fully-viable alternate model of moviemaking, spearheaded by a few visionary producers and distributors taking advantage of new avenues to produce, market and distribute film. And some of the earliest beneficiaries of that were black filmmakers, who found new opportunities to get their voices heard in the fall of American inner cities and the rise of hip-hop as a cultural force.
Boyz in the Hood, Menace II Society, New Jack City, Juice - by 1994 the field of gritty inner-city crime dramas was becoming downright crowded. So it’s not entirely a surprise that Fresh, the debut film by a white Israeli action-movie screenwriter named Boaz Yakin, was lost in the shuffle. There were no cameo appearances by famous rappers and no tie-in songs by Snoop Dogg or Public Enemy; the soundtrack, by Police drummer Stewart Copeland, featured no hip-hop, no lyrics, and was as aggressively minimalist as Philip Glass.
Audiences ignored Fresh, but critics noticed it. That’s how I heard about it - effusive praise from Kansas City Star critic Robert Butler, and Roger Ebert on Siskel & Ebert - but I wouldn't get to see the film until years later on VHS.
It was worth the wait.
Michael (Sean Nelson) is a 12-year-old boy in the ghettos of Brooklyn. He comes from a broken home, but he's a smart kid, a, quiet, hardworking student. Everyone tells him he has a bright future. He saves his money and he takes care of his family. But Michael is also a drug runner, moving huge amounts of crack cocaine and heroin across the city, and in this world, he goes by "Fresh."
Everything that happens in Fresh depends on you, the viewer, understanding Michael and the world he moves through, so the first forty minutes very carefully and patiently show you everything you need to know. Fresh lives and bunks with 11 other children in a shelter run by his aunt. His older sister is beautiful and he loves her, but she is a heroin addict, living with whatever dealer can keep her supplied. His father (Samuel L. Jackson) is an alcoholic living in a tiny camper, but at one point was a national chess contender, and now makes his booze money hustling games in the park. Fresh isn't supposed to see his father, but he visits him anyway, once a week, and learns to play. Fresh goes to school, and his friends there talk about comic books and making money, about breeding fight dogs, about imaginary millionaire relatives - but Fresh doesn't join in very much. He keeps his own counsel, speaking only when he has to, and Nelson's quiet, impassive face invites us to try and get inside his head.
There are two drugs in the ghetto, heroin and crack cocaine, or "base," and two kingpins responsible for them. Corky, the crack dealer, isn't a world away from Avon Barksdale in The Wire; he's a hot-tempered street fighter, and runs a shabby-looking organization from the corners. Esteban, the heroin dealer, runs a largely Hispanic organization; many of his employees are members of his extended family. As played with an unwholesome sort of class by Giancarlo Esposito, Esteban prides himself on the smooth efficiency of his work:
“Smack is the way to go. This is a gentleman’s operation. The clientele is stable and peace-loving, the competition is unconfrontational, and the heat mostly let it slide.”
Both men employ Fresh as a courier, paying him to move weight across the city - as a young boy, he's almost invisible. Both men respect his scrupulous honesty and his discretion, and both promise that he will be an important wheel in their organizations when he's older, while warning him against the promises of the other.
For his part, Fresh is interested in saving his money, getting to school on time, and finding excuses to talk to a pretty girl in his class. But when a schoolyard pickup game escalates into a shooting, and his crush is caught in the crossfire, Fresh finds a new purpose - escape. Seeing how he goes about this supplies the tension of the second half of the movie, as the gears of the plot begin to turn and we realize that these characters are pieces and this world is a chessboard.
If you've seen The Wire, or Boyz in the Hood, or (particularly) Spike Lee's Clockers, the world Fresh lives and moves in will be familiar to you. What sets it apart is its twisty plot and the style with which it is told. Yakin's direction isn't flashy, it doesn't call attention to itself, but he unerringly finds telling details that help us understand a character in a single visual snap, and creates a world that feels one hundred percent tangible. The drone-y, almost avant-garde soundtrack is odd and a bit distancing at first, but after 20 years it's helped to make the movie feel timeless; a few hightop fades and giant cell phones aside, this could be one of a thousand ghettoes somewhere in 2013.
And then there's the acting. Sean Nelson has an incredibly difficult challenge as a child actor and pulls it off wonderfully, creating a character we both sympathize with but also don't fully understand until the very last shot of the movie, and he is supported in this by Samuel L. Jackson - memorable despite being in only a handful of scenes, and without relying on the habits developed over the last 15 years of B-movies - and Giancarlo Esposito's snakey charm.
Take your seat. Set up your pieces. It's time to play Fresh's game - and you'll be glad you did.
+17
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
I was in an AT&T Store today.
Amazon Fire Phone was sitting towards the front in its little far corner, free on contract and twisting in the wind much like the facebook phone before it.
I got a chance to play with it while I waited, and its not a bad phone, but it is clearly not a device that is aware of the level of competition in the space. It felt a good 3-4 years out of date.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Why would you ever pre-order a video game?
I can barely understand the desire to buy the first day. Though that at least functions under the excitement-over-sense model.
Some games are story driven and you want to experience that story before it is ruined for you. This is made worse by hanging out on the internets as we are wont to do.
Some games are co-op driven, and launch day serves as good a method as any to get you and all your friends to hop in at roughly the same time and play through the content together.
Some games are highly competitive, and not being there from the beginning puts you at a severe disadvantage against the competition who are more seasoned than you when you finally buy in.
So basically, lots of reasons.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
goodies. I love dumb little collectible shit
I don't feel particularly ashamed that I'm willing to pay a premium to do so.
Oh yeah, the doodads.
I am pretty much done with those, but about a decade back I was the biggest whore for them.
If my copy of Halo could come with a completely impractical Cat Helmet, you know I was going to buy that copy.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
you shouldn't
On average, this thread was blasting along at warp 2.7
so now I am fabulously rich, because thunderstruck trees are like the most valuable thing
it's enough gold to buy like ten months of monthly subscription from other players on the auction house
I need a fur coat or something
Those are all reasons to buy it the first day. Though god knows you could just wait a week, avoid spoilers and see the reviews from trusted sources poor in first. It's not like everyone (or even the same people) must see a movie opening night or the experience will be forever ruined. But I can at least see wanting to be in on the ground floor. But that's not what I asked.
Nothing you've said explains pre-ordering though. Variable's "the goodies" is the only point in that behaviour's favour.
I've definitely had situations in which I've wanted to obtain a game immediately after release and was not able to because I didn't preorder.
For instance, there was no way I was going to go without preordering Smash. The chance that I could arrive at the store on Friday and not be able to get my hands on a copy are fairly large.
For me, it's utilitarian. I do it so the game can preload overnight and is ready to play when I get home from work Tuesday evening. And they are games where I'm going to read the reviews just to see what other people think, not to make some 'buying decision.'
Pre-Ordering is something that publishers take note of. If the game you are excited for is made by a developer you like, you are already going to buy it so why not try and bolster their business?
I'm a little bit ashamed of the massive dragon statue that came with my Skyrim preorder. It's way bigger than what I would consider the maximum allowable size for dragon statues owned by an adult man.
Preordering digitally on steam, PS4 or XBO allows you to have the game at midnight on day 1, since it was already downloaded to your HDD and you are just waiting on the last little bit to come in at midnight.
I haven't preordered a game in ages, but I will probably preorder master chief collection and AssCreed Unity, because as far as I am concerned they are known quantities.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
If you pre-order your toy, they give you toys when you get your toy.
a:cm....
I am willing to buy indie games at release because I like to support that kind of venture
What do you mean?
oh yeah. if we are gonna use that lens about half my room is embarrassing
luckily no one is ever here but me!
There are definitely big budget studios or particular developers that I would directly like to support, though (even if my support isn't quite as important for them).
Like, I want to give Sakurai or Kamiya as much of a bump as I can, even if their shit's already gonna sell like hotcakes with or without me.
@kedinik @Podly excellent! Let me know what you guys think when you're done.
It all depends on who you care to impress.
I sure as hell ain't getting passed up on a promotion because I invited my boss to dinner and he saw all my dragon statues.
Well, compared to an indie title.
Though honestly, a show about the police force dealing with someone like Batman (but who is not actually Batman and thus actually mysterious) would be pretty cool.