JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH Review

As we get older, we become more conscious of our time and the legacy we might leave. The long game no longer feels as long and therefore the implications of our actions become just as important as the ramifications. On the day of January 15th, 1990 William O'Neal was a forty-year-old man who'd been drinking with his uncle into the early-morning hours of Martin Luther King Day before running into westbound traffic on an expressway and jumping in front of a car that killed him. His death was ruled a suicide. Later that night, on PBS, the second part of the fourteen-part documentary series, Eyes on the Prize, would debut. The second part of the series chronicled the time period between the national emergence of Malcolm X in 1964 up through to the 1983 election of Harold Washington as the first African American mayor of Chicago. Included in this span of time is the year 1969 and in 1969 William O'Neal would turn twenty years-old. 1969 is also the year a twenty-one-year-old Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, would be assassinated. Judas and the Black Messiah tells the story of how these two men were connected to one another in a tale as old as scripture as indicated by its biblical title. 

The second part of the Eyes on the Prize documentary contains the only on-camera interview O'Neal ever gave. The interview itself was conducted on April 13, 1989 and in that interview O'Neal discussed his involvement with the Black Panther Party, how he was exploited by the powers that be and a puppet for the FBI who blackmailed him into infiltrating the Panthers and eventually laying out the floor plan of Hampton's apartment that would lead to the raid where law enforcement fired a total of ninety-nine shots, executing Hampton at point-blank range. The Gospel of Matthew 26:15 states that Judas committed his betrayal of Jesus in exchange for thirty pieces of silver, but as there's undoubtedly more to Judas' story and motivation than money the relationship between O'Neal and Hampton seems to have been equally as complicated. In that 1989 interview, O'Neal stated "I didn't feel like I had done anything. I didn't walk in there with guns. I didn't shoot him. FBI didn't do it. I felt somewhat like I was betrayed...I felt like, like perhaps I was on the wrong side. Yeah, yeah, I had my misgivings. I'm not going to sit here now and take the responsibility for the raid, you know, I'm not going to do that. I didn't pull the trigger. I didn't issue the warrant. I didn't put the guns in the apartment. So, I'm not going to take the responsibility for that, but I do feel like I was betrayed." O'Neal was clearly a tortured individual who was also very much in denial. According to Matthew 27:1–10, after learning that Jesus was to be crucified, Judas attempted to return the money he had been paid for his betrayal and committed suicide by hanging. Do we really blame Judas for Jesus' death though? No, of course not, just as O'Neal is only responsible for Hampton's death so far as being a young Black man in the midst of a race war who was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover's "America" as an "informant". 

New Trailer for FREE GUY Starring Ryan Reynolds

As Ryan Reynolds and the rest of the cast of Free Guy announced on the actor's YouTube channel yesterday the action comedy originally set for a July 4th weekend release is now definitely (probably) arriving in theaters on December 11th (maybe). With the recent news of No Time to Die officially being pushed back and today's announcement that Dune will be postponed an entire year the question of if theaters will be able to remain open through the end of the year is a huge question mark and obviously a determining factor in if we'll actually see Free Guy before the end of the year. Sure, there are titles like Robert De Niro's War with Grandpa and Liam Neeson's Honest Thief set to be released over the next two weeks and November actually has a solid slew of releases set for theaters including Blumhouse's Freaky, Pixar's Soul which is still on the schedule for a November 20th theatrical release for the time being and of course DreamWorks' sequel to The Croods which seems pretty locked in for the Thanksgiving holiday. Of course, all of these are titles that could easily transition to PVOD whereas Free Guy is a legit big-budget studio blockbuster from Fox/Disney that I could have seen going the way of Mulan had that panned out the way Disney hoped, but given the delay of Black Widow and the persistence that Free Guy will play in theaters it doesn't seem like this will be an option for the movie. All of that to say, I'm as eager as the next person to return to theaters-especially for fun, good-natured entertainment like Free Guy seems to be-but I just don't know that any major release is going to actually make it into theaters before the end of the year. As for how the actual movie itself looks, this new trailer certainly expands the world we first became privy to in the initial trailer while wisely putting on display the central theme of the film: the world can always use more good people. While the first, pre-2020 trailer played more into the spectacle aspects of the Pixels/Ralph Breaks the Internet-like premise, this new trailer ventures outside the video game world in which Reynolds' character exists and gets a little more existential with everything as our hero comes to seemingly represent a beacon of hope in an otherwise pessimistic and complacent world. Of course, the action still looks big and the ensemble cast looks like a hell of a lot of fun, but it's also refreshing to see a major movie with a high-profile star typically associated with mockery feel so...genuine? Whenever this ends up being released, it seems Free Guy will be the dose of positivity we can all use right now.       

GOOD BOYS Review

If twelve year-old's could actually see the new Seth Rogen-produced comedy, Good Boys, which chronicles-in too honest a nature for their own sensibilities apparently-the misadventures of this transformative stage from elementary to middle school then there would undoubtedly be a thousand more "bean bag boy" trios popping up across the nation tomorrow and...in all honesty...that wouldn't be such a bad thing. For all of the promotional focus around this movie being on the gimmick of it starring actors too young to see their own movie because of the words and actions they say and do the truth of the matter is that despite this seemingly backwards rule (for the record, I don't think anyone under fifteen should probably watch this if for no other reason than to preserve as much innocence as possible for as long as possible) the heart of Good Boys lies in the fact that a sweetness is ultimately born from the vulgarity it would seem reliant upon. Our three co-leads, best friends and founding members of the aforementioned "bean bag boys" are so oblivious to the true meanings of some of the things they say, so unsuspecting in the ramifications of some of their actions and-most importantly-have the best of intentions in the quest the movie ultimately sends them on that the crudeness that comes to serve as the details in said quest only make to further emphasize the honesty of how kids act among themselves when their parents and elders aren't around. This point of these children being tawdry is just that-to garner cheap laughs from their peers, not because they actually possess such personalities; they're unrefined, sure, but they're not crass. The minutiae of such distinctions allows for the kids themselves to feel blameless in their thoughts and in their words, but more products of their environments in the truest sense of the phrase. This is where Good Boys becomes something wholly different in its approach though, for as much as the movie is, on a surface-level, about garnering laughs from twelve year-old's saying the "F" word writer/director Gene Stupnitsky and co-writer/producer Lee Eisenberg seem intent on emphasizing the fact the title of their film is more earnest than it is satirical; meaning the bean bag boys-despite all the trouble they get into-are in fact, fundamentally, honest-to-God good boys.