It has been a bit, but I am now back with another “Homicide: Life on the Street” commentary track. This time it is for “Son of a Gun,” the fourth episode of the first season. This episode contains several plot threads as the detectives furiously investigate the shooting of Officer Chris Thormann (Lee Tergesen), Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) and Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) continue to investigate the murder of Adena Watson, Stanley Bolander (Ned Beatty) goes out on a date with Doctor Carol Blythe (Wendy Hughes), and there is also the case of Calpurnia Church (Mary Jefferson) who has murdered many people for the insurance money. This is a lot for any hour-long drama to handle, but everyone involved seems to find the right balance to where nothing feels superfluous.
“Son of a Gun” was directed by Nick Gomez who helmed a couple of indie crime dramas back in the 1990’s: “Laws of Gravity” and “New Jersey Drive.” It marked the first appearances of Sean Whitesell who portrays Dr. Eli Devilbiss, Edie Falco who portrays Chris Thormann’s wife, Eva, and Walt McPherson who plays an patrolman who may or may not be Roger Gaffney, the most odious and bitter character in the “Homicide” series.
This episode was the first thing I ever saw Edie Falco in, and she previously appeared in Gomez’s “Laws of Gravity.” From here, Falco would go on to play a role in Tom Fontana’s HBO prison drama “Oz,” and she would eventually make her breakthrough a few years later on “The Sopranos.”
There are also other memorable performances to be found in this episode. The great Luis Guzman appears as Bolander’s next door neighbor, Lorenzo “Larry” Molera, who has quite the love for wood. Then there is the late Wendy Hughes who plays a potential girlfriend to Bolander in Carol Blythe, and seeing her and Beatty together provides this episode with the series’ more intimate moments.
Check out the commentary below. The complete series of “Homicide: Life on the Street” is currently available to purchase from Shout Factory. To this date, it is still not available to stream on any service. This is likely due to music rights.
I am back with my latest audio commentary on an episode of “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and the one on display here is “Night of the Dead Living,” a nice little play on words on the title of the classic horror film, “Night of the Living Dead.” It was directed by Michael Lehmann who gave us one of the greatest black comedies ever made, “Heathers” which starred Christian Slater and Winona Ryder. Lehmann also directed “Hudson Hawk” which starred Bruce Willis and proved to be a critical and commercial bomb, but has since become a cult classic of sorts. The teleplay was written by Frank Pugliese who won a WGA Award for his work on this episode. Pugliese is a writer and playwright, and his plays include “Aven’U Boys” which an Obie Award, and he wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film “Infamous.”
“Night of Dead Living” was the third episode of “Homicide’s” first season, but NBC decided to air it as the season finale due to its slow pace and the fact they were trying hard to “woo” more viewers for this show which was already suffering a decline in ratings. For me and many others, the airing of this episode in this order was confusing as hell as it looked as though Tim Bayliss and Frank Pembleton had another chance at closing the Adena Watson case. Watching it now, it feels like the cruelest of teases.
What I love about this particular episode is how unusual it is for “Homicide” let alone any other police drama as it is one without any murders or crimes committed. The detectives are working the night shift during a hot summer night, and Lieutenant Al Giardello is furious because the air conditioning is off in the office and everyone is sweating like crazy to where they are taking off their ties. That is, except for Frank Pembleton who remains as cool as can be despite the heat.
Please check out the commentary track below and let me know what you think about this episode.
So here I am with another commentary track after the one I did for “Pump Up The Volume.” But this time, it is for an episode of one of my favorite television shows of all time, let alone of the 1990’s, “Homicide: Life on the Street.” Specifically, the commentary is on this show’s very first episode, “Gone For Goode,” which did a brilliant job of introducing us to various Homicide detectives, and also showed how it was not going to be your usual cop show. Instead, it was initially designed to be one without onscreen violence, something which executive producer and showrunner Tom Fontana thought was crazy, and he quickly signed up with the show as a result.
What hooked me onto this show was the fact it was being developed by Barry Levinson, the Oscar winning filmmaker of “Rain Man.” He also directed the “Gone For Goode” episode and introduced its cinematic style which no other director could direct their way out of.
With this commentary track, I express my thoughts on this episode and the show at large. Upon watching “Gone For Goode,” I was immediately hooked into what this groundbreaking series had to offer, and I did my best to provide as much trivia about its making as I could. I’m not sure there will ever be a perfect commentary track to anything unless it is done by Martin Scorsese or Bruce Campbell, but I would like to think this one comes close. If you say it does, it will do wonders for my fragile ego.
Please feel free to listen to the commentary track below as you watch this episode on your DVD player. At this time, “Homicide: Life on the Street” is not available to stream, most likely due to music rights, but you can purchase the complete series on DVD from Shout Factory. It was previously available in a box set from A&E Home Video, but it has long since gone out of print.
WRITER’S NOTE: This article was written back in 2013.
Jennifer Lopez has been so deeply involved in the music business for the last few years to where it is easy to forget she is also an actress. Now that her stint on “American Idol” is over, she gets the opportunity to be an actress again in Taylor Hackford’s “Parker.” In it she plays Leslie Rogers, an unsuccessful real estate agent and recent divorcee who has been dealt an unlucky hand in life and is forced to live with her overbearing mother Ascension (Patti LuPone) almost against her will. While “Parker” itself is not a great movie, it allows Lopez to give her best performance since she acted opposite George Clooney in “Out of Sight.”
The part of Leslie Rogers came to Lopez while she was filming a season of “American Idol,” and it made her realize what was missing from her life at that point. In talking with Nina Terrero of NBC Latino, she explained how she was drawn to “Parker’s” screenplay, and being on the set of this movie made her realize how much she wanted to go back to doing this kind of work.
“To be honest, I had been doing music, releasing two albums,” Lopez said. “And when I got the chance to do this movie between two seasons of ‘Idol,’ I realized how much I really missed acting; I hadn’t done enough of it over the past few years.”
“When they offered me a third season of ‘Idol,’ I just had to say no,” Lopez continued. “I made the decision that I was going to go back on tour and after that focus on film for the next few years. It’s just the perfect time in my life with the things that I’ve lived and the things I’ve experienced. I have so much to offer as an actor at this point in my life. I’m going to make music and I’m going to focus on my artistry.”
Filming “Parker” came also came around the time Lopez was divorcing from her husband of seven years, Marc Anthony. Now many have been quick to dismiss Lopez’s performance here as they have gotten so used to seeing her being so glamorous whenever she is in public. Regardless, she has been through a rough and tumble time, before and after she became famous, which people in general are not quick to acknowledge. She explained this in more detail during her interview with Terrero.
“We’re both human beings who’ve gone through hard and difficult times,” Lopez said of the similarities between herself and her character. “At this particular time, she’s recently divorced, a little desperate. When I was filming this role, I had similar feelings. I had recently decided to divorce and it was hard to get out of bed and go to the set every day. I knew what those feelings were, to feel your world was falling apart.”
Hackford himself had zero hesitation about casting Lopez in “Parker.” While it might seem rather odd to see this particular superstar playing a down on her luck character, Hackford had known her long enough to be aware of how she had to fight hard to get to where she is now. He made this clear to me during my one-on-one interview with him.
“I know who that person is, she’s for real,” Hackford said of Lopez. “You see the glamorous person out there in the world of entertainment, rich and famous and a lot of times you get a bad rap because people are jealous. But Jennifer’s the real person. She was a dancer and they can just work and work and work.”
“I trusted the fact that she was good, but I didn’t realize how good she is. She’s a fantastic actress. She walks on the set, she frees herself of all of that Jennifer Lopez stuff and she embodies the character,” Hackford continued. “You tell Jennifer a note and BANG! It’s there in the next take. Not partially there, it’s there. You think, my God she got it, she understood it. Now part of that’s me because if you can’t explain what you want, how do you expect someone to do it? But the other part of it is she’s got an instrument that is real and very developed. She’s a much better actress now that she ever was before, and she’s also gone through some things in her life. She’s got some miles on the treads of those tires, and ultimately she’s incorporated that. I think she’s terrific in this movie.”
Still, Lopez did show some hesitation in her scene with Jason Statham, who plays Parker of the movie’s title, where she has to strip down to her underwear to show him she is not wearing a wire. Even though Lopez said she spent a lot of time eating right and working out before filming this sequence, she is no less nervous about doing stuff like that today than when she first started out in movies.
“Doing scenes like this one are so nerve-wracking,” Lopez said. “You have to get mentally ready because it’s a vulnerable state, being in front of a crew having to do a scene like that. My heart beats getting ready for it, but you know at the end of the day it’s part of the job.”
Now many may still not be willing to give Jennifer Lopez the credit she deserves for her performance in “Parker,” but this will end up saying more about her critics than it will about her. Lopez actually proves to be quite believable as a divorcee who is trying to put her life back together with varying degrees of success, and she proves to be one of the things in this movie which actually works. At this point, her career can go in many different directions, and she is excited about the opportunities which are ahead of her.
“I always want my fans to be happy with what I do,” Lopez said. “But I don’t want to choose my projects based on what I think will please them. I choose projects that are I can excel in and that are real, not stuff that’s fake or forced. I don’t consider genre so much as having a great script, great director and great actors to play off of. Doing an intense drama scene can be as much fun as a romantic comedy. I enjoy all of it!”
WRITER’S NOTE: This article was written back in 2012.
We should no longer be surprised at how it’s been several years since Chris Tucker appeared in a movie. Tucker has taken a number of years off between doing those “Rush Hour” movies, and he has made enough money to where he can actually afford to be choosy on which projects he does. Instead, what really should surprise us is how effectively he drops his manic, motor-mouth persona he became famous for in David O. Russell’s critically acclaimed “Silver Linings Playbook.” It’s a more serious role for Tucker compared to what he’s done in the past, and yet he still gets to add some of his own infectious wit to it.
In “Silver Linings Playbook” Tucker plays Danny, a friend of Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) whom he spent some time with in a Baltimore mental health facility. Tucker makes Danny into an endearingly likable individual who is full of positive energy even as he eventually discovers he’s leaving the mental facility a little too soon. With this description, you might think this would be the perfect movie for him to perform his fast-talking shtick, but what’s great about his performance is how he underplays the role and never tries to be the least bit bombastic in his portrayal.
The first question everyone has for Tucker is why he took so long to do another movie. While talking with Marlow Stern of The Daily Beast, Tucker explained he went back to doing stand-up comedy for a while and that a film he was planning to do with director Brett Ratner called “Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra” fell through unexpectedly. But for Tucker, there was a little more to it.
“Well, the break wasn’t planned – it just happened that way,” Tucker told Stern. “I waited a long time and the right things weren’t coming to me – the roles I was offered weren’t that challenging-so I started trying to develop a bunch of projects for myself. I was always looking and hoping the right thing would come. I knew stepping back a bit and going back to my stand-up roots would help me gain perspective.”
When it came to doing “Silver Linings Playbook,” Tucker told Scott Huver of NBC New York he liked how his character Danny would just “come out of nowhere.” In essence you could say this about a lot of the characters in this movie as they go in all sorts of directions you don’t expect them to, and this must have made it a fun project for everyone involved including Tucker. The other thing which attracted him to playing Danny was that he would be working with writer/director David O. Russell, and he’s a filmmaker who is known for keeping all the actors he works with fully energized from take to take.
“We knew that he (Russell) would probably do something, make it even a little bit more special because that’s how he works, because he’s so creative,” Tucker said to Huver. “David is such a great writer, and the rhythm and the way that he writes, it’s just really helpful. Then he’s like that with creating and changing stuff, and so I like that it frees you up to not worry about knowing your lines exactly. He just makes sure you feel like you can just be good, get into character.”
In talking with Wilson Morales of Black Film, Tucker said he also liked how the role had a lot of depth and that it was more serious than what people are used to seeing him do. But he also pointed out how a lot of comedy comes out of the emotionally fraught situations the characters endure throughout which is true. “Silver Linings Playbook” is one of those movies where you laugh with the characters instead of at them, and this is what makes it as joyous and positive as Danny is.
When it came to doing research, Tucker admitted he did a little bit but not a whole lot. It turned out what was already on the page was enough for him to work with.
“I just talked to the director (Russell) a lot because he knew the character,” Tucker told Morales. “He wrote the script so that was a good thing working with a writer/director because they have an idea of the character. I talked to him a lot and I didn’t read the book (by Matthew Quick, which the movie is based on) because I felt like Russell made the character even better in the movie. I basically took the director’s lead on it.”
Next up for Chris Tucker is a stand-up comedy movie he made which is coming out next year, and there are rumors he just might be up for another “Rush Hour” sequel. Many people are eager to see Tucker get back to doing the kind of comedy he’s famous for, but I hope he gets more opportunities to do films like “Silver Linings Playbook” because I think it brings out the best in him. It’s another one of those performances which proves comedians can do drama as well as they do comedy, and this is something no one should have to prove to anyone anymore.
The Ultimate Rabbit 