Taking in a screening of the film The Longshots starring Ice Cube and Keke Palmer, I was struck by its poignant portrayal of a young girl who makes it to the Pop Warner Football League’s Superbowl as the first and only female football player to ever be a part of its league. Based on the real life of Jasmine Plummer, The Longshots tackles (no pun intended) the issues of absentee fathers, single parent households, adolescence and sexual equality, all while managing to be uplifting and family friendly.

I was more struck, however, by the knowledge that Limp Bizkit lead singer Fred Durst directed this heartfelt, character driven feature film. Certain adjectives typically come to mind when one hears the name Fred Durst, or better, sees his trademark red carpet image: tattoos, backwards baseball cap, and flipping the bird while expressing some degree of generic angst. Such paparazzi shots are plentiful online, but perhaps they have all been for effect, or perhaps Fred Durst has simply moved on. Somewhere between sharing his hardcore version of George Michael’s “Faith” and belting out “Nookie,” Durst decided that he was an artistic filmmaker trapped inside the body of a rock star. And to his credit, he may be on to something.

(PR)

From IW: Damn. Nutty as five walnut trees. And yes, that is a purple lace see-thru shirt he is rocking, in case you had any doubts whatsoever of said nuttiness.

Posting is going to be very, very light this week, as I am starting a new job this week. Since I will be "the only fly in the milk" as they say (read lone Negro) I have to have the attitude of a losing linebacker in the Superbowl...ie putting on my helmet and yelling"I'm going in--arrrrrrrgh!!!"

In the meantime, the very brilliant Black Snob can keep you busy at her amazingly creative blog "The Secret Council Of American Negroes" aka "SCAN". That chick is a genius, I tell ya. You might also want to check out "Average Bro" whose blog reminds me a lot of Thembi's, and since ol' Thembs is busy parlaying with the Sand Negroes (as they say) in some hot assed Middle Eastern country, you can get your daily smart-alecky Black commentary over there.

Okay, Ms. Invisible has to go now. I'll leave you with some pictures I have spotted on the internets over the past couple of weeks. Most of them have absolutely nothing to do with Black Cinema, but I just had to share....love y'all!

First up, some faces that need serious intervention:

But with the upcoming film, many see this as closure to the insanely popular TV series tying the one loose end in Sarah Jessica Parker’s character’s long running story. Happiness.

But it seems the people that are happiest about this movie are not the gaggle of women chomping at the bit to see this cinematical extension of the Series Finale. It is the partners for product placement in the film.

Yahoo gives us:

New Line Cinema has reportedly dubbed it “the Super Bowl for women” in reference to the U.S. football championship that sees companies pay millions of dollars for television ads.

The movie has “promotional partnerships” with at least eight companies whose products appear in the film.

In a world where they made GI Joe dolls to cross market the success of Barbie, and making pink Lego’s to capture the girl market is it any surprise that they take this marketing strategy and apply it to adult markets?

Superbowl commercials are clearly targeted at the men. Beer commercials with bikini clad party girls, trucks for sale, More beer commercials. So this is the perfect opportunity for those markets targeting women to hit up their demographic with their hottest wares.

The most interesting thing about this is that most of these product placement spaces are getting their place in chick flick history on trade. Sex and the City will be promoted through their own commercials, and in trade, the products get to appear in the movie. So expect to see a commercial with the bragging rights that you saw their product in Sex and the City in Mercedes-Benz commercials, while two of the main cast are spotted driving them during the film.

This is the same as most product placement goes, but for these material girls it makes sense for them to have these things around so it adds punctuation to their upper class lifestyle. Unlike the blatant Burger King bag in Iron Man, these products will fit in on purpose.

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Complications arrive in the trim form of Chicago journalist Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger), an ambitious writer dispatched by her editor to investigate Carter’s claims of battlefield valour after a former comrade exposes him as an opportunistic fraud. Soon Lexie has both men in a flap as she trails the team across the country, spitting out machine-gun witticisms, squinting suspiciously and brandishing her irrepressible moxie.

Leatherheads isn’t a bad premise for a screwball comedy and it is clear that Clooney has gone to considerable effort to bring it to the screen; taking hefty dollops of inspiration from classics like It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story, adding an emphatically jazzy score from Randy Newman and peppering his cast with lumpy 20s faces. Nothing wrong with any of that, either. Furthermore, the influence of the Coen Brothers on his cinematic thinking is obvious from the opening frames; a little of O, Brother’s sepia-tinted glow and more of Hudsucker’s pin-sharp tailoring and rat-a-tat dialogue. Again, nothing amiss in that. But none of that matters, in the end because no matter how the director and his cinematographer, Thomas Sigel do to make Leatherheads look authentic, it never feels right; the beat is off, the momentum flags.

After a bright, tight first act, the film gradually loses focus and heft, wandering aimlessly around the marked boundaries of the story before congealing into a pastiche of Golden Age adventurism and then attempting to revive itself for a grandstand sporting finale. A long scene which has the main players trapped in a room thrashing out a complicated compromise hangs flat on the screen; Clooney perched in a corner waiting for his moment to waggle his eyebrows in triumph when he should be behind the camera, making it better.

The cynic might see the whole shiny effort as a complex delivery system for a tutorial in movie-star charm, duly delivered by the closest thing we have to Cary Grant nowadays, but the lumpy, tedious results are far less bewitching than Clooney would have wanted. Both sport and movies, according to Clooney, were better before the marketers and the regulators got involved; amateur football played by adventure-seeking privateers, movies made by fast-talking, wit-slinging daredevils. In the good old days, blithe talents like Clarke Gable and Jean Arthur made it look easy, but making good movies is never easy. Capra and Wilder, Hawks and Cukor made magic through certainty of purpose and hard graft at the typewriter. Clooney’s heart is in the right place, but no amount of clever homage, genuine affection or old-fashioned tenacity can make up for a dull script and an inattentive presentation.

George Clooney is the sort of movie star who gets to do what he wants, especially if he's willing to direct himself. In this case the period football comedy Leatherheads had been languishing on the shelf at Universal for decades, and was going to be directed by Steven Soderbergh at one time. Clooney's version is a sweetly daffy valentine to classic Hollywood screwball comedies, Coen brothers comedies and romantic comedies. Clooney stars as a handsome over-the-hill football player who's pretty smart but gets beat up on the playing field and takes plenty of pratfalls and romances a wise-cracking reporter (Renee Zellweger).

Does Clooney have the directing chops of Howark Hawks (His Girl Friday's Rosalind Russell is a model for Zellweger's tough-girl reporter) or the Coens? That's a tall order, but he does use the Coens' storyboard artist, and the film looks great. It could have been a tad sharper and faster and better, and I suspect it will have more appeal to women over 25 than anyone else. Whether the football marketing will alienate them is anyone's guess, and the critics are bound to be mixed. Here's Variety's review.

Universal has been spending heavily on Leatherheads, even giving it a Superbowl send-off spot, but I can't imagine it will make its P & A money back, much less its budget. Which will make it all the more difficult for execution-dependent, overtly uncommercial movies like this to get made. All power to Clooney for having the moxie to go for it, commerciality be damned.