Tag Archives: Michael B. Jordan

Movie Review: Sinners

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The new movie “Sinners” stars Michael B. Jordan, who plays two roles, Stack and Smoke, in a rare example of one actor playing twin brothers.

This film is set in the Deep South, 1932, Clarksdale, Mississippi, where twin brothers, Stack and Smoke, return home to open a juke joint. There is massive evidence of bigotry, and members of the Klan as Smoke and Stack, throw money around town, attempting to convince people to perform or work at the new juke joint. Much of this is rather slow and boring for most of the movie until the entire story takes a gigantic turn into murdering vampires and zombies and violent battle scenes, until the insane conclusion, making this the strangest turn on a dime story change I have ever seen in any movie.

This movie is both written and directed by Ryan Coogler, marking his fifth collaboration with Michael B. Jordan that includes both “Black Panther” movies (2018, 2022), “Creed” (2015), and “Fruitvale Station” (2013), Jordan’s first movie.

I was surprised that a promising story degraded into something that seemed more like a B movie, and another run-of-the-mill Vampire film. I was also surprised at the appearance of actress Hailee Steinfeld, who seemed miscast in this movie, playing Stack’s love interest.

The special effects, while well done, have been seen many times before, with battle scenes involving the living and the dead, and the various methods of how to kill a Vampire. At this point, enough of the killing of the already dead.

The biggest surprise is the extremely high and wrong 98% rating for this movie on Rotten Tomatoes, with my rating 75% and only a very small recommendation, because there is nothing new in this story, other than the sudden and drastic change in direction.

Movie Review: Creed III

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In 1980, Robert De Niro won the best Oscar for “Raging Bull”, released in 1980, he created a new genre of acting that included becoming a great athlete first – by training for months, to play Jake La Motta, the great middleweight boxer. De Niro’s performance in Raging Bull was so significant that there was no way he was not going to win the Oscar for best actor, even to the point of moving the best actor nomination for Timothy Hutton in “Ordinary People” to supporting actor, so he could win a deserved acting award for his outstanding performance for that great movie. De Niro then went on to gain 60 pounds so he could play La Motta in his later years, making De Niro’s great acting performance secondary to an amazing physical achievement unprecedented in movie history.

For all of the 9 Rocky and Creed movies, one has to admire the physical shape of all of the actors in the boxing scenes are in. This requires a great deal of hard work and training for months in order to become believable in their roles as professional boxers. For the 3rd installment of the Creed franchise, “Creed III” the shape Micheal B. Jordan and Jonathon Majors are in for this film is some of the best within both the Rocky and Creed series.

The boxing scenes are as always – not realistic because no human brain can take repeated shots like these and continue boxing. The other flaw with most of these movies is that the Boxing Association would never sanction a fight where one boxer is in a completely different weight class than the other fighter. In this case, Jonathan Majors, who plays Damian Anderson weighs at least 240 and Michael B. Jordan, who plays Adonis Creed is at most 205 pounds. In the real world of professional boxing, middle-weight or lightweight boxers do not fight heavy-weight boxers.

Aside from the flaws in this film, I thought the story was as good as the previous 2 Creed movies, although the extremely fast rise of Damian who gets out of prison and very quickly gets to fight for the heavyweight title is not believable under any circumstances. But this is a movie and very often to create a great conflict story, corners sometimes have to be cut.

Overall, I thought that the acting was good throughout this film, with Tessa Thompson, as Adonis Creed’s wife, and
Phylicia Rashad, as Creed’s mother. Florian Munteanu, returns as Drago from Creed II and he weighs close to 260 pounds, making the weight class issue even more obvious in the last movie.

There is no mention of the character of Rocky throughout this entire story, and due to politics with Sylvester Stallone and Irwin Winkler, it seems that Stallone has been pushed out of the Creed franchise. One reason is that producer Irwin Winkler owns the rights to both franchises. I would rather have seen some explanation about what happened to Rocky, given that he was battling Cancer in the last movie and Stallone gave such a great performance in the previous 2 Creed movies.

I agree with the high Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Creed III of 86% and highly recommend this film.

Movie Review: A Journal For Jordan

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For the far too few of us who include empathy as one of their most valued traits – this review is for you.

I have often wondered how any actor, director and especially a screenwriter must feel when they toil for weeks, months or even years on a project – then complete it – then wait for the day when the movie is released so desperate with hope that the movie they spent years of their lives working on gets reviewed positively. Then their hard work gets trashed by a few critics who have no clue what they are writing about. How must that feel? How hard is something like that to recover from?

For the new movie “A Journal For Jordan”, directed by none other than Denzel Washington and starring Michael B. Jordan and relative newcomer Chanté Adams, the Rotten Tomatoes ratings are a downright stupid 40%. This rating ranks as one of the worst out of proportion opinions I have ever even heard about.

Obviously, this is one of those films that going on you already know will be a tear-jerker from the start. This is a true a story about a young couple’s early relationship told mostly with flashbacks. Dana, played by Adams and is a writer for the NY Times, Charles, played by Jordan, is a soldier who winds up going to Iraq soon after the 2001 Terrorist attacks. We all see tragedy coming a mile down the road, but this does not take away from this very well produced and acted real life story. This story is based on a Novel by Dana Canedy A Journal for Jordan (Movie Tie-In): A Story of Love and Honor that some years ago was a best seller and important enough to catch the eye of Denzel Washington to produce and create this movie.

I thought this story was very well told with a very emotional ending that worked extremely well. What the hell the critics are thinking this time around, I have no idea. 94% for a bad recent Spiderman movie with an idiotic premise and this real life story about true love, life and death gets 40%. None of this makes any sense. Making movies is in fact a brutal field to choose as a career. This movie definitely proves that.

My rating is a solid 80% and I highly recommend this movie.