Saul Williams Movies
This documentary showcases ambitious hip-hop acts that are attempting to maintain a career, and catch the eye of a music label that will help give them more stable footing in the business. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stress Mykill Myers, Saul Williams, (more)
Filmmaker Drew Thomas brings California's popular Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival to the screen with a different kind of musical documentary that not only showcases performances by some of the hottest acts to take the stage, but offers interviews with such musical icons as Beck, Joshua Homme, Mos Def, and Perry Farrell as well. From English icon Morrissey's performance at the inaugural Coachella Festival back in 1999 to Canadian indie rockers the Arcade Fire's electric 2005 set, the musical acts featured here run the gamut from hip-hop to alternative and virtually everything in between. Other artists featured include the Pixies, the Flaming Lips, Kool Keith, Radiohead, Saul Williams, and Squarepusher. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
A young boy grows up among a makeshift family of oddballs and dreamers in this adaptation of Ruben Santiago-Hudson's acclaimed one-man show. Ruben Junior (Marcus Carl Franklin) is a young boy who was born in the late '40s into a family that started crumbling not long after he was born. Ruben Junior's parents were from Lackawanna, a city in Upstate New York, and were living in a rooming house run by Nanny Crosby (S. Epatha Merkerson), whose place was a hub for the local African-American community. When Ruben Junior's parents split up, he and his mother return to Lackawanna and Nanny's rooming house; with mother overworked physically and in sad shape emotionally, Nanny takes Ruben Junior under her wing, and offers him the sort of nurturing she gives all her boarders. Nanny's house is full of people struggling for a fresh start in life, ranging from former convicts to recovering drug addicts, and she opens both her doors and her heart to them as they strive to make themselves better people. Ruben Junior finds a loving home amidst the colorful eccentrics in Nanny's circle of friends, but as America changes over the course of the 1950s and '60s, so does the neighborhood where Nanny and her tenants live -- and not for the better. Produced for the premium cable network HBO, Lackawanna Blues features a stellar supporting cast, including Delroy Lindo, Louis Gossett Jr., Rosie Perez, Jimmy Smits, Jeffrey Wright, Mos Def, and Ernie Hudson. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- S. Epatha Merkerson, Julie Benz, (more)
Poetry has long been a medium that has communicated the concerns of the heart and mind during times of crisis, and one subject that has motivated many poets to reach for their pen is war. Many of the world's great poets have written eloquently about the violence and madness of armed conflict, among them Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Sherman Pearl, and Siegfried Sassoon among many others, and in 2003, when Laura Bush invited a group of poets to visit the White House for a symposium on American verse, author Sam Hamill responded by founding an activist group called Poets Against the War, and persuaded many of the participants to contribute verse that denounced American military policy. Filmmaker Rick King has examined the link between poetry and anti-war protest in the documentary Voices in Wartime, which looks at how many writers have used their poems as a vehicle of protest, the events that promoted poets to speak out, and how the tragic consequences have inspired both experienced and novice writers alike. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Chris Abani, Sinan Antoon, (more)
- 2005
911 Power to the Peaceful Festival '05 documents a music festival designed to spread information about a variety of political issues. Among the musicians and notable personalities who spoke or performed were Woody Harrelson, Angela Davis, and Michael Franti. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Michael Franti, Spearhead, (more)
The documentary Soundz of Spirit, an attempt to make viewers understand a lesser-recognized aspect of hip-hop life, involves interviews with a variety of hip-hop artists who discuss how their spiritual life interacts with their creative life. Among the artists interviewed are KRS-1, Andre 3000 from OutKast, and Talib Kweli. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
The 1995 novel by Dr. Gene Brewer becomes this drama from director Iain Softley. After a mugging incident at New York's Grand Central Station, Prot (Kevin Spacey), a man who claims to be an alien from the planet K-PAX, is turned over to a public mental hospital and the care of Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges). When medication fails to alter Prot's insistence that he is visiting from another world on a fact-finding mission, Powell gets more involved with his patient, who seems to have a calming effect on the other residents of his ward. At first convinced that Prot is a delusional who can be treated, Powell begins to wonder if his bizarre patient's story is true, particularly after the hospital's doctors find that Prot possesses the baffling ability to see ultraviolet light. As the date grows nearer when Prot claims he must leave Earth (a "class BA-III planet"), Powell becomes increasingly concerned that a psychiatric breakthrough must occur by then. K-PAX (2001) co-stars Alfre Woodard and Mary McCormack. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, (more)
- 2001
Deniz (Serpil Turhan) is an actress of Turkish ancestry in her early twenties who is living in Berlin. One day, she wakes up in an unusually good mood, and decides it's time she does something to improve her life. Over the course of the day, things begin to go her way -- she gets a job dubbing a French film into German, she parts ways with her listless boyfriend Jan (Florian Stetter), she has a promising audition with a film director (Hanns Zischler), and she keeps running into a handsome stranger named Diego (Bilge Bingul); they finally speak, and have a pleasant evening sharing dinner. The next morning, Deniz wakes to what appears to be another good day. Thomas Arslan's subtle, character-driven approach in Der Schone Tag shows the influence of Eric Rohmer, to whom Arslan nods in the dubbing sequence, in which his characters are recording a new dialogue track to Rohmer's Conte d'ete. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Originally shot in 1980-81, this film, directed by Edo Bertoglio, is a rare real-life snapshot of ultra-hip subculture of post-punk era Manhattan. Starring renowned artist Jean Michel Basquiat (who died in 1988 at age 27) and featuring such early Village hipsters as Melle Mel, John Lurie, and Lydia Lunch, the film is a bizarre elliptical urban fairytale. The film opens with Jean (Basquiat) in the hospital with an undisclosed ailment. After checking out, he happens upon an enigmatic woman, Beatrice (Anna Schroeder), who drives around in a convertible. He arrives at his apartment only to discover that his landlord is evicting him. Later, while trying to sell his art work, he meets up with musician Arto Lindsay and his band DNA. Jean eventually does manage to sell some of his art work to a rich middle-aged woman who is interested in more than just his art, but she pays with a check. As the film progresses, he wanders the streets of New York, looking for Beatrice. He happens upon a bag lady (Debbie Harry) who turns into a princess when he kisses her. As a reward, she gives him a stack of cash. Abandoned in the mid-'80s due to financial problems, producer Maripol Fauque rediscovered the film and cleaned it up in 1999. It was screened at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jean-Michel Basquiat, Anna Schroeder, (more)
- 1998
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The phenomenon of the poetry slam originated in Chicago in the 1980s, where young writers would perform their verses in competitive form at bars and coffeehouses before a live audience. Poets would be given three minutes to perform a piece they wrote themselves, and a panel of judges (chosen at random from the audience) would rate the poets and their delivery on a scale of one to ten. As spoken word performance gained a new popularity in the '90s, the poetry slam began to spread nationwide, and soon four-member slam teams from different cities were competing against each other around the U.S. Slam Nation: The Sport of the Spoken Word is a documentary shot at the 1996 National Poetry Slam in Portland, Oregon, in which groups of young performers from across the country compete with their streetwise, aggressively-performed verses in front of an enthusiastic audience. Director Paul Devlin, who has also directed sports programming for ESPN, focuses on the competitive nature of the performances onstage, and their more contemplative and philosophical sides offstage. One of the featured performers, Saul Williams, also starred in a dramatic feature about the poetry slam movement, Slam. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Saul Williams
Filmmaker Marc Levin, known for his documentaries exploring prison life, drug addiction, and street gangs, won the 1998 Sundance Film Festival grand jury prize when he made his feature dramatic directorial debut with this downbeat prison drama about a black poet jailed on minor drug charges. At "Dodge City," a Washington, D.C., housing project, streetwise Ray Joshua (Saul Williams), a marijuana dealer who writes poetry, sees his drug connection gunned down, winds up busted as a murder suspect, and is also charged with possession. Incarcerated in a tough D.C. jail, Ray is caught between two rival gangs, Thug Life and the Union, when both compete for his membership, and he becomes friends with the Union's leader, Hopha (Vibe columnist Bonz Malone), and Lauren (Sonja Sohn), a volunteer who runs the prison's creative writing workshop. Prison yard fights between the rival gangs prompt a poem of such passion that Hopha decides to bring his connections into play to arrange for Ray's bail. Back in Dodge City, Ray learns Big Mike was blinded yet is still alive, and he joins Lauren in a poetry session. Real-life poets Williams and Sohn wrote their own material. This film was produced by Levin, New York nightclub owner Henri Kessler, and Prison Life magazine founder Richard Stratton, who spent eight years in prison on marijuana charges. Stratton encountered Williams during a 1996 poetry reading at New York's Nuyorican Poets Cafe. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Saul Williams, Sonja Sohn, (more)
