Tony Todd Movies
Colors stars Robert Duvall and Sean Penn as partners on the LAPD's gang crime division. Duvall had hoped to spend more time with his family, but he's pulled back into active service because of a step-up in gang activity. He makes no secret of his contempt for his novice partner Penn, but eventually comes to rely on the younger man as a valuable street contact. The central crisis is the battle for supremacy between the "Crips" and the "Bloods", with every effort to call a truce stymied by the gang members themselves and by undue police intervention. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Sean Penn, Robert Duvall, (more)
Forest Whitaker stars as the brilliant jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker in this elegiac biopic. Director Clint Eastwood pays full homage to Parker's musical genius, but also devotes ample time to the musician's twin demons--drugs and alcohol-which accelerated his death at the age of 34. In his struggles to gain widespread acceptance for his music, "Bird" is forever stymied by his own self-destructiveness, and forever bailed out by the love of his life, Chan Richardson Parker (Diane Venora). The film bemoans the decline of the brand of jazz fathered by Parker, which came to be replaced by more conventional material -- as illustrated by the "descent" into the mainstream of Parker's mentor Buster Franklin. Also starring in Bird is Samuel E. Wright as Dizzy Gillespie. That's the real Charlie "Bird" Parker on the film's soundtrack, though most of the background music has been re-orchestrated. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Forest Whitaker, Diane Venora, (more)
- 1987
- R
In this violent crime drama, the residents of a New York City housing project live in fear of The Vampires, the brutal gang that continually terrorizes them. Things change after an insurance agent and a telephone repairman end up trapped there. Perhaps things would not be so desperate had the fellow not accidentally offended one of the gang members. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Gary Frank, Ray Parker, Jr., (more)
- 1986
- R
Mysterious and suspenseful, with a touch of the supernatural thrown in, this first feature by director Sara Driver follows Nicole (Suzanne Fletcher), a woman who works at a computer all day, through an odd and menacing series of events. Nicole has been translating an old Chinese manuscript, and the more she translates the stranger her life becomes. Surreal events seem to interrupt reality on a regular basis. A Japanese woman who worked on the manuscript has been killed, Nicole's roommate Isabelle (Ann Magnuson) develops some inexplicable problems, and now Nicole's son is missing after he fell asleep in Isabelle's car, which was then stolen. A desperate Nicole goes out looking for her son in a reality that seems less and less "real" all the time. This film was in competition at the 1987 U.S. Film Festival. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Suzanne Fletcher, Ann Magnuson, (more)
- 1986
In this comedy thriller, the words of the title Bang! You're Dead! are what anyone with a computer and foolish enough to let the mad scientist in this film gain access to it is likely to see, before something ingeniously awful happens to him. The scientist met an American schoolteacher at the Frankfurt airport as she was arriving to participate in a convention for teachers of German. Almost immediately, she gets embroiled in a series of adventures, beginning with the scientist having a heart attack, being taken in hand by emergency services, and then recovering sufficiently to give them (and her) the slip. She then encounters the doctor's assistant, who knows he is up to no good, and plans to find him and thwart his plan to wreak mayhem via computer. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ingolf Lück, Rebecca Pauly, (more)
Helene Hanff's book 84 Charing Cross Road had previously been a TV program and a stage play before it was converted into this 1986 film. The scene is New York, 1949: Anne Bancroft plays a struggling writer and passionate bibliophile, who answers an advertisement from a rare-volumes bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road in London. Thus begins a two-decade romance by correspondence between Bancroft and Briton Anthony Hopkins, the man in charge of the overseas department of Marks and Company. Though several meetings are arranged, Bancroft and Hopkins never come face to face thanks to mitigating circumstances. But Anne finally makes it to London, and finds that much has changed. 84 Charing Cross Road was produced by Mel Brooks, the husband of star Anne Bancroft. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins, (more)
Oliver Stone's breakthrough as a director, Platoon is a brutally realistic look at a young soldier's tour of duty in Vietnam. Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) is a college student who quits school to volunteer for the Army in the late '60s. He's shipped off to Vietnam, where he serves with a culturally diverse group of fellow soldiers under two men who lead the platoon: Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger), whose facial scars are a mirror of the violence and corruption of his soul, and Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe), who maintains a Zen-like calm in the jungle and fights with both personal and moral courage even though he no longer believes in the war. After a few weeks "in country," Taylor begins to see the naïveté of his views of the war, especially after a quick search for enemy troops devolves into a round of murder and rape. Unlike Hollywood's first wave of Vietnam movies (including The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Coming Home), Platoon is a grunts-eye view of the war, touching on moral issues but focusing on the men who fought the battles and suffered the wounds. In this sense, it resembles older war movies more than its Vietnam peers, as it mixes familiar elements of onscreen battle with small realistic details: bugs, jungle rot, exhaustion, C-rations, marijuana, and counting the days before you go home. This mix of traditional war movie elements with a contemporary sensibility won Platoon four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, and a reputation as one of the definitive modern war films. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, (more)
