Cynthia Wood Movies
This independently produced drama from director Andrew P. Jones travels back to the Great Depression of the 1930s. It tells the sad saga of Homer Hobbs (Tyson Beckford), a young African-American man who wraps up a two-year jail sentence and returns home to his dead-end small town with a complete lack of prospects. Instinctively, Homer develops a rapport and begins to stick together with four other people roughly in the same boat as he is: Clarence (Glynn Turman), a zero who longs to be someone significant; Gracie (Lynn Whitfield), a down-and-out boarding-house owner who harbors a shocking secret; Benny (Reginald T. Dorsey), a street hustler who plans to relocate to sunny Florida and start afresh; and Lucy (Linara Washington), a woman whose scandalous past threatens to destroy the lives of those around her. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Starring:
- Tyson Beckford, Linara Washington, (more)
In September 2004, comedian Dave Chappelle took a break from his immensely successful Comedy Central show to stage a free, unpublicized, all-star hip-hop concert in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. Inviting fans over the Internet, on the street, and even in his family's hometown of Yellow Springs, OH, Chappelle asked filmmaker Michel Gondry to document the event from its inception on through to the performances themselves. The result is Dave Chappelle's Block Party, a concert film that provides not only a sampling of the music on display that September, but also an intimate look at the comedian himself. Gondry's cameras tag along with Chappelle as he visits Ohio, recruits a university marching band to play at the show, and surveys the opinions of Clinton Hill on the show that's about to take place. Along the way, we're introduced to some the comedian's favorite acts, in rehearsals and on-stage: Dead Prez, Jill Scott, Mos Def, the Roots, Erykah Badu, Kanye West, and the surprise reuniting of the Fugees. ~ Michael Hastings, Rovi
- Starring:
- Dave Chappelle, Kanye West, (more)
Francis Coppola had more than his share of production difficulties while shooting his epic-scale Vietnam War drama Apocalypse Now, including disastrous weather conditions, problems with his leading men (Harvey Keitel was fired after less than two weeks on the project and was replaced by Martin Sheen, who suffered a heart attack midway through production), and a schedule and budget that quickly spiraled out of control (originally budgeted at $10 million, the film's final cost was over $30 million). But Coppola's troubles didn't end when he got his footage into the editing room, and he tinkered with a number of different structures and endings before settling on the film's 153-minute final cut in time for its initial theatrical release in 1979. Twenty-two years later, Francis Coppola returned to the material, and created Apocalypse Now Redux, an expanded and re-edited version of the film that adds 53 minutes of footage excised from the film's original release. In addition to adding a number of smaller moments that even out the film's rhythms, Apocalypse Now Redux restores two much-discussed sequences that Coppola chose not to include in his original edition of the film -- an encounter in the jungle between Willard (Martin Sheen), his crewmates Chief (Albert Hall), Clean (Larry Fishburne), Chef (Frederic Forrest), and Lance (Sam Bottoms) and a trio of stranded Playboy models on a U.S.O. tour, as well as a stopover at a plantation operated by French colonists De Marais (Christian Marquand) and Roxanne (Aurore Clement). Apocalypse Now Redux received a limited theatrical release in August of 2001 after a well-received screening at the Cannes Film Festival -- the same month that the film finally reached theaters in 1979, after a rough cut received a Golden Palm award at the Cannes Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, (more)
One of a cluster of late-1970s films about the Vietnam War, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now adapts the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness to depict the war as a descent into primal madness. Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen), already on the edge, is assigned to find and deal with AWOL Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), rumored to have set himself up in the Cambodian jungle as a local, lethal godhead. Along the way Willard encounters napalm and Wagner fan Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), draftees who prefer to surf and do drugs, a USO Playboy Bunny show turned into a riot by the raucous soldiers, and a jumpy photographer (Dennis Hopper) telling wild, reverent tales about Kurtz. By the time Willard sees the heads mounted on stakes near Kurtz's compound, he knows Kurtz has gone over the deep end, but it is uncertain whether Willard himself now agrees with Kurtz's insane dictum to "Drop the Bomb. Exterminate them all." Coppola himself was not certain either, and he tried several different endings between the film's early rough-cut screenings for the press, the Palme d'Or-winning "work-in-progress" shown at Cannes, and the final 35 mm U.S. release (also the ending on the video cassette). The chaotic production also experienced shut-downs when a typhoon destroyed the set and star Sheen suffered a heart attack; the budget ballooned and Coppola covered the overages himself. These production headaches, which Coppola characterized as being like the Vietnam War itself, have been superbly captured in the documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Despite the studio's fears and mixed reviews of the film's ending, Apocalypse Now became a substantial hit and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Duvall's psychotic Kilgore, and Best Screenplay. It won Oscars for sound and for Vittorio Storaro's cinematography. This hallucinatory, Wagnerian project has produced admirers and detractors of equal ardor; it resembles no other film ever made, and its nightmarish aura and polarized reception aptly reflect the tensions and confusions of the Vietnam era. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
- Starring:
- Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, (more)
- 1979
- R
A guy who lives for cars and girls find both on Los Angeles's main drag for cruising in this teen-oriented comedy from the '70s. Bobby (Bill Adler) is a kid from middle-of-nowhere California who is crazy for cars. Bobby's girlfriend Jo (Susanne Severeid) is more interested in settling down than racing, so when he hears about Van Nuys Boulevard in Los Angeles, the number-one place for hot rodders to cruise in California, he hops in his souped-up van and hits the highway. Arriving in L.A. Bobby hits Van Nuys and soon meets a handful of other gearheads, including Chooch (David Hayward), who has been king of the strip for years and lives with his car in his garage; Greg (Dennis Bowen), a nice guy chasing his dream girl; Zass (Dana Gladstone), a hard-nosed cop trying to shut down the hot-rodders; and Wanda (Tara Strohmeier), a beautiful carhop who serves up sex along with cheeseburgers. But things really take a turn for Bobby when he crosses paths with Moon (Cynthia Wood), a pretty girl who also digs cars and whose van is a match for his own. Cynthia Wood, who played Moon, was Playboy Magazine's Playmate of the Year in 1974, and later played a model for the magazine visiting troops in Vietnam in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Bill Adler, Cynthia Wood, (more)
A frankly adult comedy about the sex lives of the aimless and the rich, Shampoo is also a pointed commentary on the demise of 1960s idealism at the dawn of the Nixon era. It is Election Day, 1968, and randy Beverly Hills hairdresser George Roundy (Warren Beatty) is too worried about attending to all of his women's tonsorial and sexual needs, while trying to swing a bank loan to fund his own salon, to notice the fateful Presidential race. As George juggles the demands of girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn) and mistress Felicia (Lee Grant), not to mention Felicia's daughter (Carrie Fisher), he meets Felicia's husband Lester (Jack Warden) to get money for the salon and discovers that his beloved ex-girlfriend Jackie (Julie Christie) is now Lester's mistress. Lester asks George to escort Jackie to a banquet for Nixon supporters, leading to a series of climactic confrontations at the dinner and a Hollywood orgy that expose the conflicting demands of sex, love, and security among these terminally narcissistic L.A. denizens. As Nixon's victory speech drones in the background the following day and Paul Simon's mournful '60s music plays on the soundtrack, George's free-wheeling world collapses around him for reasons that he can barely begin to comprehend. Produced and co-written (with Chinatown scribe Robert Towne) by its star Warren Beatty, Shampoo became Beatty's second critical and popular success as a producer after Bonnie and Clyde, and it bolstered Hal Ashby's track record as director. Shampoo earned Grant an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, as well as a Supporting Actor nomination for Warden and Beatty's first nomination as writer. With Nixon's 1974 Watergate disgrace adding an extra edge to the humor for 1975 audiences, this tragic bedroom farce became one of the highest-grossing films in Columbia Pictures' history at the time. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
- Starring:
- Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, (more)
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