June is African-American Music Appreciation Month — Black Music Month, as President Barack Obama officially shortened it in 2009 — and digital television channel Bounce TV, as well as its streaming-platform arm Brown Sugar, is celebrating the month with a bevy of films and documentaries.
Houston's own Beyoncé Knowles Carter will be featured in two such productions.
Over at Bounce, you can see her in Cadillac Records, the 2008 biopic on legendary Chicago blues label Chess Records. She plays Etta James, while Mos Def takes on Chuck Berry and Jeffrey Wright assumes the role of Muddy Waters. (The movie will air on these days and times.)
Meanwhile, on Brown Sugar, you can also see Beyoncé: On Top, the hour-long, 2018 doc that chronicles her rise from Houston girl to Destiny's Child frontwoman to the all-powerful Queen Bey.
Bounce TV will also show the 1978 musical The Wiz, starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross; the 2005 Dirty South rap drama Hustle & Flow, starring Terrence Howard; Idlewild, that 2006 musical starring Big Boi and Andre 3000 from OutKast; and the 1992 inner-city drama Juice, starring the late, great Tupac Shakur.
And, on Brown Sugar (which will be free to anyone accessing the service through Xfinity X1 from June 15-21), look for documentaries and concert films featuring such icons as Michael Jackson, Prince, Al Green, Rihanna, and gospel legend Mahalia Jackson.
For more information, visit the Bounce TV site here.
For all its cheesy ‘80s greatness, the original version of The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was a very loose adaptation of the novel by Stephen King. For the new remake, writer/director Edgar Wright has tried to hue much closer to the story laid out in the book, a decision that has both its positive and negative aspects.
Glen Powell takes over for Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, a family man/hothead who can’t seem to hold a job in the dystopian America in which he lives. Desperate to take care of his family, he applies to be on one of the many game shows fed to the masses that promise riches in exchange for humiliation or worse. Thanks to his temper, Ben is chosen for the most popular one of all, The Running Man, in which contestants must survive 30 days while hunters, as well as the general population, track them down.
Given a 12-hour head start, Ben earns money for every day he survives, as well as every hunter he eliminates. Since he only has a relatively small amount of money to use as he pleases, Ben must rely on friendly citizens who are willing to put their own lives on the line to help him. That’s a task made even more difficult as the gamemakers, led by Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), use advanced AI to manipulate footage of Ben to make him seem like a guy for which no one should root.
Co-written by Michael Bacall, the film is shockingly uninteresting, working neither as an exciting action film, a fun quippy comedy, or social commentary. The biggest problem is that Wright seems to have no interest in developing any of his characters, starting with Ben. Our introduction to the protagonist is him trying to get his job back, a situation for which there is little context even after we’re beaten over the head with exposition.
The situation in which Ben finds himself should be easy to make sympathetic, but Wright and Bacall speed through scenes that might have emphasized that aspect in favor of ones that make the story less personal. The filmmakers really want to showcase the supposed antagonistic relationship between Ben and Dan (and the system which Dan represents), but all that effort results in little drama.
Ben has a number of close calls, and while those scenes are full of action and violence, almost every one of them feels emotionally inert, as if there was nothing at stake. It doesn’t help that Wright doesn’t set the scene well, making it unclear how far Ben has traveled or who/what he’s up against. There are times when Ben feels surrounded and others when he can walk freely, weird for a society that’s supposed to be under almost complete surveillance.
Powell has been touted as a movie star in the making for several years following his turn in Top Gun: Maverick, but he does little here to make that label stick. With no consistent co-star thanks to the structure of the story, he’s required to carry the film, and he just doesn’t have the juice that a true movie star is supposed to have. Nobody else is served well by the scattershot film, including normally reliable people like Brolin, Colman Domingo, Michael Cera, and Lee Pace.
The Running Man is a big misfire by Wright and a blow to Powell’s star power. On the surface, it has all the hallmarks of an action thriller with a side of social commentary, but nothing it does or says lands in any meaningful way. Schwarzenegger’s one-liners in the original film may have been goofy and over-the-top, but at least they made the movie memorable, which is way more than can be said of the remake.
