I turn 30 today…I had big ideas of what I wanted to write down and now I’m drawing a blank…I guess all I can say is that while a lot of people might see turning another decade older as bad, I see it as moving on from the roller coaster ride that were the twenties. Not that my twenties were bad, at all. But it was a roller coaster ride, one that I’m hoping tapers out into my much more calm thirties.

I am hoping that turning 30 wipes the slate clean and I can restart anew in a new decade of my life; again, not that things are bad, but it’ll be good to restart…it’s like a new year!

Here are some baby pics:

Newborn, first baby pic

9 days old

2 months!

The Mother Brain Files: Red Tails Movie Review
By Mother Brain

Before I dive right into my review, I want to quickly share my initial reaction after seeing the George Lucas-produced historical war drama Red Tails. I wrote a comment on Facebook about how refreshing it was to finally see some heroic African-American role models who can inspire the young people of our generation. There’s no surprise that some of my friends would respectfully counter my point when they reference today’s African-American movie stars like Will Smith and Denzel Washington who often play heroic characters of color. While they’ve had their own struggles in their careers, they’ve also grown to a level of super-stardom in which they can play larger than life characters. The difference between them and the young actors in Red Tails, however, has less to do with star status and more to do with depicting real life heroes who don’t always have the answers and are not afraid to show vulnerability.

As reported in the press recently, Red Tails took over 20 years for George Lucas to get produced into a feature film. Despite Lucas’ massive success with the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, no studio in Hollywood was willing to risk bankrolling on an all-black, action-adventure film; especially when it’s a period piece requiring lots of special effects.  As a result, Lucas covered the production and marketing costs himself and hired television director Anthony Hemingway of HBO’s The Wire to helm the project with a screenplay by former comedy writer John Ridley.

The story is set in 1944 near the end of World War II with the African-American pilots of the Tuskegee program are not only battling the Nazis in the air but also having to battle racial discrimination within the military. But even by having to deal with hand-me-down fighter planes, simplistic missions, and the threat of their program being shut down, the Tuskegee pilots ultimately prove their worth on the most dangerous missions ever given to any American fighter pilots period.

There were many aspects to the film that stood out to me. One of them was nice cinematic comebacks of Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrance Howard. Gooding’s once promising career following an Oscar win for Jerry Maguire in 1996 was tarnished with humiliation following a string of box office flops in the comedy genre while Howard’s negative attitude on film sets had cost him major roles. The performances of Gooding as the tough Tuskegee base Major and Howard as the supporting Colonel tackling the military politics back at home reminded me of why they were so talented to begin with. They show growth as actors as well as a sense of pride and defiance in their respective scenes.

The film also had a plethora of up and coming black actors in the roles of the pilots themselves. Although everyone had their special moments, it had to be David Oyelowo (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and Nate Parker (The Great Debaters) who were truly the heart and soul of the film. A lot of critics whose reviews I’ve read panned their individual subplots for being uninspired. But they completely miss the context of the characters’ relationship. As Lucas stated in a recent New York Times interview, Parker’s role as “Easy” was a metaphor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in that he “respects the army brass and plays by the rules”; Oyelowo’s role as “Lightning”, however, was a metaphor of Malcolm X in that he “bristles at authority and blows up German warships when he chooses.” But of the two stand-out performances, Oyelowo made the most impression to me. After having played a sinister corporate antagonist in last summer’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Oyelowo turned on the charm and winning personality that I’d say many in the audience identified with.

Finally, there was the amazing cinematography of John Aronson. As many people know, there was a good amount of sets and locations that were CGI with the actors working around a green screen setup which was the case in making the Star Wars prequels. But it never took me away from the story. I found myself mesmerized by the classical look of the Tuskegee base and the way in which the pilots are photographed beautifully just like the great photographic works of the late African-American photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks. The dogfights in the air were also a spectacular sight to see. One could understand what inspired Lucas’ spectacular space battles in the Star Wars films after seeing how skilled and courageous these pilots really were. The folks at Industrial Light & Magic carefully studied the remaining real war footage to get the details down to create some amazing aerial feats. You have to see it to believe it.

It’s hard for me to discuss the things that didn’t work in Red Tails. A lot of people complained about some of the cheesy dialogue and the lack of stand out performances due to director Hemingway’s lack of film experience. I’ll be bias in saying that none of these criticisms mattered to me whatsoever. Much of this bias had to do with the film reminding me of my grandfather who fought in the war and whose stories were shared with me by my dad. I don’t think the film necessarily holds a candle to the more realistic and stylish aerial combat sequences in Top Gun. But to me, the real experience of seeing Red Tails was to watch a story about young African-American boys who became men in the midst of combat. Men who were incredibly daring and courageous even in the face of fear and adversity. I believe it is truly an inspiring story for everyone no matter what your nationality is.

It is also a timely story that I hope will help young African-American men of our generation realize that true to life heroes don’t brag about their fame and fortune or get overpaid because of their talents in music, sports, or entertainment in general. Real heroes never get held down by adversity or fear. Red Tails gave me a reason to believe that there are heroes of color who still exist in the world.

Source: Coming Soon

News broke today that Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight Schrute on the US version of “The Office”, has been in talks with show runner Paul Libererstein and NBC about potentially making a Schrute Farms spin-off.

In “The Office” Wilson’s Schrute character is the owner of Schrute Farms, an old Beet Farm and currently a Bed and Breakfast that has housed generations of Schrute family members.

They said that the Dwight character would be not leave “The Office” right away, if the series is renewed for another season; but would appear on the show until the potential mid-season show of Schrute Farms.

I for one hope that they make it in the same manner as “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” as a documentary comedy show.

Our friend Alison sent us this pic of her cat with this caption:

“Bathroom cat is watching u be gangsta”

From those crazy kids at College Humor! My friend Sean showed me this video. You won’t be disappointed!

The Mother Brain Files: The Robocop Series

By Mother Brain

The year was 1987. My wonderful grandmother took my cousin and I to a local supermarket in Brooklyn to do food shopping. I remember passing by a bus stop with a large poster of a man in metal stepping out of his car. It was an image that was etched in my mind for over a year until one night when I snuck into my parents bedroom where they had cable. They were watching a movie on HBO called Robocop and it starred the very character I saw on that poster just a year earlier.

Like many young boys born in the 80s, I saw Robocop as a live action superhero. The story about a slain Detroit cop named Alex Murphy who gets resurrected into a law enforcement cyborg by a major corporation called OCP reminded me of all the comic books I read at the time. Robocop was just as much of a childhood fad as Ghostbusters and Batman. But it was in my adult years, however, when I learned to appreciate the film’s underling story about the evils of capitalism and the character serving as a Christ metaphor. The combination of memorable characters, storytelling with substance, and over the top violence with a purpose puts Robocop next to Ghostbusters as one of my all time favorite films.

As I had done previously with Beverly Hills Cop, I’ll be looking back at the Robocop films as well as his live action television incarnations. While the sequels and TV shows never measured up to the original, they each had some positive aspects. But for the most part, they were really just “glitches”.

Robocop (1987)

So where do I begin? While screenwriters Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner laid out the groundwork for this corporate crazy world where law enforcement is privatized and American capitalism is satirized in parody commercials, it was Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven who set a tone that no other filmmaker had been able to match successfully. His use of excessive violence was not only entertainment value for action junkies but it also revealed how absurd the people the world are. The horror of ED-209 blasting an young OCP executive into hamburger meat was minimal compared to the sight of other executives pushing him out of their way and the Old Man character’s lack of remorse when he utters the line “Dick, I’m very disappointed.” When it comes to the actors, Robocop was undoubtedly Peter Weller’s signature role. Over the years, I’ve learned to appreciate Weller’s efforts while suffering in a fiberglass suit and using mime techniques to get the proper movements down. More importantly, the audience feels pain when the character himself is vulnerable and Weller captures such pain in moments like when he sees his reflection after removing his helmet for the first time. This character trait along with his ability to see memories of his previous life make Robocop unique character in that he is less of a superhero and more of a mentally tortured man struggling to regain his humanity. Something that studio executives would ignore later on.

Almost everyone in this movie gives a memorable performance including Kurtwood Smith playing Clarance Boddicker as the villain everyone loves to hate, Miguel Ferrer as the charming asshole executive who forms the Robocop project, and Ronny Cox ditching his good guy image to play the ruthless corporate baddie, Dick Jones. On the technical side, Phil Tippett’s stop motion puppetry work with ED-209 reminded people of Ray Harryhausen’s greatness with stop motion monsters in Jason and the Argonauts. Rob Bottin, who was responsible for the terrifying alien transformation effects and makeup in John Carpenter’s The Thing, compliments Verehoven’s manic style not only creating Robocop suit and makeup but also the shocking makeup work on one of Boddicker’s goons who gets drenched in toxic. Finally, the memorable original score by Basil Poledouris has to be up in the ranks as John Williams’ scores for Star Wars and Superman. Having watched it again recently on cable, the original still holds up in the digital age. Ironically enough, however, its themes and messages about the evils of capitalism are even more relevant now than they were in 1987.

Robocop 2 (1990)

I remember seeing the first sequel the day it opened that summer. By then, I had collected the Kenner action figures as well as owning the NES video game based on the original film. While I liked Robocop 2 at the time, I quickly found myself hating it a year after it was released. The story moves forward as Robocop takes on a new drug epidemic on the streets of Detroit called Nuke and it’s being manufactured by the psychotic Cain (Tom Noonan). At the same time, OCP continues their plans to foreclose on the city as well as develop a newly advanced Robocop who is bigger, badder, and doesn’t elicit emotion.

All the original cast members return. Unfortunately, Verehoeven was busy filming Total Recall. So Irving Kershner, the director of The Empire Strikes Back, took the director’s chair. With all due respect to the late director’s past work, Kershner completely missed the mark on Robocop 2. He unsuccessfully attempted to mimic Verehoeven’s manic style while ditching the Dutchman’s gritty direction and fancy camerawork for a more polished, traditional sci-fi actioneer. The great comic writer Frank Miller was also hired as the screenwriter only to find his work getting butchered by studio rewrites. The resulting film was filled with good ideas without a conclusion (i.e. OCP forcing Robocop to tell Murphy’s wife that her husband bit the dust) and bad ideas that were just plain silly (i.e. Hob the adolescent foul mouth drug dealer). Even Leonard Rosenman’s score is atrocious with the choir chanting Robocop’s name in the overture. The film’s true saving grace had to be Phil Tippett who put together an incredible climax between the two Robocops at OCP headquarters. It was an insane, brutal battle taking place in elevator shafts, rooftops, and the streets of Detroit. Too bad the rest of the film couldn’t be as good.

Robocop 3 (1993)

This is where things got bizarre. I was 9 in 1992 when there was a flood of video games and comic book tie-ins for the new Robocop film; however, there was no announcement of a release. All I knew was that he turns against OCP when they go after homeless Detroit citizens, befriends a little girl, gets a new machine gun attachment and a freakin’ jet pack. As it turned out later on, the studio behind the franchise was going bankrupt and their slate of films sat on the shelf for a year. Like the 2nd film, Robocop 3 made me stand up and cheer in it’s initial release. Today, I believe this is the weakest film of all.

So what went wrong? First, the edginess of the previous films was toned down for a PG-13 rating. At this point, kids were the only Robocop fans that the studio would cater to. Peter Weller decided that the suit and lack of story direction were good reasons to leave the series and had to be replaced by a lookalike actor named Robert John Burke. The hard-working New York actor and real life fireman managed to succeed Weller fine despite the change in voice and appearance. But he lacked the sense of pain in the character that only Weller portrayed best. Old supporting character favorites like Robo’s kick ass chick partner Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen) and the Old Man were either ditched or killed off in favor of a series of new characters played by many future stars. They included Crossing Jordan’s Jill Hennessy as Robo’s personal scientist, CCH Pounder from The Shield as the leader of a Detroit resistance against OCP’s armed force group, future alcoholic jailbird and Men in Black boss Rip Torn as the new head of OCP, and Bradley Whitford of The West Wing as an asshole OCP executive.

Fred Dekker of the cult classic The Monster Squad took the director’s chair in the 3rd Robocop outing. He did a better job at incorporating important elements of the first film (the Christ metaphor, the Poledouris score, etc) and tried a fresh approach to the material by having OCP merge with a Japanese corporation with their own martial arts cyborg sent to destroy Robocop. But Dekker’s cartoonish ideas with the gun attachment and jet pack only did more harm to the character than good. Robocop is supposed to be a gunslinger no different from Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. By this film, he’s just a walking swiss army knife. The sad attempt at bringing the character down to Transformers and Spider-Man territory did nothing to save the franchise and it would be the last Robocop movie released theatrically to date.

Robocop: The Series (1994)

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse. Orion Pictures sells the TV licensing rights to a Canadian production company called Skyvision. They produce an hour long, weekly syndicated series following the further adventures of Robocop despite the fact that all the supporting characters were altered due to copyright reasons and the sequels were completely ignored. Like the 3rd film, the series was made to be kid friendly and even that got worse. The character kills no one on screen, gets equipped with excessive gadgetry, and has too many friends including the OCP Chairman and a dead scientist who’s resurrected into a ghost trapped inside Detroit’s power lines! WTF?!

The performances are downright bad. In addition to hiring Canadian actors to fill the main roles, the title character would be played by soap actor Richard Eden. Let’s just say he looked like a leukemia patient without his helmet on. The villains were just plain terrible and that goes for the Freddy Kruger-looking gangster Pudface Morgan.

Interestingly enough, the pilot episode adapted an unproduced draft of Robocop 2 written by the original creators and Rowdy Roddy Piper guest starred as a comic book creator-turned-vigilante. None of this saved this bastard child.

Robocop: Prime Directives (2001)

In hopes of resurrecting the franchise, another Canadian company produced a 4 part mini-series designed to be the definitive Robocop follow-up, picking up 10 years following the events of the first film. The new story follows an older Robocop confronting Alex Murphy’s old parter John Cable who also gets killed and resurrected into a new, badass Robocop while a mad scientist tries to use a bio-tech virus to wipe out all life on earth.

The mini-series director, Julian Grant, wanted to return to the dark and gritty tone of the first film while modernizing the themes at a time prior to 9/11. He cast Page Fletcher from HBO’s The Hitchhiker in the title role and dropped all the original characters except for Murphy’s son who is now a major OCP executive. The initial buzz was promising. But when it aired in America on the Sci-Fi Channel that summer, Robocop fans were left disappointed. Everything from action scenes to special effects suffered due to the low budget. A budget so low that stock footage from Robocop: The Series had to be utilized. The scripts for the mini-series were unpolished, repetitive, and downright silly. Its poor ratings were the final punishing blow to the franchise.

The Future

Fans of the original Robocop came to terms with one consensus: Robocop is a stand-alone film that never needed sequels. If and when you see the film, the story is open and closed. Everything else after should have been left up for interpretation. When Sony Pictures bought out the MGM library which had the Robocop rights, they announced plans for a remake rather than producing a 4th entry. Black Swan’s Darren Aronofsky was slated to direct until conflicts with the studio over making film in 3D forced him to quit. As of this date, Brazilian director Jose Padilha is attached to direct the remake and the search is on for a leading actor. Only time will tell if audiences overwhelmed with superhero and alien invasion flicks in today’s cinema will embrace Robocop’s return to the big screen. As for Frank Miller’s Robocop Vs. Terminator in live action form, let’s just say I’ll buy that for a dollar on opening day!

If you liked reading this, see my earlier blog about the possible Robocop statue in Detroit.

Found a iPhone App (our friend George told me about it today) and I was able to make some pictures turn into some really cool drawings:

Along with putting some pictures inside of other cool backgrounds:

American Idol

Week #1

THIS…..IS AMERICAN IDOL.

Yes, it’s back. Love it or hate it, you know you secretly love it. Now until May our weeks will be filled with music (good or bad has yet to be decided). While preliminary reports show that viewership is down by 5 million on premier night, I’m not necessarily worried. American Idol (AI) is still the number one show on TV most weeks and is leaps and bounds ahead of its competition.

With the new judges still in place and Ryan still steering the ship, it’s safe to say that all is well. However, controversy remains such as: Is this the last season of AI?  Is Ryan leaving? And…will NBC’s ‘The Voice’ steal its thunder?

Honestly, I’m not too worried. After watching the first two shows, nothing much has changed.  Steven Tyler loves the ladies and makes no secret about it; JLO can’t seem to hide her emotions; and Randy is the same old boring record producer who is still around because…wait, I’m not sure.  But, I think we’re all comfortable with that.

What troubles me is that there is more of a focus on the individual contestants during the auditions versus soaking up the fun of ALL the auditions. I miss the days when they intertwined real talent with those who waste our time but make it fun to watch. Now they are showing home videos of contestants on their journey to Idol. Personally, I don’t like to learn about their stories until they are further into the process; true talent should lead the process. True talent is incredibly hard to find-but really easy to identify. You can tell in a few seconds who has what it takes. However, a few misfits who believe they can sing still belong in the process at the beginning.

It’s still too early to tell what’s going to happen and who’s going to win. Let’s remember-a female AI has not been named in many years. Can females dominate this season? They did say last year’s females were better than the males, but that didn’t matter in the end?

I’m ready to see what Season 11 has to bring. It’s hard to keep an old series fresh—but I think AI can do it. They will do it. Somehow.