Barry Shear
6 connections found
Filmography
View:
Connections, in both directions
Tarantino completes his laid-back vibe (deceptively laid-back, of course, as this is a crime film of considerable urgency) with his soundtrack selections, including Bobby Womack's "Across 110th Street" (the theme to an earlier film of the same name) and songs by The Delfonics and The Meters.
I was also pleased at Tarantino's homage to Grier and the '70s, as he plays some Delphonics soundtracks and introduces Pam's appearance in the film with a '70s soundtrack of Bobby Womack singing "Across 110th Street".
Tarantino actually teaches you how to watch “Jackie Brown” during the opening credits, which are initially content to regard former Blaxploitation movie goddess Pam Grier as the title character, gliding along the LAX people-mover made famous by “The Graduate” (and recently on “Mad Men”) to the tune of Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street.”
Pam Grier, dolled up for her job as a stewardess for Cabo Air, glides into the right edge of the frame, while Bobby Womack's creamily desperate anthem "Across 110th Street" sets a pristine, hummable stage for both the character and the movie.
In the opening sequence, the camera caresses her as she travels through an airport, and the movie caresses us with the great, lost Bobby Womack song ''Across 110th Street,'' with its ghetto lament about ''doing whatever I had to do to survive.''
Some of the best moments in "Jackie Brown" are when he simply allows his camera to watch her, as she's carried along a moving airport sidewalk while Bobby Womack's "Across 110th Street" plays on the soundtrack or simply as she's sitting enjoying a cigarette.
Mixing conspiracy themes not dissimilar to those found in The Manchurian Candidate, Soylent Green, and even the obscure Wild in the Streets (a ludicrous 1968 drama in which anyone over thirty-five is sent to retirement camps and fed a stream of hallucinogens), Derek Zoolander, with an assist from "humorless" Time Magazine journalist Matilda Jeffries (Christine "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" Taylor, a.k.a.
Aimed at a hip young audience but inspired by generational paranoia, "Battle Royale" represents something of a reversal of 1968's "Wild in the Streets," about a future America in which the voting age is dropped to 14 and people over 35 are placed in concentration camps.
Like its cinematic compatriots, Shaft (1971), Trouble Man (1972), and Car Wash (1976), Across 110th Street owes much of its notoriety to a memorable theme song.
The movie’s unabashed effrontery connects it to American cinema’s great B-picture and exploitation past, including films like Barry Shear’s Wild in the Streets (1968), the major counterculture hit about a rock star who rises to the presidency and sends everyone over age 35 to “re-education camps.”
There’s more and more sensationalistic brutality in shoot-‘n’-knife-em-ups like American International’s Foxy Brown and the indefensible Truck Turner (both 1974).