May 10, 2019

Once in a while someone will send me a couple of tapes that they’d like me to give the VHSOTW treatment to. Well, my buddy Matt Erhartic has sent me not one but TWO copies of Melvin Van Peeblessssss’s kid Mario’s 1991 gangster classic New Jack City...which must mean that he really wants to know what I think of said film. What I think is this: I like it. The end. Seriously though...some of y’all who were around back in the day might remember that New Jack City’s opening weekend was marred by several gang-related shootings in NYC and LA. Up to 100 shots were fired at one Friday night screening, leaving one man dead. When this news reached my mother and got filtered through her exaggerate-o-meter it was subsequently relayed back to me as “did you hear 100 people got murdered at New Jack City!!??” Needless to say--automatic lifetime ban from ever watching New Jack City, right? But what eventually happened was 1. My mom went to work and left me home alone and 2. I rode my bike to the video store and cautiously pulled NJC off of the shelf...and even though my mom promised me a hail of bullets would rain down on me if I tried to rent it...I got the tape back to my house without incident. What I saw was this: At the top of the flick we helicopter in on the Queensborough Bridge...where Radio Raheem is dangling some white yuppie in a business suit over the edge of the bridge. A jeep pulls up and out steps man who thinks that paying taxes ain’t baller Wesley Snipes. This is Nino Brown...the ice coldest drug dealer in all 5 boroughs. We know he is ice cold because he tells the dangling yuppie that he will see him but would not, in fact, want to be him. He then instructs Radio Raheem to drop the poor bastard into the East River. I mean...he might be OK. Ope! They quickly announce that he’s dead. Sorry brah. We immediately cut to a part of the city that is composed entirely of burned out buildings, abandoned cars, and daytime barrel fires. This is the same part of the city where, in 2019, you cannot get a glass of riesling for less than $18. But in the Nino Brown years (1986-1991) this is where went to buy crack...and that’s exactly that’s what our man Ice-T has come to do. A couple of things real quick; Ice-T’s real name is Tracy Lauren Marrow. So there’s that. Also--in the 9th grade I got into a heated argument with Ritchie Rovezzi on the school bus about which Ice was playing Lollapalooza ’92, Cube or T. Who was right you ask? We both were! But before the internet you had to just argue about it and then NOT KNOW! Anyway...you might recognize the dude selling crack because he is superstar comedian Chris Rock. He plays Pookie the Crackhead...and he is pure acting dynamite! Seriously...I don’t know why he hasn’t done more drama. Or more importantly...why he wasn’t up for Best Supporting Actor at the ’91 Academy Awards?? Wait...who won that year? Ahh...Mr. One-Handed Pushups Jack Palance #OscarsSoWhite. Right so it turns out Ice-T is 5-0 but Pookie gets the jump on him and runs off with his cash AND the crack. There’s this super long foot chase scene through alleys and train tracks and such but Ice-T waits until Pookie has safely reached a playground full of children before he whips out his gun and starts blasting away indiscriminately. He shoots Pookie in the foot...so that’s cool...but then he gets fired from being a cop or whatever...which is less cool. Back across town Nino Brown meets up with his best buddy and consigliere Gee-Money, who boasts of the potential benefits of selling crack cocaine. He says that not only is crack super duper addictive, it is also particularly loved by the bitches, who will do anything for it. He claims to have had his Jimmy waxed several times a day by crack-seeking women. It is possible that the “Jimmy” Gee Money is referring to is the affordable mid-range SUV that GMC produced in the 1980’s....but I fear that he is not. Here I should point out that there are around 1.5 redeeming female characters in this film. Women are often called bitch, ho, or skeezer (the “R” is silent). There’s one you never here anymore: skeezer. I’m gonna start a Weezer cover band called Skeezer that only plays their very worst songs (Beverly Hilllllssss). Nino, Gee Money, and Radio Raheem, (aka the late, great Bill Nunn...who plays a stuttering character called Duh Duh Man just so everyone else in the movie can make fun of stutterers) decided to form a crime syndicate called the Cash Money Brothers. They do have ONE lady in their gang who is played by the actress Vanessa Williams...who is NOT the same person as the singer/actress/Miss America Vanessa Williams...who was also super famous in 1991. Just mentioning that fact makes me nostalgic for a time when all we had to worry about was confusing Vanessa Williamses. Anyway, in order to centralize their operation they decide to take over a sprawling renaissance-style apartment building in Harlem called The Carter. Years later rapper Lil’ Wayne will release 5 different albums called The Carter. What that has to do with what we are talking about I do not know. So Nino and his henchmen want to move into the building...but there are tenants and shit, right...so they just burst into all of the apartments and murder whomever happens to live there and VOILA! The Carter is belongs to the CMB. Suddenly it’s five years later and Nino is king shit of crack mountain. He’s got a big ass mansion with an indoor swimming pool and a screening room that shows Scarface 24/7. Everyone loves the dude...with the exception of some racist mafioso Goodfellas cosplayers who keep coming around and demanding Nino pay part of his profits to some poor man’s Armand Assante called Don Armateo. He offers to make the Italians chitlin alfredo...which sounds friggin’ delicious. Down at the police precinct # whatever whatever who cares some detective who is totally the director of this movie we are watching Mario Van Peebles is under pressure to take down CMB and get that crack off the streets. He decides the best way to do this is to dig up Ice-T and pair him with Judd Nelson, who seems to be here because someone probably told someone that they needed at least one white person in this movie. Nelson’s character has zero backstory...we are just told that he’s a loose cannon...and we calmly nod our heads. After all, Judd Nelson IS John Bender! Ice-T immediately hates his new partner because he is white and calls him “biscuit head”. Judd Nelson responds with “What about you dad? Fuck you. No dad....what about YOU!? FUCK YOU!” Ice-T is all....”umm...what??” Ice-T carries some guilt for shooting Pookie in the foot back in the day so he decides to seek him out at the crack house he’s been living at and make him the face of his undercover sting operation. This makes sense to absolutely no one...on screen or off. There’s a long “Pookie goes to rehab” montage...and suddenly dude is like 10 days clean and totally ready to go undercover at The Carter. Before all that can go down though there’s a humungo New Year’s Eve party at Nino’s nightclub where Flava Flav is the house DJ. (yeahhhh boyyyyyyeeee). Nino and Gee Money raise their glasses to each other and definitively state that NOTHING will ever come between them...which means that something is about to come between them post haste. And it totally fucking does in the SAME SCENE!! Like...they couldn’t have made it the next day or something?? Gee Money is dating the girl from Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” video. Nino says he fancies her...or something less chivalrous. Gee Money is not pleased. Said ladyfriend decides to complicate things further by immediately standing up on the table and stripping to Color Me Badd’s “I Wanna Sex You Up”. Nino agrees to back off. Later he stands in the doorway and watches the two of them fuck. Totally normal stuff. Can we pause for a second and talk about how the biggest hit single from the NJC soundtrack was by the most vanilla band of crackers ever assembled (ok, there was one black dude in the group...but he didn’t do much). Color Me Badd?? Shit...those dudes made Sinbad look like DMX. Anyway, Pookie quickly moves up the ranks at the Carter and gets transferred to the room where they bag up all that crack (naked). How does he handle being in a room full of crack? By smoking fucking crack, dummies! He shows up to work zooted and Gee Money shakes him down and finds his video camera belt and tells his henchman to kill Pookie and then blow up the building. Seems like a pretty harsh reaction...but that’s exactly what goes down. Gee Money calls Nino to tell him of their misfortune only to find him in the middle of a lengthy fornication session with his girlfriend (Gee Money’s girlfriend, that is. Nino has a girlfriend too but she is not fornicated with). Nino calls an emergency meeting. Dude is just RIPSHIT! He stabs someone in the hand and tells Gee Money that if he messes up again he will kill him. I’d be like “dude, remember 3 scenes ago when you said nothing would ever come between us?” Gee Money is so bummed he goes home and smokes crack. Ice-T is fired from the cops but Judd Nelson turns nice and decides to help him bring down Nino Brown. So now Ice-T...who has already been a cop...been undercover...been a cop ...is about to go undercover AGAIN in the same friggin’ neighborhood. The chances that someone would not know who he is: less than zero chances. It’s like the movie starts all over again: Ice-T arrives on the scene as a big drug dealer...has to impress the lower level guys and Gee Money...eventually gets introduced to Nino. Granted this all happens over the course of like 4 minutes...but it’s like COME ON already! Nino and Ice-T are fast friends and Nino tells Ice-T about some lady he had to kill back in the day as part of his gang initiation. Ice-T doesn’t mention that his mother was killed by a random teenager as part of a gang initiation...but I feel like it’s safe to assume that Nino killed Ice-T’s mother, yeah? I feel like I also need to mention the scene where a preacher-y neighborhood old timer comes to see Nino and tries to kill him...only because this is the man who eventually kills Nino Brown at the end of the movie. There...you can stop reading now if you’d like! What else? All the CMB dudes go to an outdoor wedding where they can’t even enjoy Keith Sweat’s entire set because the Italians show up with machine guns and there’s a shoot out and mad people die. Not Nino though cuz he uses a little girl as a shield. Punk. Ice-T goes to sell Nino some drugs at some movie warehouse you can rent to stage shootouts in but one of Nino’s dudes finally recognizes Ice-T as 5-0. There’s yet another shootout and a shit ton more people die...including the Duh Duh man. Nino and Gee Money meet on a rooftop and Nino is Superfly Tn’T pissed because Gee Money brought Ice-T into the fold. Gee Money gets on his knees and weeps and begs for his life. He reminds Nino that they had said that nothing would ever come between them. Nino says “dude, that was like 25 movie minutes ago.” Gee Money is shot and killed. Nino goes to hide out with a new ladyfriend but Ice-T finds him and beats the shit out of him and throws him off of the building’s fire escape. They land in a pile of trash bags where somehow everyone in the cast who has not yet been killed has gathered to watch them fight. Ice-T tells Nino “I want to shoot you so bad my DICK is hard!” The people in the crowd manage to talk him down. I mean...from killing Nino, anyway. No idea who manages to talk down his blazing hard-on. It’s up to the courts to decide Nino’s fate and, even though he confesses to all of his crimes, he makes some tricky plea deal in the middle of his testimony and they let him off with a suspended sentence. Unfortunately the preacherman is preparing to murder him outside of the courtroom...and does exactly that. The credits roll while that “Money Money Money” plays us out. You know...I never knew it was The O’Jays who did that tune until just now?? The end.