The World Of Shaft

Up To Here!

The World Of Shaft 
By Steve Aldous
Foreword by David F. Walker
McFarland Books, ISBN 9780786499236

Subtitled, on the edition I read, A Complete Guide To The Novels, Comic Strip, Films And Television Series, Steve Aldous’ book The World Of Shaft is an almost but not quite complete overview of the Shaft phenomenom, which of course was started by writer Ernest Tidyman in the late 1960s/early 1970s (indeed, that original first novel was sold to the studio before it was published and was released at more or less the same time as the original movie). I say almost complete because this was written just before modern comic book imprint Dynamite had released their comics and new Shaft novel and, this was also a few years before the advent of the fifth (and probably final) of the Shaft cinema movies, which reunited Richard Roundtree and Samuel L. Jackson for a second time. Which is a shame because of a point the author makes in this book but I’ll get to that in a minute. 

Okay, the book is written by someone with an obvious love and respect for the character and the writer behind him. Indeed, the research which has gone into this, which includes going through a load of the late Tidyman’s boxes full of notes and letters, is nothing if not thorough. And, after a potted history of Tidyman’s career which is very illuminating, I’d say the emphasis is possibly more on the books themselves but he does bring a deep knowledge of this when looking at the rest of the media involved in Shaft. 

And it’s a cool breeze to read and, since there’s not much written critically. at least all gathered in one substantial place as it is here, it’s an absolutely essential tome to own in regards to the black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks. For instance, I didn’t know that of the seven Shaft books that Tidyman wrote... due to his being busy with other projects... the last four were partially ghost written by two other writers he was employing with the man himself coming in to flesh out and rewrite for the final draft. I liked those books as an early teen but never got around to acquiring the three gaps I had in the run. Silly me… I may have been picking them up for 30p a piece in second hand book shops in the 1980s but, when I looked into filling in my holes while reading this, I was shocked to find that they’ve been long out of print and mostly attract three figure sums on the likes of eBay. Apparently, the only place where the books are still in print is in Germany, where they still love the character but, you know, I don’t speak the language. 

After covering the books (Shaft, Shaft Among The Jews, Shaft’s Big Score, Shaft Has A Ball, Goodbye Mr. Shaft, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers and The Last Shaft), their collective creators and the various character traits of regular characters in the books, not to mention a load about the proposed Shaft newspaper strip which never came to fruition (with some rare samples of the artwork)... there’s also a big section on the movies and TV movies/series. This includes a breakdown of each episode/film of the series and, of course, gets to the first revival film with Samuel L. Jackson. One of the author’s sticking points is that Jackson’s Shaft couldn’t possibly be the nephew of the original Shaft because he had no surviving kin in the books (and didn’t survive the last book himself, for that matter). So this makes it a shame that there’s no coverage of the last movie because, as you may or may not know, they retconned this in that story and it turned out that, actually, he’s Shaft’s son after all. Of course, given their similar ages, Roundtree would have had to have fathered Jackson when he was four but, yeah, that’s another story. 

But yeah, this is an informative read and it would be true to say I had a ball with The World Of Shaft. What it really needs now, though, is a second, revised edition to take into account the Dynamite stuff and the 2019 movie… can you dig it?

Thelma

Scam, Bam,
Thank You Ma’am

Thelma
Directed by Josh Margolin
Switzerland/USA 2024

Not to be confused with the famous identically titled Nordic horror infused sci-fi movie from 2017 (reviewed here), Thelma is a movie starring 95 year old actress June Squibb as the 93 year old title character, Thelma Post. She’s actually based on the director’s grandmother, also Thelma Post, who is currently 103 and who is also seen in the movie in a mid-end credits scene. Thelma Post is the widow of Ted Post, the famous Hollywood director, who is in family photos in the movie. Which would make sense because the location used for Thelma’s apartment in the movie is actually the real Thelma’s actual apartment.

Joining the actress in the film are her character's grandson Daniel (played by Fred Hechinger) who she has a very good relationship with... and his parents played by the wonderful Clark Gregg and the always brilliant Parker Posey (is she still regarded as the queen of indie film-making these days?). One day, Thelma gets a phone call with someone pretending to be her grandson in jail, who puts her onto a ‘lawyer’, and she falls for the scam, posting ten thousand dollars of bail money to the PO box given. The rest of the family, apart from her brilliant grandson, think she should be put in a home but, while they are procrastinating on stuff like this, she makes up her mind to track down the scammers and get her money back... inspired by Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible films she watches with her grandson.

So she goes to collect an old friend, Ben, played by the late, great Richard Roundtree in his final film (he died a few months before the premiere and it has an ‘in loving memory’ tag to him at the end of the credits). He has a new, two seater scooter and the two go a long way to find the scammer, after collecting a loaded pistol from another of Thelma’s old friends.

The film also has a nice touch where the main scammer at the end of their quest is also an elderly guy and, in some ways, much worse off than they are. He’s played here pretty well by the fantastic Malcolm McDowell (wow... Roundtree and McDowell, two 1970s cinematic icons in the same movie).

And it’s a nice, gentle comedy which explores what it means to be very old and the differences between people and the way they accept ageing, or don’t. Ben, for example, is perfectly happy in his elderly residence, where he is playing Daddy Warbucks in a version of Annie they’re putting on for the other residents... but, since the death of her husband two years prior, Thelma is more of a loner. In one scene, which I thought was a really nice touch, her grandson asks her what her plans for the day are... and we next see her sorting out all her pills for the next week and putting them into their respective compartments. Sadly, I am now at the age where I can totally sympathise and understand that... and not just from watching my folks do the same thing, alas.

Now, the film isn’t as pacey as I thought it would be but it is quite heartwarming and I think it also doesn’t make the kinds of turns I thought it would, so there’s a lot to keep things entertaining and surprising. The music by Nick Chuba is pretty good too... leaning into the action themes from the kind of movies which inspire Thelma but with a more modern take. Sadly, Schifrin’s Mission Impossible theme was, presumably, too rich for the budget but the score has a nice vibe to it and, at some point, I’m sure I heard one of my favourite musical instruments, the cimbalom, on one of the cues.

By the end of the film, everything seems to be maintaining the status quo of the central character (I thought it would go down a different route) and, my only real criticism is that Thelma, as old as she is, maybe doesn’t seem to learn too much from her experiences in the movie (or at least not unless certain things were left on the cutting room floor). But it’s a nice enough ending and, as I said, the real life Thelma pops up halfway through the end credits. This one is nothing spectacular but it is a heart warming and fun time at the movies so, yeah, definitely worth a watch.

Shaft

Shaftermath

Shaft
USA 2019
Directed by Tim Story

So... earlier this year my best friend unexpectedly died. He was only a few weeks older than me and we had a whole host of things already earmarked to see in the coming months but one of the two most anticipated things was to go to the cinema to see the new Shaft movie, since we’d both been talking about the Shaft films together since we first met. As it turns out, this didn’t get a cinema release in this country but I’ve managed to find a way to watch it anyway and, although I have mixed feelings about the final product, I’m pretty sure that my friend would probably... mostly... have liked this one.

Shaft is the fifth film of a franchise which started with the original movie, Shaft, back in 1971 and which was followed by two direct sequels in 1972 and 1973, Shaft’s Big Score (my favourite) and Shaft In Africa with Richard Roundtree playing the titular role based on Ernest Tidyman’s novels. This was followed by Roundtree continuing the character for a TV series and then, decades later, a fourth film starring Samuel L. Jackson was made in 2000, originally to be called Shaft Returns but eventually just called Shaft, also... which was confusing enough at the time. That one had Richard Roundtree back as the original John Shaft in what amounted to a couple of long cameos and with Jackson playing his nephew. It was a quite good movie. Now we have a fifth installment in the franchise where the Shaft family tree has been convincingly retconned to make Jackson the son of Roundtree’s character, even though in real life he’s only 6 years younger than the actor himself.

And, yes, if you can believe this stuff... they’ve called this fifth film Shaft. Which is totally ridiculous and makes no sense whatsoever. At least the Star Wars films have subtitles but why have a franchise where over half the movies have the exact same name as the other ones. That’s not going to get confusing at all in years to come, is it?

So, anyway, this movie deals with the next generation of Shaft, played by Jessie T. Usher and is a humourously intentioned script dealing with his problematic relationship with his dad, his potential girlfriend Sasha, played by Alexandra Shipp.... and his mother Maya, played by Regina Hall.

So this starts off with a set up of Jackson’s Shaft and Maya and their baby son in a scene set over a decade before the events in the previous movie, where some motivation for barely seen villain of this film is provided and the film then gives us a montage catch up of the intervening years which briefly replays some scenes from Shaft (2000) and maps out Usher’s Shaft’s troubled non-relationship with his father. Then, when the latest family member’s best friend gets mixed up with drugs and is murdered, Shaft Jr, who works for the FBI but doesn’t exactly have much clout, gets his father involved with the case and the two bond as they try and catch the ruthless killers and even, in the last 20 minutes of the movie, have some nice scenes where the original ‘grandad’ Shaft, played by Richard Roundtree, gets involved in all the action.

So... okay. There’s good and there’s bad. The good being that there’s some nice and cleverly  handled shot transitions throughout the movie and even a split screen section at the beginning of the film. It’s also a blast seeing both Samuel L. Jackson and Richard Roundtree doing their thing throughout and, even though he’s mostly played as a joke, Shaft Jr is also not terrible in this either although, to be fair, he does get irritating quite quickly. Especially where a perfect reference to the very first Shaft movie... the scene where Roundtree crashes through the window on a rope, is payed homage to but, alas, in a very jokey way because Jr can’t get through his window.

There’s a lot of bad in this too though.

For instance, despite some nice shot set ups, there’s a scene fairly early on where Shaft Jr is talking to a teenager on the street  and the shot design, or lack of it in terms of consideration as to how the scene would be edited, is just all over the place and completely popped me out of the movie. I couldn’t believe how amateur this series of shots was in terms of cutting back and forth between characters on completely different and seemingly random areas of the screen. It didn’t make any sense and it’s like the scene wasn’t filmed to be cut that way at all.

Another problem... despite not being that funny, which is an objective thing anyway... is the fact that it was trying to be a comedy of sorts. The previous Shaft movies all took themselves very seriously in terms of the way the characters, for the most part, interacted and this just feels like it belongs in a different world, despite an attempt at least to give certain elements of the plot some social context. It just felt wrong. And don’t get me started on the running gag of three generations of jay-walkers who will almost get hit by a passing car whenever they walk into the road. This is just a mockery of the title sequence of the very first film.

Also, the pacing on the movie in terms of the actual story and the way it’s being driven is way too slow to fit in with the others (even the 2009 movie). I was at a point maybe 20 minutes or half an hour into the movie and I thought to myself... if this had been made in the 1970s you would have got all those story beats over and done with in the first 5 minutes. It really needed to movie faster than this and, again, this didn’t do anything to make it feel close to the franchise.

And then there’s the music.

I’m not all that familiar with Christopher Lennertz outside of his score for the TV remake of Humanoids From The Deep but he has done his best here. The music feels, for at least some of the time, like it belongs in a Shaft movie. There are some nice references to Isaac Hayes’ original Theme From Shaft although, tragically and inappropriately, the lyrics aren’t heard and the only vocal version, at the end of the movie, is just as part of some weak, sampled up rap version which, great idea as that could have been... just leaves a bad taste in the mouth (and ears, I guess). However, I was pleasantly surprised, when the two younger Shaft’s first go and revisit the original Shaft in his apartment, that he used part of Isaac Hayes original Shaft score which wasn’t part of the main theme and, I suspect, this is the first time this has been done in the franchise since its appearance in the first movie (with this particular cue... there are a few instances of similar Hayes’ references in the TV show).

Ultimately, I think fans of the original films are going to be less happy about what they’ve done with this than people who are coming into the franchise cold. True, there are some great one liners and gags scattered throughout but this honestly feels nothing like a continuation of the films although Roundtree is worth watching this for, if you do like the originals. Not the sequel I was hoping for and it took long enough getting made. I didn’t think I’d end up saying this but I kinda hope they leave this alone now. I think they’ve proven they can’t recapture the original magic which made the 1970s movies... and even the 2000 movie... such great pieces of cinema. Shut yo’ mouth!

Q (aka Q - The Winged Serpent)

Eggcentric

Q (aka Q - The Winged Serpent)
1982 USA 
Directed by Larry Cohen
Anchor Bay UK DVD Region 2

Well this is a curious little film I’ve just finally gotten around to seeing... after it being on my “to watch” list for a couple of decades. I was an admirer of this director’s famous “babies with teeth” trilogy It’s Alive, It Lives Again and It’s Alive III: Island Of The Alive which is, to be fair, equally confounding in its structure and tone. That trilogy was also a bit of a romp and I’m a sucker for those stop motion killer babies, even though they never look real (in much the same way that Ray Harryhausen’s creations never looked that real but you always made allowances because they were just so much gosh darned fun).

Q, for me, is a little bit more problematic.

It’s interesting because it starts with a flourish of brilliance in terms of the camerawork but, when the film starts proper, my first impulse was... “This is terrible.” However, it’s also quite compelling from a performance point of view and, coupled with the basic “1950s monster movie in 1980s clothes” appearance (or is that vice versa?), it makes for an uneven but never dull, treat.

The film opens with credits which are very clichéd in that they’re a roaming view of the streets of Manhattan from above... but then, as the credits finish, instead of just cutting to a new establishing shot, the camera kind of side-swipes left and we slam straight into a man on a rig cleaning windows on the side of a skyscraper. That was a pretty cool moment.  For me, that opening sleight of hand, which slightly shifts your perceptions of where the camera was filming from, is the most brilliant thing about this movie. As far as I’m concerned, it was all downhill from there but, like I said, it is kinda interesting.

The story, such as it is, starts off with a flying Aztecian serpent going around biting the heads off of random people, including the aforementioned window cleaner, who becomes a victim of its first “on screen” attack... although when I say “on screen”, the creature isn’t actually revealed in full until a little later. The film seems to be an “ahead of its time” homage to the 1950s monster movies which probably inspired it but, it’s not too long before the director is also revelling in the exploitation genre too, as we watch a toplesss and friskily endowed young lady sunbathing on top of her building and rubbing lotion onto herself... before she’s promptly chomped down as reptilian bird chow.

The story then changes tone and we get two things going on. On the one hand we have the introduction of David “Grasshopper” Carradine and Richard “Shaft” Roundtree as two detectives working the murders... which they will soon find is caused by Quetzlcoatl, the flying snake lizard thing. Simultaneously, we have an actor I’m really not that familiar with, called Michael Moriarty, who plays a small time, washed up crook. He messes up an audition playing piano which his girlfriend, played by Candy Clark, has fixed up for him. As a consequence of this, he is hired as a getaway driver on a diamond robbery but then gets roped in on the actual caper. Due to complications, he runs off by himself with the haul of diamonds (which he promptly loses when he gets hit by a car in busy traffic). When he runs from both the police and his fellow criminals, his fear and paranoia take him to the top of a skyscraper where he finds the nest and unhatched egg of the flying reptile... information which he keeps to himself.

From here on in, the different plot threads start coming together... kinda.

I don’t know. Although the film all makes sense, I did find it feeling like various scenes didn’t connect like they maybe should do... even though they clearly did. It might be because the film was shot very quickly... but it feels like, I don’t know how to say this properly so I’ll use an analogy. Remember those old polaroid cameras where you’d take a shot and the photograph would start developing when exposed to the air before your very eyes. Well this felt like that somewhat... but like you only got halfway through the developing process. You could see all of the picture but it looked kinda faded and only half glimpsed... somewhat. That’s how the movie “felt” to me.

The acting seems very naturalistic from both Moriarty and Carradine and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of that stuff turned out to be ad libbed while the cameras were rolling. In that way, the disjointed, fragmentary nature of the various character’s encounters, such as I perceived them, seems more Altmanesque, in some respects. Certainly, Moriarty and Carradine both put in amazing performances in this... it just didn’t quite feel like either of them were particularly relating much to other characters they encountered the way they should be. Roundtree is also, of course, excellent in this but he doesn’t get much air time.

The monster effects are a real throwback to low budget 1950s shenanigans and appear to be a combination of stop motion and puppetry. For most of the build up into the early parts of the story, the monster pretty much is not in shot when it strikes, and this is probably a wise move by Cohen so he doesn’t alienate his audience right from the outset, I suspect. There’s never really a moment in the film when you become scared by the antics of the title creature... least of all when its gulping down on unsuspecting extras or protagonists. Frankly, I didn’t really care or believe in any of the people in this film enough to worry if they came to a sticky end but there were some little moments which make the film worth a look sometime... asides from the excellent acting.

One of these is when we cut to a shot of a stray human leg fallen onto the streets as the crowd panics. I couldn’t help but snort in laughter and it’s one of the things that makes me think that Cohen is very much “in” on the joke in terms of the amount of parody and homage in the movie.

The other thing is a jump scare moment which, although I didn’t really register, I would imagine must have been a quite spectacular adrenalin rush moment when this was shown in cinemas in front of a large, paying audience who would be concentrating on the action. In this scene, Richard Roundtree is standing on the roof of a building and you are maybe expecting a monster to attack him... as it happens, I wasn’t, but I’m guessing that’s why this sequence and the one soon to follow (which I won’t talk about) play out the way they do. In this one though, a kite suddenly lands in Roundtree’s face from the side of the screen... must have been a pretty big jump moment in cinemas, I’ll bet.

Other than this though, I can’t say there’s much to recommend Q - The Winged Serpent... especially if you break it down into little bits like I just did. I know this movie has a very passionate and dedicated following of people but it seems I’m not one of them. It’s not a film I would highlight to most people but it is an interesting watch, perhaps, if you’re into acting as an art form in and of itself and/or interested in B movie monster homage. I’m certainly more in tune with the latter and I’m certainly glad I saw it... but I can’t imagine I’ll be revisiting it that often again in my life unless I need to hook back into it for research purposes. Still... really don’t take my word for it because I know some people out there love this movie... and you may be one of them.