1990s Hip Hop

Next Friday/Friday After Next

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Next Friday (2000) / Friday After Next (2003)

Dir. Steve Carr / Marcus Raboy

Written by: Ice Cube

Starring: Ice Cube, Mike Epps, DC Curry, John Witherspoon

 

I decided, for the sake of brevity and completion, to include both Friday sequels in this post, rather than doing a full write up for Friday After Next and then coming back to Next Friday sometime next year when I get to its place in the alphabet. The movies are fairly similar, featuring some familiar faces from the original, as well as a few new characters, and I honestly don’t know that I would have had enough to write about each movie individually to warrant full posts on them. Both of these sequels have their moments, but neither can hold a candle to the original movie, and I don’t have a particular nostalgic attraction to either of them, despite having seen them both in the movie theater and having watched them each multiple times. I came to own the Friday sequels because it was less expensive for me to purchase a three-disc-set with all of the movies rather than buying Friday by itself. Since I now own the movies, I’ve watched them both, but I don’t return to either one with any regularity. The original Friday is a mainstay in my comedy rotation, but neither of its sequels have the comedic consistency and satisfaction to keep me coming back very often.

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Next Friday sees Craig (Ice Cube), still unemployed, moving in with his Uncle Elroy (Curry) and cousin Day Day (Epps) in the suburbs after Deebo (Tiny Lister), the villain from the original film, breaks out of prison swearing revenge on Craig for getting the better of him in the previous film’s climactic fight. Though he leaves the hood, Craig’s problems seem to follow him, as he and Day Day run afoul of the Joker brothers, a family of Mexican gangsters who are Day Day’s neighbors. Meanwhile, Craig finds out that Day Day and Elroy’s million-dollar home, bought with their lottery winnings, is going to be sold at auction if the family can’t come up with money that they owe in back taxes. The cousins devise a plan to rob the Jokers, but things quickly go south, and soon the whole family, including Craig’s dad, Willie (Witherspoon), are involved in the heist. Unbeknownst to him, however, Willie has delivered a secret package to the suburbs, as Deebo has stowed away in the back of his dog catcher’s truck, hoping that Willie will deliver him to Craig so that he can finally get his revenge.

In Friday After Next, Craig and Day Day, along with the rest of their family are back in the hood, and getting ready to celebrate Christmas. The film opens with Craig and Day Day’s apartment being burglarized by a robber dressed like Santa Claus who steals all of their rent money. The movie primarily takes place in a strip mall where the cousins have gotten temporary jobs as security guards and where Willie and Elroy have opened up a barbeque restaurant. While Craig and Day Day patrol the strip mall, hoping to earn enough money to replace their stolen rent, they encounter a whole new cast of characters. However, their tenure as security guards doesn’t last long as they’re run off the job by some tough guys whose grandmothers Day Day kicked out of the strip mall for loitering. When they lose their jobs, the cousins decide to throw a rent party and their family, as well as all of the oddballs from the strip mall, attend, helping them raise enough money to pay the rent. In the end, the cousins are also able to catch the robber, reclaiming their Christmas presents and their money, and leaving him in his Santa suit, gagged and bound to a chimney.

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The sequels are largely very similar to Friday, with all three films revolving around Craig’s need to acquire some small sum of money, getting dragged into schemes by his friends and family, and hooking up with a beautiful girl by the end of the movie. All three films also feature deep and talented casts of comic actors, both up-and-coming and established, but the biggest thing that the sequels lack in comparison to the original movie is the presence of Chris Tucker. Tucker didn’t sign on for the Friday sequels, so his character, Smokey, was conveniently sent off to rehab and Epps’s Day Day stepped into the role of Craig’s friend and sidekick in Next Friday. Tucker was the break out comedic star of Friday, and, as I wrote last week, he was the engine largely driving that film’s humor. Day Day is a funny character, and he certainly has scenes in both films that generate some good laughs, but Smokey was iconic, and the sequels suffer heavily without Tucker’s energy. Epps has a much more laconic comedic style and the dynamic between he and Ice Cube simply doesn’t carry the same charge that Tucker and Cube developed in the first movie. Though the Friday franchise turned Ice Cube into a media mogul, he never really developed much chemistry or timing as a comedic actor. He maintains a laid back delivery throughout, playing the straight man, but Epps doesn’t turn in an energetic enough performance to recreate the other half of the buddy dynamic successfully. The two actors both manage to have memorable scenes here and there throughout the sequels, but without Tucker’s humor tying the films together, the Friday sequels never become more than the sum of their parts, and often seem directionless, with the plots meandering from one contrived point to another.

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This is particularly apparent in Next Friday, as the film is largely built around the relationship between Craig and Day Day and eschews some of the ensemble casting that was so successful in the original film. With Cube and Epps still feeling out their comedic partnership, Curry, Witherspoon, and others are asked to provide the lion’s share of the laughs, but they aren’t given nearly enough screen time to do so. Another problem is that most of the new characters who are introduced in the supporting cast are too one-note, and often they’re little more than racist caricatures. While no one would accuse Friday of being the most intellectually stimulating film ever made, Next Friday too often goes for low-hanging fruit, settling for offensive or tasteless jokes rather than trafficking in the well-established observational comedy style of the original movie. While Friday felt like a genuine slice of life, an opportunity to take a brief glimpse into one day in Craig’s life, Next Friday feels like a hastily penned series of comedy sketches, with Craig and Day Day being shoehorned into one implausible and unfunny scenario after another. The movie has a handful of moments, and a few lines here and there that for some reason are ingrained in my memory, such as Day Day trying to pass of his obviously small rims as 20s early in the film, but on the whole, I think that Next Friday is the weakest movie in the franchise. It fails to integrate its new characters into the universe gracefully or to continue the successful formula of the original, taking instead a more cartoonish approach to comedy.

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Luckily, in Friday After Next, it seems that the creative team learned a few lessons from the failures of Next Friday and opted to steer the franchise back in a more familiar direction. The film returns the family dynamic that was missing from Next Friday (despite featuring more members of Craig’s extended family) by beefing up Witherspoon’s role, and by reintroducing the character of Craig’s mother, played again by Anna Maria Horsford. The strip mall also functions in a similar way to the block on Friday, giving the film a much more observational feel. Again, the audience is able to be a fly on the wall as Craig lives through another crazy Friday, and gets to meet a new set of eccentric characters in the process. Katt Williams headlines the supporting cast, playing a pimp named Magic Mike who is trying his hand at opening up a retail clothing store. Terry Crews is also a highlight, as he almost always is. Crews’s character, Damion, has recently been released from prison, where he picked up a taste for forced sodomy, and he and Williams share one of the funnier scenes late in the movie. Ice Cube and Epps seem to be more comfortable in their onscreen chemistry, and whether that’s the result of them having more experience working across from one another or from having a stronger ensemble cast to take some of the comedic burden off of their shoulders, the movie is better off for it. Friday After Next leans heavily on physical comedy, more so than even its predecessor, and it sometimes feels outdated and a bit offensive, but not nearly as much so as Next Friday. The movie largely feels like a Christmas-themed rehash of the original, and though it certainly doesn’t stack up favorably when compared to Friday, it’s a step in the right direction after Next Friday’s wrong turn.

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Overall, I doubt that I’ll be checking out Next Friday anytime soon, but there’s a chance that I decide to dust off Friday After Next sometime later this year when I want to get in the holiday spirit. While it won’t ever be a go-to movie for me like Friday, the third installment in the trilogy is a serviceable enough studio comedy. Its laughs are mostly cheap, but at least they’re there, which is often more than I can say for Next Friday, which almost entirely fails to move the needle on the humor scale. The franchise probably shouldn’t have continued without Tucker, but it did move on without him, and after a bit of fumbling in its second installment, Ice Cube and the cast manage to nearly stick the landing with the current final installment.

There is a fourth Friday film currently in the works, with Tucker’s involvement reportedly not totally ruled out at this point, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t going to go see it, whether or not he ends up reprising his role as Smokey. I love the original movie so much that I’m willing to at least extend the benefit of the doubt to future installments of the franchise. If it ends up being made, the upcoming sequel might well end up being terrible, but even if it is, my fervor for the original won’t be quieted anytime soon. When it’s a Friday, and I ain’t got no job, and I ain’t got shit to do, I’ll likely just opt to pop in the original Friday, but having the option to watch Friday After Next once in a while isn’t bad, either.

Friday

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Friday (1995)

Dir. F Gary Gray

Written by: Ice Cube and DJ Pooh

Starring: Ice Cube, Chris Tucker, Tiny Lister, John Witherspoon

 

Friday is one of those seminal comedies for me that I grew up watching, first on television in my parents’ home, then at sleepovers at friends’ houses, and finally into adulthood anytime I wanted to just throw on a funny movie and pay sparing attention to it while I have other tasks to accomplish. I’ve got every line of the movie memorized, and I’ve seen it enough times that I could probably replay its images perfectly on the back of my eyelids in my sleep. Somehow, though I know when my favorite lines and scenes will arrive, the movie never fails to disappoint me and it never gets old. It has the familiarity and comfort of an old sweater, enveloping and warming me with its humor, and making me feel like I’ve arrived in a place of serenity. Friday is one of my favorite chill-out movies, and I can’t be the only person who feels that way, because the movie has been an enduring success, helping to legitimize Ice Cube’s nascent film career, and preceding a pair of sequels. It’s another movie that I like to watch because it’s just fun and familiar and it takes me back to a place where I was just discovering a love of movies and humor, and I enjoy the nostalgic aspect of it.

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The titular Friday refers to a day that Craig (Ice Cube) wakes up with no job and nothing to do except hang out on the front porch with his best friend Smokey (Tucker) and preside over the comings and goings of their block in Watts. Craig and Smokey spend the day getting high and cutting up on their neighbors while trying to avoid run-ins with neighborhood bully, Deebo (Lister), and Big Worm (Faizon Love), a drug dealer whom Smokey owes $200. The friends try to devise schemes to get Big Worm’s money, but when Craig’s family is unwilling to lend him any money, and Smokey continues to smoke all of his weed rather than sell it, they have to take desperate measures to try to get the money, with Smokey attempting to steal it from a sleeping Deebo. When Smokey is unsuccessful, he and Craig are forced to face the music, and Big Worm tries to shoot them in a drive by. While they successfully evade the gunfire, Craig finds himself walking right into a showdown with Deebo when he tries to defend his crush, Debbie (Nia Long), from Deebo’s attacks. The two fight in the street and though Deebo gets the better of Craig initially, Craig takes his beating and comes back at Deebo with a brick, knocking him the fuck out. In the end, Craig becomes a neighborhood hero for standing up to Deebo, manages to get the girl, and starts off his first weekend of unemployment on a high note.

One of the best, and most appealing, aspects of Friday to me is that the movie not only has great performances from Ice Cube and Chris Tucker in the lead roles, it also features a who’s who of prominent comedians in supporting roles. Craig and Smokey’s neighborhood is full of colorful characters and even the smallest roles are memorable thanks to the excellent and diverse comedic styles of the movie’s cast. Friday isn’t really an ensemble comedy, but Craig and Smokey almost fulfill the role of a Greek chorus, sitting on Craig’s porch and observing, and commenting on, their weird neighbors and family. John Witherspoon is a standout as Craig’s cantankerous father, a dog catcher who hates dogs and who disparages Craig for his joblessness and lackadaisical attitude. The veteran character actor is adept at physical comedy and provides many of the film’s memorable zingers and catch phrases, with his comedic energy contrasting with straight man Ice Cube’s laconic line delivery. Anna Maria Horsford matches Witherspoon’s performance, playing Craig’s mother as a strong, no-nonsense woman who also doesn’t shy away from the opportunity to crack jokes at her son’s expense. Bernie Mac and Ronn Riser are both funny in small appearances, as a preacher and as Craig’s fastidious, wealthy neighbor, Stanley, respectively. Cube’s co-writer, DJ Pooh, is memorable as Red, the sad-sack loser who Deebo repeatedly victimizes, and Lister is a proper villain, monstrous and physical. This depth and breadth in the cast lends Friday a broad, and unique, comedic sensibility, one that would come to be emulated by the film’s own sequels, and by mainstream stoner comedies throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. The brief, scene-stealing appearances by now-famous comedians also gives Friday a high degree of rewatchability, because there are so many absurdly funny moments to relish in.

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Of course, though, a buddy comedy like Friday is only as successful as its primary pairing, and Ice Cube and Chris Tucker make for a classic comedic duo. Cube lends the movie serious street cred with his cool, laid back line delivery, and thousand yard stare, while Tucker keeps the comedic energy sky high. The two actors are perfect foils for one another, and the movie wouldn’t work well without their performances at the core. Although Friday is supposed to be Craig’s story, Smokey is the breakout character, and Tucker’s manic energy gives the movie its life force. Tucker propels the story forward, with the movie often taking divergences from the narrative prompted by Smokey’s stories, or following Smokey into situations that Craig is absent from. Friday was an important movie for pushing both Cube and Tucker into mainstream movie stardom, and there’s little arguing that Cube has had the more successful career to date, but Tucker steals Friday in a way that makes one think the movie was written and conceived of as a vehicle to launch his career, specifically. He chews the scenery, mouth running a mile a minute, and steals every scene that he’s featured in, supplying the film’s most memorable moments and lines. I think that Tucker’s Smokey does need Cube’s Craig as a foil, but not nearly as much as Friday the movie depends on Tucker to provide the laughs that Cube isn’t fully able to. Ice Cube is a pretty fine actor, but he’s always playing some version of his own star persona, whereas Tucker’s star persona has largely become informed by his signature performance as Smokey. As the sequels would come to prove, without Tucker’s energy, the Friday formula doesn’t work nearly as well.

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In a lot of ways, Friday and its comedy contemporaries laid out the blueprint for a specifically 1990s style of comedy. As hip hop was emerging as a dominant force in mainstream music and pop culture, Hollywood responded by greenlighting dramas and comedies that reflected a changing demographic and cultural landscape. In this film, Ice Cube found himself at the intersection of gangsta rap and mainstream film comedy, a move that would foretell his eventual status as a media mogul, headlining multiple huge film comedy franchises. Though Cube has sometimes become a punchline for appearing in Disney films and other family-oriented entertainment later in his career, there’s no denying the credibility and originality of Friday. It opened the doors for a new type of entertainment, and for other rappers to try their hands at acting and headlining movie franchises. The film’s run-away success dovetailed with a sea change in popular entertainment, and its sense of humor helped develop a new trope in comedy. I still love returning to this classic just as much as I did when I was a young person, and I probably will be watching Friday when I want a laugh and a pick-me-up for years to come.

Belly

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Belly (1998)

Dir. Hype Williams

Written by: Hype Williams

Starring: DMX, Nas, Taral Hicks, T-Boz

 

Belly is probably the worst movie, objectively speaking, that I have written about for this project to this point. The first and, to date, only feature film from acclaimed music video director Hype Williams is a bit of a mess, but it also serves as a showcase for Williams’s distinct visual aesthetic. Belly is a stylish crime drama that follows childhood friends Tommy (DMX) and Sincere (Nas) as they pursue fortune and street rep through drug deals and armed robbery until their lives ultimately diverge following Sincere’s decision to get away from his life of crime. The premise is simple to the point of being derivative, but the film’s kaleidoscopic visual style makes it memorable and gives the typical gangster narrative a new coat of high gloss paint. I find myself watching Belly more frequently than many other, better, movies in my collection because I enjoy its frenetic editing, moody color palette, and memorable visual style. It’s a fun movie in spite of its many glaring flaws, and for hip hop fans of a certain age, it’s a certified classic.

Starting with the good, Belly is full of visually interesting and memorable scenes. As I mentioned, Williams rose to prominence as a filmmaker by becoming one of the most prolific and acclaimed music video directors in hip hop in the 1990s. In many ways, Williams defined the visual aesthetic of hip hop during the mid- to late-1990s, a period in which the style fully crossed over into the mainstream. Over the course of his early music video career, Williams developed an eclectic but recognizable style while directing some of the most memorable videos in hip hop history. That style is fully developed and stretched out over the course of a feature film, and Belly is a natural extension of Williams’s music video work, portraying both the gritty street-level realities of its protagonists’ lives of crime and the opulence that that lifestyle has afforded them. Williams captures the drama with technical proficiency and visual flair, opting for dramatic, evocative lighting choices, and employing a restless, moving camera to reflect his characters’ mindsets.

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The film’s opening heist scene is a perfect example of this stylistic virtuosity. The scene, in which Tommy, Sincere, and Mark (Hassan Johnson) murder several people while robbing a strip club, sets the narrative and visual tone for the film. The men approach the club in slow motion, though the pace of the editing is quick, with the camera changing angles and distance from its subjects frequently. The quick cuts continue as the three step into the club, but the film’s color palette shifts to an eerie blue, with the black lights of the club causing a negative effect. The close up shots of Tommy and Sincere’s faces are striking and otherworldly, with their eyes glowing hot-white under the black lights. The camera’s constantly shifting perspective, the reversed color palette, and the frequent lens flare from the club’s strobe lights all combine to create a disorienting feeling and a fragmented sense of place. The action shifts upstairs to the club’s office, where the owners are counting cash. The shots lengthen and the camera moves in short, smooth pans and tilts, exploring the room and the cash within it slowly, in contrast to the choppy snapshots of the club floor. Williams continues the longer shot durations as Tommy and Sincere step into the club’s bathrooms where they’ve stashed their guns, a la The Godfather, but he also maintains the disorienting effect and creates visual tension by intensifying the strobe. As Sincere and Tommy approach and ascend the stairway to the office, the strobe is diminished, allowing for more visual clarity. Sincere nonchalantly shoots a bouncer in the chest and after he and Tommy throw him over the stairs, they and Mark charge up the stairs pulling white masks that glow in the black light over their faces. Panic breaks out in the club, and the strobes return, matched by the flashes of the robbers’ guns as they burst into the office and shoot everyone inside. One of the owners falls backwards through the wall-length window overlooking the club floor, descending in slow motion into the blue-lit depths as glittering shards of glass cascade after her like a diamond rain. As she smashes through a table, the beat to “However Do You Want Me” by Soul II Soul, the a cappella intro to which has been seething quietly under the scene up to this point, kicks in, and the film shifts back to a naturalistic color pattern as the men grab the cash and make their getaway. This scene establishes the visual and narrative themes that the film will explore in less than three minutes, and is one of my favorite credit sequences ever.

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Belly is a film of visual contrasts. Williams associates characters with different colors throughout the film, using blue lights to establish a cold, menacing aesthetic for Tommy, reflecting his ruthlessness and predatory nature. Sincere is visually linked with warmer reds and yellows. He will eventually break with Tommy, rejecting the life of crime for Afrocentrism and attempts at self-improvement. Williams also employs contrast within the same shot by pairing slow motion with quick edits, as he does in the opening robbery scene. These are recognizable music video techniques, and it is obvious at times that Williams’s background is in music video. Often the film seems to be constructed of vignettes, moving from set piece to set piece, and often these vignettes are tied to memorable use of music. These aren’t criticisms, necessarily, as Williams’s experience matching sound to image creates some perfect scenes that almost act as music videos within the film. “However Do You Want Me” is integral to the success of the film’s opening, with the edits syncing perfectly to the music, and the music helping to inform the images. Williams is playing to his strengths in Belly, and while they don’t necessarily lend themselves perfectly to coherent narrative filmmaking, they are enough to keep the film interesting and entertaining.

I think that most of Belly’s shortcomings are a result of Williams wanting to squeeze too much into his first feature. Williams brings a laundry list of influences to the project, many of which he borrows from liberally, resulting in a film that is jumbled and incoherent. There are too many narrative threads, all of which are underdeveloped. This kitchen sink mentality makes the film’s narrative difficult to navigate, as the action shifts from New York to Omaha to Jamaica, following Tommy as he continues to involve himself deeper and deeper in the criminal underworld. Williams too often relies on voice over narration from Sincere to provide context and exposition. For a filmmaker who is so prodigiously gifted visually, Williams often opts to tell rather than show in Belly. With more focus and character development, Belly could be a very good crime film, but as it stands the film only scrapes the surface of its potential, choosing to emulate other, better gangster films and trade in clichés and heavy-handed symbolism rather than developing complex characters and original narrative arcs.

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The film also suffers from the performances of its leads. Across the board, the acting in Belly is pretty bad. DMX and Nas aren’t asked to do dramatic heavy lifting in the film, still neither is up to the task. Belly marked the onscreen debut for both rappers, and they are essentially each extending their brands in the film, playing characters who closely resemble their on-record personae. DMX’s physicality lends Tommy’s air of menace credibility, but his line delivery is wooden and he is incapable of registering any facsimile of genuine emotion. Nas seems to be a somewhat more natural actor, but he has to contend with bad dialogue and with the film’s overreliance on his voice over. When he’s not asked to be the film’s narrator, his performance is decent. The lone bright spot in the film, performance wise, is Method Man’s turn as Shameek, a hitman who is sent to Omaha to dispatch of the local drug dealers who reported on Tommy’s drug trafficking operation. In this early role, Method Man displays the charisma and acting chops that helped him cross over into a successful film and television career. He plays Shameek as a joker whose easy charm belies his underlying penchant for violence. He has made a career playing these sorts of lovable, relatable criminals and he shines through in what is essentially an extended cameo. In fact, aside from Tommy and Sincere, the roles in the film all feel like cameos. None of the other characters are given enough screen time to develop any real motivations or character arcs. Sincere’s girlfriend Tionne (T-Boz) serves no actual narrative purpose in the film, while Keisha, Tommy’s girlfriend, is ostensibly a femme fatale, but Taral Hicks’s performance is more sultry than sinister.

Despite these legitimate criticisms of it, I will still continue to enjoy watching Belly. I’m sure it’s obvious by now but I am a big fan of the visuals of this film. Williams’s stylish direction helps to elevate what could otherwise have been a derivative and uninspired gangster film. Even when Williams is shamelessly ripping off his influences, as he does with de Palma’s Scarface for Jamaican kingpin Lennox’s (Louie Rankin) death scene, he makes the homage distinctive and memorable. The female assassin Chiquita who slits Lennox’s throat is memorable despite having less than 30 seconds of total screen time because of the way that Williams frames her visually. As I mentioned, Williams’s skillset doesn’t necessarily lend itself to crafting a complex narrative film, but they are perfect for creating intensely memorable images and translating simple bits of information through visual cues. The audience feels like they know Chiquita despite her limited screen time because her appearance, wearing a spiked collar-style necklace with dermal piercings adorning her face like war paint, conveys simple visual information so well. This is a skill that Williams has translated from music video where meaning must be conveyed simply and easily through the image, or through its relationship to the underlying song.

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I think Belly’s reliance on music video tropes actually enhances my enjoyment of the film, because it reminds me of a time in my life when I was beginning to really immerse myself in hip hop culture, around the time that the film came out. Belly was only a modest box office success in 1998, but hip hop in general was experiencing one of its biggest boom periods. I really discovered hip hop as an early teen through Puff Daddy, Ma$e, Master P, Nelly and other popular rappers of the day. Hip hop culture was the dominant culture when I was growing up, and I have fond memories of sitting in my friend Ryan’s bedroom and listening to rap CDs on his oversized stereo. His older brother would pack their multi disc stereo with all the newest rap albums and we would soak them all in. Although I gravitated more and more towards punk rock and heavy metal music as I got older, I never lost my love for hip hop, and in particular the rappers who were popular when I was aged 12-15. This nostalgic attachment to that time period certainly helps to overlook some of the flaws in Belly. It’s a movie that is inextricably tied to that time period, and I like to pull it out when I want to turn my brain off and enjoy a well shot action movie that reminds me of one of the passions of my youth.

 

I apologize for the quality of the stills in this post. I couldn’t find too many great quality screen caps from the film, and the few that I did choose to use were automatically compressed to a smaller size. I’ll try to find a way to fix this and avoid the problem in the future.