Cuba Gooding JR – Page 2 – Podcasting Them Softly

The first IMDB review to pop up when you look up Hardwired has the log line “wtf?”, which just about sums up the movie. It’s straight up cow dung, a stunningly bad attempt to emulate everything from Blade Runner to Minority Report, failing in all imaginable ways. It does, however, possess a few deranged qualities which are worth a look purely for your own mirth and amusement. Let’s start with Val Kilmer’s hairdo. He sports a getup that looks as if someone threw the head of a mop into a wheat thresher, put it on his head and tried to style it like an emo anime character. It’s baffling, shocking and the hairpiece gives a better performance than the former Bruce Wayne sitting beneath it. Now,here’s the curious thing: on the dvd cover, Kilmer has a garden variety haircut, with no trace of the horror to come once you hit play. This makes not a bit of sense to me; if I were the filmmaker and it was my movie and I’d chosen that epic Goku hairdo for Kilmer, let alone get him to agree to it, I’d advertise it loud and proud, and put his image like nine different times all over the cover art. It’s ironic that a film about excessive commercialism is guilty of false advertising, but there you have it. Anywho, Kilmer and the hair play Virgil Killiger, a whacky PR manager of a mega corporation whose main revenue comes from serial advertising, in a half assed future where society has reached the oft imagined 1984 dystopia. He’s tasked with harassing Luke Gibson (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a man who owes a heavy debt to the company due to their products saving his life following an accident. Only problem is, it doesn’t end there. The corporation gets greedy and tries to insinuate itself into every aspect of people’s lives. Gooding bands together with a group of cyberpunk hackers led by Michael Ironside, and together attempt to bring down the company once and for all. It’s al big dumb dumb of a flick that doesn’t even put a modicum of effort in most of the time. Lance Henriksen fans beware: despite a credit, he’s not even in the thing, except for a single recycled photograph which sets the film up for sequels that I will bet my left testicle will never get made.

We’ve reached a tipping point with dramatic television. The new golden age of TV has almost reached this Marvel-esque oversaturation point. There is a constant onslaught, whether on the television itself, or ads online, of new programming. Programming that promises to be different, to be sharper, to be like nothing you’ve seen before. Then came THE PEOPLE VS OJ SIMPSON.

This new series, American Crime Story, started last night with its pilot episode, and it is PHENOMENAL. We all know the story, we can recall the nostalgic era of the OJ trial. Jay Leno and his dancing Itos, the NBA finals game getting minimized for the “high speed” chase, but how much do we actually know about it?

The cast is paramount, stringing together former star power with character actors and current talent; the cast may very well be on the top tier of television ensembles ever. Sarah Paulson and Bruce Greenwood as wonderfully solid as ever. John Travolta, David Schwimmer, Courtney B. Vance, and Cuba Gooding Jr have dusted themselves off, and marked their return in wonderful showboating performances.

Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander have created a show that not only drums up our nostalgic rememberings of the greatest media circus ever and humanizing it, but also made this at a time where the social climate of the OJ trial is more relevant than ever. Just when you thought TV couldn’t get any better, then came THE PEOPLE VS OJ SIMPSON.