TV on DVD: True Jackson, VP -- Season 1, Volume 1 (2008-2009)

Now Available to Own



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I'm often asked if I get bored screening so many different titles and while, occasionally this happens as there's no worse feeling than getting one episode into a television box set or ten minutes into a movie and realizing it'll be an extremely long experience, overall I subscribe to the adage that I can learn something new everyday.

Consider Nickelodeon: before SpongeBob SquarePants came along, I would never have imagined that an animated sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea would be that funny. And boy did I kick myself after watching True Jackson, VP.

Had it ever occurred to me that I could "get discovered" that way, I'm thinking I really should've set up lemonade stands in the lobbies of publishing houses, The New York Times, and just outside the gates of my favorite movie studios. Alas, no, silly me-- limited by geography and reality-- by the age of eleven I began sending out my query letters, screenplays and manuscripts and kept the lemonade stand separate.

Yet, I employed the same discipline with the stand as friends and I used strategic locations to maximize the potential of new neighbors moving in and construction workers putting in long hours by offering Crystal Light and Kool-Aid for a dime (or if we were feeling extra ambitious) a whole quarter.

However, fifteen year old True Jackson, played by likable Akeelah and the Bee star Keke Palmer was not only braver than a suburbanite for heading right into the fashion district but she brought along sandwiches as well obviously forgetting the lesson in Devil Wears Prada that you're not supposed to eat... much. Fond of taking designer clothing and tailoring it to fit her own style with different color buttons or a new hem, after a five minute encounter with boss and CEO of the brand of clothing True happens to be wearing, Max Madigan (Greg Proops) sees her potential and hires her as the newest Vice President in charge of Youth Apparel for his company MadStyle.

Luckily hopscotching right past design school, internships, and Project Runway, True Jackson skips directly past go and finds herself pulling an Ugly Betty except Palmer is adorable, down-to-Earth and not based on a telenovela. Yet, diversity and girl power rules the day as originally True aired in its world premiere following iCarly's first TV movie, iCarly Goes to Japan and reached record numbers of viewers with its initial few episodes.

Luckily Nickelodeon has always been thankfully more diverse than most other rival tween and teen networks and essentially it uses the same model as iCarly in presenting us with a friendly, intelligent main character and her female and male best friends, this time all of different races and with a unique flip in personalities. While Miranda Cosgrove's iCarly costar Jeannette McCurdy appears in a cameo performance on True, instead of providing Palmer's True with a sidekick like McCurdy's aggressive bully Sam, True's BFF is the fun-loving but flighty and easily distracted Lulu (Ashley Argota) who has the world's shortest attention span.

Essentially if Twitter were a person and all of the tweets of numerous users were embodied by an individual, it'd be Lulu who loses focus faster than she text-messages which wouldn't normally be a problem aside from the fact that True hires her to be her secretary and soon realizes she's doing double the work. The third amigo Ryan (Matt Shively) isn't an employee of MadStyle but he might as well be. Ryan basically spends his entire summer vacation in and around True's office as though he were a painting someone has never moved, that is until he enlists Lulu's help to attract a girl he likes and later when his gal pals try to boost his self-esteem by talking him up at a skate park.

Quickly discovering that life in offices, meetings, and/or cubicles is as cliquish and gossip prone as high school, True clashes with the office's sycophantic Queen Bee, the amusingly named Amanda Cantwell who is determined to bring down the bubbly teenager who skipped all of the hard work, networking, and education to find herself given a beautiful office on the strength of a few stitches and a sandwich.

Despite the dubious set-up and the fact that we never actually get a good sense of True's flair as a designer since most plots involve the central cast's interpersonal issues with barely any mention or scenes involving the work that True constantly alludes to throughout the series, the ensemble volleys well back and forth to keep us distracted enough not to notice all of the gaps in logic or questions about what's going to happen when school comes back around etc.

With very weak humor and the obvious audio "assist" of the live studio audience nurturing it on by laughing uproariously at the most minimal of jokes and a struggle to balance the adult plots with those of the kids in a way that engages either demographic fully or authentically, it'll be an uphill climb for True Jackson, VP to reach the natural flow of iCarly. Although it makes an interesting companion show to Carly, from an audience standpoint and lackluster pilot aside, that program succeeded right off the bat with a cast and writing staff that was all on the same page and by ensuring that the Carly kids still act like kids while in grown-up environments.

While the kids are still kids on True Jackson, it's much tougher to buy into the shenanigans that occur at MadStyle because the two pieces of teen wackiness and important business meetings just don't fit very well together without making the adults look irresponsible or more immature than True (which the writers do most of the time). While of course, this could be remedied if True, Lulu and Ryan tbecame miniature versions of Tim Gunn, this would lose the kid vote immediately.

As someone with a personal interest regarding child prodigies who-- as the daughter and cousin of former models-- also loves fashion, I was very hopeful that True Jackson, VP would be a creative success. And despite a few entertaining episodes, overall I couldn't help wishing I could set up a lemonade (or sandwich stand) outside the Nickelodeon gate and try to rework it in the writer's room along with the talented cast and crew. Moreover, I want it to succeed as its own series and not "iCarly Goes Vogue," "Project Nickelodeon," or "Ugly Betty Gets Slimed" since the potential is there but the setup and payoff just don't "rock the show," to combine fashion talk with TV critique.

Filled with mini behind-the-scenes plugs and cast lead-ins to episodes that no doubt aired to remind Nick viewers about the new series in its first year for these 13 episodes, the best extra by far involves Runway's Heidi Klum herself as we're given a five minute overview of the coveted Barbie Fashion Show during New York's Valentine's Day 2009 Fashion Week.

Text ©2009, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com
Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited.

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DVD Review: The Longshots (2008)

Now Available

Who knew that Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst, who once sang about how much he wanted to rip someone's head off in "Break Stuff" or confessed that he did it all for the "Nookie" to keep "Rollin'" had it in him to direct a heartfelt, touching family movie? I certainly didn't but was delighted to be proven wrong with the refreshing and uplifting film, The Longshots.



Another in a long line of true sports stories-- Longshots stars Akeelah and the Bee's talented young actress Keke Palmer. While the young phenom she played in Akeelah was the brainy spelling champ, this time she shows us her athletic side by portraying eleven-year-old Jasmine Plummer. Plummer, the first female quarterback in the fifty-six year history of Pop Warner's league, ultimately rallied the hearts of everyone in her small town of Minden, Illionis when she took her team to Warner's Super Bowl.



In a nice change of pace for rapper/actor Ice Cube, he becomes Jasmine's unlikely mentor and father figure. As her unemployed, slacker uncle Curtis, we first encounter Cube's character as he's still having trouble getting over his mother's death and spends his days playing Backgammon and drinking beer, all the while putting any spare change he can wrangle up into a box he labels "Get Outta Minden Fund." While the box also contains sunny postcards of his dream relocation of Miami-- more than anything, we get the feeling that the former high school football star Curtis just wants a second chance to play the game, even if it's vicariously through his niece.

A bit of a shy bookworm who's endlessly teased by the cliquish, trendy girls in her middle school, Jasmine spends far too much time alone as her hardworking mother has to take longer shifts at the local diner to make ends meet and her deadbeat father has disappeared from her life. And unfortunately, yet true to most kids who've been abandoned, Jasmine endlessly hopes he'll return, going as far as to compulsively wear his wristwatch twenty-four hours a day.

When her mom encourages Jasmine to sign up for an after school activity, the girls laugh her out of joining a fashion club in her quest to become a model. Retreating once again to her solitude and books, soon Jasmine's mom manages to bribe her uncle Curtis into spending more time with his niece after school. While initially they get off to a rocky start as he forgets to feed her dinner and manages to lose her for the better part of an evening when she storms off in frustration, soon as a last straw she throws a football back to him in the park and he notices her natural ability to fire it straight to his fingertips.



Inspired for what seems to be the first time in his life since high school, Curtis begins training Jasmine to become the ultimate quarterback. And after having to prove both the other coaches and her eventual male teammates wrong, Jasmine soon becomes the quarterback for Pop Warner's Minden, Illinois team.

Of course, I grant you that sports films are a dime a dozen as they follow a set paradigm and manage to continuously comfort us again and again by serving up a much needed dose of optimism, especially in these trying times. However, this being said, The Longshots benefits where others have failed in not just telling a story that is true but by nearly making the football secondary in lieu of developing fully realized and heartfelt characters. Additionally in a rare change of pace for the genre, it's awe-inspiring to see the tale of a young woman who despite being athletic is still very much feminine as she's trained via an unorthodox and hilarious "hit the diva" target practice you'll need to see to believe.

Moreover, we can't help but become moved as Jasmine discovers not only her self-confidence as well as finding and choosing her own father figure in the form of her uncle Curtis, which especially appealed to the director as the adopted Durst notes on the DVD that he could fully relate to the script and was drawn in by the familial "love story." Likewise, in choosing to include so much of the eccentricities of the small, tight-knit yet broken down community that has been hit very hard by the same dire situations facing all of us, Durst manages to really make his story memorable by making a great character driven and community celebration film disguised as an average sports picture.



Arriving on DVD and Blu-ray shelves on December 2 from Dimension Home Entertainment, Genius Products, and The Weinstein Company, Longshots' DVD contains some truly worthwhile special features that go beyond simple promotional coverage to include separate interviews with Durst, Ice Cube, and the amazing Palmer. Additionally, we're served up a great featurette that interviews the real Jasmine Plummer and her relatives who we still find setting high goals for herself, yet remaining intelligent, grounded, and witty when discussing what it was like to see her life become a feature film. And although you couldn't ask this reviewer to explain even the fundamentals of the game of football, I can promise you that when it comes to the movie, The Longshots manages to score a touchdown.

Akeelah and the Bee

Director: Doug Atchison

Back in 2000, Doug Atchison’s screenplay for Akeelah and the Bee received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) Nicholl Fellowship in an international competition of 4,250 entries. Six years later, this small film about an eleven-year-old girl who challenges stereotypes and inspires her southern Los Angeles Crenshaw neighborhood to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee on ESPN became the first film ever produced by Starbucks Coffee. Shot in just 31 days on a budget of 6 million dollars, this sleeper gem was unfortunately released after the higher profile, big-screen adaptation of Myla Goldberg’s novel Bee Season. While the much less kid-friendly Bee Season was better left on the page, Akeelah and the Bee is vastly superior. Newcomer Keke Palmer's title character makes a wonderful contemporary heroine for young women and the movie is such a vibrant celebration of diversity in that our three main young characters come from vastly different ethnic backgrounds-- while Akeelah is African-American, the two friends she meets along the way are Latino and Asian respectively, thereby challenging stereotypes that it’s a traditionally “white” event. In addition, Atchison’s pitch-perfect screenplay has much to say about the pressures faced by the young competitors in regards to family, nerves, self-esteem challenges and frankly-- in the end-- the luck of getting certain words to spell that can make or break their chances. Admirably, the film also illustrates the importance of learning from a wide variety from tutors such as friends, relatives, teachers and neighbors. Tackling a similar role to the one he played in Searching for Bobby Fischer, Laurence Fishburne stars as Dr. Joshua Larabee, a former UCLA English department chair currently on sabbatical after a personal tragedy. While Larabee (inspired by a teacher of writer/director Atchison) provides the traditional rigorous scholastic structure for Akeelah as a proper tutor, she also finds inspiration in her own neighborhood and becomes a symbol of hope for a community that as she notes earlier in the film, doesn’t even have enough money to put doors on the bathroom stalls in her school. Angela Bassett (reuniting with her What’s Love Gotta Do With It costar Fishburne in a role that couldn’t be further from Tina Turner) is fine as Akeelah’s hardworking mother who is skeptical about her daughter’s pursuit but eventually begins to realize how important it is to Akeelah. Although some may argue that the ending is a bit contrived or far too convenient, it succeeds because (just as the film had been up until that point) it has much to say about the plusses and minuses of a win/lose environment in a competition where children spell words that large portions of viewers (including myself) have probably never heard, which is an admirable feat in itself. Overall, Akeelah and the Bee is a wonderful, quality family film that deserves more attention now that it’s been released on DVD.

From Akeelah and the Bee


“All My Girlz” by Keke Palmer


“Respect” by Aretha Franklin


“ABC” by Jackson 5


“Respect Yourself” by The Staple Singers


“Rubberband Man” by The Spinners