Keke Palmer

  • Akeelah and the Bee (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) I definitely slept on Akeelah and the Bee when it first came out, but it’s never too late to sing the praises of a genuinely enjoyable film. In many ways, it pairs quite well with Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters—they’re both stories of para-academic achievement featuring black casts, a traditional reverence for higher education, and clearly go for uplifting finales from very humble roots. They even both have wise mentor characters, in this case Laurence Fishburne (in a somewhat rare kindly turn) as a linguistic academician who is convinced to coach an eleven-year-old girl from a troubled family. Taking place in circa-2006 South Los Angeles (and beyond), there isn’t much in Akeelah and the Bee that feels particularly new or original (especially fifteen years later, and a spate of movies featuring young black heroines) but the charm of the film is in its execution—solid character work from Fishburne, a breakthrough role of sorts for Keke Palmer, straightforward helming from writer-director Doug Atchison, a good use of detail to evoke the world of competitive spelling, and a scope that draws in adults as much as younger audiences. It ends more or less like you’d expect, and that’s a further point in its favour.

  • Hustlers (2019)

    Hustlers (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, December 2020) Welcome to the 2020s! Your new moral orthodoxy, and you don’t get to choose to accept it, is that drugging, robbing and possibly abusing people is perfectly fine as long as they’re men and you pre-emptively declare yourself the victim! Wait, what? Well, yes: While it’s absurdly reductive to see Hustlers through the lens of reactionary misandry, there’s also a lot of that in the film. Adapted from an article about real NYC strippers drugging and robbing Wall Street types, the film does become more potent as a class-war kind of screed. It does have the (belated) decency to recognize that its heroines may not be completely righteous – that once you successfully target the deserving, it’s much easier to hurt the undeserving. Fortunately, some top talent goes into the execution: written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, the film assembles an all-star cast of actors-singers like Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu, Julia Stiles, Keke Palmer, Lizzo and Cardi B (who once said she drugged and robbed clients of their money during her early years as a stripper – role model, wooo). Nearly everyone does great work, with special attention paid to a great performance from Lopez, who hits upon a number of her personal strengths to create her character. The execution of Hustlers is a great deal better than its somewhat problematic premise, in between what could have been male exploitation of a salacious topic, on the one hand, or unrepentant man-bashing on the other. Having never been a stripper nor a strip-club patron in the past, I’m clearly not in the target audience for this film, but even I could appreciate the better moments of the film when it gets cracking on the atmosphere, the characterization and the dark irony inherent in its Robin Hood(ick) premise. Maybe it’ll go down more easily on a second viewing.