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Ice-T proves he's still 'Merciless' on Body Count's latest attack of gory hip-hop metal with a message

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Ice-T proves he's still 'Merciless' on Body Count's latest attack of gory hip-hop metal with a message

“You don’t know me, fool / You disown me, cool,” Ice-T snarls in the 1988 hip-hop gang treatise “Colors.” The Afrika Islam-produced cut, the title track from the film of the same name, boosted the Jersey-born, then-L.A.-dweller out of the underground, kick-starting a multifaceted career that today finds Ice sitting on a curved couch in the bright open kitchen/family room of his Edgewater, N.J., home, daughter Chanel’s mostly pink toys carefully stacked nearby.

These days, fans of his music are used to seeing the rapper-turned-actor in mainstream commercials that would’ve been too scared to cast him back in the day. O.G. Ice-T wouldn’t have been caught dead shilling for Cheerios (Ice teaches yoga); Tide (Ice “cold calls” chef Gordon Ramsay); or GEICO (Ice at a lemonade stand). But if the leap from gangster to gladhander wasn’t part of a master plan, it’s not a far stretch.

“First, people don’t know who you are,” he explains of his early career. “The neighborhood knows, but the people don’t. So you got to make them understand that you’re a serious person. Before we can have fun, you have to understand that I’m not all fun, right? So now people meet me. They go, ‘you’re nice.’ I’m like, ‘Well, you’re not my enemy. There’s another Ice. You don’t want to meet him.’ ”

Today’s Ice-T — in the month prior to the U.S. election and before the death of one-time collaborator Quincy Jones — speaks eloquently on both those subjects. As well as on his Harley-Davidson-riding father-in-law, meeting Presidents Clinton (“That motherf— was charming as f—”) and Trump (pre-first presidency, “his character alone is piece of s— to me”), and the Constitution, before joyfully breaking into the chorus of the New Radicals song he hopes to cover, “we only get what we give.”

It’s a day off from the 66-year-old’s role as NYPD detective/sergeant Odafin Tutuola on NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” a role he’s played for 24 years. The irony of the “Cop Killer” — the song by his heavy metal band Body Count that resulted in a parting of ways with Warner Bros. Records — playing a cop on TV is lost on no one.

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“It’s like they think it’s a snuff record something. Like they really believed I was telling people to go kill cops, which I wasn’t,” Ice-T says, not for the first time since the track’s 1992 release. “I was acting a character out. But f— it, I call that a badge of honor. Like the new ‘Merciless’ album cover, Japan says they don’t want it.” (The band logo is in blue and red; giving both Crips and Bloods and Democratic and Republican connotations; Ice is in a blue surgical cap, blood-covered and holding a bone saw in front of a blond man in a Ku Klux Klan robe tied to a chair.)

The 12-track record is Body Count’s eighth album, with Ice and Crenshaw high school pal guitarist Ernie C (Cunnigan) and turntablist/keyboard player Sean E Sean its original members. Bassist Vincent Price, drummer Ill Will and rhythm guitarist Juan of the Dead round out the lineup with Ice’s son, Little Ice, his middle child, the band’s hype man and backing vocalist since 2016.

“Merciless,” like its predecessors, is full of sound and fury, signifying much that Ice finds wrong with the world, his evenhanded, intelligent opinions writ loudly, if graphically. The record was influenced by the COVID pandemic, but not in the way one might imagine.

“The whole ‘Merciless’ album is based on my love of horror movies. The last four albums have been the rebirth of Body Count with Will Putney producing. We went from ‘Manslaughter’ to ‘Blood Lust’ to ‘Carnivore,’ ” Ice says. “So this is ‘Merciless,’ this is all the saga. When ‘Carnivore’ hit last year, we did well, we won the Grammy. Everything’s hot. The label goes, ‘OK, give me another album.’ ”

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Ice’s voice rises. “We just s— an album out!’ I’m like, ‘How the f— imma do another?’ We never got to perform because the album dropped the day COVID hit.” Ice, who takes riffs and songs written by his band and rearranges them to his liking before coming up with lyrics, adds, “People don’t understand that when you make a record, you might put on 12,13, songs, but you made 27 that didn’t make it because they weren’t good enough. You don’t want to use them for the next album. You have to start from scratch.”

With a shuttered New York City across the Hudson River, Ice, wife Coco (née Austin) and daughter Chanel spent COVID lockdown in Jersey. “I was watching horror movies, serial killers, all this s—. So before you know it, there’s a song called ‘The Purge.’ There’s a song called ‘Psychopath.’ I’m looking at this new election coming. I’m like, ‘these motherf—s are gang banging.’ All these different topics are coming to my head, and we make the next record.”

While both metal and hip-hop audiences are quick to call out posers, Ice-T comes by his rock ‘n’ roll bona fides thanks to his teens in L.A., the city he moved to after both his parents passed away. “I had a cousin when I lived in L.A. who thought he was Jimi Hendrix and would keep the radio on KMET and KLOS. I heard everything from Pink Floyd to J. Geils Band to Boston to ELO to Mott the Hoople to Edgar Winter,” he recalls. “I started to get into groups like Blue Oyster Cult, Deep Purple and of course, Sabbath. I started to like the darker stuff, right?”

While there remains precious few Black rock and metal bands, Ice-T says the initial goal with Body Count was “to find an audience to play for so Ernie could play his guitar.” Ernie C and late drummer Beatmaster V began pro careers on Ice-T’s 1987 debut studio album for Sire, “Rhyme Pays.” “We used the Sabbath hook from ‘War Pigs,’ but it was live drums, Beatmaster V. Then I did “The Girl Tried to Kill Me” (1989). Ernie played on that.” At the time, hip-hop was very sample-based. But a creative spark was lighted when Ice-T went on tour with Public Enemy. He saw “kids moshing off of ‘Bring the Noise’ and ‘[Welcome to the] Terrordome.’

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“I’m like, ‘We’re gonna take the punk sensibility of Suicidal [Tendencies],’ who already had a gangbanger look,” says Ice-T, excited at the memory. “I said, ‘We’re gonna take the speed of Slayer and the impending doom of Black Sabbath, mash that together, and I’m gonna sing about the same s— that I sing about in rap. But I’m not gonna rap it. Imma bark it. I call it ‘barking’ because I was listening to New York hardcore, like Madball and groups like that. They’re not singing. I can’t sing like Journey, but yeah, this vocal delivery isn’t out of my range.’ So I said, ‘Let’s go.’ ”

More than 30 years later, Body Count has not run out of heavy riffing ideas or equally weighty lyrical topics. The new song “Do or Die” isn’t from his horror movie binge; it’s the frontman’s view on guns. Ice-T isn’t necessarily pro-gun, rather, the former Army infantryman clarifies: “I walk into a room, and nobody’s got a gun, OK. But if I walk in the room and somebody’s got a gun, I want a gun. I don’t want to be the guy with the butter knife.”

Thanks to his common sense approach to life, people tell Ice-T he should be in politics. The one-time gangster’s retort? “I got out of crime. I’m on a soapbox. I can say whatever the f— I want. I’ve pretty much said everything I wanted to say. I think in my history, you can look at Ice-T and say, ‘Ice-T has done some crazy s—.’ But I doubt if you find something I done stupid.”

The father of three and husband of 22 years’ time denies having any secrets. “I never been to no Diddy parties; not my scene. Honestly, I come from so much drama and chaos that when I finally got a chance to get out of it… I don’t jaywalk in New York. I don’t break the law. I don’t do that,” he adds, “because I used to do it every day. I was deep in, and I could have caught a life sentence. I’ve been so blessed and so lucky. if I did anything illegal, if I lied to somebody, if I did something crazy, I think I’d die. I think I would suffer Instant Karma.”

Elder statesman Ice-T is also OK that he’s no longer speaking to the youth. “You have to embrace your evolution and understand that the torch has to be passed. Like Chuck D told me, ‘At this point, if you’re not having fun, you did all this for nothing.’ I think what we did,” he concludes, “was the heavy lifting. We did enough to change the world. To me, Barack Obama was a hip-hop president. He was the president of the kids who voted for him, that grew up with us. Those white kids didn’t exist before hip-hop, you know? We created a surge of young white youth who weren’t racist.”

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And while he’s happy to “talk s—” to his longtime fans via “Merciless,” he says, “we did our part. It’s now time for young kids to do their part. We need a new young PE. A new young Ice-T. Because now, I’m sorry, but I’m the old guy.” He’s glad to still hold — and step over — the line, while understanding he’s not influencing young people “the way a 21-year-old or youngster would if he was saying it. It hits them harder because it’s their peers.”

That’s not to say a Body Count show is anything short of raucous or provocative, Ice-T bringing the noise and intensity with his equally pumped high school OGs in the band. “When I play a song, the audience goes back to the day they first heard that song. And then for me to perform it correctly, I have to go back to that moment when I wrote ‘Colors,’ ” he says. “So now I’m a 16-year-old dude on a stage, gangbanging, because to perform it correctly, I have to get into that place. So music is the fountain of youth.”

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Movie Reviews

Film Review: The Fire Inside – SLUG Magazine

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Film Review: The Fire Inside – SLUG Magazine

Film

The Fire Inside
Director: Rachel Morrison
Michael De Luca Productions, PASTEL
In Theaters: 12.25

I’m not a fan of combat sports in real life, yet I find that movies about them are nearly irresistible. Whether it’s Rocky, The Karate Kid, Warrior or the upcoming wrestling flick Unstoppable, the underdog who comes out swinging and bests their bigger, more experienced opponent always plays. It’s also nearly always the same movie, and that’s what makes The Fire Inside a knockout.

In this fact–based story, Claressa Shields (Ryan Destiny, A Girl Like Grace, Oracle) is a young woman from Flint, Michigan, who has one skill and one passion: boxing. Despite limited support from her family, Claressa is taken under the wing of Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry, If Beale Street Could Talk, Godzilla vs. Kong), a coach at a local gym. As Jason becomes as much a surrogate father as a coach, Claressa trains with a ferocious determination and earns a spot on the 2012 Summer Olympic team —  Claressa “T-Rex” Shields becomes the first American woman to take home the gold in the sport at age 16. From there, Claressa goes from being a poor inner city kid with nothing to … a poor inner city kid with a gold medal overnight.  There are no endorsement deals, no professional career and seemingly no new worlds to conquer. As Claressa fights discouragement, she must find a path to lead her beyond a one time victory into a lasting better life.

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Rachel Morrison, the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for her work on Black Panther, makes a strong directorial debut, coming out swinging. She’s ably assisted by a terrific script by Barry Jenkins (Moonlight). The Fire Inside transcends the tropes of the genre by reaching the rush of climactic fight and then daring not to end there, instead delving into the reality that in Shields’  life, one triumph in the sports world doesn’t change your circumstances, especially for an uncouth young woman with no interest in playing the public relations game and selling a softer, more traditionally feminine image. We’ve heard the cliche “this isn’t just a movie about sports, it’s about life,” but such a candid look at a life-changing moment that does nothing to change your life, and learning how to face this, was something refreshingly new and honest. The often bleak and at times stunningly beautiful cinematography by Rina Yang, along with the stirring score by Tamar-kali, lift the sensory experience and go a long way to making this one a winner. 

Destiny shows potential as a breakout star, commanding the screen as effortlessly as Claressa commands the ring. Henry is the highlight of any film he’s in, and The Fire Inside is no exception, with his grounded performance keeping the film moving along and setting the tone for a story about learning that you can still lean on others while you’re believing in yourself. The sizzling chemistry between these two actors drives a poignant and entertaining story to a satisfying and believable conclusion that’s not the one you’re expecting.

The Fire Inside is a breath of fresh air in a genre that far too often settles for stale and dank. It provides enough inspirational warmth to fulfill its duties as an uplifting sports movie, but its got the stamina and the drive to go a few extra rounds and push its own limits. Unlike most boxing films, this champ doesn’t pull any punches. –Patrick Gibbs

Read more film reviews here:
Film Review: A Complete Unknown
Film Review: Babygirl 

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The 2024 Envelope Oscar Roundtables

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The 2024 Envelope Oscar Roundtables

The fear factor behind great art

Adrien Brody, Kieran Culkin, Colman Domingo, Peter Sarsgaard, Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong dive into their films, truth-telling and acting alongside your director. READ HERE

The word "Directors" in pink

Doubts, sure. Compromise? Never

6 directors on doubt, compromise and Timothée Chalamet. READ HERE

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Movie review: Reverence to source material drains life from ‘Nosferatu’

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Movie review: Reverence to source material drains life from ‘Nosferatu’

Passion projects are often lauded simply for their passion, for the sheer effort that it took to bring a dream to life. Sometimes, that celebration of energy expended can obfuscate the artistic merits of a film, as the blinkered vision of a dedicated auteur can be a film’s saving grace, or its death knell. This is one of the hazards of the passion project, which is satirically explored in the 2000 film “Shadow of the Vampire,” a fictionalized depiction of the making of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent horror film “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror,” in which John Malkovich plays the filmmaker obsessed with “authentic” horror.

This meta approach is a clever twist on the iconic early horror movie that looms large in our cultural memory. Inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula” (with names and details changed in order to skirt the lack of rights to the book), “Nosferatu” is a landmark example of German Expressionism, and Max Schreck’s performance as the vampire is one of the genre’s unforgettable villains.

“Nosferatu” has inspired many filmmakers over a century — Werner Herzog made his own bleak and lonely version with Klaus Kinski in 1979; Francis Ford Coppola went directly to the source material for his lushly Gothic “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in 1992. Now, Robert Eggers, who gained auteur status with his colonial horror film “The Witch,” the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired two-hander “The Lighthouse,” and a Viking epic “The Northman,” delivers his ultimate passion project: a direct remake of Murnau’s film.

His first non-original screenplay, Eggers’ version isn’t a “take” on “Nosferatu,” so much as it is an overly faithful retelling, so indebted to its inspiration that it’s utterly hamstrung by its own reverence. If “Shadow of the Vampire” is a playful spin, Eggers’ “Nosferatu” is an utterly straight-faced and interminably dull retread of the 1922 film. It’s the exact same movie, just with more explicit violence and sex. And while Eggers loves to pay tribute to the style and form of cinema history in his work, the sexual politics of his “Nosferatu” feel at least 100 years old.

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“Nosferatu” is a story about real estate and sexual obsession. A young newlywed, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is dispatched from his small German city to the Carpathian Mountains in order to execute the paperwork on the purchase of a rundown manor for a mysterious Count Orlok (an unrecognizable Bill Skarsgård), a tall, pale wraith with a rumbling voice that sounds like a beehive.

Thomas has a generally bad time with the terrifying Count Orlok, while his young bride at home, the seemingly clairvoyant Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is taken with terrifying nightmares and bouts of sleepwalking, consumed by psychic messages from the Count, who has become obsessed with her. He makes his way to his new home in a rat-infested ship, unleashing a plague; Ellen weighs whether she should sacrifice herself to the Count in order to save the town, which consists of essentially three men: her husband, a doctor (Ralph Ineson) and an occultist scientist (Willem Dafoe).

There’s a moment in the first hour of “Nosferatu” where it seems like Eggers’ film is going to be something new, imbued with anthropological folklore, rather than the expressionist interpretation of Murnau. Thomas arrives in a Romanian village, where he encounters a group of jolly gypsies who laugh at him, warn him, and whose blood rituals he encounters in the night. It’s fascinating, fresh, culturally specific, and a new entry point to this familiar tale. Orlok’s mustachioed visage could be seen as a nod to the real Vlad the Impaler, who likely inspired Stoker.

But Eggers abandons this tack and steers back toward leaden homage. The film is a feat of maximalist and moody production design and cinematography, but the tedious and overwrought script renders every character two-dimensional, despite the effortful acting, teary pronunciations and emphatically delivered declarations.

Depp whimpers and writhes with aplomb, but her enthusiastically physical performance never reaches her eyes — unless they’re rolling into the back of her head. Regardless of their energetic ministrations, she and Hoult are unconvincing. Dafoe, as well as Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin, as family friends who take in Ellen, bring a winking campiness, breathing life into the proceedings, while Simon McBurney devilishly goes for broke as the Count’s familiar. However, every actor seems to be in a different movie.

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Despite the sex, nudity and declarations of desire, there’s no eroticism or sensuality; despite the blood and guts, there’s nothing scary about it either. This film is a whole lot of style in search of a better story, and without any metaphor or subtext, it’s a bore. Despite his passion for the project, or perhaps because of it, Eggers’ overwrought “Nosferatu” is dead on arrival, drained of all life and choked to death on its own worship.

‘Nosferatu’

GRADE: C

Rated R: for bloody violent content, graphic nudity and some sexual content

Running time: 135 minutes

In theaters Dec. 25

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