Entertainment
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.
“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.’ ”
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.’
“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.”
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.”
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: A real-life ’70s hostage drama crackles in Gus Van Sant’s ‘Dead Man’s Wire’
It plays a little loose with facts but the righteous rage of “Dog Day Afternoon” is present enough in Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire,” a based-on-a-true-tale hostage thriller that’s as deeply 1970s as it is contemporary.
In February 1977, Tony Kiritsis walked into the Meridian Mortgage Company in downtown Indianapolis and took one of its executives, Dick Hall, hostage. Kiritsis held a sawed-off shotgun to the back of Hall’s head and draped a wire around his neck that connected to the gun. If he moved too much, he would die.
The subsequent standoff moved to Kiritsis’ apartment and eventually concluded in a live televised news conference. The whole ordeal received some renewed attention in a 2022 podcast dramatization starring Jon Hamm.
But in “Dead Man’s Wire,” starring Bill Skarsgård as Kiritsis, these events are vividly brought to life by Van Sant. It’s been seven years since Van Sant directed, following 2018’s “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” and one of the prevailing takeaways of his new film is that that’s too long of a break for a filmmaker of Van Sant’s caliber.
Working from a script by Austin Kolodney, the filmmaker of “My Own Private Idaho” and “Good Will Hunting” turns “Dead Man’s Wire” into not a period-piece time capsule but a bracingly relevant drama of outrage and inequality. Tony feels aggrieved by his mortgage company over a land deal the bank, he claims, blocked. We’re never given many specifics, but at the same time, there’s little doubt in “Dead Man’s Wire” that Tony’s cause is just. His means might be desperate and abhorrent, but the movie is very definitely on his side.
That’s owed significantly to Skarsgård, who gives one of his finest and least adorned performances. While best known for films like “It,” “The Crow” and “Nosferatu,” here Skarsgård has little more than some green polyester and a very ’70s mustache to alter his looks. The straightforward, jittery intensity of his performance propels “Dead Man’s Wire.”
Yet Van Sant’s film aspires to be a larger ensemble drama, which it only partially succeeds at. Tony’s plight is far from a solitary one, as numerous threads suggest in Kolodney’s fast-paced script. First and foremost is Colman Domingo as a local DJ named Fred Temple. (If ever there were an actor suited, with a smooth baritone, to play a ’70s radio DJ, it’s Domingo.) Tony, a fan, calls Fred to air his demands. But it’s not just a media outlet for him. Fred touts himself as “the voice of the people.”
Something similar could be said of Tony, who rapidly emerges as a kind of folk hero. As much as he tortures his hostage (a very good Dacre Montgomery), he’s kind to the police officers surrounding him. And as he and Dick spend more time together, Dick emerges as a kind of victim, himself. It’s his father’s bank, and when Tony gets M.L. Hall (Al Pacino) on the phone, he sounds painfully insensitive, sooner ready to sacrifice his son than acknowledge any wrongdoing.
Pacino’s presence in “Dead Man’s Wire” is a nod to “Dog Day Afternoon,” a movie that may be far better — but, then again, that’s true of most films in comparison to Sidney Lumet’s unsurpassed 1975 classic. Still, Van Sant’s film bears some of the same rage and disillusionment with the meatgrinder of capitalism as “Dog Day.”
There’s also a telling, if not entirely successful subplot of a local TV news reporter (Myha’la) struggling against stereotypes. Even when she gets the goods on the unspooling news story, the way her producer says to “chop it up” and put it on air makes it clear: Whatever Tony is rebelling against, it’s him, not his plight, that will be served up on a prime-time plate.
It doesn’t take recent similar cases of national fascination, such as Luigi Mangione, charged with killing a healthcare executive, to see contemporary echoes of Kiritsis’ tale. The real story is more complicated and less metaphor-ready, of course, than the movie, which detracts some from the film’s gritty sense of verisimilitude. Staying closer to the truth might have produced a more dynamic movie.
But “Dead Man’s Wire” still works. In the film, Tony’s demands are $5 million and an apology. It’s clear the latter means more to him than the money. The tragedy in “Dead Man’s Wire” is just how elusive “I’m sorry” can be.
“Dead Man’s Wire,” a Row K Entertainment release, is rated R for language throughout. Running time: 105 minutes. Three stars out of four.
In a bid for greater user engagement, Walt Disney Co. will introduce vertical videos to its Disney+ app over the next year, a company executive said Wednesday.
The move is part of the Burbank media and entertainment company’s effort to encourage more frequent app usage, particularly on smartphones.
“We know that mobile is an incredible opportunity to turn Disney+ into a true daily destination for fans,” Erin Teague, executive vice president of product management, said during an onstage presentation in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. “All of the short-form Disney content you want, all in one unified app.”
Teague said the company will evolve that capability over time to determine new formats, categories and content types.
Disney’s presentation also touched on its interest in artificial intelligence. Last month, San Francisco startup OpenAI said it had reached a licensing deal with Disney to use more than 200 of the company’s popular characters in its text-to-video tool, Sora. Under the terms of that deal, users will be able to write prompts that generate short videos featuring Disney characters and use ChatGPT images to create those characters’ visages. Some of those Sora-generated videos will be shown on Disney+, though the companies said the deal did not include talent likenesses or voices.
Disney also said it would invest $1 billion into the AI company.
Part of Disney’s move toward AI is to appeal to young Gen Alpha viewers, who are more comfortable with AI and “expect to interact with entertainment” instead of simply watching stories on the screen, Teague said.
“AI is an accelerator,” she said. “It’s why collaborations with partners like OpenAI are absolutely crucial. We want to empower a new generation of fandom that is more interactive and immersive, while also respecting human creativity and protecting user safety.”
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Is This Thing On?
Cinematic stories of disintegrating marriages are fairly commonplace—and often depressing emotional endurance tests, besides—so it’s interesting to see co-writer/director Bradley Cooper take this variation on the theme in a fresher direction. The unhappy couple in this place is Alex and Tess Novak (Will Arnett and Laura Dern), who decide matter-of-factly to separate. Then Alex impulsively decides to get up on stage at an open-mic comedy night, and starts turning their relationship issues into material. The premise would seem to suggest an uneven balance towards Alex’s perspective, but the script is just as interested in Tess—a former Olympic-level volleyball player who retired to focus on motherhood—searching for her own purpose. And the narrative takes a provocative twist when their individual sparks of renewed happiness lead them towards something resembling an affair with their own spouse. The screenplay faces a challenge common to movies about comedians in that Alex’s material, even once he’s supposed to be actively working on it, isn’t particularly good, and Cooper isn’t particularly restrained in his own supporting performance as the comic-relief buddy character (who is called “Balls,” if that provides any hints). Yet the two lead performances are terrific—particularly Dern, who nails complex facial expressions upon her first encounter with Alex’s act—as Cooper and company turn this narrative into an exploration of how it can seem that you’ve fallen out of love with your partner, when what you’ve really fallen out of love with is the rest of your life. Available Jan. 9 in theaters. (R)
JANUARY SPECIAL SCREENINGS
KRCL’s Music Meets Movies: Dig! XX @ Brewvies: As part of a farewell to Sundance, Brewvies/KRCL’s regular Music Meets Movies series presents the extended 20th anniversary edition of the 2004 Sundance documentary about the rivalry between the Dandy Warhols and Brian Jonestown Massacre as they chart different music-biz paths. The screening takes place at Brewvies (677 S. 200 West) on Jan. 8 @ 7:30 p.m., $10 at the door or 2-for-1 with KRCL shirt. brewvies.com
Trent Harris weekend @ SLFS: Utah’s own Trent Harris has charted a singular course as an independent filmmaker, and you can catch two of his most (in)famous works at Salt Lake Film Society. In 1991’s Rubin & Ed, two mismatched souls—one an eccentric, isolated young man (Crispin Glover), the other a middle-aged financial scammer—wind up on a comedic road trip through the Utah desert; 1995’s Plan 10 from Outer Space turns Mormon theology into a crazy science-fiction parody. Get a double dose of uncut Trent Harris weirdness on Friday, Jan. 9, with Rubin & Ed at 7 p.m. and Plan 10 from Outer Space at 9 p.m. Tickets are $13.75 for each screening. slfs.org
Rob Reiner retrospective @ Brewvies Sunday Brunch: Last month’s tragic passing of actor/director Rob Reiner reminded people of his extraordinary work, particularly his first handful of features. Brewvies’ regular “Sunday Brunch” series showcases three of these films this month with This Is Spinal Tap (Jan. 11), The Princess Bride (Jan. 18) and Stand By Me (Jan. 25). All screenings are free with no reservations, on a first-come first-served basis, at noon each day. brewvies.com
David Lynch retrospective @ SLFS: It’s been a year since the passing of groundbreaking artist David Lynch, and Salt Lake Film Society’s Broadway Centre Cinemas marks the occasion with some of his greatest filmed work. In addition to theatrical features Eraserhead (Jan. 11), Inland Empire (Jan. 11), Mulholland Dr. (Jan. 12), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Jan. 14), Blue Velvet (Jan. 19) and Lost Highway (Jan. 19), you can experience the entirety of 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return on the big screen in two-episode blocs Jan. 16 – 18. The programming also includes the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life. slfs.org
Death by Numbers @ Utah Film Center: Directed by Kim A. Snyder (the 2025 Sundance feature documentary The Librarians), this 2024 Oscar-nominated documentary short focuses on Sam Fuentes, survivor of a school shooting who attempts to process her experience through poetry. This special screening features a live Q&A with Terri Gilfillan and Nancy Farrar-Halden of Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah, with Zoom participation by Sam Fuentes. The screening on Wednesday, Jan. 14 at 7 p.m. at Utah Film Center (375 W. 400 North) is free with registration at the website.
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