Samuel+L+Jackson

Atoshica Daniels

Samuel L Jackson



I chose Samuel L. Jackson, who I think is a great actor; from what I have watched. The definition for good is being positive. The reason I picked Samuel L. Jackson is because he is a great actor, he is always playing in a role as being a strong minded person and it's always a positive thing you will learn in his movies.

Samuel L. Jackson was born on December 21, 1948 in Washington D.C; he was raised in Chattanooga, by his mother, Elizabeth Jackson, and grandparents, when his father left him at a young age. His grandfather was a janitor, while Elizabeth worked in a factory. His mother had high hopes for her son to be better and to do better, as did his grandparents. He graduated from Morehouse College in 1972 and started performing. Jackson's early memories remained with him, when he entered the historically black Morehouse College, in Atlanta. He became increasingly involved in the black-power movement. After college, Jackson joined the Black Image Theatre Company with his future wife, LaTanya Richardson, whom he met at Morehouse's sister school, Spellman College.

He moved to New York City where his friendship with Spike Lee, which was a student of University films, helped him land his first movie gigs. In 1994, he had landed a role in the cult hit, Pulp Fiction**,** which he had received several award nominations and critical acclaims. The movies that I have seen are all great but the one I love the most is Coach Carter, Kill Bill Vol.2, Iron Man 2, and Die hard with a Vengeances; I really like all his movies because he always plays the same role in every movie, which people don’t like but I do. I think if you can play a role that is the bad person in the movie, and make it seem that you are the positive person, than you must be a graet actor. By the age of 63, he had appeared in more than 100 films, and in 2011 he was named the highest grossing actor of all time with more than $7.2 billion in wealth.

A great actor can take bad and make it good, with a positive turn-out even when nothing but the bad is around, and that is Samuel L. Jackson.


 * Spike Lee**



I chose Spike Lee because he is a wonderful director**.** The definition for good is being positive and Spike Lee has done nothing but postitve projects with his movies. The reason I chose Spike Lee is because I watched a show talking about him and all the movies he directed which are most of the movies I love to look at; and, also his movies tell the side of a story that no one will ever come out and say back in his time.

Shelton Jackson Lee was born in 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. At a very young age, he moved from pre-civil rights Georgia, to Brooklyn, New York. Lee came from a proud and intelligent background. His father was a jazz musician, and his mother, a school teacher. His mother dubbed him Spike, due to his tough nature. He attended school in Morehouse College in Atlanta and developed his film making skills at Clark Atlanta University. After graduating from Morehouse, to go to the Tisch School of Arts, graduate film program. He made a controversial short, The Answer (1980), a reworking of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) -- a ten-minute film. Lee went on to produce a 45-minute film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), which won a student academy award. However, success did not mean money.

Lee's films focus on various aspects of contemporary African-American life. //She's Gotta Have It// centers on the life of Nola Darling, a young woman with strong sexual desires who does not believe in restricting herself to one man to fulfill them. Nola represents a modern, independent woman who makes her own choices about her sexuality, yet in the end she discovers she loves the man who rapes her. Lee's second major film was //School Daze// (1988), a musical which parodies the conflict between light-skinned and dark-skinned African Americans at an all-black college in the South. Lee's //Do the Right Thing//(1989) follows a day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn on the hottest day of the summer. Racial tensions rise, culminating in the murder of a young African-American man by the police and the burning of a local pizzeria. In //Mo' Better Blues// (1990), Lee explores the world of a jazz musician and the conflicts between his creative life and his love life. Lee's next project, //Jungle Fever// (1991), centers on an interracial affair between an African-American architect and his Italian-American secretary. The relationship is met with scorn and violence from the families and members of the neighborhood. "Jungle fever" describes the phenomenon of sexual attraction between the races based on sexual myths, and the film explores this aspect of interracial relationships as opposed to relationships based on love and culminating in marriage. //Malcolm X// (1992) was one of Lee's most ambitious projects and covers the life of African-American activist Malcolm X. //Crooklyn//(1994) is a semi-autobiographical movie that Lee wrote with his sister and brother.

The story follows a few months in the life of a family in the 1970s. The Carmichael family lives in Brooklyn; the father is a musician, the mother a teacher. The film is told from the perspective of the 10-year-old daughter and follows her as she deals with the death of her mother and her journey to adulthood. In //Clockers// (1995) Lee tells the story of an African-American teenager who becomes a drug dealer. The character is able to rationalize his decision to deal crack until he sees the murder and black-on-black violence that drugs bring about. With //Girl 6// (1996) Lee returned to a female protagonist. The heroine is an actress who becomes disenchanted when a director asks her to take her top off during a reading. She turns to the phone sex business to make a living and is quite successful. When a sadistic customer reveals that he knows where she lives, Girl 6 decides to leave the business, move to California, and resume her acting career. The film closes as it began, with a director asking her to take off her top, but this time she calmly finishes her monologue and leaves.

Critics who review Lee's work often digress into discussions of Lee's persona in addition to or instead of his films. Some assert that Lee is a keen commentator on contemporary society and a cinematic innovator. Others describe him as an untalented commercial sellout. Lee is typically criticized for his lack of technical virtuosity. Reviewers point to his use of a moving screen behind two still characters to make them appear to be walking as a sign of his amateurish preoccupation with cinematic gadgetry.