The Basic Plot in the Form of a Haiku:
            Millennium Shaft
            is balder, and also has
            a goofy goatee.

My Basic Ramblings: It took a while for Chris and I to decide what we wanted to see.  The whole decision to go to the movies came about because I wanted to see Chicken Run; he didn't.  He wanted to see The Patriot; I didn't.  (I liked it better when it was called Braveheart.)  So back and forth we went, naming movies and ranking them in our own little lists (I discovered I want to see M:I-2 more than he does, neither of us want to see Me, Myself & Irene, and so on and so forth) until eventually we decided we would go and see Shaft.

My husband and his brother are obsessed with blaxploitation flicks.  They're always giving each other copies of Car Wash or Blacula for birthdays and the like.   At Christmas, you can always guarantee that some such movie will be playing in the background as we open gifts.  (Everybody, sing along!  On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me a movie starring Richard Roundtree!)

So we went and saw Shaft.

Y'know how before a movie starts, they (at least around here) run slides advertising local vendors, showing stupid movie trivia, and the like?  Our theater was broken and showed the same slide over and over and over and over and over for about twenty minutes.  (It was for a video arcade/bumper car/mini golf/batting cage/laser tag extravaganza on the other side of the county, next door to the other theater run by the same company as the one we went to.)

So after all the previews [Kings of Comedy, What Lies Beneath, some Wesley Snipes action flick, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps] and the "Don't smoke/turn off your frickin' cell phones/know where the emergency exits are/your seat cushion turns into a floatation device" announcement, courtesy of the little Pepsi chick, the movie started.

Isaac Hayes still sings the "wocka-chicka-wocka-chicka" theme song, but instead of watching Richard Roundtree walk through Times Square, we get spinning montages of money, chicks, guns and Samuel L. Jackson's bald head.  Luckily for him the movie doesn't take place in the summer; with those turtlenecks and that big long Armani leather duster he'd probably die of heat exhaustion.  (As a few reviewers have said, it's amusing that Shaft asks the retired police chief how he can afford a big nice house on a cop's salary when he's out there in a $3,500 jacket.)

So a black guy's bludgeoned to death and it takes Shaft about two seconds to realize it was Christian Bale, looking like a combination of JFK, Jr. and Paul O'Neill.  (Chris is a Yankees fan, I'm not, but I watch enough of their games to know that Paul is going to have an aneurysm some day.  Either that or he's going to strike out one day and rip the head off a fan in frustration.)  Toni Collette, who is super-duper cool, is the waitress who witnessed the murder.  (Shaft knows this because she has a tiny smudge of blood on her chin.  Meanwhile, when Toni is explaining what she witnessed, and how Christian/John/Paul grabbed her face, there is blood on both sides of her mouth.  How can she clean one side and not the other?)

No matter; Shaft is a bad motherÖ.but I'd better shut my mouth.  There are cameos aplenty from the original movie; the director of the original pops up and Richard Roundtree does as well.  I think he's wearing the same jacket.  I think I read somewhere that Samuel L. Jackson is only about three years younger than Richard Roundtree, yet he's playing the nephew.  I suppose that could happen, it's not as unusual as, say, a fifty-five year old guy marrying a nineteen-year old and being the mother-in-law of someone in their late thirties and then having a baby with the 55 year old guy and then getting raped by the son and having another kid, and those two kids hooking up and having four children, two of which die and the other two hook up themselves.  (I indulged my V.C. Andrews obsession over the weekend.  Flowers in the Attic is wonderful guilty pleasure reading.)

New Shaft is not nearly as much of a sex machine as Original Shaft; while he does admit his duty to please the one bartender's booty (I didn't realize the NYPD's job was so diversified), that's about it in that department.  It would appear that James Bond is the only movie character left who has no qualms about sleeping with every woman he encounters.

Eventually Paul O'Neill hooks up with Jeffrey Wright as Peoples Hernandez, a very scary drug guy who enjoys stabbing himself in the chest with an icepick, which is very creepy to watch.  The whole theme of the movie becomes "Get Toni Collette and Kill Her" (if you're a bad guy) or "Get Toni Collette and Get Her To Testify" (if you're a good guy).  There are lots of shoot-outs and late 70's-looking cars with lots of chrome and Busta Rhymes shows up at a few points and everyone calls everyone else "dawg", or something.  (I readily admit I am the whitest person I know.)  Dan Hedaya is in there as a bad cop but at least we don't have to see his hairy, hairy back.  Vanessa Williams is a cop too, but she's pretty much a window-dressing cop.

Everybody runs around, trying not to get shot or ice picked or bludgeoned, the bad guys die (with apparently no investigation afterwards), the woman from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (who was also Noah's mother on All My Children) wraps up all the loose ends and Richard Roundtree shows up again and convinces his nephew to join him in being a private dick, leaving it open for a sequel.  Maybe they will resurrect Blacula and they can solve mysteries together.