Jesse Hawken
patreon
170: Fresh (with David Jamell Moses)
🕑 Added 2024-06-19 15:36:45 +0000 UTCThe film writer David Jamell Moses joins the show for a discussion about a great nineties film that has been flying under the radar for too long, Boaz Yakin’s debut feature Fresh (1994) starring Giancarlo Esposito, Samuel L. Jackson and a 13-year-old actor named Sean Nelson making his film debut, in one of the greatest screen acting performances by a child.
Nelson plays Michael (aka Fresh), a quiet 12-year-old boy who runs drugs for rival gangsters in New York City, including one kingpin who has addicted his sister to heroin and considers young Fresh to be his heir apparent. When Fresh witnesses an act of horrifying gun violence, he takes inspiration from his estranged alcoholic father, a speed-chess master, and applies the principles of the game of chess to carry out a complex strategy to eliminate the gangsters and save himself and his sister from their fates.
Fresh isn’t as well-remembered as other urban crime dramas of the 1990s but David and I love it, and on this episode we go deep on the film’s many virtues; some may be surprised to learn this film was made by a white director but Yakin hardly takes a wrong or phony step to tell this Black story, which functions as a thriller and a tragedy, with magnificent performances and a devastating conclusion.
Plus: how to properly pronounce the name “Giancarlo Esposito”!
Follow David Jamell Moses on Twitter, and check out his writing over at his blog Departures.
Here’s David’s appreciation thread for Fresh on Twitter that inspired this episode
Trailer for Fresh (Boaz Yakin, 1994)
Comments
Jesper Ohlsson
I remember wanting to track down this movie's soundtrack after I saw it (it played a few times on the satellite-movie-service we had), and I remember it having a very memorable and pretty flute or oboe theme (that I can still hum), and which always ran in the background of its trailer. This was way before the internet was robust enough for me to download songs, and probably even less so when you'e trying to get a song from a movie that might not even have had a soundtrack release (so it was basically audio-taping the little musical sting off the tv, or I dunno, hope my parents took me to London on the off-chance that HMV or Tower Record's had the OST on some shelf?). ...I also distinctly remember a pretty shocking proposition of a child by an adult, and some unfortunate business with a dog in this movie. I had zero supervision of the kind of movies I watched growing up.
