Big Media Vandalism

Something Noir Besides Our Owners

2012-01-26T20:05:00.001-05:00

by Odienator

While you're waiting for Black History Mumf, check out my postings from the 10th Annual Noir City Film Festival in San Francisco! It's over at "The Odie Blog," Tales of Odienary Madness.

This is my ticket to all manner of dark joys.

I'm out here being a bad boy in San Francisco. The slogan for the Noir Festival is "No Happy Endings." Whether that's the slogan of my vacation is just too nasty for me to talk about right now.

But seriously, get your ass over there and read it every day. Don't make me show up at your house wearing this:

The Big Media Vandalism Christmas Special

2011-12-24T22:05:00.002-05:00

by Odienator

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through this blog
Odienator was passing out, drunk on eggnog.

Well, not quite. Or rather, not yet.

If you've been nice this year, leave this blog immediately and go read my Christmas Meditation over at Tales of Odienary Madness. If you've been naughty, however, stick around and stay tuned for Big Media Vandalism's Christmas Special! I truly wish I were good with a camera, because I'd do my own Rankin-Bass inspired animation, featuring Steven Boone as Rudolph and me as Hermy the Coming Out of the Closet Elf. (Wait, you actually thought he wanted to be a dentist? Don't you know dentist is code? Have you listened to any blues records about dentists?)

Alas, my artistry lay elsewhere, so I thought we could have a series of Christmas song parodies. That piece started out well, but quickly denigrated into "lump of coal in Odie's stocking" territory. Don't believe me? Bear witness:

(in my best Brenda Lee imitation)
Fuckin' around the Christmas tree
Get a glass bulb in yo' ass.
If you make sure the kids don't see
Everyone will have a blast.

This could only end badly. You don't wanna know what I did to poor Frosty.

And then I thought: Why don't I just share my Christmas Eve traditon with you? No, it doesn't involve screwing under the Christmas tree (that's a Christmas Day tradition). My Christmas Eve tradition involves wrapping my presents while sipping eggnog and listening to Christmas music. Old school ghetto favorites fill the air while I use wrapping paper and Scotch tape with the skill of a 3-year old. It's chock full of holiday spirit and good cheer.

Surrey down to our Stone Soul Christmas Picnic and sample our Christmas playlist. Merry Christmas to the Christians, Happy Hanukkah to our Jewish audience, and Happy Kwanzaa to the folks who are Blacker than I'll ever be.

If we're going to do a Soul Christmas Eve, we gotta start here:

1. This Christmas, by Donny Hathaway

If you're my age and the owner of a troublesome kitchen that terrified an Ace comb, you are familiar with this song. Written and recorded in 1970 by Donny Hathaway, This Christmas is the quintessential 'hood Christmas record. It's the rare Christmas song we 'hood rats can lay claim to, and while I'm sure it's appreciated by others, I have yet to hear it played on any station that doesn't specialize in R&B/Urban Contemporary. I mean, there's a radio station here that's been playing 24 hours of Christmas music and I haven't heard This Christmas on it once. And they've been doing this agonizing Christmas shit since October!

So ingrained in my nappy soul is this record that it does NOT feel like Christmas until I hear it. 'Tis a great irony that I as an adult did not own a copy of this song until 2004. An even bigger irony is that the copy I own is on the Friday After Next soundtrack. Avoid at all costs any remake.

2. That's What Christmas Means To Me, by Stevie Wonder

Stevie Wonder Christmas songs, brilliant as they may be, are DEPRESSING. Have you ever listened to Someday at Christmas? Or this song about a Christmas tree? Jesus, I'm bawling my eyes out right now. Thankfully, we also have this song by the genius known as Steveland Hardaway Morris, with its Funk Brothers bass line that dares you to sit still. I linked to Wonder's live performance at Disneyland (because, come on, it's Stevie Wonder singing live) but I'm partial to his original recording.

3. Silent Night, by The Temptations

There are actually two versions of Silent Night by the Temptations. I believe this is the later version. The original version is on that Friday After Next soundtrack, and while it's a decent rendition, it doesn't hold a candle to this. This version of the standard written in 1859 is the only other song I had to hear before I could truly get into the holiday spirit. I have spent the last thirtysomething years trying to make my voice as deep as Melvin Franklin, the Temptations' resident bass, especially when he says "Merry Christmas from the Temptations" at the end. It will take thirtysomething more.

4. Santa Baby, by Eartha Kitt

This is why I'm going to Hell. I follow a deeply spiritual song about Jesus' birth with this, a ditty raunchy enough to turn Santa's face as red as his suit. When I did my Eartha Kitt remembrance here at Big Media Vandalism, I wrote:

When Kitt re-emerged on my radar in the 80’s, I learned that she was a singer. She had been singing long before I existed, but remember, all I knew of her was Catwoman. I wasn’t aware at the time that she was willing to fuck Santa Claus in exchange for lavish gifts. Santa Baby, her 1953 hit, is the original golddigger song, with Kitt implying with her voice what the censor wouldn’t allow her to say: At her house, trim is a noun during Christmas.

Kitt has another tie to Christmas Day: She died on December 25, 2008. I hope she went to her final resting place without ever hearing Madonna's version of this song.

5. Give Love on Christmas Day, by The Jackson Five

Years ago, my cousin told me that Mike was singing "Give it up on Christmas Day." Like a dolt, I believed her. So gullible a child was I! While my cousin's mondegreen would make a great parody (and I wrote one before I ditched the concept in favor of this), it's clear that Mike is asking you to give love from your heart on Jesus' birthday. Or is it? Maybe we ARE supposed to give "the man on the street and the couple upstairs" some ass. Listen and decide for yourself.

6. Merry Christmas, Baby, by Otis Redding

This is the first Otis Redding song I ever heard. Like that song Kanye and Jay-Z sample, Merry Christmas Baby is a remake that Redding manipulates, making it his own. (Just like Aretha Franklin did to Redding's Respect.) Oddly enough, I hadn't heard this in a while, so revisiting it was a joy. Also a joy, and far, far, FAR better than that hideous cover of Santa Claus is Coming to Town, is Bruce Sprngsteen's cover.

7, Do You Hear What I Hear, by Whitney Houston

Yes, I'm always making fun of Whitney Houston here at Big Media Vandalism, but I never said she couldn't sing. It's a testament to the former spouse of the King of R&B that she takes a song I've always disliked and makes me want to hear it again and again. Her version is also the only one that doesn't make me think of Gremlins.

8. Christmas in Hollis, by Run-DMC

This was a hard choice for me, as I had to decide between this, Kurtis Blow's Christmas Rappin and the Beat Street Santa Claus Rap by the Treacherous Three. I chose Run-DMC because it's become shorthand for feeling pride in celebrating Christmas in your 'hood, whether that 'hood is Hollis, Jersey City, Mount Vernon or some ritzy suburb where only rich White folks live. Their kids love this song too, you know!

9. The 12 Days of Christmas, by John Denver and The Muppets

I admit that The Twelve Days of Christmas is the Chinese Water Torture of Christmas songs. The repetiton of the lyrics alone has been known to drive people insane. But I can't help myself; I love this version of it. The Muppets have fun with it, from Fozzie forgettig his line to Miss Piggy going "Ba-da-bop-bop!" after her lyric (you can guess which day this diva gets). If you think including this was me indulging my bad taste, to quote the singer of The Help's unofficial theme song, "you ain't heard nothin' yet."

10. Santa Claus is a Black Man

I think I was four years old the first time I heard this song. My Mom used to tease me by changing the lyric to "Santa Claus is a Black Lady." (She was right--at least for me.) The song remained tucked in an obscure corner of my brain until many years later when I was doing a radio show. We dug it up on the Internet, burned it, and brought it to the station. It was Christmastime, so we played it.

"You know," I said, "I want to play this again."

After I repeated the song, the radio station phone rang. It was one of our 3 or 4 listeners.

"Duuude, what was that," a young, somewhat stoned voice asked me. "That was Santa Claus is a Black Man," I told him. "John Waters says it's his favorite Christmas song."

"Can you play it again?" asked the voice on the phone. "I got some friends here that didn't believe me when I told them about this!"

His wish was granted. This time, I started singing along, trying to imitate the cute little voice on the record. (I sounded like Elmo on crack.)

For shits and giggles, I said over the air, "I know y'all are out there singing along. Call me, and I'll put you on the air."

I didn't think anybody would have the balls to--holy shit, the phone rang!

"Hey, man!" said the inebriated voice on the phone. "Can I sing Santa Claus is a Black Man?"

'Sure!" I said.

"Um, I'm White. Is it still OK?"

"Of course," I said. "Santa Claus loves all his nice boys, even the White ones."

"Dude, I'm so naughty right about now."

"Aren't we all?" I said to him.

I played the record again. To his credit, the guy sang. To my credit, I put him on the air. He was joined by a few other people in the background. I could only imagine what this looked like on the other end of that phone.

All in all, I played Santa Claus is a Black Man 8 times in a row. Five of those times, I had drunk, stoned suburban college kids singing along, over the air and into the universe. This may be the greatest thing I've ever done on the radio.

Click that Youtube clip. You know you want to. And sing along, because, gosh-darn-it, it's catchy as hell and "really out of sight." Hell, I'm singing it now. You'll thank me later!

Happy Holidays everybody!

The True Meaning of Black Friday

2011-11-25T16:04:00.000-05:00

by Odienator

I should be ashamed of myself.

Steven Boone, creator of Big Media Vandalism, turned over the keys to this blog to me months ago, and while I haven’t exactly been completely idle on the writing front, I’ve been writing less and none of it has been here. (Check both Boone and me out at Roger Ebert's Movies on Demand blog.) As Avenue Q so nicely put it, There is Life Outside Your Apartment. I’ve been trying to deal with mine.

But I’m here now, and it’s only fitting that my first piece as the “owner” of Big Media Vandalism is one of our commercials. You may remember our Vote Or Get Your Ass Whipped commercials from Black History Mumf (here and here). Well, today is Black Friday! It's the one day of the year where shoppers wake up an ungodly hours of the night to fight over deceptively cheap sale items! With all the rumbles, riots, stampedes and pepper spray incidents, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that people of every race use Black Friday as an excuse to act like a buncha Niggas. That's why the Mad Men on Madison Avenue called it Black Friday.

I spend every Black Friday the same way: I gorge on movies rather than shopping. While you're reading this, I'm at The Artist and A Dangerous Method. I used to hit the malls on the day after Thanksgiving like everyone else. But let me tell you about two incidents that scarred me for life.

Remember Cabbage Patch Kids, the ugly ass dolls that smelled like powder and caused a shopping frenzy? They were my generation's Tickle Me Elmo. My sister wanted one for Christmas, so I went to several stores. They proved as elusive as a deadbeat dad running from child support payments. But at a Kmart, I found a doll. Two women were standing in front of the display, arguing over who saw it first. One woman poked the other, and that led to a blue-light special on catfights. As the women tussled and fought, knocking down other displays and screamnig profanities, I casually walked up and took the doll off the shelf and bought it for my sister. I remember both the doll's name on its "birth certificate" (Joya Kitt) and the look on the women's faces when they realized I'd taken off with the object of their affection.

"Hey, stop that kid!!" one screamed. I started running. They chased me, but thankfully, Kmart security stopped both of them due to their prior catfighting. "I hope you die, asshole!" one of the women screamed at me.

The second incident occurred when I was much older. I was in JCPenney when this motherly woman approached me. "Excuse me," she said, "but you're the same size as my son. Would you mind trying on this coat?" I tried on the coat, a three-quarter Shaft-style leather coat. It fit me perfectly. "Where did you get this?" I asked her. "From over on that rack." She pointed out the rack of coats.

I checked the size on the coat I'd tried on, and then went to the rack to find it. After digging for a minute or two, I found one coat in that size. As I was taking it, this crazy-eyed woman appeared in the aisle, as if summoned by magic.

"HEY!" she yelled. "That's MY COAT!!"

I looked at her as if she were nuts. As I continued to walk, she yelled out "HEY! I hid that coat on the rack! It's mine!!" I walked faster. So did she. "Gimme that coat!" she yelled, "OR I'LL KICK YOU IN THE NUTS!!"

Immediately, my body went into prep mode. Adrenaline started pumping. "Is this bitch actually going to fight me in the store?" my brain asked in panic. I outweighed her, and I was bigger than her, but none of that would matter if she had a gun in her pocketbook. There was a very short line at a register about 20 feet away from me. I made for it, almost in a sprint. I could hear heels clicking on the store floor, sounding like the Morse Code for "I'ma Beat Yo' Ass!" As I got to the register, the woman behind it shot a dirty look over my shoulder. Her face said "try it, bitch! Make my day!!"

I left the store with my coat and immediately went to my car. I was terrified that woman would be inside it like a slasher movie monster. I'd look in the rearview and she'd be there. "COOOOAT!!" she'd yell before stabbing me in the neck, causing my car to flip over and explode. The next shot would have been the woman spinning around in the street like Leatherface, holding a burnt up coat instead of a chainsaw.

That didn't happen, but the incident killed my desire for any Black Friday shopping.

So I decided to redefine Black Friday as a cheerful Hallmark Card Holiday. Who doesn't love holidays? You already have the day off, so let's recast today as a more positive event. Here's Big Media Vandalism's latest commercial. It's for a different kind of Black Friday. And remember the BMV Commercial Credo:

"It's Satire, Folks!"

(Roll Commercial!)

JT: Hi, everybody! I'm Justin Timberlake, singer, dancer, entertainer, actor and lifetime Ghetto Pass Holder. I'm Blacker than a lot of people you know, (coughhermancaincough) and I'm here to tell you about the latest way to send one your love. No, it's not another Dick in A Box! That's for Christmas. This is for Black Friday. No, not the one where you kill people over flat screen TV's and toys at Walmart, the one where you show your affection for that special someone in your life.

That's right: Hallmark Cards is introducing greetings designed specifically for your token Black friend! They teach you Soul(TM) and give you valuable advice you can't get from your rich, preppy friends. So, show 'em you care!

Let's see how it works!

Chip: Yo, Tyrone.

Tyrone: Whassup, Chip?

Chip: Yo, you know I appreciate you being my nigga, my ace boon coon and all dat, right?

Tyrone: Yeah. You my nigga too, G.

Chip: Yo, I know I don't show it, cuz that shit is gay, but (pulling out card) it IS Black Friday, and I just wanna give you this, you know, to say thanks and shit for givin' me street cred amongst my suburban homies, helpin' me talk to the sistahs and maknig me look legit on the dance floor when we at the club.

Tyrone: Aw man, you shouldn't have. This is some cool shit right here! (Opens envelope. Reads the front of the card) "To my nigga!" (Opens it, reads inside) Widoutchu I'd be just another wigga! (Closes card) Aw man!

Chip: I mean it man, from inside here. (Pounds his heart with his fist)

Tyrone: Aw, I'm all choked up and shit. (Gives Chip a pound and a hug.)

JT: See! The token in your crew is bound to appreciate these cards, with special sayings from Eminem, Robin Thicke, and Dr. Maya Angelou! And it's not just for da homeboys! We got 'em for the honeys too!

Muffy: Oh my GOD! Shenequa, you are my number one bitch!

Shenequa: Gurrrl, I know! And I so appreciate this "Sorry for tryin' ta fuck yo' man card!" I was all ready to pull those fake ass blonde extensions out yo hair and now this card! We cool now!

JT: So don't forget! Black Friday falls on November 25th this year! Ladies, make the token Negro in your life feel like Rhianna--the only Gurrrrl in Your World! G's, help your homeboy get his Franklin from Charlie Brown on! Hallmark: When You Care Enough To Show Just How Narrow Minded Your Ass Really Is!

Happy Black Friday, everybody!

ANNONCE: INTRODUCING ODIE HENDERSON'S BIG MEDIA VANDALISM

2011-09-08T16:04:00.003-04:00

by Steven Boone

I started Big Media Vandalism spontaneously six years ago, after spending an unhealthy amount of time visiting Iraq Body Count and thenausea.com's Patriots page, where I gorged on images of bloody 21st Century conquest. I was all messed up. Though I hated the word and concept of blogging (it's one of those milquetoasty terms that just plucks a nerve, like "foodie"), I suddenly found it to be the best way of venting my rage and despair. There was also room for my patented crazy talk on pop culture.

When the filmmaker and critic Matt Zoller Seitz came across my blog (probably through our mutual friend, the mad-brilliant Ryland Walker Knight), he invited me to write for his own, called The House Next Door. I had been a freelance film critic, on and off, for almost ten years at that point, but nothing I got paid to write was as inspiring to me as hanging out at THND. Just jumping in on that site's raucous comments threads was more nutritious than most articles I'd written for pay. Matt was a great mentor, instigator (in the best sense of the word) and booster for every writer of any merit he could find. Still is.

A few months into lounging at The House, I met a fellow commenter named Odienator. Odienator? What kind of a name-- at first I thought of a Garfield character as stone cold cyborg assassin. But in the comments section and his film writing, I came to associate that moniker with crystalline insight, vast knowledge of film history and merciless wit.

As Ross Ruediger once put it: "... there’s this guy called 'The Odienator', and his posts mesmerize and hypnotize in the sickest sort of sense (this is a compliment)."

Odie (right) pitches Black History Mumf.

Odie and I became frequent pen pals outside of THND, trading emails that, if printed out at this point, would qualify us for a Pulitzer Prize in talking shit. By the time we got on the phone with our madness, laughing ourselves sick, we were already good friends--good enough for Odie to pester me about my poor frequency of posting. Wildly prolific himself, he became so fed up with the way I squandered genuine reader interest that he instituted a mammoth annual Black History Mumf project as a way of provoking me to post more often. It didn't work, but the Mumf became BMV's only bona fide hit. Every year since 2008, he has performed the daredevil stunt of posting an essay here for each day of February. We are coming up on BHM's fifth anniversary.

Odie makes this silly blog worth reading, year after year. The Mumf is only the most epic of his contributions here. We have tons of other non-February "trouble-making" Odie articles you'll be delighted to discover by roaming the archives*.

And now I hand the keys to this place over to Odie Henderson completely. He is the Editor and Publisher, H.N.I.C. From time to time, I'll contribute some videos or crazy talk, with his permission. I trust that this blog will remain a place where he cuts loose and showcases his writing at its most brilliant, personal and illuminating.

(*Roaming the archives, you'll also find hilarious textual performance art by manic Kinskichrist disciple Dirk Schlaf and at least one acidic outrage from Lady Scorpio.)

BLIND FURY: NOTES ON CHAOS CINEMA

2011-08-27T17:44:00.003-04:00

by Steven Boone

[Editor's note: Don't bother reading all this until you've watched both chapters of the Matthias Stork masterpiece Chaos Cinema: The Decline and Fall of Action Movies.]

"This is what happens when you lose your eyesight. Your other senses try to compensate."

Matthias Stork's thrilling two-part video essay Chaos Cinema tells us that the state of the art in modern action filmmaking is unsound. He blames a chaotic style of covering the action that has proliferated wildly over the past decade.

His presentation has had the effect of a schoolmarm busting in on a cocaine orgy to tell the half-naked, moaning participants that what they're engaging in isn't exactly healthy. No shit? You'd think they'd be grateful, but the reaction from those who happen to enjoy the action movies Stork trashed has been, essentially, "Shut up, nerd! And close the door!"

But I'll bet each of those cokeheads staggers home from the bacchanale only to lie awake in bed, wondering whether there was something to what the kid was whining about. After all, their nostrils are raw and bleeding, their mouths are dry and they have pounding headaches. What's worse, they can barely remember all the fun they had. Just a blur of dildos and Tasers. All they know is that they have to go for some more cocaine and erotic asphyxiation just as soon as they can sit upright again.

Stork's video is an intervention. The addict is any moviegoer who believes that what Stork calls Chaos Cinema (and which I refer to as Snatch bullshit) represents a mere stylistic preference or, even worse, an evolutionary leap in film storytelling. Or, even worse, base-level nutrition, in the manner of a ghetto child raised on Pizza Rolls and Skittles.

The backlash has been predictable but surprisingly passionate. "Styles change and cinema moves forward," writes somebody at The Week. Scott Nye hisses: "What's next, aim for people who turn away because of widescreen? Steadicam? Color? Sound?" Mr. Nye, I hope you can elaborate on how action sequences slapped together to convey nothing but shock and panic are drawing us closer to the Promised Land. After that, let's hear about how the robber barons of neo-3-D are actually living up to the innovative spirit of the French New Wave. (I picture a bunch of portly Disney executives running free like those kids in Jules and Jim.)

Over at PressPlay, Ian Grey scolds anti-chaos zealots by calling us Barry Goldwater:

It’s depressing that the ultra-conservative pro-classicists will not even consider that there might be something valuable occurring through these “chaos” films, planting the seeds of a new movement and establishing a new, valid way of seeing things for a new generation. Can it be possible that those young people born after the advent of 8-bit video games experience everything faster, harder, more intensely and more vaguely than the generations that came before it, on multiple levels, in both ecstatic and numbed-down ways? Whatever the explanation, classical cinema is not and never again will be their answer. It doesn’t match the experience of a generation of Facebookers, Tweeters and Call of Duty players. It just doesn’t. No amount of hectoring will change that.

Grey's rant (like most of the ones I've read that step forward in defense of a storytelling style born in the hectic control rooms of TV news companies and the editing suites of ad agencies) uses the children as a human shield. No, chaos cinema could not be helped. This is what the kids want, because they play video games and they can't sit still. Kids today are said not to have attention spans sufficient to engage with stories that unfold rather than crash down. But even hyperkinetic first-person shooter games are closer in effect to vintage Roman Polanski than to Shoot Em Up. Many of the most popular video games on the market are sprawling role-playing games that reward concentration and spatial awareness. An immersive RPG like Shadow of the Colossus? Pure cinema:

The kids didn't create--or ask for--Chaos Cinema, no more than little Johnny asked for the neighborhood pusher to move onto his block and offer him some new sneakers. Kids just want to escape boredom. They want to feel alive. Chaos Cinema came along at a time when young people and adults alike had learned to expect instant gratification from their DVD players and cable boxes. The kind of spontaneous montage I created as a child couch potato of the '80s, armed only with a cable dial and a slothful VCR, acquired exponentially greater firepower by the late '90s, with thousands of satellite channels and the random-access of DVD chapter stops to draw from.

Concurrently, AVID (and later, Final Cut Pro) non-linear editing systems gave professional film editors the same freedom to make instant selections from their pools of footage.

Meanwhile, the Internet went from a convenient tool for interpersonal and business correspondence to a direct telecommunication and commerce channel. This quickened the pace of everything. Once digital video became widely accessible, it was even easier to feed the beast, 24/7. Finally, cheap portable media devices and Internet screens of varying diminution reduced the amount of information we could be expected to retain in a single image, lending shots the quality of flash cards. Car. Man. Smile. Pile of shit.

In the movie business, this quickening became an opportunity: Storytelling in mainstream movies would get faster and more furious with each year of the last decade, in the style of product upgrades. Let's think of the movies in the aughts as Dell desktops. Each new movie packed more RAM (more footage to draw from, and from a wider variety of camera angles), faster processors (editing that obeys fight-or-flight impulses like a channel surfer) and bigger hard drives (more screen time devoted to densely-packed expository dialogue, like Wikipedia clippings in an undergrad's netbook). Except that, unlike computers, these increasingly tricked-out flicks narrowed our selection of applications (visual styles) to ones with cluttered, user-unfriendly interfaces. This phenomenon was sold as a sign of the times by Ho'wood's de facto publicity outlets and happily/resignedly indulged by consumers who came to think of movies as perishable items. Slurp, burp, next.

And so, corporate filmmakers have found a way to seize young people's attention with relentlessly jarring montage where beguiling storytelling has always done the job more effectively. Kids now get what corporations want them to want. In this scheme, a focus group or test screening functions as a kind of standardized test to confirm that audiences know how to panic. It's also quality control against movies that don't panic sufficiently.

Stork's essay arrives after the movie business has already established cocaine cutting as the new classical and is pushing neo-3-D as the next must-have product line. Oh, just wonderful. We are approaching a decade anniversary of imperial wars in the middle east. Violent flash mobs are storming American groceries, and tea party rednecks are keelhauling minorities from the backs of SUV's. Children are uploading their barbaric street crimes to YouTube. Shattered ex-soldiers are slaughtering their entire families before running onto the highway with samurai swords. Everybody is sucking down energy drinks and lattes to keep pace with this century's greedy, gossipy stock ticker, the Twitter feed. Katy Perry, Lil Wayne and Drake are providing the real-life soundtrack, jingles of vanity, sociopathy and Rolex watches. Panic and complacency bump uglies in every public space. To say that Chaos Cinema reflects the times we live in is accurate, but the times reflect the temperament of constant mania and caprice set by Chaos Cinema and her media cousins, a warped hall of mirrors.

This is not progress. It is the language of hard-sell advertising subsuming the movies. Stork is right to call it out and name names, especially those filmmakers whose intelligence and discernment supposedly exempt them from the anti-chaos firing squad. Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) and Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum) are the worst offenders. Their films, whatever they are about textually, move through space and time with the inhuman ferocity of (to quote another rabid screed of mine) a Rwandan radio broadcast circa 1994. The editing of such films induces us to accept agitation as our default state.

The reason for this trend is clear, old as dirt, and anything but revolutionary. Chaos Cinema puts us in our place. In action movies, it makes the world unintelligible and morality actionable only by its implacable onscreen hero, who can plow through concrete walls without ever losing his soft-spoken Matt Damon-ness--his superficial connection to us civilian lambs. Chaos Cinema is not the New New Wave. It is John Wayne back from the dead, proclaiming liberal sympathies while hiding a bloody bowie knife behind his back. In other genres, CC draws our concern away from the principal business of human drama--namely, the humans--to stupid flash card theatrics: Frown. Retch. Shout. Flail. Cry.

This is the visual grammar of the Tea Party, Crips and terrorists.

What serves to keep movie audiences simultaneously docile and hostile also makes for voters who fail to see beyond the personal emergencies and must-buys that big business tailors for their demographic. The New Wavers spoke up for human frailty and the most delicate, evanescent of emotions. Their jump cuts and violations of the 180 rule were humanism standing up to inane certainties and conventions. They opposed the same shape-shifting corporate orthodoxy that now brings us Jay-Z and Kanye rapping about luxury products as if they were Anna Karina's smile.

Never mind what the screenplay says. Cinema lives by its flow of images onscreen, as experienced in the dark in real time. To dismiss the way a film moves as secondary to plot is akin to insisting that a Brother Theodore monologue would be just as mesmerizing if read verbatim by Michael Cera on club drugs. (Well, actually....) In a common dismissal that mocks this grievance as a mere peeve, Ian Grey misses the point by kilometers: "Another critic could include [as an example of Chaos Cinema] Black Hawk Down, which, instead of being despised for its racism, is despised because its missiles aren’t fired in sufficiently elegant fashion." Form can transform content, Mr. Grey. Takeshi Kitano's Fireworks contains eruptions of violence that positively gasp at the fact of brutality, of all tragic departures from this earth. It's a crime saga in which a simple dissolve from Kitano's frail, cancer-stricken wife gazing up at an explosion of fireworks blossoms with compassion.

When you watch a movie primarily with your eyes and heart rather than your fears, your social ambitions or your bank account, you might see that Chaos Cinema is neither a fad nor a spontaneous youth movement. It's a business decision. Those jumpy teenagers at the head of the march are child soldiers. They get their orders from the limos in the back, via the same technology that might free them.

-------------------------------------------------------

To give an example of an anti-chaos classic, Stork's essay highlights a movie that John Wayne would have have enjoyed, the John McTiernan blockbuster Die Hard. One could go on forever dissing Chaos Cinema, but I will let my cheesy music video below express why a hyper-violent siege picture from 1988 expresses a love of light and life that today's lightest romantic comedies could learn from. Never mind the snarky, reactionary plot. Pay attention to the movement within--and of--the frame. Die Hard's camera nurses a schoolboy crush on life itself. In contrast, Chaos Cinema says it serves at your pleasure while, in truth, it would kill you for the insurance money.

For more on this phenom, go over to Jim Emerson's Scanners and Cinema Blend.

Those Southern Folks Sure Got It Maid

2011-08-22T23:57:00.001-04:00

by Odienator

The Help has been kicking ass at the box office for 2 weeks, and in that time, I’ve read numerous articles defending its subject matter and its storytelling device. Some of these pieces have been extremely condescending, with the writer expressing shock—SHOCK!!!!—that some people (uppity Negroes and “liberal” Whites, this means you) would find the film either patronizing or more of the same “Black story told through White characters shenanigans” Hollywood is known to pull. Equally condescending have been some of the conversations I’ve had, both online and in person, with people who love the film. I’ve been told that I don’t know how to watch a movie, that I went in looking for problems, and that I was just too Black to enjoy the movie. My personal favorite piece of wisdom came from a White colleague of mine, who looked me dead in my redbone face and told me that Kathryn Stockett, The Help’s author, knew more about the Black experience than I did. Granted, Black women had a hand in both our upbringings, but unlike Ms. Stockett’s influential mother figure, mine repeatedly made it clear that she was not my goddamn maid.

I don’t know anyone who read The Help, and I haven’t picked up a book on the South since I read The Secret Life Of Bees. Guys, if you want to see what the universal hand signal for vagina is, bring some chick lit on a plane. Even the flight attendants were throwing up the pussy dubs to mock me. Since I haven’t read The Help, I can only assume that, with the luxury of over 500 pages of reading time, Ms. Stockett presented her characters and their situation in a deeper fashion than 137 minutes of screen time could. After all, Miss Sofia just loved it to pieces and put it on her Book Club.

This was the original Abbey Road album cover.

Entertainment Weekly, a magazine that somehow keeps coming to my house despite the fact I cancelled it 5 years ago and moved twice within that time trying to outrun it, did a big write-up/interview section on The Help the week it came out. The piece, which featured the film’s three main actresses, Stockett and the film’s director, Tate Taylor, took pains to constantly remind me the movie had the Good Housekeeping Seal of African-American Approval. Tyler Perry loved it! The NAACP blessed it! A Black audience in Chicago danced the Hucklebuck after a screening! Pictures of Black Jesus were weeping at grandmother’s houses everywhere! (OK, Black Jesus and the Hucklebuck are slight exaggerations on my part.) But Stockett and Taylor discussing their influential maids in EW made my skin crawl, as both of them are my age and I unrealistically didn’t want to think that someone of privilege could have a Black maid raising them in the 70’s and 80’s. I suppose that’s my problem.

As I read the EW article, I thought to myself “they’re trying pretty damn hard to head off any backlash! This must be off-the-chart offensive! Now I have to go see it!” You know I just love a good movie Negro stereotype. Until I read that article, I was content to leave The Help out of my viewfinder, as it seemed like a run-of-the-mill extension of the White character tells Black story feel-good genre that includes Cry Freedom and Mississippi Burning. In truth, having the story told through a White device is actually more insulting to White people than to us. It’s as if Hollywood is saying “you can’t put yourselves in the shoes of an ethnic character, so here’s Kevin Kline! He’s JUST…LIKE…YOU!!!” At least Hollywood thinks minorities are smart enough to relate to the White characters.

I’m tired of these movies, and even more tired of getting into discussions with people who insult my intelligence about these movies’ intentions. But EW’s coverage made me wonder if The Help were going to be Mammy Writer: The Movie. It was now a must-see.

Well, contrary to what some have said, The Help isn’t racist as hell. In fact, the only thing racist as hell in The Help is Bryce Dallas Howard’s character. More on her in a second, as she is my secret weapon, the character I’ll be throwing back at those who pretend this movie avoids the “congratulations, White people!” trappings of its genre. She brings the Paul Haggis Crash element to this film, except instead of having a magic racism-curing staircase as Crash had, The Help has a Noble Negro Water Closet.

The Help also has some intriguing things going for it, and its problems are not insurmountable, which makes it all the more aggravating and disappointing. It features three actresses knocking their stereotypical roles out of the park, and an original subplot I wanted to see more of than the main plot. The main plot (spoilers from here on in) is, in Cliffs Notes fashion: White grad from Ole Miss returns to Jackson, realizes her friends and her Mama are snooty racists, falls in love with a sexist, racist jock pig, writes a Peyton Place of a book using stories from the neighborhood maids, discovers the whereabouts of her own Mammy, gets a publishing job in NYC and gets the hell out of Mississippi, but not before indirectly getting her lead maid storyteller fired. As the fired maid walks up the street toward the closing credits, like Richard Pryor does at the end of Which Way Is Up? (coincidentally, both characters have lost everything by the film’s end), Miss Thing is in New York City turning into Samantha Jones from Sex and the City.

That’s right, folks: The bad guy (I mean, girl) wins. Post-comeuppance, the villain returns to commit one final dastardly deed. Let’s talk about this bad girl, an over-the-top figurehead of bigotry played by the consistently horrible Bryce Dallas Howard. She is so extreme she makes the Grand Duke Wizard of the Klan look like Eldridge Cleaver by comparison. Howard is the Statue of Liberty of racism, a symbolic Incredible Hulk zapped with tons of gamma racism. If Howard's villainous Hilly Holbrook had a mustache, she'd twirl it wildly before ripping it off her face and eating it like Cookie Monster. In other words, she is completely unidentifiable as a real human being. Not even the gang of White men who chased me in Hamilton, Ohio, throwing bottles and slurs at me a few years ago were as racist as Hilly Holbrook. In keeping her a caricature, she belongs in the same cardboard box as the characters from Crash; she makes you feel good for not being that racist.

"I'm a witch! I'm not you!"

The Help is confused as to whether Holbrook is a comic foil or a serious threat. She’s the butt of a seemingly endless joke about her eating a pie made of Pure T. Shit, but she manages to get people arrested and destroy their livelihoods with false allegations of theft. Hilly gets so many maids dismissed from jobs in Jackson that she should have been crowned Miss FireCracker 1963. She also presents a problem for us as she relates to Skeeter (Emma Stone), the main character of The Help. Hilly and her bitchy friends didn’t turn this way overnight, so Skeeter’s idea to write the book seems more an act of self-promotion than a means of getting some justice. As nasty as Hilly gets, Skeeter still hangs out with her, and even falls for the guy with whom Hilly hooks her up. That last item blows away any notion that The Help is not meant to be seen through Skeeter; this courtship is boring, eats up time, and is a useless way to keep the story on Skeeter rather than the more interesting maids.

Unlike some of the film’s detractors, I don’t have a problem with Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer playing maids. Black people were maids in the 60’s, and many of them raised White children just like the Mammys of yore. Plus both actresses are fantastic, with Davis speaking volumes with her eyes and a stone face, and the comedic Spencer knowing where the minstrelsy line is and slyly threatening to go over it. Davis’ Aibileen is a character that deserved to be the lead of this movie. She narrates the film, but it is not her story. Yet Davis at times threatens to steal it from its segregated gaze. Early in the film, Skeeter asks her if she wanted to be something other than a maid. Davis gives her a “bitch, are you fucking crazy?” look (watch her eyes) before answering yes.

Skeeter’s follow-up question “how does it feel to raise White children while your children are at home being raised by someone else?” is left unanswered. To Aibileen’s story, it’s very valid, but to Skeeter’s, it’s just another interview question. I wanted to hear the answer to that question, but The Help doesn’t. Aibileen does note that the White kids who loved their maids as children eventually shat on them when they became adult members of society. This is a plotline worth fleshing out and explaining. Even the maid who is integral to Skeeter’s story, her beloved, missing Constantine, is given no back story besides appearing as Super Mammy in flashback. My depression at the misuse of the great Cicely Tyson was jolted when Tyson looked at the camera with a mix of devastation, anger and hurt after being fired. “Damn, Cicely!” I said to myself. In that moment, she told me so much more than The Help had time to explore.

The other actress who does wonders with her stereotypical role is The Tree of Life’s Jessica Chastain. The movie pairs Chastain’s lower class Miss Celia with Spencer’s Sassy maid Minny after Hilly fires Minny for using the White house toilet instead of her Colored outside one during a tornado. I’m surprised Hilly didn’t appear in a window flying on a broom before handing Minny her pink slip. Due to Hilly’s influence, Minny can’t get another job anywhere but at Miss Celia’s. Miss Celia is hated by Hilly, and by extension, the women in Jackson, because, as Minny notes “they think you White trash, Miss Celia.” Miss C. has the ill nana, which led her to marry Hilly’s ex-boyfriend. Minny becomes something of a Magical Negro by way of the Food Network; she helps Miss Celia cook on the down low so Miss Celia can impress her man. What I liked about this subplot was the way it comically handled the class issue. Both Miss Celia and Minny are the town outcasts, but the film doesn’t try to compare Miss Celia’s ignorance of the rules to Missy’s skin color-related troubles. Instead, Missy is constantly correcting Miss Celia, whose bubble-headed naïveté leads her to all manner of societal faux pas.

I liked Spencer and Chastain’s interplay so much that I was willing to forgive how their storyline is resolved: Minny’s happily ever after involves a lifelong membership as Miss Celia’s maid. Still, I could have watched an entire movie of their interactions. I hadn’t seen a relationship like this before in a movie, with Minny almost having to teach Miss Celia how to treat her like a maid. This is ripe with Skin Game-like comic and satirical potential. When I mentioned my desire to see the Minny and Miss Celia movie instead of The Skeeter Story, I was told that I should go watch 48 Hrs. You can figure that one out for yourselves.

The Help is going to be a huge hit, which means Hollywood will make 6 million more maid movies. Its influence is already being felt in the real world: I have seen three different stories about Southern White women looking for, and being reunited with, the maids who helped raise them. Everybody cried, syrupy music played, and the newscaster narrated the story in hushed tones. I wondered if a) I’d see a story where the maid went looking for her ward and b) if I’d see the found maid slap the Calhoun Shit out of the ward looking for her, saying “you ungrateful heffa, where the hell were you all these years? You’re just looking for me NOW?!” Neither a nor b was going to happen on my TV.

I sat next to an older Black couple at my screening of The Help. The theater was nearly full, with a mixed crowd of old and young, male and female, Black and White. Crammed and uncomfortable, slumping in the second row, the couple stared at the screen with rapt attention. I detected a slight Southern accent from the woman, who occasionally muttered something brief to her husband. I guesstimated they were my parents’ ages, not just from their appearance but from their manner of speech. They sounded like an old married couple, with her comments met simply by her husband’s “um-hmms and yeah’s.” Occasionally, they both would laugh at something comedic, and at one crucial point, the woman gasped along with much of the audience. I heard the faint rustling of a pack of Kleenex during a moment of high drama, with the husband making a sympathetic noise of support. Normally, I don’t pay much attention to who’s sitting next to me at the theater, but whenever I’m that close to the screen, I have to look around on occasion to keep my neck from becoming stiff.

As the credits rolled, the audience broke into enthusiastic applause. The couple next to me did too. Immediately, I wanted to talk to them, to ask them why they felt this film warranted ovation. They were older than me, and their opinions on the period would carry much more knowledgeable weight than mine. How did they feel, and what light could they shed for me? I was momentarily distracted by the person on my right, a teary-eyed teenage girl who suddenly stood up to continue her applause. She looked at me in surprise, her face asking “why aren’t you clapping?” I found myself contemplating the weird look she gave me, sort of a “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” look. When I shook myself from my distraction, I turned back to my desired task: a discussion with my elders.

Unfortunately, they were gone.

It was a fitting end, for like the film itself, I wanted to see The Help through the eyes of the people who would provide me a different perspective than Hollywood wishes to entertain.

"Hi, Hollywood wants to make The Help II: Electric Boogaloo. I'll need to order more Negroes. Oh, and some Kung Pao Chicken! Thanks!"

A New Aktionist Eruption Taken To The Pathetic Pathological Cubicles and Corporate Boardrooms:

2011-08-17T21:14:00.007-04:00

by Dirk Schlaf

With the pervasive extension through social media and mobile platforms of an almost wholy neutered corporate aesthetic, one of the anihilation of freedom and individual will and revolt, an anti Situationism, a suffocation of the plane of action where freedom and manifestations of non-control erupt and manifest and forced neurosis and sublimation are pervaded through "marketing" and advertising media injecting into the blood and swamping the floor with the watered down broth derived from the unsalted sweat of eunichs. You know all the choked off voices with their flip "in jokes" like the Orwellian duck speak.

Wholly convulsive and relentless aktions of physical self evisceration which will unsulllyingly and unsublimatedly mirror the self annihilation practiced daily in the managerial plantation, chained slaughterhaus, constricted sex, raped consciousnes, branding, branding, branding...

A direkt new extension of Aktionist art and confrontation should fill the finance gulags and cubicle cells. Ritual annihilation manfiested viscerally like the ritual evisceration in the Aktions of Brus. The self castration manifested in the submission to late capitalist, globalized finance hegemony for 9 10 hours a day of the voluntarily cubicle celled drone will be made unsublimated and in direct cruel light and convulsion. Right there in the cubicle, in the conference room, in the faces of the overseers and Management stasi class of finks and slave overseers. The necktie, a voluntary self mutilation and masochistic dog collar ( curious the news stories of collar bombs, people collared to their own potential immolation) will be the means of hanging, a performance of decapitation, ritual lobotomies as Powerpoint presentation. A tablet devise stretched in the lip, stretching the lips of the marketing assistant high end prostitute or suburban ex frat boy dad, his khakis painfull hitched to the navel to contrict his useless loins and intestines, stretching the lips of the colonized daily internees like in the fashions and ritual of the ubangee tribes.

The corporate and capitalist word is one of Nietzchean power and sexy sexy sexy is it? Let's make it Nitschean! Hermann Nitschean!! Well let's have mass orgiastic copulation on the desks and self slaughter at the same time!!! Let's have intestines smeared on the loins of voluptuous interns like in the Vienna Aktions. Let's splatter the corporate logos and reception desks with gallons of ritual semen!!! Sexy Sexy Sexy!!!! Power Power Power???? Let's show the cubical dweller hogtied with his headset with the apple in his mouth fresh to be cannibalized so as to pay his credit card interest his neighbor tearing his face off and ripping his skin like Brus did, slashing his skull and removing his tortured brain and consiousness polluted for years with buzzwords and stupd sports culture and throwing it against the glass of the boardroom where the creatine and steroid addled no necked salesman fight bare knuckled and bare arsed. The music will be that of the constant jackhammer and buzzsaw of needless and pointless overdevelopment, the sick urbanism and prison architecture not even foreseen by Debord in his worst delerium tremens. Personal branding? The Aktionists will brand them like cattle : SLAVE, LARDASS KAPO, COLLABORATOR, SHILL, LICKSPITTLE, CHARACTERLESS DOG, RANDIAN UNTERMENSCH, PUSSYWHIP, PAINTED SHAUFENSTERPUPPE DEVOID OF GRACE AND SEX.

Investment Fands? Investment Fands? Bend over for the VC capitalist dressed as as SS officer. Do the Obama bongo and the Tea Party piss ritual. They yap like mangy little chihuahuas the Tea Party. Little doggies fed with fish, not fed with fish but only the assholes of fish, deep fried in batter. Drinking cheap piss beer. The unventilated torment of the debt ridden mutation in slave holds with no natual light. Bring Bauhausian design and airy open space!!!!

First is Der Neue Aktionismus! Branding? Brand the ass of the next coworker who appeals to you ravish them on the desk. Corporate Fascist training? Show some films of Nuremburg criminals hanged. Show how you treat Mussolini. Macho Macho Wall St. Tough Guys eh? eh? big swinging schlongs sexy sexy sexy huh? Madmen real visionaries. Real St. Augustines huh??? Hahahaha! The Aktionists will infiltrate your cloud computing seminar like von Stauffenburg! The only corporate message will be Artaudian opium ravings. We all drop our pants like centaurs when asked for ID in the lobby. The Fleisch mob will make Pol Pot look like your spinster aunt. This isn't Jonestown Mr Jobs! Put those tablets in Ubangee lips. Throw raw red meat to the insatiable whores and empty vats of wine down the corporate corridors and pipe in the opiatic fumes of madness.

JUNIOR SECRETARY FILMMAKING

2011-08-11T03:35:00.003-04:00

written and photographed by Steven Boone

smurfs poster, east village

Junior secretary filmmaking. Neat and legible, to the point. Nice haircut. How much did it cost? Nice weather we're having. A firm handshake. Let 'em know you mean business. Business. That's what we're here for, not to go climbing in trees, nekkid, howling. Fight the temptation. Stay on the job. It'll all pay off someday.

"tree of life" ripoff poster for "life in a day", Ave D

A few days after I delivered the love packet, Annette asked me how I was able to draw her so well from memory. I shrugged. She seemed impressed, but I had no idea where to go from there. I couldn’t say in words, in person, what I so easily, crazily set down on paper. So nothing came of it.

Two years later, I was in film school when I got a phone call from Annette. I had left my family’s house number in the love letter, but this was the first time she ever used it. She said she’d seen me walking in Mt. Vernon as her bus passed on the street. I looked so different, she said. Bigger, tougher. I still hadn’t yet acquired any clue of how to respond to genuine female interest aside from shock and awe, so I am sure I sounded bored and distracted to her ears. And at one point I was distracted: “You got your TV on?” I asked her. Mine was on MUTE, but the picture showed an aerial shot of Los Angeles on fire and people fighting like mad dogs. The word LIVE in the corner of the screen. “Something’s going on in L.A.” I said. “Oh, yeah?” she said, in a tone that my self-flattering memory interprets as disappointment that I would take more interest in the TV than the girl I once offered my heart.

But she couldn't see there was a riot going on.

1990. I looked in the newspaper for something to watch. I had a little cash from my work-study gig to blow on a movie. I was 18 and positively addicted to flicks. Still, there was nothing too appealing in the paper.

Wait: Goodfellas, a Martin Scorsese Picture. It was playing at the Quad, a small theater in the Village. The tiny ad, featuring an inky image of Robert DeNiro, Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci, made it look like a a low-budget TV movie. Blech. But it was a Martin Scorsese Picture. Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, King of Comedy, After Hours. Plus it had gangsters in it. How bad could it be? I hopped on the subway to Union Square and rushed over to the 9 o’ clock show. The theater was a little shoebox, with about ten other people in the audience. Travis Bickle watched Swedish porn in a more auspicious setting.

But when the movie came on, from the moment Pesci and DeNiro finished off the dying man in the trunk of the car and Liotta slammed the hood, I could not blink. Not until the very end, when Pesci shot me in the face. What a thing to see in your first semester of film school, at the start of a crazy decade.

And from that night on, going to the movies after a long day at School of Visual Arts film department became a habit. It didn’t matter that in school I often saw two or three films a day anyway. I often came out of there so thirsty for more stimulation, more inspiration. But whereas as most of my classmates went off in groups to hang out, I usually went solo, making up some excuse or other. Anything to disguise the fact that, having severe social anxiety disorder, I hated groups. Actually, the only groups I enjoyed were the ones gathered in the dark of a movie theater. It was as close as I came to having a church.

I had a few churches I could rely on back then. One was the Film Forum on Houston street, where classics were always running. That’s where, at the behest of Georgia Brown’s sweeping write-up in the Village Voice, I spent a life-changing day watching Val Lewton classics in dreamy, inky, silvery prints. The Leopard Man, Isle of the Dead, Ghost Ship, Cat People. Such quiet, despairing, sepulchral films, the template for any filmmaker who wishes to create suspense and atmosphere with a human heart.

The Angelika Film Center, a venue that I didn’t particularly like because of its yuppie coffeehouse slickness and similarly upmarket selection of movies, surprised me in 1992 by offering both Bad Lieutenant and Reservoir Dogs. Those crime sagas were actually enhanced by the real-life subway noise that routinely interrupts screenings at Angelika.

But it was Cinema Village that had my heart. Not much bigger or any prettier than the Quad, it screened whatever foreign, classic and indie films it could get its grubby hands on. It often ran features that had already played at other venues, last stop on a Manhattan run. That’s where I saw both Visconti’s The Leopard and Caligula: The Director’s Cut. Cinema Village also hosted Kung Fu Christmas, which showed classic martial arts films. I’ll never forget the madness that ensued at screenings of Once Upon a Time in China, A Chinese Ghost Story, Fist of Legend and Iron Monkey.

I didn’t take nearly as much advantage of The Anthology Film Archives, the venerable institution at Second Avenue and Second Street, as I would have If I weren’t in film school. At SVA, I was already seeing so many of the “Essential Films” Anthology regularly screened. It made me ponder, somewhat bitterly, what if I’d just saved my tuition money and bought an Anthology membership…? Still, catching trippy screenings of Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Tsui Hark’s Green Snake there were enough to make it worth keeping the Anthology calendar close by. The place was also good for palate-cleansing (or shattering) experimental films.

One couldn’t just stay in the Village to feed the habit, though. Sometimes I was tempted uptown by such offerings as a brand new print of Seven Samurai at Symphony Space (packed house, raucous applause when stoic swordsman Kyuzo came back from slaying the bandit scouts), or the African films at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. The “no” heard round the world at the end of the shattering anti-apartheid tragedy Mapantsula. MoMA offered rare treats on pay-what-you-wish Fridays, like Kon Ichikawa’s eye-popping cinemascope sex comedy Odd Obsession. (The colors and compositions in that film defy description.)

On an unassuming floor of the Adam Clayton Powell office building uptown, the annual Harlem Week Black Film Festival showcased edgy stuff you couldn’t find even at Anthology, such as the blistering NYPD expose, The Police Sell Drugs, Too! and the black revolution epic The Spook Who Sat by the Door.

Midtown was still the essence of New York City movie grunge back then. As late as 1995, Times Square still looked and felt like the classically dangerous, charismatic place enshrined in Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver. The hookers and drug dealers still milled about openly. The porno marquees kept equal claim on your field of vision as the legit theaters. After my brother dragged me to see Pulp Fiction at a multiplex in suburban Yonkers, I had a yen to re-watch it in the “proper” setting. Paying it forward, I dragged my girlfriend to a dingy old converted porn palace on Times Square, where Pulp played on a huge, slightly warped, filth-gray screen. We sat so close to the buckling screen that the image of John Travolta’s heroin needle and then of his woozy face top-lit in the darkness took on an ecstatic glow. The surf music strumming along. I wanted to cry: At 21, I didn’t want much more than this, to look over at my girl, who was grinning up at sublime movie images, joining me in movie heaven. It was one of many movie-going experiences we would share and reminisce about and quote, to the dismay of friends. Poor girl. I had turned her into a rabid geek in a matter of months.

The following year, as demolition on 42^nd Street loomed, we grabbed a hot dog at what must have been the very last old school lunch counter in the area before crossing the street to another converted porn theater, where you got to see two movies for $4. First we watched Get Shorty in an auditorium no bigger than your living room, grimy print. Perfect. Then we went downstairs to watch Se7en in a room just as small as the first one. I didn’t realize it until years later, but the projectionist must have had the light bulb turned down low, because as dark as Se7en is, this presentation was dark. Since this was our first time seeing the film, we just took it as director David Fincher’s diabolical genius. No subsequent screening of that film has been as terrifying or mysterious. The reek of ammonia and bleach probably also helped.

We had a similar geekout in the last days of old Midtown, at what I still consider New York’s last great People’s Cinema, the Cineplex Odeon Worldwide at 50^th Street near 8^th Avenue. It was known as the $3 house. There we saw Boogie Nights in 1997, with an SRO crowd from all walks of life. Such was the genius of the Worldwide. The low ticket prices made people take all kinds of crazy chances on movies they would otherwise not give a second glance in the listings. In the case of Boogie Nights, it meant that an eccentric little Indiewood film about the porn industry got a shot at a mainstream audience, which went crazy for it. Watching gorgeous prints of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures and David Lynch’s Lost Highway with similarly universal crowds at the Worldwide taught me that there is no such thing as an “indie” film. A great filmmaker can reach anybody with the sting and lilt of his images.

Down the street from the Worldwide was a little shop called The 43^rd Chamber, where one could mainline pulp thrills via VHS bootlegs of Hong Kong laserdiscs. There I copped beautiful dubs of HK classics like Black Cat, The Blade, The Killer, Hard Boiled, City on Fire, Peking Opera Blues, Chungking Express, Comrades: Almost a Love Story and Drunken Master. The clerks boasted that Quentin Tarantino and Wesley Snipes were regulars there. Cool. It's long gone now, the space currently occupied by a $1 pizza joint.

INT. ROOM-DAY.

BARROW NULL, a black man in his mid-fifties, sits on the edge of his bed, picking through a wallet.

The wallet is fat, the thickness of a King James Bible, overstuffed with receipts, business cards and plastic consumer cards, its fold maintained only by rubber bands that seem eager to snap. He peels off the rubber bands and unfolds the wallet to reveal one wrinkled dollar bill and some change inside.

He pours the change onto the bed.

After a moment of staring blankly at the money, he sorts it, counting to himself in a whisper.

When he finishes counting, he scoops up the money and shovels it into his pants pocket as he gets up, grabbing his coat from the back of a chair.

INT. BODEGA- DAY.

Barrow peruses the snack selection:

Various 50 cent snack cakes, chips and candies.

BARROW

Exorbitant.

He zeroes in on a bunch of chewy granola bars marked 25 cents.

BARROW

Salvation.

CUT TO:

A pile of chocolate chip granola bars land on the countertop, followed, after a beat, by Barrow’s hand slapping that crinkly dollar down next to them. Then an avalanche of loose change.

BARROW (O.S.)

That should be two dollars precisely.

The CASHIER just stares, heavy-lidded.

EXT. STREET-DAY.

Barrow leaves the store, tearing a granola bar wrapper open with his teeth and digging in while stuffing the rest of them in his coat pocket.

A TEENAGER passes him, muttering:

TEENAGER

Trees, trees, trees…

BARROW

Thank you, no.

Barrow continues on his way…

A MIDDLE AGED MAN passes by, muttering:

MIDDLE AGED MAN

Loose, loose, loose…

BARROW

Don’t smoke, thank you.

MIDDLE AGED MAN

Aw, nigga, ain’t it time you started? You ain’t

getting any younger.

BARROW

You have a point.

He continues on his way.

A man wearing a sandwich board advertising a jeweler:

HAWKER

We buy gold,all kinds brother, caaaasssh

moneymoneymoneymoney…

BARROW

Never bought gold in my life.

HAWKER

(leans in, lowers voice)

They don’t got to know that. You go in there—

just going in—and my boss sees, good for me,

na mean? Go in there. They got lots of shit might

interest you. And you’d be helping a needy child.

Me.

Barrow looks inside the store:

It’s a typical jewelry/electronics/bootleg ripoff joint. A church lady and her grandson are haggling with the salesman behind the counter over a laptop.

Barrow pats the hawker on the shoulder.

BARROW

I will help you, young man.

He heads into the store.

INT. STORE.

Barrow goes along the display counter, past the jewelry, past the bootleg CDs and DVDs, up to the case of cell phones beside the computer area where the GRANDMOTHER and GRANDSON bargain poorly with the SALESMAN.

He seems absorbed in perusing the cell phones while craning his head to listen to the transaction:

GRANDMOTHER

And you say for two hundred more we get what?

SALESMAN

You get wireless internet. That means you get internet

right out the air, no cables or special equipment. This other

one is cheaper, yeah, but it doesn’t come with wireless.

And for school and whatnot, he’s gonna need

GRANDMOTHER

If he needs it, he needs it, I guess. (sighs) It’s just—

BARROW (OFFSCREEN)

It’s just that it seems a bit steep, yeah?

They turn to Barrow, who is now wearing shades. He takes them off almost robotically and folds them.

BARROW

(to the salesman)

What is the meaning of this?

SALESMAN

What’s the meaning of what?

Barrow stuffs the shades into a jacket pocket and comes up with another granola bar. Peels the wrapper.

BARROW

I haven’t time for this. You know precisely what I

mean.

The salesman just stares.

BARROW

Or shall I bring in my interpreter? He can put it in

plainer terms for you. Would you prefer that?

SALESMAN

Man, I don’t know what you’re—

BARROW

What are you charging for this machine?

He points at the laptop with his granola bar.

The grandson speaks up ahead of the salesman:

GRANDSON

Four hunned and seventy five, but

with the wireless—

BARROW

Almost seven hundred. For this

three hundred dollar machine?

SALESMAN

(smiling to the grandmother)

This your husband? Brother?

GRANDMOTHER

I don’t know this man.

Other salesmen approach from behind Barrow.

BARROW

(to salesman)

She doesn’t know me. But I know you. And I know what

you’re trying to do here, just so you can continue to live

beyond your means in Astoria or Bayside or wherever.

SALESMAN

Man, they got a psych unit just down the street.

I think you

(to grandmother) I’m sorry, we get some—

GRANDMOTHER

(to Barrow)

This thing is really worth only three hundred?

BARROW

Tops. And every laptop comes with wireless, standard,

these days.

GRANDMOTHER

That’s not what he said.

BARROW

He’ll tell you anything to get your money.

Exactly (a viewing log)

2011-07-08T16:24:00.001-04:00

by Steven Boone

"Til We Get Our Freeeedom..."

2011-05-12T15:26:00.000-04:00

by Steven Boone

Let’s face it: There is always something awkward between the urban down-and-out and their liberal, educated sympathizers. It hovers, it looms, but it won’t even whisper its name. If you are a member of the former, all you have to do to bring the monster out of the box is show a member of the latter a certain music video: "Hell Yeah," by Dead Prez. It is, in my opinion, the greatest rap video in the history of the medium. It's also, on the surface, a sharp slap at shallow liberal sympathy.

This video from 2004 is choreographed like a Muppet Show number directed by Spike Jonze (actually by Gil Green), but right from the start, its buoyancy is undercut by “home movie” footage of a white suburban family driving down the wrong block while on vacation. In a reality-TV-nightmare flipside to National Lampoon’s Vacation, they end up getting violently carjacked. Dead Prez members stic.man and M-1 take off in the car with a couple of homies, recording their crime with the freshly stolen family camcorder.
The rest of the video (and song) is a lyrical primer on every hustle, caper and scheme uneducated, underfed, over-stimulated poor folks pull to get by: armed robbery, petty theft, credit fraud, welfare fraud …

Continue reading at Capital New York.

EbertFest Day 2

2011-04-30T09:55:00.000-04:00

by Odienator

The EbertFest screenings consist of an introduction before, and a Q&A after the movies. The Q&A’s are usually the filmmaker and a moderator who asks questions and then takes questions from the audience. Welcoming us to every screening is Roger’s wife, Chaz, a bundle of energy determined to pump up the crowd and offer up interesting stories about the films being shown. So far, the highlight of Chaz’s introductions has been her Oprah imitation, which you can see streaming over at EbertFest’s website.

On Thursday, Chaz let the dogs out with two features starring man’s best friend. The first was Umberto D, Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 neorealist masterpiece about an old man and his dog. De Sica shows the human decency of the downtrodden as they make their way through their existences in Italy. Umberto D is about to be evicted by his landlady for unpaid rent. His only friends are the pregnant maid who cleans his landlady’s house and his dog, Flike. Flike is played by several completely different looking dogs, and is designed for the maximum “awww” factor.

Umberto D extracts water from your tear ducts by using devastating scenes like Umberto D’s inability to beg for money or his numerous attempts to get rid of Flike. It builds to a powerful climax involving Umberto, Flike and an oncoming train. Whether Umberto and Flike go the way of Anna Karenina is for you to discover. Our Far Flung Correspondent post-film Q&A spent some time discussing what scenes choked them up and sent them running for the Kleenex.

The second dog feature was an adaptation of the novel My Dog Tulip. An animated feature hand drawn by its director and narrated by Christopher Plummer, Tulip is a must-see for dog lovers. It unflinchingly and lovingly details the 16 year relationship between the narrator (J.R. Ackerly, the author of the book) and his dog, a high strung Alsatian named Tulip. Tulip was rescued from a mean owner, and has behavioral problems that make Marley and Me look like Romper Room. Aided by the late Lynn Redgrave as his sister and Isabella Rossellini as some kind of dog whisperer vet, Plummer and the film discuss every aspect of Tulip’s plumbing, digestive and reproductive system. In other words, cartoon piss and dog shit fly everywhere, and there are scenes of doggy style that one audience member suggested should be in a porno. Director and animator Paul Fierlinger pointed out in the Q&A with his wife, Sondra and moderator Matt Zoller Seitz, “dogs are all about eating, dumping and humping.”

Fierlinger’s Q&A was outrageous, featuring tales of drowned puppies, dogs who won’t bark and friends letting friends eat their own dogs. It left the audience speechless. He also caused a spirited debate during the Umberto D Q&A over whether the film was set in pre- or post-war Italy. The audience was on Fierlinger’s pre-war side, while no one came to Ebert Presents At the Movies co-host Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's post-war side until Far Flung Correspondent Ali Arikan provided numerous items to support it.

I skipped Tiny Furniture on Thursday, but I did attend a karaoke session at Bentley’s with the Far Flung Correspondents and several other guests. Highlights included Rachael Harris’ cover of Salt N’ Pepa’s What A Man, Chaz Ebert getting her SuperFreak on, and director Robbie Pickering channeling Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre (which explains my comment from yesterday). Matt Seitz, Pickering and I sang Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer. Paul and Art can sleep at night.

Speaking of sleeping at night: Last night I did not. It’s 8:52 AM and I’m delusional from sleep deprivation. Still, I’m off to see today’s features. I’ll find some way to slip out and re-register into my hotel between features 2 and 3 at the Fest.

Later today: Incriminating Pictures, Revisiting Ohio and Meeting Mr. Ebert.

Greetings From EbertFest

2011-04-29T11:50:00.001-04:00

by Odienator

Greetings from EbertFest 2011!

Today is the third day of the festival, which runs from April 27 - May 1st, and you'll have to forgive me if I'm filing items late. I'm having more fun than should be legal, and Mr. Ebert knows how to keep his attendees busy. I shall try to catch up today and tomorrow with multiple posts.

The festival schedule is packed with 13 films and several panel discussions with filmmakers and Ebert's own Far Flung Correspondents. The schedule is somewhat familiar for me; I've seen 9 of the films listed. The Far Flung Correspondents, or FFC's as they're called here, are, excepting Ali Arikan and Kartina Richardson, familiar to me only from Ebert's fantastic website. Their panel discussion yesterday allowed me to put a human costume on their words. More on that later.

I have a press pass, graciously provided for me by the festival and brought to you by this blog. So I do feel a small sting of shame for being late. I shall try to make up for it at some point. Meanwhile, let's set the stage by starting off with a brief explanation of how things work at EbertFest. An hour before a screening, people line up in front of the Virginia Theatre, a charming, old school movie house complete with balcony. People with festival passes, VIP passes and press passes have first dibs on the seats. In fact, the VIP's have their own section, as VIP's should. After the pass people occupy the seats, anyone with an advance ticket can enter. If there are empty seats after that, anyone can walk up to the box office and buy a ticket. In Ebertfest's 13 year history, I hear that not one person has been turned down for a ticket. So you have no excuse.

Thus far, I've seen four of the five films scheduled, and while that makes me a very naughty reporter, I had always intended on avoiding the movie I skipped. There are two films in the festival that I actively, perhaps vehemently, disliked, and I'm going to one of them solely for the Q&A afterwards. I've never said my opinion was the definitive word, so I hope the seat left unoccupied by my lazy ass (which went back to the hotel to watch The Office) was filled by someone who loved Tiny Furniture. I've yet to enjoy a movie made in this style, and knowing me, I doubt I ever will.

Speaking of the hotel: I'm about to get kicked out of it, so I'd better type fast. See, thanks to the Illinois Marathon, which runs tomorrow, I am roomless tonight. I had to make hotel arrangements from Wednesday-Friday, and then Saturday-Sunday. There were no rooms at any inn for your friendly neighborhood Odienator. Keep in mind that I made these reservations 4 months ago! It's ironic that something I love (movies) is being interrupted by something I used to love (long distance running), but it's also fitting: between my busted knee and the arthur-itis in my foot, running is as big a pain in the ass as being evicted from your hotel mid-stay. Tonight is an all-nighter, with me roaming the streets looking for trouble to get into. I'll duly report to you from somewhere on Saturday morning, even if it's jail. They have Internet access now, you know.

Some brief notes for now:

EbertFest opened with the complete (yeah, right--this is the fourth version of this movie) cut of Fritz Lang's 1927 silent masterpiece, Metropolis. The new cut, which I had seen, contains footage found in Argentina. The new footage is scratchy and worn--restored as well as possible--and adds even more heat and emotion to this classic. This complete version runs 74 minutes longer than its prior incarnations, and marked the seventh time I have seen some form of Metropolis. I first saw Metropolis in its 1984 incarnation as a tricked out, tinted, Giorgio Moroder-scored science fiction movie. That Razzie-nominated version is worth seeking out, if only to compare to this version, and to see just how bad music was in 1984, if you hadn't been privileged to life back then.

A far better musical accompaniment is attached to the EbertFest screening courtesy of the amazing Alloy Orchestra. They created a unique sonic universe highlighted by one of the most batshit go-go music numbers I have ever heard. What it accompanies in the film is perfectly synched, and to hear it performed live was incredible. Not to mention that these guys played, continuously, for 154 minutes as the film unspooled. I forgot they were there, which is high praise indeed for their timing and ability. The standing ovation by the maximum capacity crowd was long, sustained and more than well-deserved.

Unfortunately, the German rights owner of Metropolis would not allow this score to be used on the Metropolis DVD. So you will have to do what the Orchestra advised us to do: Buy both the CD of their score and the Metropolis DVD.

The second film on opening night was Natural Selection, which I will write about under separate cover. The writer/director, Robbie Pickering, and the star, comedian and actress Rachael Harris, were present at the screening and in some of the after festival activities. More on that later as well, especially about my conversations with Pickering, whom Dr. Dre probably wants to shoot right now. I will say that Harris turns in remarkable work here, which makes up for her being wasted in The Hangover.

Next time: Chaz Ebert's Oprah Imitation, Dog Movies, Friends in Low (and High) Places, and Mr. Henderson finally meets his idol.

If you see me roaming around at 3 AM tonight, stop by and say hello. I'm a night person, so I'll be nice. It's in the morning that I'm a real bitch.

Odie and Boone Take on Tyler Perry

2011-04-27T09:57:00.000-04:00

by Odienator

I'm on my way to EbertFest, where I'll be reporting for this blog. In the meantime, please enjoy the latest e-convo between me and my fellow BMV troublemaker, Steven Boone.

It's been too long since we last had a Big Media Vandalism tete-a-tete, and I've got just the troublemaking topic for us: Emmitt Perry, Jr. Our reading audience will know him by his stage first name, Tyler.

Dissed by Black directors for engaging in "coonery," and dismissed by the same critics who'd lick the asses of even worse directors channeling in mumblecore, Tyler Perry has nonetheless managed to succeed. Like Roger Corman, he has his own studio AND all his movies have made money. In the past 10 years, I've read numerous books on Zanuck, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jack Warner and other Hollywood moguls. After reading their exploits, I had to conclude that, in his own ghetto fabulous way, Tyler Perry has brought the old studio system back to Hollywood.

Read more at Tales of Odienary Madness!

Erudite Suckers (or The Grudge)

2011-03-24T21:42:00.009-04:00

by Steven Boone

... in which a reluctant internet troll (me) responds to a years-old post about film editing by The New Yorker's Richard Brody (<---and you better read him first before reading the following):

I stumbled across this post back when it was first published and let it slide but, bumping into it again just now, I find I can't let its distortions stand for film geek posterity. First, you reduce my argument to the typical Old Man Cinema Rant, which it most certainly is not. I was born in 1972 and am of Tarantino's and Anderson's and Soderbergh's generation. I love all those guys and don't equate their rich talents with that of 1960's studio hacks. My argument is that basic editorial craft, which, in the past, ALL filmmakers great and small were at least adept, is now all but dead as a language. It simply isn't taught or appreciated. What's taught now is software and workflow proficiency-- how to cram a certain amount of story "data" into a certain interval of time.

The end-of-cinema arguments of the past have no parity with what I'm saying in the quote you selected. Yes, cinema is evergreen, but to mistake what is happening in mainstream commercial movies today for some kind of innovative next step in continuity with the past is the fatal mistake of most academic film critics. The Ho'wood cinema we are subjected to now is generally more prosaic and word-bound than anything Stanley Kramer might have hacked together in 1962. Don't let the opulent surfaces fool you.

You talk about the "look" of films then versus now but not the most important aspect of the image that makes cinema cinema- how it FEELS. Cinematography and production design continue to push fascinating new boundaries but film editing, the vehicle by which the FEELING of a film takes root in the mind and body of the viewer via the seductive interplay between TIME and SPACE, as arranged on a rectangular screen... is, to quote a Tarantino character, dead as fucking fried chicken. And those film critics who stand by contentedly as this great sell-out to the visual language of Wall Street and Madison Avenue proceeds apace... are suckers. Erudite suckers.

I sure told him, right? But I forgot to address his points about how vast and varied cinema language is now. He basically cited the cream of the mainstream crop and some arthouse icons, past and present, to illustrate his point. This is exactly what I once meant about discerning Whole Foods shoppers reveling in their wonderful culinary options while the Food Stamp recipients dine on potted meat and Ring Dings. It's the best of all possible worlds for the former.

I mean, how many Joes in line at Best Buy hearda some damn Apichatpong Weerasethakul? Or Tsai Ming-liang? Or Carlos Reygadas? But eeerbody's heard of, seen, and endured the brutalities of gargantuan noisemakers like Battle: L.A. There is a consequence of this split in nutritional intake, in which only the educated and relatively affluent now receive images that are put together with some basic understanding of how a thoughtful human being responds to the behavior of light and shadow projected on a screen. That was something you useta could get from just bout anywhere.

The consequence is a firmly stratified society where what should be our common church, the multiplex, is only rarely the site of fellowship and spiritual transportation. That's just how the folks who control the big money want it. They don't want true social cohesion (just consumer obedience), clarity (just order) or patience. They want the Richard Brody's of the world to be content that cinema marches on even as its power as art for illiterates (not just elites) has been bled out like an oil rig in the Gulf.

My Brother from Another Planet: Seti

2011-03-22T10:38:00.002-04:00

by Steven Boone

The New York underground rapper who was my best friend in high school has had many monikers over the years. Last I heard, his latest is Seti Amun Ra Jakada. I run into him every couple of years, usually on a bus or subway car, each of us with a battered notebook at his side. The last time was in 2008, when I was homeless and he had just gotten out of jail. "What were you in jail for?" I asked. "For telling the truth," he said, only half joking. I didn't ask him to explain. Knowing this dude for almost 25 years, I'd seen his mouth get him into all kinds of trouble.

Seti is one of the few bona fide geniuses and uncompromising individuals I personally know. Nah, for real. For one thing, can Jay-Z freestyle like this? And even if he could, would he dare?

rap olympics with seti
Uploaded by lil_crise. - See the latest featured music videos.

Martin Luther King Was a Ho

2011-03-15T02:26:00.002-04:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

Odienator Note: Folks, Black History Mumf is over, but I do owe some pieces to the series. Here's the first of a few BHM Extras that will include a One Drop of Black Cinema and a certain movie by QT. And also catch me on Thursday back at my own blog, Tales of Odienary Madness.

After the success of the My T Fine Barber Shop sequences in Coming to America, somebody MUST have suggested to Paramount that a movie set inside a barber shop would work. A spinoff, perhaps, with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall playing several roles. Someone could come up with a bullshit reason for being in the shop for most of the movie. Maybe once or twice, we’d follow Mr. Clarence to some real ghetto event that surpasses the one featuring Randy Watson and Sexual Chocolate. Alas, either Paramount didn’t listen or no one broached the subject. Not that I am lamenting this; I’m glad Mr. Clarence and Sol remained in their one movie together, unspoiled by corporate greed.

Fourteen years later, MGM made a movie set in a barber shop, called it Barbershop, and got it rated PG-13. Mr. Clarence would have scoffed at the tamer rating (remember his response to “you ain’t never met Martin Luther the King!”), but by this time, his portrayer had gone past PG-13 and into the no-man’s land of Parental Guidance Suggested. Barbershop uses, as a starting point, your recollection of how much you loved those Coming to America scenes or, if you are in possession of a nappy head and a Y chromosome, your own experiences at your local barber shop. It then goes on to craft an amusing character study merged with a rather stupid and unfunny slapstick subplot. Sort of like a Tyler Perry movie.

WAIT! WAIT! Don’t leave! Barbershop eventually weaves this subplot into the main one, using it as a rather clever payoff. However, your mileage may vary on tolerating the film’s shifts from character-based verbal humor to broad, physical buffoonery. Two fools (Anthony Anderson and Lahmard Tate) smash and grab an ATM from an Indian-owned business across the street from the Barbershop of the title. They will spend the entire movie trying to get it open, often interrupting interesting scenes of comedy or conflict to appear onscreen wrestling with this bulky machine.

Barbershop tips its hat early by telling you the machine is empty, so any suspense that would have made these silly Wile E. Coyote-ish scenes work is gone. It’s just Anderson screaming and getting hurt, and Tate acting like he should be under the shortbus, not on it. I know I’m in the minority for being aggravated. I love slapstick, but these guys just tried my last nerve. Full disclosure: When I watched Barbershop again for this piece, I fast-forwarded through most of their scenes. There are two moments of humor I stopped to watch (Anderson outsmarting a cop trying to use the stolen ATM and Anderson’s grandmother’s reaction to seeing him), but other than that and the film’s climax, I saw less of these two characters than Barbershop contained.

Barbershop’s main plot, and the memorable characters it brought to the screen, more than make up for the Anderson subplot. At first, we see the similarities between Calvin’s Barbershop and the My T Fine: There’s a wisecracking old man whose statements get him in trouble with the other members of the shop, plus there’s a Jewish character mixing it up as well. Old folks just sit around playing checkers or shooting the breeze. Both films capture the barbershop atmosphere, but Barbershop uses it and its characters to offer up lessons for its younger audience.

Calvin (Ice Cube) is a man with dreams, a pregnant wife, and a fledgling barbershop deep in the ‘hood of Chicago. Inherited from his father, the barbershop is a neighborhood landmark where fathers and sons have convened for two generations. Calvin has given chairs to an African immigrant, Dinka (Leonard Earl Howze), snooty college boy Jimmy James (Sean Patrick Thomas), cornrowed former criminal Ricky (Michael Ealy), temperamental sistah Terri (rapper Eve) and wannabe Negro White Boy Isaac (Jane Fonda’s kid, Troy Garity). Also in possession of a chair, though it is rarely used for anything but sitting, is Eddie, a 70 year old man with a Frederick Douglass do. Eddie was there when Calvin Sr. opened the shop, and he provides the link to the past. (In the sequel, the filmmakers make this link more explicit). Eddie is played by the much younger comedian Cedric the Entertainer. He provides the commentary that got Barbershop in serious trouble back in 2002.

Everybody has their mini-dramas, but the main drama involves the shop’s owner. To fund his latest pipe dream, Calvin sells the shop to Mr. Wallace (Keith David), who, unbeknownst to Calvin, plans on turning it into a strip club. When Calvin discovers this, he tries to give back the money Mr. Wallace ponied up. But Mr. Wallace is a loan shark, and unwilling to give up a prime piece of property unless Calvin pays double the price. Only the magnificent Keith David can be menacing while dressed like a groomsman at a 1981 wedding. When Calvin reveals his mistake to his very pregnant wife (Jazsmin Lewis), her reaction is not the typical pissed off sistah response one would expect. She’s the voice of reason, and Lewis plays her big scene with a sweet, quiet wisdom.

Speaking of pissed off sistahs, Terri is introduced barging in on her trifflin’ boyfriend Kevin (Jason George) with another woman. “Why don’t you look under the bed?” he asks her incredulously. It’s reverse psychology—his latest conquest IS under the bed. Comic violence ensues, and Terri starts her work day at the barbershop in such a foul mood her customer runs away. “She can’t cut my hair lookin’ like that!” he yells. Terri’s foul moods are common at the shop, as is her penchant for going back to Kevin no matter how badly he disrespects her. She’s ready to kick the ass of anyone who drinks the apple juice she keeps in the shop fridge, but she keeps forgiving a man who screws around on the regular. As I’ve said before, I’ll never understand why women do this, nor am I happy that these men get away scott free while the burned woman makes life a living fucking hell for the good men in the world. Why even try to be faithful and nice to a woman? (Do I sound bitter? Good.)

One of those good men, Dinka, has a severe crush on Terri. He has a cute, Prince Akeem-ish accent and an optimism that being Black in America hasn’t yet destroyed. Typically, Terri doesn’t give him the time of day, but he’s persistent and, as Larenz Tate says in love jones, you’d be surprised how far persistence can get you. But Dinka’s timing is WAY off: he leaves flowers and a love poem for Terri on the day she whips Kevin’s other girlfriend’s ass. Terri throws the flowers into the middle of the shop floor, embarrassing Dinka and causing the entire place to yell out “DAAAAAAMMMN!!” “This ain’t no bullfight,” says Eddie under his breath.

Desperate, Dinka seeks help from Ricky, a pretty boy who has the roughneck edges that attract women. Ricky is trying to prove himself—he’s an ex-convict Calvin took a chance on—and whenever there’s a crime in the neighborhood, Detective Williams (Tom Wright) shows up to harass Ricky. After the ATM robbery, Williams sits in Ricky’s chair, threatening him with arrest if he finds out he’s involved. Ricky responds by intentionally running the clippers over the detective’s ear. BZZZZT! Ricky’s truck was used in the robbery, so Detective Williams and his chewed up ear will be back.

Also at odds with Ricky is Jimmy James, who thinks the barbershop job is beneath him because he is “edumacated.” Jimmy is a college educated know-it-all whose attitude is completely at odds with the other workers, including Isaac. Isaac loves rap music, has a really hot Black girlfriend, and is far more stereotypically Black than Jimmy could be even if he were possessed by J.D. Walker. Jimmy talks down to Ricky and annoys the rest of the shop. He thinks he can never be wrong, citing that scallops are not mollusks and the Indian shop owner whose ATM was stolen is Pakistani. “He better pack and stan’ his ass on the corner before they beat it,” says Eddie.

Political correctness is the farthest thing from Eddie’s mind. Representing the old school barber shop commentators, Eddie holds nothing sacred. He calls Martin Luther King a ho (he must have read Abernathy’s book), calls Dinka “Roots” and, in the film’s most controversial scene, treats Rosa Parks in far worse fashion than Outkast:

There are three things that Black people need to tell the truth about. Number one: Rodney King should've gotten his ass beat for being drunk in a Honda a white part of Los Angeles. Number two: O.J. did it! And number three: Rosa Parks didn't do nuthin' but sit her Black ass down!

When the Barbershop protests this, Eddie persists:

Wait, hold on here. Is this a barbershop? Is this a barbershop? If we can't talk straight in a barbershop, then where can we talk straight? We can't talk straight nowhere else. You know, this ain't nothin' but healthy conversation, that's all.

All these melodramas come to a head at some point in Barbershop. It turns out that the dumbass who robbed the ATM is Ricky’s cousin. Detective Williams barges into the barbershop to arrest Ricky because his cousin used Ricky’s truck AND left Ricky’s bumper at the scene of the crime. Kevin tries to sweet talk Terri back into his bed for the bazillionth time, only to be met with violent resistance by an unexpected source. Both Ricky and Isaac give Jimmy James a dressing down. And Eddie brings the fire that Mrs. Calvin didn’t when he discovers Calvin has sold the shop without so much as a warning to his employees:

This ain't no Goddamn school of the blind, Calvin! This is the barbershop! The place where a black man means something! Cornerstone of the neighborhood! Our own country club! I mean, can't you see that? Hell, that's the problem with your whole generation. You know, y'all... you don't believe in nothin'. But your father, he believed in something, Calvin. He believed and understood that something
as simple as a little haircut could change the way a man felt on the inside.

Twice in the film, Eddie’s theory is proven. One of Calvin’s customers has a penchant for not paying for his haircuts. Using a “job interview” as his latest excuse, he gets Calvin to cut his hair before running out without paying. Calvin uses this as an example of why he’s losing money on the shop and wants to close it, but after his decision, the guy shows up to finally pay for his haircuts. Seems his job interview excuse was no excuse at all. “I got the job,” he tells Calvin, something he might not have had the confidence to achieve with the tore up ‘do he had before Calvin shaped it up. With Eddie’s chastising words still ringing in his ears, Calvin refuses his money.

A haircut is also the reason Jimmy James comes to accept Isaac as something other than what he considers a poser. Jimmy James offers his own hair as a means of Isaac proving that he is worthy of not only the chair in Calvin’s shop but the pleasure of cutting Black hair. Isaac does a great job, and Jimmy James is humbled. To show he is the bigger man, Isaac makes no mention of Jimmy James’ earlier faux pas, where the latter does what we all feared whenever the clippers came toward our Afros back in the day: He accidentally cuts a bald spot in a customer’s head.

Since a sequel AND a spinoff were made from Barbershop, it’s no spoiler to reveal that Calvin keeps the shop open and staffed with the same cast. I was not enamored with Barbershop II, but like its predecessor, it provides a showcase for Cedric the Entertainer. Cedric inhabits Eddie with uncanny precision, from the physicality of an old man to the mumbly patois older Black men tend to have. He is hilarious in his comedic scenes, which makes his dramatic takedown of Calvin at the film’s climax effective and surprising. His nimble theft of every scene he is in is why the supporting actor Oscar category was created. No such fate befell Cedric the Entertainer.

Eddie is the primary reason one remembers Barbershop, but the other cast members hold their own. Sean Patrick Thomas is convincing as a bougie Negro, Troy Garity is the Blackest White boy since Vince Vaughn in Be Cool, and Leonard Earl Howze’s Dinka is far from the Prince Akeem clone his accent suggests. Michael Ealy’s Ricky gets a great speech late in the film, and makes a convincing ex-con. Ice Cube, primarily the straight man here, successfully juggles both a sense of mentorship toward his barbers and a schoolboy’s crazy pipe dreams of success.

Approaching the level of Eddie’s greatness is Eve’s Terri. She is all attitude, but like Eddie, under her bravada beats the heart of a sentimental fool. When things get too tense between Isaac and Jimmy James, she diffuses it with some Marvin Gaye on her radio. When Dinka discovers her in the shop’s locker room, she first apologizes for her treatment of his flowers, then asks him about the poem he left with them. “It’s by Pablo Neruda,” he tells her. (I hope it was Neruda’s Me Gusta Cuando Callas.) “He knows what to say to a woman,” Terri tells Dinka. “You got me feeling all gentle.” Considering what we’ve seen of Terri’s rage, this is fine praise indeed, and Eve makes you feel her vulnerability. In this brief moment, you see what Dinka sees in her, and you understand why he levels her trifling ex-boyfriend with one punch.

Barbershop was the last good movie director Tim Story shot. After this, he helmed such disasters as Queen Latifah’s Taxi (she fares better in the Barbershop spinoff, Beauty Shop) and the Fantastic Four movies. This kicked off Ice Cube’s more family friendly fare like Are We There Yet, which is reason enough to condemn Barbershop, but stupid ATM plot aside, I can’t protest too much. Mr. Clarence would approve.

Happy Oscar Day!

2011-02-27T15:45:00.001-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

For the second time, I have no “sway” over what will happen at the Academy Awards. Last time, I wrote about the wonderful Taraji P. Henson, but the ceremony had been moved to March; her loss wasn’t the result of the Black History Mumf Oscar curse. This year, the ceremony is back in February—tonight in fact—but I can’t hurt anybody because the show is severely Negro-impaired. If you do see a Black face on TV tonight, it’ll probably be wearing a waiter outfit.

Since you’re here, I suppose I should write something. I already feel guilty about my schedule keeping me from being more prolific this year. I have folders of screenshots for three movies I’ve yet to write anything for this month—we’ll have to do BHM extras in March. For now, let’s discuss the past Black winners of acting Oscars. Let’s start with the first winner:

Hattie McDaniel, Gone With the Wind (1939): Olivia de Havilland is the first White actor to lose to a cullud person, but she knew this before the ceremony because, back then, the Oscars were no big secret. Imagine if she hadn’t known! I would pass out if her loss had elicited Shelley Winters’ classic Cleopatra Jones line: “That troublemaking coon!!!” But seriously, folks, McDaniel deserved her Oscar simply because Mammy was no ordinary Mammy. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Mammy was kicking Scarlett O’Hara’s ass when the camera wasn’t on them. Racist White Southerners knew this too: Wikipedia cites that “[h]er role in Gone with the Wind had alarmed some in the Southern audience; there were complaints that in the film she had been too familiar with her white employer.” Too familiar? Yeah, too familiar with airing her employer out. “Go get me a switch, Miss Scarlett!” I can hear Hattie yelling.

Of course, some bougie Negroes and liberal White folks cringe at not only this role but this win. To them I say something I haven’t said since Black History Mumf 2008: SIT YO’ ASS DOWN!!!! As Ms. McDaniel once said: “I’d rather get paid $7,000 for playing a maid than $70 to be somebody’s maid. Lest I forget, it’s a damn good performance too, with several winks to us, the Black folks in the audience. My score: A.

James Baskett, Song of the South (1945): I’ve already said everything I wanted to say about Song of the South; I’m just putting Baskett here because, technically, he was the first Black man to receive an Oscar, honorary or not. Sure, he couldn’t go pick it up at the ceremony (McDaniel got hers at the Oscars, and read a speech written for her by the studio), but he received the Oscar nonetheless. My score: B- for Uncle Remus, A- for Brer Fox.

Sidney Poitier, Lillies of The Field (1963): Y’all know I love Sidney. He’s been a constant here at Black History Mumf, both as actor and director. But honestly, what did he do here that warranted an Oscar? This is Sidney at his most asexual—he’s with NUNS for God’s sake—and though he has several good scenes with the Mother Superior (Lilia Skala), it’s nothing worth worrying Price Waterhouse. He’s been so much better in so many different pictures. This was pure charity. My score: C.

Louis Gossett, Jr, An Officer and A Gentleman (1982): Gossett’s drill sergeant was up against a gay man, a transsexual, Mandingo’s Warren Maxwell (did James Mason attempt to use Gossett’s head to drain his rheumatiz’?) and George W. Bush. W is played here by my personal favorite in this year’s category, Charles Durning, who remains the only person who deserved an Oscar nomination just for singing a song. My Pops said that Gossett was “pretty soft for a drill sergeant,” and he’d know: he was in Vietnam. Gossett feels a bit soft, especially when you compare him to Adolph Caesar, R. Lee Ermey or hell, even Lynn Whitfield in that dreadful Pauly Shore movie. Still, he turns in a good B-plus worthy performance here, calling Richard Gere “Mayo,” and singing one of the more entertaining march songs. Gossett was the third Black Supporting Actor nomination and that category’s first win. Which leads us to:

Den-ZELLLL, Glory (1989): Denzel Washington was here two year before, for Cry Freedom, and in Glory, he manages to steal the spotlight from his fellow nominee in 1987, Morgan Freeman. Private Trip is the PERFECT STORM of Denzel mannerisms. This is the role you go to if you want to perfect your Den-ZELLLL imitation. His vocal “heh-heh’s,” his righteous indignation, his puffed up pride, his brooding and his “so you’re tellin’ me” verbal sarcasm—they are ALL HERE. Unlike some of his later performances, where the Denzel-ness borders on parody, here it’s perfect. Pauline Kael, who disliked Washington’s performance and called it overly telegraphed, was absolutely wrong here. But I can’t help think of her complaint when I watch Denzel slum his way through movies he shouldn’t have taken in the first place. But Glory is a must-see, and this may be Washington’s best performance. My score: A.

Whoopi Goldberg, Ghost (1990): Here’s a performance that divides people. Some saw it as coonery. The Academy saw it as a great performance. I think what Goldberg is doing here is intriguing: She knows this role’s potential for Willie Best-style coonery (She’s seein’ ghosts, y’all!) and she both acknowledges it and subverts it. She knows how far she can go, and unlike Best, there is genuine emotion and craft in her performance. Her role is strong enough that, had the makers of Ghost not pussied out and kept Goldberg onscreen with Moore at the end rather than go all Swayze on us, I would have believed her as Swayze. Most critics don’t respect comedic performances. I do. My score: A-. If you think I’ve gone soft in my militancy, the next paragraph will be my downfall.

Me, Jerry Maguire (1996): My doppelganger, Cuba Gooding, Jr., is remembered more for his Oscar speech than his performance. If you happen to watch Jerry Maguire again—and I did a few nights ago when it was on cable—you’ll see that Gooding’s speech is foreshadowed in that movie. Cuba G’s shouting down of the Oscar orchestra is pure Rod Tidwell, his Jerry Maguire character. As I wrote in my Regina King piece at BHM 2008, Jerry Maguire does an Imitation of Life style switcheroo: We think it’s about the White love story, but it’s really about the Black one. Gooding and Regina King are both excellent here, a fact that is overshadowed by all the terrible choices Gooding has made since he won this thing. (Boat Trip, Cuba? Why hast though forsaken me?!) No matter. Bitch at me if you want, and I’ll send you an autographed picture of me; Gooding deserves an A.

Den-ZELLLL, again, Training Day (2001): Had Pauline Kael gone after Washington for this performance, I would be in her corner. Washington is quite convincing as corrupt cop Alonzo during his early “mentoring” scenes with Ethan Hawke, but as the film progresses, he slowly starts going off the rails until his big “KING KONG AIN’T GOT SHIT ON ME!” freakout, which is NOT convincing AT ALL. This is three-quarters of a great performance, helped along both by the joy you get watching Washington have a good time as the bad guy AND how close to Denzel parody this gets. Just listen to the way Alonzo says “heh-heh (pause) MY nigga!” Like the last Black actor to sink his teeth into blatant villainy (the far superior Morgan Freeman in Street Smart), Alonzo is not given an exit worthy of his character. And sorry, Denzel, this should have been Wesley’s role and his Oscar. My score: B.

Halle Berry, Monster’s Ball (2001): I won’t waste any time. I hated hated hated this performance. Her Southern accent is shaky, her scenes with her son (which foreshadow Precious) are unconvincing, and there wasn’t a single moment her character felt real to me. Berry has been convincingly downtrodden before (she’s fantastic in Jungle Fever, good in Losing Isaiah), but not here. I remember laughing my ass off when she talks about getting “curtains on credit,” (a more knowledgeable screenwriter would have used the correct word: LAYAWAY) and rolling my eyes at hack Marc Forster’s attempts at symbolism (a little white spoon going into a big ass mound of chocolate ice cream? REALLY, Marc? That’s about right.) In my review, I said her sex scene with Billy Bob Thornton (who should have gotten the Oscar nod instead of her) sounded like “Rhett Butler screwing Mammy.” Black pussy can cure a lot of things. Racism is not one of them, and I’m insulted this movie even attempted to make that statement. The same folks who called Precious poverty porn seemed to just love Monster’s Ball. I wasn’t fooled. Angela Bassett should have broken the Black Best Actress curse instead of Berry, at least not for this role. My score: F-.

Morgan Freeman, Million Dollar Baby (2004): More charity from the Oscars. I loved Million Dollar Baby (as I’ve said before, as a former boxer I am a true sucker for boxing movies) but this was payback for former slights by the Academy. Freeman won this for his narration. Yes, he’s convincing as a former boxer and Eastwood’s right hand man, and it’s nice to see him and Eastwood together again after Unforgiven, and yes, there is that Freeman gravitas. If he could exchange this Oscar, he should send it in for the one he deserved for Street Smart or The Shawshank Redemption. As Carol Burnett said about her role in The Four Seasons: It’s fine, no gem. My score: B.

Jamie Foxx, Ray (2004): Who knew Ray Charles was such a dick?!! The general complaint about this win is that Foxx is just doing an imitation of Ray Charles, but what an imitation it is. I forgot I was watching Foxx—he became Ray Charles to me. And damn, I didn’t like Brother Ray very much. That Foxx could add that layer of complexity on Charles—with Charles’ blessing—is why I think he deserved this Oscar. Ray is ultimately too long, and does fall into the biopic trap, but Foxx is stellar throughout. I should also mention that the actress who played Charles’ mother, Sharon Warren, has one of the greatest moments in movie history. I could watch that scene 100 times. My score: A.

Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls (2006): Yeah, she had that damn song on her side, and yeah, I think Eddie Murphy was more worthy of the Oscar than she was, but I saw Dreamgirls on Broadway and if Jennifer Holiday could win the Tony, Hudson could win the Oscar. The role is better written, and better acted, in the movie than the musical, and Hudson’s pitching of the song is perfectly calibrated to the movie. Had she done it Holiday’s way (and Holiday’s version of the song is better), it would have come off as grotesque on the big screen. Like on stage, my love of Effie White was helped by the audience I sat with at the movie theater. They talked back to Effie, and made her one of their own. On stage, I must admit I did not hear one note of Holiday’s performance after the first line—the Broadway theater vibrated so loudly with cheers and stomps that I feared it would collapse. People went batshit at my movie theater too. That has to count for something Hudson did right. My score: B.

Forrest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland (2006): OOGA BOOGA!!! Whitaker is the Black boogeyman as Idi Amin. I’ll give him much credit for the accent, but maybe the mistake here is that the only way Idi Amin can work as a movie character is by showing real footage of him. He’s stranger than fiction, and nothing Whitaker does can make his performance work. I kept comparing him to the Amin I saw in documentaries, and he kept failing. The script also doesn’t help him very much by making the “hero” of the piece so stupid that you want Idi Amin to get him. I’m going to give Whitaker a pass. My score: C+.

Mo’Nique, Precious (2010): Mo’Nique is outrageous in Precious. This is one of the most fearless performances I have ever seen, and what made it even more compelling for me is that I knew people like this in my old neighborhood. I knew Precious, the kids at her school, and mothers who screamed at their kids the way Mary Jones screams at Precious. The movie does pour it on a bit thickly sometimes, but in comparison to the harrowing novel, viewers of Precious are getting a break. I’ve never been a big fan of Mo’Nique’s comedy, but I had newfound respect for her after this (and, from a comedic perspective, after Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins). Her big scene should have inspired envy in other actresses that they weren’t able to deliver it—and nail it—the way she does. When you read my autobiography, you’ll understand just how much I understood the 80’s ‘hood environment Precious forces you to wallow in, and you’ll get to meet my neighborhood’s Mary Jones. Mo’Nique captures not only the character’s villainy, but also the character’s victimization. That she forces you NOT to feel sorry for her earns her the Oscar. My score: A.

Enjoy your Oscars tonight. I am hoping Anne Hathaway has a wardrobe malfunction to spice up the Harvey Weinstein payola!

Ain't I'm Clean?

2011-02-25T23:52:00.003-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

In August, 1965, the neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles erupted in four days of rioting after the DUI arrest of Marquette Frye by the California Highway Patrol. The residents of Watts, Black, poor and tired of feeling oppressed and disrespected by police expressed themselves in a way that caused 34 deaths, injured 1,032 and caused $40 million in property damage. In August, 1972, the citizens of Watts came together in a far more peaceful community expression. At the beginning of Wattstax, Mel Stuart’s concert film, Richard Pryor describes it thusly:

“All of us have something to say, but some are never heard. Over seven years ago, the people of Watts stood together and demanded to be heard. On a Sunday, this past August, in the Los Angeles Coliseum, over 100,000 Black people came together to commemorate that moment in American History. For over 6 hours the audience heard, felt , sang, danced and shouted the living word in a soulful expression of the Black Experience. This is a film of that experience, and what some of the people had to say.”

Wattstax is the 1973 film of this Los Angeles Coliseum concert, sometimes referred to as the Black Woodstock. The concert, and the film, took its name from the combination of Watts and Stax, the Memphis label that brought us a different kind of soul than its rival in Detroit, Motown. Stax, whose record labels were yellow with a snapping Black hand on them, gave Salt n’ Pepa a career of samples to use. It was the home of Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MG’s, The Staple Singers, Rufus Thomas and his daughter Carla, The Bar-Kays, Sam and Dave and the writer of numerous Stax songs for others and himself, Isaac Hayes. Several of these acts appear in Wattstax at a concert that charged a dollar for admission. Hayes, the biggest Stax star of the time, sang two songs from the Shaft soundtrack, but until 2003, this footage was never seen by viewers of Wattstax due to MGM’s refusal to release the rights to this Columbia release.

Richard Pryor, years before Silver Streak, Live in Concert, and Twin Peaks: Fire Run With Me, is your master of ceremonies for Wattstax. It’s a role he previously assayed in the horrible 1971 film, Dynamite Chicken, and like that film, he appears in hilarious stand-up comedy bumpers whenever the main feature takes a break. Wattstax also features commentary from numerous people in the Watts community, including Raymond Allen and a grey mustached Ted Lange. The former took his Watts ties over to Sanford and Son, playing the perpetually drunk husband of Aunt Esther. The latter wound up in much more dire straits as the token Negro on The Love Boat. They and others discuss various topics including the riots, women (Black and White), church, and the word nigger. That word gets a major workout in Wattstax, but none of the singers ever utter it.

Watching Wattstax brought back a lot of memories for me, from hearing both the music and the conversations. Seeing all the Afros and bad 70’s clothing took me back to my Superfly coat and hat and my bushy Afro. We had all the Stax records, from Hayes’ Black Moses to Rufus Thomas’ Do the Funky Chicken, one of my favorite songs as a kid. My aunt loved Staple Singers songs, and I loved Mavis Staples so much that, when I was a teenager, I dreamt that Pops Staples beat my ass with his guitar because I grabbed Mavis’ titty. Still reeling from that guilt all these years later (remember, the Staple Singers were originally a gospel group), I kept my eyes in my head during their musical number in Wattstax. Melvin Van Peebles, no stranger to breasteses, introduces the Staples’ Respect Yourself.

Sigh. She doesn't look like this anymore.

The Los Angeles Coliseum is packed with Black folks, dancing in the stands and singing along with the entertainment. Director Mel Stuart and his director of photography John Alonzo provide numerous shots of audience members, especially if they’re hot chicks wearing short skirts and booty-choker shorts. The DVD of Wattstax I got from Netflix looks like shit, but the audience’s energy was so infectious I wanted to climb into the screen. No, not to get to Mavis! I swear!

Every kind of 70’s hairstyle, from Afros to Afro puffs to cornrows and pigtails was displayed. One talking head from the neighborhood sported a hairstyle that looked like the UltraPerm from Hell, and several other talking heads were depicted getting their Afros trimmed and picked at a barber shop. The nostalgia was overwhelming as I ran my hands across my bald (by choice, folks) head.

In the privacy of my own house, I danced with impunity the Funky Chicken with Rufus Thomas, who comments on his ridiculous pink outfit with the title of this post.

"Can I ask y'all somethin'? Ain't I'm clean?!!!"

I laughed at how easily Thomas gets the crowd, who had rushed the field during his number to do exactly what I was doing, to go back to their seats. I sang along with Luther Ingram’s If Loving You is Wrong, I Don’t Want to Be Right and Johnnie Taylor’s Odie’s, I mean Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone. The Emotions’ Peace Be Still, set in a Watts church, almost made me want to go back to church.

Pryor’s commentary is a series of riffs on ghetto life, from winos to women, and the editing makes it seem that his commentary leads to further comments from the Watts community. Women and men discuss relationships and it’s interesting to hear just how differently people thought back then. Jesse Jackson, back when he was respectable, opens the concert, and it ends the way Wattstax should have in 1973, with Isaac Hayes singing perhaps his best song, Soulsville. Dressed in a knee-length shirt made of gold chains, Hayes cuts quite the figure of gaudy machismo.

It’s impossible for me to try to review a concert movie for you, as it is an experience that words really can’t convey. So allow me to close out with two memories from my youth that came to me while watching Wattstax.

Ted Lange tells a story about when he was first called a nigger. Immediately, my mind went back to when I was 12. I had to travel after school to a predominantly White part of Jersey City to stay with my brother in the hospital until my Mom came at 8PM to stay the night. I took the wrong bus and wound up about a mile from the hospital. As I walked back, I passed this group of White kids on a stoop. I didn’t look at them until one of them shouted at me, “Hey nigger!” I turned around to find the entire group following me. They surrounded me and called me everything but a child of God, but I kept walking. I was terrified out of my mind until one of them said “Y’all come back now, y’hear?!!” I had never heard anybody but hillbilly White folks on TV say that to each other; it had nothing to do with the racial slurs they were spewing. So I started laughing hysterically, which made them mad as hell. They chased me the rest of the journey but, considering I’d spent most of my childhood running from dogs in my neighborhood, I outran all those kids, running straight into the emergency room. My location was appropriate because it felt like I was about to have a heart attack from my ordeal.

On a lighter note: During the Emotions’ gospel number, a woman in church gets hit by the Holy Ghost. Black folks in my church called it “getting happy.” I’ve told this one before: In my church, there was this woman who got happy every week. We thought God was touching her more than necessary, but then we realized she was full of shit. She was doing it for the attention. Those nurses at my church would grab her when she started getting happy and drag her out of the church as if she’d just bombed on Showtime at the Apollo. When kids in my neighborhood would visit our church, I’d bet them a quarter that I knew who would get the Holy Ghost in church that day. They’d always take the bet, because who God was gonna touch in church was a mystery…except at MY church. I made a good amount of post-church junk food money that way, spending it on Drakes Coconut Jumble cookies. I am so burning in Hell.

Your Homework Assignment:
Look out for Pops Staples. He wields a mean guitar.

Now THIS is a movie credit!

Not So Super Negroes

2011-02-24T17:12:00.003-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

Richard Pryor has a great joke in Live In Concert where he awakens from his heart attack in an ambulance full of White EMT’s working on him. In his groggy, resuscitated state, he thinks he’s dead. “Ain’t this a bitch?” he says, “they sent me to the wrong goddamn Heaven!” That’s the same reaction fanboys had when they discovered that Idris Elba was cast as Heimdall, a Norse god in the upcoming Marvel Universe movie, Thor: He’s in the wrong goddamn Heaven. The only Norse gods I remembered were Loki and Odin, so I had to go look up Heimdall. Wikipedia tells me that Heimdall is “the whitest of the gods.” Here’s a picture of Idris Elba, in case you were one of the fools who DIDN’T watch The Wire.

The fanboys are mad because the only thing Norse and Negro have in common is that they’re five letter words beginning with N.

Kenneth Branagh, the director of Thor, has partaken in the race switcheroo before: Robert Conrad’s Jim West was played by The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in the fiasco that was the Wild, Wild West movie. That caused little controversy because fanboys weren’t old enough to know what Wild Wild West even was. This, however, was blasphemy. If he were the whitest of the gods, that meant he had to the purest Aryan muthafucka there is. Heimdall is White with a capital W, White and pure, like Ivory Snow soap powder. For them to cast a bruva in this role was a slap in the pointy hood!

In response to this, Idris Elba appeared on British TV to dispute the uproar. He said that those who protest have no problem believing that there’s some huge White man with a magic hammer running around, yet they can’t accept him being cast as the NordicNig. I wish Elba had read that Wikipedia entry, because he would have had some serious ammo to shut those whiny bastards up. From that site, I learned that:

1. Heimdall is a horn player
2. Heimdall hangs in his crib, Himinbjörg, drinking mead all day
3. Mead is a cheap ass wine made out of honey and water, and has as much alcohol as malt liquor, if not more.
4. Heimdall has GOLD TEETH.
5. Heimdall has a tricked out horse with gold hair, the horse equivalent of rims.

Now if dat don’ soun’ like a stereotypical Negro, I will eat my hat! Plus, didn’t all humanity come from Africa in the first place?

I was about to end this piece by saying that these friggin’ fanboys should stop worrying about some fake ass comic book hero and start doing things like getting a job, moving out of their parents’ basements, getting off the goddamn Facebook, Twitter and video games and finding some pussy (or dick—we’re equal opportunity and non-judgmental here at Big Media Vandalism). BUT THEN I had a horrible, awful thought:

These guys might be onto something!

Have you SEEN Black superhero movies? They’re atrocious! Have a look:

Meteor Man: Robert Townsend follows up on his Hollywood Shuffle promise and makes a Black Superman movie. He plays the lead, a man who gets hit by a meteor, and unlike Stephen King in Creepshow, he gets some good out of it. Seeing Townsend battling his Hollywood Shuffle nemesis Roy Fegan is fun for us fans of his work, and the film is full of Black stars like Bill Cosby, Eddie Griffin, Robert Guillaume, Marla Gibbs, LaWanda Page and Don Cheadle (with yellow hair!!!). It even has a clever power for our hero: He can absorb a book’s knowledge like Number 5 in Short Circuit. The problem is the movie is a mess, full of plot holes and confusion about its tone. There are some funny moments in it, as in all of Townsend’s movies, but there’s so much wasted potential that I walked out feeling depressed. The one truly inspired thing Townsend does is cast Luther Vandross as a mute hitman. Luther conveys much without using that awesome voice of his, but we see so little of him that it becomes just another wasted opportunity.

Blankman: Damon Wayans scored comic points for some by playing Handi-Man on In Living Color. In an attempt to cash in on that, Wayans plays what imDB refers to as “a simpleton inventor with a bulletproof costume and a low budget.” They make it sound so much better than it is. David Alan Grier, the Blaine to Wayans’ Antoine, is more interesting as his brother and sidekick “Other Guy,” but Wayans’ attempt to bring a ghetto (in every possible definition) hero to the screen is unfunny, boring, and unwilling to exploit Blankman’s potentially interesting mental state. On the plus side, this movie has Lynne Thigpen, who’s smart enough to get shot early in the movie. It is also probably the cleanest movie Damon Wayans has ever done.

Hancock: Let me see if I get this straight: Hancock is a homeless, drunk superhero who destroys property and acts like a genuine ass. Yet, people still live in the town Hancock occupies. Never mind that he’s more of a danger-slash-menace than the criminals. I guess that’s because Hancock lives in L.A., and if earthquakes, gangs, and Botoxed Hollywood types couldn’t get people to leave, one superpowered lush isn’t going to either. And wait—Hancock’s weakness…is a White woman. From South Africa. It would be a lot more subversive if it didn’t come out of nowhere. To quote the R-and-B classic Heartbeat: “Now you know this just don’t make no kind of sense!”

To clear my palette, I have to mention a GOOD Black Superhero:

The Brown Hornet!

The Brown Hornet appeared on Fat Albert, and was the reason they got rid of all those catchy songs that used to show up at the end. He looked like Bill Cosby and, as voiced by the Cos, had a very interesting way of speaking. You could...imitate himmmm...all day. He and his sidekick, Stinger, drive a bee-shaped spaceship, fight crime in space and always "naturally escape unharmed" from whatever trap they find themselves in. He battles space witches and graffiti artists while the Cosby Kids cheer.

Hancock should have killed any attempt to give a Black man superpowers, but it made money, so now we have Idris Elba in Thor. Perhaps the fanboys who protested were trying to make the same point I am making, that outside of the Brown Hornet and Richard Pryor’s classic SuperNigger routine (“who, disguised as Clark Washington…”), Black superheroes make bad movies. Perhaps?

Nah.

One Ignorant Negro Don't Spoil the Whole Bunch

2011-02-23T01:55:00.002-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

The mystery in A Soldier’s Story never compelled me. I knew whodunit early on, and I don’t think director Norman Jewison and screenwriter Charles Fuller intend to generate much suspense over it. The bigger question is whydunit, which is answered by the flashbacks that make up both A Soldier’s Story and the Pulitzer Prize winning play from which it is adapted. Both the film and the play open with the gunshot murder of Sergeant Waters, the commanding officer and baseball coach of an all Black regiment in 1944 Louisiana.

Though Sergeant Waters has his favorites, he treats most of his men even worse than the Whites In town would treat them. He calls them shiftless and lazy niggers, and is especially harsh to darker skinned Southerners like C. J. Memphis, a talented blues guitarist and ace baseball player. Memphis is a musician and a sports hero, two things that guarantee boatloads of booty, but he is COUNNNN-TREEEEE. Like a chicken coup. Sergeant Waters, a light-skinned, well educated Negro, hates the fact that Memphis, like many other of his men, is willing to shuck and jive to stay alive. He calls it yassir-bossin’. Of course, Sergeant Waters, a man in a rather high position for a cullud person, had to do his own yassir-bossin’ to get there. Educated as he may be, he had to defer at some point to racist, White officers in order to climb the few steps up the ladder the segregated US Military would allow. He can do plenty less yassir-bossin’ nowadays. How quickly they forget.

Right before Sergeant Waters is gunned down, he cries out “they still hate you!” We assume he is talking to his murderer, and in an ironic way, he is: Sergeant Waters is talking about himself.

The army calls in a lawyer named Captain Davenport (Howard E. Rollins, Jr.) to conduct an investigation. The victim would have liked Davenport—he’s no nonsense and obviously well-educated. He’s also something of a blank slate, numb almost, a tactic that would have helped Sergeant Waters had he considered it. After numerous viewings over the years, I’ve concluded that Davenport’s rigid state of coolness is a defense mechanism. Everybody stares at him because nobody has seen a Black officer with this high a rank in the Army before. Some White soldiers won’t even salute him, which forces him to have to call them out. Even Colonel Nivens (Nathan Arizona himself, Trey Wilson) tells Davenport that if he’d known his skin color, he would have called off the investigation. Having your rank and achievement constantly tested, disbelieved and shat on has to make you present a more enigmatic front as protection. After all, as my favorite racist joke in Truly Tasteless Jokes goes: What do you call a Black lawyer? You know the answer. You’ll hear it a lot in A Soldier’s Story.

Davenport interviews Sergeant Waters’ platoon. There’s Corporal Ellis (Robert Townsend), who also serves as Davenport’s personal Jeep driver (“I’ve only flipped this over twice,” he assures Davenport.); Private Wilkie (an excellent Art Evans) who was once both Sergeant Waters’ right hand man AND a higher rank; Corporal Cobb (David Alan Grier), Private Henson (William Allen Young), Private Smalls (David Harris) and his partner from Alabama, Private First Class Peterson (a young but still fiery Denzel Washington). C.J. Memphis (Larry Riley), Peterson’s fellow ‘bama and Sergeant Waters’ constant target, committed suicide in the jail cell Sergeant Waters threw him in after he finally worked up the courage to fight back. Scratch him off the whodunit list and push him near the top of the whydunit one.

The first time I watched A Soldier’s Story, I kept watching the flashbacks looking for clues to the mystery. After reading the play, I realized that I’m looking for the wrong thing. I should be focusing on Sergeant Waters, on what he says and how he reacts. In one scene, he practically begs his White superior officer to give his men work instead of the afternoon off the superior promised. In another, he fights, verbally and physically with Peterson, who, tired of the verbal abuse, asks him “what kind of colored officer are you?” Peterson gets chewed out because he’s country, then gets his ass beaten because the Sergeant fights dirty. The flashbacks also reveal a big clue to Sergeant Waters’ belief system, which turns out to be his undoing. It’s a chilling sequence of dialogue about his WWI days, and a bravura speech by actor Adolph Caesar:

You know the damage one ignorant Negro can do? We were in France in the first war; we'd won decorations. But the white boys had told all them French gals that we had tails. Then they found this ignorant colored soldier, paid him to tie a tail to his ass and run around half-naked, making monkey sounds. Put him on the big round table in the Cafe Napoleon, put a reed in his hand, crown on his head, blanket on his shoulders, and made him eat bananas in front of all them Frenchies. Oh, how the white boys danced that night... passed out leaflets with that boy's picture on it. Called him Moonshine, King of the Monkeys. And when we slit his throat, you know that fool asked us what he had done wrong?

One ignorant Negro. That’s what Sergeant Waters thinks is holding the Black race from rising in the ranks more quickly in the military and in life. When Davenport asks Cobb why Memphis was Sergeant Waters’ favorite target instead of him spreading the wealth to the equally Southern Peterson, Cobb states that Waters respected Peterson because he fought back. Memphis didn’t, and every time he expressed his odd, country beliefs about crows and mojo, Sergeant Waters felt as if he were pushing the race back.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Waters thinks his own upbringing, the way he speaks and how he was educated will make a difference in 1944 (or even today, for that matter). Whites will see him and he will elevate the race by sheer will. After all, he’s respected by many of the Whites on the base. But he forgot one thing: It really doesn’t matter in 1944 Louisiana. His illusion of inclusion blinds him. When two angry, racist White officers become suspects in the murder, Davenport believes they are innocent after his cross-examination, even if the White officer he is with thinks they are guilty. Those two officers did accost the drunk Sergeant Waters the night of his death, but they didn’t kill him. They killed his illusions about all the work he’d done in crafting his persona, but they didn’t literally kill him. The ass-kicking they dispensed on Waters was an eye-opener. All those dominoes he set up and knocked down, actions that led him to his demise, were for naught. At that moment, he realizes that no matter how smart he is or how high he gets in this Army or this life…

They still hate you.

This may seem like a dated message. But look around, people. Listen to what is being said. Look at the vitriol and the hatred that’s grown exponentially the past few years. It’s not so dated at all. When Davenport confronts the murderer, he asks a question he would have had to ask Sergeant Waters: “what right do you have to decide what a good Negro is?” Charles Fuller is asking us that very question, embodying it in the character of the hated Sergeant Waters, who looked at his platoon and saw things about himself he’d rather forget. Fuller’s question gets to the heart of the lack of unity I sometimes feel amongst Black people. Who killed Sergeant Waters isn’t important; the death of what he stood for does.

And now a few words about the man who played Sergeant Waters. I grew up listening to Adolph Caesar’s voice—he was the announcer on practically every Blaxploitation trailer/commercial AND he told me that “A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste” on numerous United Negro College Fund commercials. (Click those first three links to hear him.) Here, in a few scenes, he creates a complicated character, oozing with hatred and using that wonderful voice of his for malicious evil. He originated this role on stage, and he owns it. His final scene, when he drunkenly realized the gravity both of his situation and his actions, is stunning. You can see his world collapsing in his eyes. Shooting him was a mercy killing at this point. For this performance, Caesar was nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar—he’s one of the two nominations people tend to forget when they compile lists of Black nominees (Rupert Crosse in The Reivers tends to be the other). Caesar died in 1986, but I have this performance and his work in The Color Purple to remind me how great he was at being sinister. And that voice! It’s wonderful.

Lest I forget: Miss Patti is in this movie, singing a wonderful blues number about whiskey. She sings two songs in this, and both are worth the price of admission.

Prez Day Double Feature: Life is a Traffic Jam

2011-02-22T00:26:00.000-05:00

By Odienator
(click here for all posts, and don't forget the first part of this double feature!)

With all this crazy healthcare shit going on, I thought it appropriate to bring up Vondie Curtis-Hall’s Gridlock’d. It’s a tale of two junkies who decide, after their partner overdoses on New Year’s Eve, to try to get clean. But that’s not so easy for those who don’t have any insurance. Curtis-Hall puts his two male leads through the wringer, sending them from one gov’ment office to another. If that weren’t enough, in this After Hours-like film, the director himself plays a drug dealer named D Reeper who frames the duo for murder before trying to kill them.

Strech and Spoon, the two leads, are played by Tim Roth and the late Tupac Shakur respectively. It’s an odd pairing of actors rounded out by the character who instigates the run to get clean, Cookie. Cookie is played by Thandie Newton, one of the finest looking and least talented actresses around. The best thing about Gridlock’d is that she spends most of it unconscious, though her few awake scenes are tolerable enough. Roth and Shakur are both quite good as heroin addicts, playing off each other with a combination of comedic timing and outright frustration. Roth is the more unrestrained of the two, and Shakur makes for a convincing voice of reason and straight man.

On New Year’s Eve, Cookie decides to try heroin, which is not her usual drug of choice. The trio are slam poets at a club who are up for a potential record deal. That changes when Cookie winds up in a coma after overdosing. Spoon and Stretch try to hail a cab to get her to the hospital. No cab will pick up someone who looks like Pac, so Stretch tries to hail a cab with Spoon and Cookie out of sight. When he gets one, and Spoon comes out to join him, the cab pulls off. Their attempt to call 911 is worthy of Flavor Flav’s famous song about the emergency number: Spoon tells the operator “a White lady’s been shot,” which is the quick way to get an ambulance in the ‘hood, but then he fucks up by adding “and there are a buncha Black people running around talking about revolution!” They wait in the phone booth for a while. Nobody comes to help.

After dragging Cookie through the streets to the hospital, Spoon is met with his first bureaucratic obstacle of the night. An uncaring ER nurse played by Elizabeth Peña asks Stretch questions about Cookie he can’t answer. When he freaks out—after all, Cookie is laying on the seat in the ER practically dead—the nurse curses him out, tears up the ER application he tried to fill out and screams “well I should just let the bitch DIE!!!”

A quick aside here. You might find this scene unbelievable, but lemme tell you a story. I was cutting up an onion in my apartment a while back and the knife slipped and went through my hand. The outcome was like a Brian DePalma movie, blood flying everywhere while the soundtrack blared string sections being abused by a conductor. I couldn’t stop the bleeding, so I did the one thing most dying people do: I called for my Momma! Well, actually I CALLED my Momma on the phone, and she agreed to meet me at the hospital, which was on the corner of her block. I wrapped a T-shirt around my hand and walked the four blocks to the ER. When I got there, the entire T-shirt was red. I went to the desk and there was a pissed off sistah sitting there. She was annoyed that I’d interrupted her phone call, presumably to her trifling ass man. She threw some paperwork and a clipboard at me.

I’m now bleeding all over the floor, but I fill out the paperwork. When it got to my insurance part, I realized I’d forgotten my wallet. My mother said “give me your keys and your father will drive me to your house to get the wallet.” I gave her my keys. While Mom was gone, I went back up to the desk to explain the situation. I told her I had Blue Cross and even gave her the information I knew on the form, but since I didn’t have my card, she wanted nothing to do with me.

“I think I’m bleeding to death here, lady!” I said as calmly as I could. “My Mom drove to get my wallet. I live four blocks away. Can I please get something—a bandage, a tourniquet, something?!! I am really in trouble.”

“HELL NO, NIGGA!” said pissed off ER Desk Sistah. “No card, no service!” she said. She did the sistah neck roll as she said this. “Either gimme your card or get the hell out of my ER and go to the STATE HOSPITAL!!”

In my mind’s eye, I could see myself choking this heffa to death with my chopped up hands. (Hey, this IS a Brian DePalma movie! Misogyny is expected, folks.) Instead, I left the hospital. My Mom returned to find me bleeding all over the parking lot. I’ll spare you the part where my Mom curses the ER woman out so badly that we have to go to a different hospital to get service. To quote Slick Rick “shit like this happens every day.”

Stretch and Spoon don’t have Odie’s Mom in Gridlock’d, so they have to flag down a sympathetic doctor who puts Cookie into a room. He returns to tell them that she may not make it. In their panic, the duo decide they want to get clean. To get money, Stretch and Spoon sell camcorder boxes full of bricks. They sell one for $83 to an unseen guy with D Reeper on his Ohio License plate. When Stretch disses D Reeper’s Mom, Curtis-Hall makes a dramatic entrance, threatening to kill Stretch before the cops show up.

Down at rehab, the guys meet up with Koolaid, their supplier. He tells them they need a Medicaid card to get in. Since they don’t have one, they’ll need to go to the welfare office to get one. But first, they go with Koolaid to get high. They’ll need that high because, at the welfare office, they discover that it can take weeks to get a card. Fearing that if they wait, they’ll chicken out, Stretch and Spoon try to follow the trail to either a quickie Medicaid card or a different rehab center. Unbeknownst to them, this trail is covered in red tape.

They fall asleep at a different rehab, and miss when their number is called. The woman at the desk won’t help them. “You have to choose another number,” she says. A blind man played by Johnny Fever himself, Howard Hesseman, gives them the extra number he usually takes for his seeing eye Rottweiler, and when it comes up, Stretch and Spoon discover this rehab no longer accepts junkies. It’s alky only now. When they go down to the new Medicaid office, they find MAD TV’s Debra Wilson having a conversation with another sistah about her man. When they interrupt her, they are told the Medicaid office moved, something the guard could have told them at the front desk. When Strech protests, Wilson treats them the way my ER clerk treated me.

Frustrated, they go back to get high again with Koolaid and discover that he and his girl, played by Lucy Liu, have been roughed up by D Reeper. Stretch and Spoon saw him when they were leaving Koolaid’s earlier. D Reeper was accompanied by his henchman, Tom Towles from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. “My client was upset that his product didn’t come with the batteries,” he says of the brick-filled camcorder box. Stretch and Spoon run off, only to return later to find Koolaid beat up. The next time they return to Koolaid’s, they’ll find him and Liu dead. That doesn’t stop them from getting high while the dead bodies are laying on the floor.

Once these murders have been committed, the cops put out an APB on Stretch and Spoon, whom they encounter leaving Koolaid’s apartment. The race to get off the street and into rehab becomes imperative. It becomes a necessity when D Reeper and his pal start gunning for them too. Between the bureaucracy of welfare, Medicaid and rehab centers, and the imminent death promised them by D Reeper, Stretch and Spoon have their hands full. It culminates in a harebrained scheme where Spoon gets the now injured Stretch to stab him so they both can enter the hospital together. Once inside, they can try to get clean. The only problem is that Stretch is not really good at being stabby. Watching Roth repeatedly stab Tupac is the comic highlight of this morbid movie.

The ending of Gridlock’d is a tad ironic. Curtis-Hall frames Roth and Shakur in the foreground and Newton in the background. She’s in a phone booth across the street, calling home looking for Stretch and Spoon without realizing they are in the same building she’s just left. It’s the message she’s leaving for them that provides the irony, along with the location of Shakur and Roth. The film ends with Shakur’s government name in the film, Ezekiel Whitmore, being called by an offscreen voice. “It’s about time,” we hear him say as Newton walks off in the background.

Gridlock’d is a dark comedy that anyone who has had to deal with a gov’ment agency (especially when healthcare is involved) can appreciate. Curtis-Hall gives small roles to recognizable faces, including those of directors John Sayles and Kasi Lemmons (Curtis-Hall’s wife, who cast him in Eve’s Bayou as well). He generates tension and suspense in several scenes, and he gets fine work out of his actors. Tupac has always had a wonderful screen presence, and Roth plays idiotic mania very well. Newton does fine in her musical/poetry performances.

During the closing credits, the trio perform a song whose chorus is “Life is a Traffic Jam,” which accurately describes the life of lower class people having to deal with shelters, welfare, social security, veterans administration, and any number of institutions that don’t really seem to care. Hesseman’s blind man does what I’m sure these people would like to do: He goes batshit, destroying a gov’ment office with his cane while his seeing eye Rottweiler holds the cops at bay. It’s Gridlock’d’s one moment of genuine catharsis. That the dog’s name is Nixon doesn’t hurt either.

Prez Day Double Feature: Mandingo

2011-02-21T15:50:00.001-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

Happy President’s Day! Today we celebrate our pals on the penny, quarter, dollar bill and 5 dollar bill! They deserve reverence in the selection of movies I discuss today, but to quote Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” We have a double feature today at Black History Mumf. Our second movie, Vondie Curtis-Hall’s Gridlock’d, is about bureaucracy and frustration. Our first movie, however, details a topic both Washington and Lincoln knew something about: slaves!

In 1975, Roger Ebert wrote a zero star review of Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo. One of the numerous things that bugged him was the amount of children present at the screening he attended. The review ends:

“This is a film I felt soiled by, and if I'd been one of the kids in the audience, I'm sure I would have been terrified and grief stricken.”

Well, I was one of those kids in the audience—not at this screening but at one in Jersey City—and with all due respect, Mr. Ebert, I was neither terrified nor grief-stricken. I was bored. I went to sleep, laying my head on my cousin’s lap.

Most of the reviews that appeared when Mandingo premiered sounded like Ebert’s review. The movie was a major commercial hit but was reviled by most critics, who saw it as camp or exploitative trash. Fast forward 30+ years, and a new set of reviews popped up declaring Mandingo to be some kind of honest masterpiece that fearlessly showed what slavery was like. It’s even been compared to the work of Toni Morrison. This notion is, to quote my aunt Carol, “pure T. Shit.” Ms. Morrison is way too dignified to get in her car, drive to these reviewers, and slap the everlasting gobstopper shit out of them with her Nobel Prize. If only she had my level of dignity.

Mandingo is trash. It is just as guilty of overkill as any pro-Southern piece of antebellum bullshit produced in Hollywood back in its heyday. Tarantino is quoted as saying it’s the first time a major studio partook in making an old-fashioned exploitation movie. QT’s description is accurate; Mandingo is an exploitation film. Sure, it operates under the “pretense” that we are seeing the “real truth,” but isn’t that what all exploitation movie posters tell you in order to get your ass in a theater seat? It comes “highly recommended” in Josiah Howard’s Blaxploitation book, and Black historian Donald Bogle says it’s “a pulpy, lurid, antebellum potboiler that turns the fantasy world of a romanticized film like ‘Gone with the Wind’ inside out.” That it does, but in exchange it presents a falsely serious film that focuses with laser-like precision on a hot button issue of the ‘70’s: Jungle Fever Sex.

Plus, every single time the film shows something that has the weight of historical accuracy, it is depicted in the most salacious way possible. Mandingo is historic not because it shows these things. It is historic because Dino De Laurentiis, a man who never met a piece of trash and pulp he didn’t like (thanks, Dino!), convinced Paramount to put up the dough to make a big studio exploitation picture. It wasn’t made as a corrective. It was made because we all know nasty motherfuckers will pay to be titillated and shocked by taboo material.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

What pisses me off isn’t the movie itself, but some of the reviews I’ve read, both by well-known critics and viewers on imDB, that try to make Mandingo respectable. I stayed awake for my second viewing of Mandingo on VHS, and also last night, when I watched it for the first time since 1988. My reaction is the same: The filmmakers knew what they were doing, and it wasn’t trying to make a serious film about this material. There are far more offensive movies made about slavery (see Goodbye, Uncle Tom if you really want to be sick), but this one has more than enough potential for offense. Its bread is buttered on the Roger Corman side, not the David Wolper one. I submit several examples that prove this was NOT meant to be anything but a moneymaker for the studio by any means necessary.

Example #1: Slaveowner son Hammond Maxwell (Perry King) discovers that his trusted nigger Agamemnon (Richard Ward from The Jerk) can read. He’s been taught by the troublemaking buck slave Hammond just sold to another massa, Cicero (Ji-Tu Cumbuka—more on him in a minute). Hammond’s daddy, Warren (James Mason, who should be ashamed of himself for doing a worse Southern accent than Laurence Olivier does in The Betsy) tells Hammond he should shoot Agamemnon. But Hammond is one of dem new-fangled massas that tries to be fair where appropriate. He doesn’t want to shoot Agamemnon, so he agrees to have him beaten instead. “You gotta cut deep,” says Warren, “cuz a nigger don’t feel physical pain as quick as a White man.” Then Warren tells him to rub fresh red pepper and “plenty a’salt” into the wounds. Hammond strings up Agamemnon, naked and upside down, and tells another slave to beat him, but not as badly as normal.

So far, so good. I’d read that slaves were often hanged upside down to be beaten, and the whole salt and red pepper thing Warren talks about also seems accurate. I’m even willing to grant that Hammond would ask that his favorite slave be treated a little more gingerly—King does a good job showing conflict and sympathy in this role. But then we get to the beating.

Agamemnon is, how can I put this delicately, a little more toned than you might have expected him to be. Director Fleischer makes sure he keeps that nekkid ass in frame, so you can see almost every single time that bottom gets paddled. Whap! Whap! Whap! Perry King goes to the far corner of the frame to weep, and you’d think Fleischer would stay with his actor as he tries to reconcile his emotion. But no, Fleischer moves his camera right back to focus on the nekkid ass whipping. Whap! Whap! Whap! It goes on and on and on.

Then, Hammond’s sadistic cousin comes in, and, in obvious sexual glee, takes the paddle from the slave so he can show him the real way to whup an ass. More ass shots. Whap! Whap! Whap! Hammond comes running, screaming “How dare you handle my niggers!” before realizing that this is his cuz. Even during this conversation, Richard Ward’s ass appears between the two actors. Don’t dare tell me that the framing, and length, of these scenes wasn’t intentional, and designed for maximum exploitative value.

Example #2: Hammond has Jungle Fever. “It’s massa’s duty ta plez-yuh da wenches de first time,” says James Mason’s shitty accent, and Hammond has taken this to heart, nailing every young Black female on the plantation. So far, so good. We all know massa was in our ancestors’ tents. But then we get scenes of Hammond’s latest deflowerin’ running off crying that “I too Black for massa!” Then, in the scene before Agamemnon’s beating, Hammond is shown undressing before bedding his next bed wench. Fleischer gives the ladies a full frontal shot of Hammond. Lest you think I’m anti-penis or something, I say this is only fair as in the same scene Mandingo gives me something I had a harder time viewing: Debbi Morgan, who gave one of the best performances ever put on celluloid in Eve’s Bayou, is here reduced to a naked bed wench with really bad dialogue. “I’se knocked up, master suh! When mah sucker come, why cant’s I keep it?”

Hammond explains that this isn’t possible because he might have to sell her “sucker” so he doesn’t want her to become attached to it. Then, Hammond kneels down and starts praying. Rather than the Lord’s Prayer or the 23^rd psalm, he says the kiddie prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Morgan’s titty, which has been in the frame all this time, stays in the corner of the frame, bearing witness to this grown ass naked man saying a 5-year old’s prayer. Yeah, this is how it “really was.” Uh-huh. They could have at least gotten the titty out of the frame if they wanted me to take this seriously.

Example #3: There isn’t ONE SCENE of anybody doing any work in this movie. Nobody picks a bale o’cotton, let alone jumps up and turns around before doing so. The reason why Falconhurst looks like shit is because the slaves aren’t working. Everybody is just having interracial sex, doing UFC or giving ridiculous speeches about Black pride. Ji-Tu Cumbuka brings the fiery Nat Turner vibe to his role as Cicero, but his dialogue is designed to stoke the fires of 1975’s audiences. He calls himself Black, for starters, tells Massa to kiss his ass right before they hang him and, in the screenplay’s most blatant pander, says “when I hang, you gonna know they HUNG A BLACK BRUVA!!!” Cumbuka should have thrown up the Black power fist while a wah-wah guitar blasted in the background.

A few years ago, I sat in a room in a museum in San Francisco and listened to Black actors like Samuel Yell Jackson, Loretta Devine, and Angela Bassett read the actual narratives and letters of former slaves. The room was empty and dark, forcing you to focus on the words spoken by the actors. I sat there in the dark for about 2 hours, mesmerized by what was said. None of it sounded one iota like the shit writer Norman Wexler puts into the mouth of Cicero. For starters, every single narrator I heard referred to him or herself as "cullud" or "nigger."

Example #4: The Mandingo of the title, Mede, played by Ken Norton, is primed for a revolt that never comes. The moviemakers must have realized their mistake because Mandingo’s “sequel” Drum was released a year later. Norton broke Ali’s jaw two years before Mandingo, but the film treats him the way George Foreman did in 1974. Norton’s first scene is my favorite in the movie. He’s on the auction block, and there’s a German widow with a disastrous accent interested in buying him. She knows the Mandingo has a rep for being an uber-buck who “is hung so big he might tear the wenches.” The German “vidow” doesn’t waste any time. “This is what I lookin’ for, ja!” she says. Then she puts her hand right down Norton’s loincloth. When Hammond protests, Mr. Bentley from the Jeffersons (who earlier looked directly up a guy's ass to check for piles) tells him that the “vidow” is down with the swirl. To keep her from turning Mede into a sex slave, Hammond buys him. The vidow utters a line I swear to you someone said to a guy about me when I was working in Germany:

“You are no gentleman! Trying to take the nigger away from the poor German vidow voman!”

Mandingo gives us a scene between Cicero and Mede that makes us think that Mede will pick up where Cicero left off. He’s certainly big enough to cause damage to more than the slave wenches. He looks like he can kick some ass, which is the other reason why Hammond buys him. You could even justify the UFC match at the brothel, where Mede treats his opponent the way Cookie Monster treats a cookie, as foreshadowing for a bloody revolt against Massa. THAT would have turned Mandingo into the “anti-Gone With the Wind.” But no, Mandingo goes down that trash route, turning Mede into a get some dick for free card. When Mede finally rebels against the slave life, his rebellion is two words: “No massuh.” Massa kills his ass with a pitchfork, a gun, and a cauldron of scalding hot water. Jason from Friday the 13^th got less killing than Mede does.

Are you tired of me pulling apart those bullshit reviews that say this is some kind of revisionist masterpiece of realism and not the trashy camp classic crowdpleaser it actually is? Bear with me for one more example:

Example #5: Susan George’s over the top ridiculous performance as Hammond’s cousin/wife, Blanche. (Why are all the crazy Southern chicks named Blanche? It’s like how all the leads in cullud musicals are named Joe.) Deflowered by her brother (the same guy who likes whipping slave ass), Blanche jumps at the chance to marry Hammond so she can get away from her family. So far, so good. Incest was fairly popular in the South back then, a holdover from the days when royalty married family members. I can also buy Hammond’s fury when he realizes after marriage that he’s not the first man to have “plez-yuhed” Blanche. This entire plot line is presented with minimal trashiness, and Hammond’s refusal to touch Blanche after this is credible. I’m even willing to go with Hammond falling in love with the lovely, sexy Brenda Sykes (who wouldn’t?) and favoring her over the screechy Blanche. But Blanche is the key to Hammond’s undoing, and as played by George, she’s so absurdly rendered that you can’t stop laughing at her. If Fleischer were going for realism, couldn’t he have made George watch some old Bette Davis movies to see how to play a Southern belle?

Watch the scene where Blanche causes Sykes to fall down the stairs and miscarry the “sucker” she’s going to bear for Hammond. George gets a riding crop and starts whipping items in the room. Her entire scene with Sykes is a mismatch. All Sykes has to do is hit this bitch and run like hell. Instead, she falls to her knees and Blanche chews the scenery to bits. It’s not harrowing at all, and George, a horrible actress by every standard (yes, I’ve seen Straw Dogs folks), is the movie’s one true camp attribute.

Blanche’s seduction of Mede is the best example I can give for Fleischer and company’s intentions of “shocking” sexuality in the false guise of revisionism. Maurice Jarre’s score has, until this point, had an out of place jauntiness that seemed way too cheerful for the material. But during the seduction scene, the score takes on almost a horror movie tone. It’s saying “oh Lawdy! Dis here big buck gon’ fuck da hell outta dis here White woman! Dis what y’all done came ta see!” It’s the ONLY sex scene in the movie shown in its entirety, and the shot of the huge Norton laying between the legs of this small, “gentile” White woman was given to us for ONE REASON ONLY.

Like I said earlier: Mandingo is trash. Readers know I love trash like Oscar the Grouch does, so I admit I found Mandingo “highly recommendable” from that perspective. But to you folks who think this movie is anything but exploitation: don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining. Accept this movie for what it is, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you. One scene of James Mason resting his nasty bare feet on a naked slave boy he thinks can cure his rheumatiz’ is harrowing.

Multiple scenes of him doing that (I counted six) is parody.

This is like kiddie porn crossed with foot fetish videos.

Where were the child labor laws protecting that poor kid?!

I like to think Mason's character died from athlete's foot he got from those naked slave boys.

With different framing, a better script, and a more honest depiction of some of the things the movie touches on, we could have had a truly subversive movie, a cinematic Roots. But that was never the filmmakers’ intention at all. And I’m fine with that, so long as we, to use that racist phrase, “call a spade a spade.”

This is for showing my ass being paddled for 5 fucking minutes!!

The Pondering Odie Returns

2011-02-20T23:36:00.005-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

As is custom, I am entitled one political statement here at Black History Mumf. Last year, I forwent it in exchange for an episode of The Pondering Odie. The host of that show, Octo Rooney, provides Andy Rooney style musings from inside my head. This year, I decided to merge both political and movie ponderings together. I separated them so you could bail out if you don’t want to deal with just how mean Octo Rooney can be when it comes to politics. Tomorrow’s a double feature of movies to celebrate President’s Day.

Movie Pondering

1. Did Black folks go to see Stepin Fetchit, Mantan Mooreland and Willie Best movies back in the day? And if they did, was it because they were starved for a person of color onscreen? Or did they actively enjoy seeing these people with their coonery because, on occasion, they'd get the better of the White characters exploiting them in the movies? I won't lie and say I didn't enjoy Gone with the Wind as a cinematic spectacle, but much of my enjoyment came from the fact that I knew Hattie McDaniel was fucking Scarlett O'Hara up when the camera was elsewhere. Scarlett would push Mammy, but if you watch closely, you can see McDaniel giving her some of the same looks my mother gave me when I embarrassed her in public. A swinging hand sometimes followed those looks! The book and film versions of The Celluloid Closet point out a buttload of coded gay symbols in old Hollywood, items that gay people picked up as they flew over the heads of everyone else. I've watched a lot of these coon and Tom movies, and sometimes, I swear I picked up on things the actors did under the radar, like Gitlow does in Purlie Victorious. Am I crazy?

2. The Karate Kid remake continues an under-the-radar tradition, started by Enter the Dragon, of Blacks and Asians partnering to kick ass and take names. Except unlike the other movies in this sub-genre, films like Romeo Must Die and Brother, The Karate Kid was actually good. The Asian stereotypes are that they are incredibly smart and have little penises. The Black stereotypes are that we're stupid as hell and hung like horses. Is this merely coincidence, or the best case of Opposites Attract since Paula Abdul and MC Skat Kat?

3. Which Jungle Fever Cookie style movie was more hilarious and unbelievable: Obsessed or Lakeview Terrace? I vote for Obsessed because it played less like reality and more like a cathartic crowd pleaser for pissed off sistahs whose men ran off with White women.

4. When was the last time you saw a Black character in a mainstream movie acknowledge their Blackness by doing something proud and/or militant? I had it right in my BHM opening shot 2010 when I said "post-racial America" meant that we had all turned White. It is no longer socially acceptable in this day and age for any minority to be proud of his or her race, but this was foreshadowed decades ago by cinematic Sidekick Negroes. Think about it. When was the last time you saw minority pride? I'm not talking about Black themed movies, either, though I should extend the question to include them.

5. Since Hollywood keeps adapting TV shows into movies, how long will it be before we see Good Times: the Movie? And who’s going to play J.J.? I vote for Marlon Wayans.

6. What the hell happened to that Halle Berry movie where she has a racist, White split personality? Now THAT is truly a tragic mulatto! She got a Golden Globe nomination for it, and then the movie vanished into thin air. They must have known I wanted to see it! Maybe there will be a sequel where she adds a Mexican personality, and the racist White personality tries to have it deported from her mind. You know who else needs a racist, White split personality? See #7.

Political Pondering

7. Would it help if Barack Obama had a racist, White split personality? If he started hearing all the shit that Fox News and cartoonists and others are popping—if he heard that shit in his head—he might actually have the LOOKEEHERE moment I’ve been hoping he’d have for the past 2 years. Remember, he’s biracial, so unlike me, he can say “cracka ass crackas” and get away with it. There’s no respect for you already, Mr. President, so come on down to their level! I’ll keep asking for this until a) he does it or b) he doesn’t get re-elected and THEN he can do it.

8. Normally, I don’t help dumb muthafuckas out, but this one’s for y’all who keep trying to get Obama’s Presidency revoked by attempting to negate his birth certificate. Screw that, people!! Here’s an easier way: Photoshop a picture of the President and some half-nekkid woman, then e-mail this to the First Lady. She’ll whip Obama’s a--you know what? Scrap the bitch in the picture—photoshop the Prez next to a half-nekkid Barney Frank wearing a burqa. The First Lady wouldn’t believe that, but if you leak it to TMZ, you’ll energize the anti-Muslim and anti-gay people. Wouldn’t that get you a quicker impeachment?

9. If women are technically a minority, is there such a thing as an “Uncle Tom” for women? If so, what is she called?

10. America does not celebrate losers. There are no ticker tape parades or Sports Illustrated commemorative editions for losing teams. Nobody’s wearing a “2001 World Series Losers NY Yankees” T-shirt. Americans don’t have time for, nor do they celebrate, the losers. So why the fuck does the South keep celebrating the Confederacy? 2011 brings a celebration commemorating the 150^th anniversary of Jefferson Davis becoming head of the Confederacy. Since I’m not picking cotton, being called Toby and getting my ass whipped with a whip right now, it’s safe to assume that my public school history class told the truth: The South Lost. At least for us brown folks, it’s a good thing they did. The longing for a prior time, when White men ruled, women were powerless and Blacks were property, is just plain sickening to Black folks. We don’t celebrate the losers here in America. Why do they keep celebrating these particular losers?

Dazed and Confused

2011-02-19T23:30:00.001-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

If a fly should land on your head,

Then I’m sure he’d break all his legs.

Cuz you got so much grease up there!

Dear is that a weave that you wear?

Time for another plug for our sponsor for 2011’s Black History Mumf, Weave(TM). Weave is a co-star of today’s movie, School Daze. It gets a visual shout-out atop the heads of actresses Tisha Campbell, Tyra Ferrell, Jasmine Guy and others. Our sponsor is verbally given its due in song, a verse of which appears above.

Spike Lee’s second joint, released in 1988, tackles two topics I had never seen before in a film: the “colorstruck” war between light and dark skinned Blacks, and the campus of a historically Black college. Released in February, 1988 with little fanfare by Columbia Pictures (the only film Lee did for them), School Daze became both a Black cult sensation and a goldmine of casting for the Cosby Show spinoff, A Different World. According to Lee’s DVD commentary, Daze’s casting director, Robi Reed, was also the casting director for A Different World. This explains why Jasmine Guy, Kadeem Hardison, Darryl M. Bell and others from this film wound up on NBC before School Daze hit screens. School Daze was shot in the spring of 1987, and A Different World debuted in the fall.

Had it not been for She’s Gotta Have It, Lee’s debut feature, School Daze would never have been made. It garnered critical acclaim, cost $175,000 to make and grossed $8 million dollars. Telling the tale of a woman who liked sex and was (as is typical of American cinema) ultimately punished for it, She’s Gotta Have It is notable for introducing Nike ads to Mars Blackmon. I was not enamored of She’s Gotta Have It, though I cop to giving it a higher (though still negative) rating than it deserved simply because the amount of Black sex depicted onscreen was plentiful, welcome and, most importantly, unheard of back then. With the credentials of an indie hit under his belt, Lee made the leap to a much bigger picture, with loads of extras and production values far surpassing She’s Gotta Have It. What resulted is a gorgeous looking hot mess of a movie.

School Daze takes place during homecoming weekend at a historically Black college. I was educated by the Jesuits, who are far more boring than anything you’d find at Tuskegee University, so I defer to Lee’s knowledge of this environment. Lee, like several of his collaborators in front of and behind the camera, went to a historically Black institute of Higher Learning. Coincidentally, Higher Learning is John Singleton’s third feature which, like School Daze, takes place on a college campus, is a Columbia picture and an even bigger hot mess. But I digress. School Daze tries to cram two vast storylines and a musical into 2 hours, and things get beyond the director’s control. Watching School Daze again today, I realized it’s not as overtaxed as I remembered—for Lee’s first stab at a “big” movie it does numerous things quite well. But its mistakes are a harbinger; I’ve said before that director Spike Lee’s biggest enemy is often a writer named Spike Lee. School Daze proves that point more than once.

I disagree with the notion that School Daze was the misstep that occurred between Lee’s debut and his masterpiece, Do The Right Thing. In fact, School Daze is, in my opinion, Lee’s most important movie. That it is ultimately botched is almost beside the point; my critical brain deems it a fascinating failure, but the ghetto denizen-slash-film lover in me looks at this film’s subject matter in awe. Nobody made movies about Black universities in 1987, and while there were plenty of movies that told us how to deal with the White man, there weren’t any telling us how to deal with ourselves and our superficial hang-ups about fellow Blacks. To throw this up on the screen, with movie-movie glamour, and to wrap it in the confines of a musical—a genre that had fallen out of vogue, took balls as big as church bells. Nothing I critically say about School Daze changes that feat, and I commend Lee for getting this film made.

Spike Lee may be the only director working today who cares about opening credits. Starting with School Daze, Lee has crafted memorable opening credits sequences that set the tone for the film to come. Rosie Perez dancing in Do the Right Thing is perhaps the most famous, though my favorite Lee credits sequence remains Crooklyn’s street games. School Daze’s credits, my second favorite, take us through a pictorial history of Black people in America, scored to an old Negro spiritual by the Morehouse College Glee Club. The sequence starts with slave ships and travels through photos of MLK, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Joe Louis, Muhammed Ali, Stokely Carmichael and others. Foreshadowing Lee’s career flirtation with provocation, the director’s credit is superimposed over the last picture, the Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a Black man being stabbed with a flagpole.

The standard gallery of Spike Lee players, behind and in front of the camera, are here. We see Roger Guenveur Smith, Ossie Davis, Samuel Yell Jackson, Spike’s sister Joie, Giancarlo Esposito and Bill Nunn. Behind the camera are production designer Wynn Thomas, editor Barry Alexander Brown, costume designer Ruth E. Carter (here miscredited), Lee’s dad Bill on the music, and of course, Ernest Dickerson on cin-tog. The biggest contributors to School Daze are Dickerson and Bill Lee, who in 6 minutes and with help from choreographer Otis Sallid, gives his son a lesson on how to get the point across without belaboring it. More on that later. Lee also gives us the first look at the people mover trademark that he would overdo to the point of parody later. It’s brief, but the subject of it is Eve’s Bayou director, Kasi Lemmons.

It’s Homecoming Weekend at Mission College, established in 1883 as a Black college in Georgia. Anyone who has attended a Black college homecoming knows the routine, what he or she will see and do. School Daze captures this completely and with an accuracy that pissed off some of the fraternities and sororities Lee parodies with his fictional Gamma Phi Gamma frat. I had never been to a homecoming when I saw School Daze in theaters, so this was my first exposure to such a thing. I was a 17 year old college sophomore on February 12, 1988 when this movie opened, and had my parents not needed a historically Black babysitter for their four historically Black bad ass kids, I could have gone to Howard or Fisk instead of having to stay local. (Do I sound bitter? Good.)

Lee presents two sides of the college experience. School Daze splits its time between an activist named Vaughn “Dap” Dunlop (Ike Turner himself, Laurence Fishburne) out to protest until the college stops dealing with apartheid era South Africa, and his cousin Darryl “Half-Pint” Dunlop (Spike Lee) who is pledging Gamma Phi Gamma. Dap hates the fraternity lifestyle, though one wonders if the genesis of that hatred lay in a throwaway line about how he dropped out of Gamma’s pledging during his freshman year. Dap’s girlfriend, Rachel (Kyme), accurately thinks his dislike of the Gammas is due to its preponderance of light-skinned Blacks over dark skinned ones. Rachel has her own problems with the Gammas—they’re snobbish and think they’re better because they are lighter skinned and have processed hair and/or our sponsor, Weave(TM). Rachel and her galpals tend to be darker skinned, and have the natural, kinky, and—yeah I’ma say it—NAPPY hair that came with their (and my) original packaging. Some of the Gammas even wear blue contact lenses, a feature that got Spike Lee in an argument with Whoopi Goldberg back in the day.

The two sides clash early. Dap and his protestor pals (Kadeem “Dwayne Wayne” Hardison, musician Branford Marsalis, Bill “Radio Raheem” Nunn and Def By Temptation director/star James Bond III) are leading a protest in front of the school when Julian (aka Dean Big Brother ALL-mi-TEE) and his Gammite pledges barge into the middle of it. Julian’s pledges include Roger Guenveur Smith and Lee’s Half-Pint; his frat brothers include director Rusty Cundieff and Darryl M. Bell. The student body president diffuses the situation, but it’s clear that the school is on the fraternity’s side. The constant protesting by Dap and his ilk is pissing off the college’s investors.

Julian, I mean Dean Big Brother All-mi-TEE, loves aggravating the shit out of Dap, so he and the frat try to interrupt their protests as much as possible. As played by Lee regular Giancarlo Esposito, Julian is, depending on your stance, cool as fuck or the movie’s hissable villain. The director sees him as the latter, and takes great pains to depict actual hazing rituals he learned from his fraternity advisor, Zelmar Bothic. Bothic was a classmate of Lee’s at Morehouse, and was the sole member on his fraternity’s line come homecoming weekend. Bothic shared a class with Lee, and couldn’t sit down because of the hemorrhoids he obtained from all the paddle ass whippings he took from the frat brothers during his pledge.

Half-Pint and his fellow Gammites take a lot of abuse from Dean Big Brother All-Mi-TEE and his minions, each of which has a name the Gammites must not only say but also perform some kind of synchronized motion when they say it. Half-Pint is so brainwashed that when he talks to Dap, every time Dap refers to Julian as “Julian,” Half-Pint corrects him by compulsively saying “Dean (Clap!) Big Brother All-mi-TEE!” Julian (I’m sick of typing all that big brother shit) is especially vicious to Half-Pint, presumably because he’s Dap’s cousin but also because Julian pegs him (correctly) as a virgin. Seeing Lee cast himself as a nerdy, immature, pipsqueak virgin is inspired. He does look young enough to be one of these guys, but it had to put Esposito in a bad position when he had to take direction from his victim.

Dap has Rachel as his main squeeze, and Julian has Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell), the head of the Gamma Phi Gamma sorority. Their gang sign is a “MEOW!” followed by a G in the air with a snap. You’ll be doing it before the movie’s over. The Gamma Girls are treated like meat, made to pay for the Gammites’ going over party as well as clean the rooms of their frat brother counterparts. Jasmine “Whitley Gilbert” Guy is one of the Gamma Girls along with Campbell. She’ll eventually replace Jane as Julian’s main squeeze after Julian plays a sickeningly cruel trick on Jane late in the film.

When I first saw School Daze, I found the frat scenes a lot more annoying than I did today. For some reason, I used to read the film as endorsing (for the most part) the fraternity’s activities. This time, I had a clearer view of Lee’s intentions, yet I still think they go on way too long for my taste. I was more interested in Dap and his story, which the film doesn’t shortchange but certainly spends less time on than the frathouse shenanigans. I understand that School Daze is supposed to be a microcosm of Black society, but Lee dwells too long on the superficial things and leaves the most interesting and controversial aspects behind. It’s just too much ground to cover; I wish Lee has chosen to either make the film longer or ditch some of the frat scenes.

One thing I’m glad Lee didn’t ditch is the music. Since 1988, I have gone through 2 cassette tapes and 3 CD’s of the School Daze Soundtrack, which has been out of print for a while (so I’d better hold on to this copy). This may be my favorite soundtrack of all time, besting Shaft and Superfly, and dare I say it, Saturday Night Fever. Jasmine Guy, Kyme, and Tisha Campbell all contribute, as well as the late, great Phyllis Hyman. Her performance of Bill Lee’s Be One is given the beauty and weight it deserves by Dickerson, a dress rehearsal for his lensing of Cynda Williams’ Harlem Blues number in Mo’ Better Blues. EU shows up late in the film to sing their go-go classic, Da Butt, the biggest hit from the School Daze soundtrack (and the reason Black folks went to see the film, which as aforementioned, got no promotion from Columbia). But the real star of the School Daze soundtrack is Bill Lee.

Schooling Spike in the fine art of satire, Bill Lee and choreographer Otis Sallid construct, as the first musical number in School Daze, a blistering attack on the battle between light-skinned and dark-skinned Blacks. This must have been an eye-opener for any non-Black folks who ventured to School Daze, but for me it was a shock anybody would talk about it onscreen, let alone do a full blown, West Side Story homage musical number about the topic. Rachel and Jane cross paths, and names are called. The Gamma Girls are the Wannabes (as in Wannabe White) and Rachel’s click is called the Jigaboos, after a popular racist term of the olden days.

Suddenly, the movie turns into a musical. Busting into Madame Re Re’s Beauty Salon set, Guy, Kyme, Campbell and their cliques break into song and dance. The song, Straight and Nappy, is mean, nasty and to the point. It’s also brilliant, with its 40’s swing musical sound and its 60’s era fiery lyrics (some of which I quoted at the beginning of this piece). If the Academy can give Oscars to catchy nonsense like “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp,” they could have thrown one at Bill Lee.

While Bill Lee rhymes incendiary words like “cockleburs standin’ all over your head,” Sallid has his dancers make Al Jolson hand movements and, in a sequence that damn near gave me a heart attack, punctuates the song’s chorus with the dancers putting fans of Mammy and Scarlett O’Hara up to their faces.

Just go watch it!

School Daze needed more scenes like this. In musicals, people sing and dance their emotions, and Lee is a master craftsman of musical numbers. I wish he and Dickerson would reunite and tackle something like Bring In Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk. There’s music in Lee’s camera movements in general, and I wish he trusted his superb visuals more than he does. Several times in Lee’s joints, including this one, he does something with his camera that says it all, then bogs things down further with all this lousy dialogue. There are several scenes like that in School Daze, including one in a KFC that could have easily been shortened by half its dialogue. Lee says he based the scene on a real life experience, and the intent behind the scene is powerful. But it’s awkward, and the dialogue is cringe-worthy, yet Lee has three shots that tell a great visual story in that scene. It’s fun to see Samuel Yell Jackson in the movie (especially since his role in Do The Right Thing begins with the words that tie these two films together), but the scene is too verbally preachy and overdone.

Did KFC pay for this product placement? One actor turns the Chicken Littles sign on the table toward the camera!!!

The biggest complaint people have about School Daze is its surrealistic ending. Out of all of Spike Lee’s weird ass endings, this is the only one that makes sense. The jump to surrealism is jarring, but no less jarring than when people just start singing. Scored to Bill Lee’s beautiful Wake Up Suite, Dap runs through the college quad screaming “WAKE UP!” He’s followed by sleepy-eyed members of the cast, from Joe Seneca’s dean of Mission to Lee’s Half-Pint who, in the film’s prior scene, has joined in the villainy of Dean Big Brother All-mi-TEE, earning a violent disowning by Dap. Last to appear in the dream sequence is Julian, who looks at Dap with a sense of understanding. Then Dap looks at us, the audience, and asks us to do something:

"Please. Wake Up."

To quote Mookie in Do The Right Thing: I got it. I’m gone.

School Daze’s DVD comes with a commentary track by Spike Lee, who is genuinely amused by some of the things he lensed in this picture. He says he hasn’t seen the film in years, and his surprise at some of the things he forgot the film contained sounds real. The track is also very informative and well worth listening to for tales of Lee’s own collegiate experience and the evil frat brothers he encountered. He also takes a few digs at his alma mater, which threw him off campus during the shooting of this film and who objected to Joe Seneca as the dean because he “looked too sambo-ish.” Lee also addresses the treatment of the Jane character in this film, whose act of love for her frat and her man is portrayed as a cruel, sexist trick on her by Julian. This type of thing, passing your girl from one frat brother to another, is more common than one might think. Even the great love of my life, who went to Fisk and roomed with a sorority pledge, told me nightmare stories about what went on. Lee comments that, at least back then, Black fraternity hazing were horrendous. He compares them to gang initiations, and even notes that, right after School Daze was released, a guy died in a hazing accident at Morehouse.

Lee also explains why guys would suffer the way they do in order to join a frat: To get women. There's a line in the film where Dean Big Brother You-Know-Who tells Half-Pint "you ain't seen no paaaaarts of the pussy!" A lot of guys (including ones who looked like Spike Lee) couldn't get a woman to look at them, until they started pledging. Then they saw all paaaaaarts of the pussy. I still don't get it, and someone with the anti-social tendencies I sometimes exhibit never would. I've had all paaaaarts of the pussy, but none of the pieces were worth alcohol poisoning or getting my asshole busted with a paddle.

Spike's School Daze commentary is worth listening to, and regardless of how fractured and occasionally lecturing School Daze is, it’s worth seeing at least once.

Your Homework assignment:

Find a copy of that soundtrack, and refer to me from now on as “Dean (CLAP!) Big Nator Called Odie!” (Just kidding about that last thing…)

When I Grow Up I Wanna Be: Quentin Spivey

2011-02-18T14:16:00.001-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

Ed Note: It's a Lee Family Day! Come back later for a piece on Spike. For now, here's one on his cuzzin'.

Quentin Spivey appears onscreen 15 minutes into The Best Man. He is giving a club performance on guitar. In the audience is Harper Stewart, who has come to New York from Chicago to assume the titular role for their mutual friend, NFL star Lance Sullivan. Sullivan, a serial cheater, is marrying Mia, a woman he erroneously believes has been virtuous before he met her. Harper is the main character in The Best Man, and, as played by Taye Diggs, is an incredibly handsome leading man. But Quentin Spivey is the kind of supporting character any actor would love to play. He’s charming, roguish, talented, rich and like catnip to women. The film is not on his shoulders, but he’s got one hand holding it up, the same one he’ll use to rob it later.

Malcolm Lee’s 1999 debut is a pointed deconstruction of the male ego, and Quentin is its id. Watching The Best Man again last night, I was surprised how little time he is onscreen. My memory had given him a much bigger role in this ensemble. Taye Diggs’ Harper is the star, and the crisis in The Best Man hinges on whether Morris Chestnut’s serial cheater, Lance, will find out that Monica Calhoun’s Mia is less virtuous courtesy of a one-night stand with Harper back in the day. Until the film’s big showdown between Lance and Harper, Quentin is in the background, tossing off one liners and exuding a coolness that upholds his character’s reputation as a suave lady’s man. Even Lance, who gets more football groupie ass than the ladies’ room toilets at an NFL stadium, comments on Quentin’s way with the women. He’s so memorable to me because Quentin doesn’t let his reputation go to his head. He won’t rub it in so much as smile as if to say “you already know, so why belabor the point?” Like Don Cheadle’s Mouse in Devil In a Blue Dress, Quentin Spivey is a star-making turn that went absolutely nowhere for his portrayer, Terrence Howard.

In a film with such unrealistically beautiful Black actors as Nia Long, Sanaa Lathan, Diggs and Chestnut, the then-unknown Howard commands your attention by underplaying Quentin. He’s a movie type, to be sure, but one you know personally. I bet, if you’re a man—Black or otherwise—you will recognize all the characters in The Best Man. One of them may even be you, or, in the case of Quentin and me, the guy you secretly wish you were. Yes, he is one charming motherfucker, and if my words bear more than a hint of outrageous man-crush, I inform you that I am not only toning down my love for this character in this piece, I am also tempering it with the sad notion that I could have grown up to be Quentin Spivey. For the first time in the Black History Mumf sub-series of “When I Grow Up,” I chose a character I had a shot at becoming—and I fucked it up.

Briefly the plot: Harper Stewart is a first time novelist whose roman-a-clef, Unfinished Business, has been selected by Oprah for her book club. He’s also been chosen to be the best man at his ‘boy’s wedding. His girlfriend, Robin, is more worried about meeting Harper’s friends than meeting Miss Sofia, especially since many of them were the inspirations for characters in Unfinished Business. Robin is specifically unnerved by whomever inspired the Kendall character in the book. Kendall is the Harper character’s true love, an ideal that Robin can’t possibly emulate. Robin plans to fly from Chicago to NYC after Harper, to give him a few days to reconnect and to plan with his ‘boys Quentin, Julian (Harold Perrineau from Oz) and Lance. Lance is the betrothed, Julian is henpecked to death by his snooty girlfriend, Shelby (Melissa DeSouza). And Quentin is heir to the Spivey hotel fortune, yet more content wandering around aimlessly than dealing with the family business.

The Best Man’s women include Jordan (Nia Long) a driven TV executive dying for a scoop on Harper’s book, the aforementioned snob Shelby, and Mia, Lance’s fiancée and, forgive me ladies, his personal doormat. Jordan had an almost one-night stand with Harper back in college, brought on by Stevie Wonder (tip: he makes the panties go POOF and disappear, guys) and called off when the CD player skips and destroys the mood. Mia also has a history with Harper, though the CD didn’t skip when she got with him, and nobody knows it but Harper, Mia and Quentin. And anyone who has read Harper’s book, which, courtesy of Jordan’s underhanded dealings as a TV exec, has fallen into the hands of every one of Harper’s friends. Including Lance, whose ass-backwards though decidedly male delusions about Mia’s life before him are about to be shattered when he gets to a certain chapter in Unfinished Business.

Jordan has some Unfinished Business of her own with Harper, wanting to pick up where the CD interrupted them. Harper is down with that, conveniently forgets that Robin exists. Jordan, despite her powerful and potentially interesting role as a TV exec, is way too preoccupied with getting her cooch serviced by Harper than being a fully drawn character. (To her credit, Long is excellent in the role, and Lee gives her a great dressing down of Harper.) Mia is totally committed to Lance, naively because she knows he needs Dick Control Meetings. Mia and Lance are both delusional, but Lee is much harder on Lance. Lance, like the GOP, uses God to justify the evil that he does, comically praying and trying to force the atheistic Harper to join him in accepting God’s glory. While Lance is realistically drawn, and well played by Chestnut, Lee can’t resist having some fun at his expense.

After reading Unfinished Business, Julian figures the Harper-Mia angle out, but Harper won’t commit to answering because Julian can’t keep a secret to save his life. Harper can’t seem to either, as his characters are so thinly veiled that Robin need only look at Jordan to see who she is in the novel. Lance need only read about how the baseball player’s girl in Unfinished Business seeks out his best friend to use Chris Rock’s “Get Some Dick For Free When Your Man Cheats” card to realize what, and who, went down. Lance reacts accordingly:

I love that Lee uses D'Angelo in this scene.

He tries to throw Harper off the roof of his bachelor party suite and calls off the wedding.

Only Quentin can diffuse the situation, a situation he knowingly instigated by calling to the carpet Lance’s unreasonable beliefs about his fiancee’s sex life before him.

God doesn't want that, B!

His “God doesn’t want that, B” comment to Lance forces Lance to rethink murdering Harper. Howard delivers the line dead seriously, but you can’t help but smirk at Lance’s “devotion” to a God whose laws he openly violates.

The Best Man belongs in the same genre as love jones, but with a twist. In love jones, the slam poetry characters may be a tad too bougie for ‘hood rats who prefer their movies like Belly, but one can’t deny The Best Man’s goal of calling out male hypocrisy. Malcolm Lee hasn’t inherited his cousin Spike’s inability to write fully realized female characters, but he balances out his thinly drawn females by doing their job for them. After Lance’s fiery reaction to the truth, he asks Harper if Harper is calling him a hypocrite. Lee’s screenplay says yes, even if Harper doesn’t. Lance’s request that Harper read the Biblical passage about adultery is fucking ridiculous—Mia was nowhere near married when she slept with Harper AND you can bet your last money Lance is going to fuck around regardless of what ring is on his finger. For all his machismo on and off the football field, Lance has the unmitigated gall to call off a wedding (and beat the hell out of his best man), because his fiancée decided, well before they were to be married, that what was good for the gander was also good for the goose.

Even so, the real villain of The Best Man isn’t Lance, it’s Harper. Credit goes to Diggs for messing up his pretty boy mug with a black eye for the last 20 minutes of The Best Man, but he deserves it. Another Mia, Mia Wallace, said in Pulp Fiction that men were “worse than a sewing circle,” and Harper’s refusal to let sleeping dogs lie is an indictment of that male phenomenon of one-upmanship. Sure you can play football and are a big star, but I had your girl, so nyaah! Harper tries to play the victim, but after his second botched attempt at getting to Jordan, she hands him the truth on a silver platter:

“You wrote the book. You aired your dirty laundry. No matter how hard you tried to disguise it, it was YOU! You got me all fired up saying that my life was empty and we could have been great together! That was you, okay? Not me. YOU.”

The silver plattered truth leads me back to Quentin Spivey. He knows about Harper and Mia but enjoys watching Harper sweat as the truth gets closer to being exposed. It is he who, through his desire to call out fakers, instigates Lance’s paranoia about Mia. Most cheating men freak out when the thought of them being cheated on pops into their head. Before the shit hits the fan, Quentin and Harper have a conversation about Quentin’s father:

Harper Stewart: Hey, is your pops still trying to groom you for the hotel management business?

Quentin: Yeah, for the last 20 years? I'm just not trying to hear all that stuff, you know? Dealing with complaining-a guests, unions, and payrolls, and all that...

Harper Stewart: Yeah, too much like a real job, huh?

Quentin: You know what, nigga? Fuck you. You're my judge, right? That's your job. You judge me.

Harper Stewart: No, I'm just playing, man...

Quentin: No, nigga, you... it's just amazing how you've always analyzed everybody else's shit and then you don't do the same thing for your own self.

Harper Stewart: Will you chill?

Quentin: No, because you've done dirt too, motherfucker, and you're doing more dirt! That's right. You're fucking Jordan tonight, remember? Jordan. See, you ain't any better than the rest of us, got it? Your shit just ain't caught you yet.

Your shit just ain’t caught you yet.

Quentin’s honesty, combined with his attitude, demeanor and overall suaveness, puts him in the sights of my character idolizing. A lot of people who have seen The Best Man tell me that Harper reminded them of me. Outside of his writing, I have no idea why this is so. Revealing other people’s dirty laundry ain’t my style; I’d prefer to smirk at you and watch as the truth blows your ass up. My Mom told me as a kid that I had a tell that let her know when I was lying. She refused to tell me what my tell is. Mom was probably full of shit, but I’m not risking it! Her statement made me a dreadful liar, so I tend to either shut up or just tell the truth. I clean up nicely, and I tend to do with my voice what Howard does with his here. Even his dialogue sounds like me.

Why I didn’t grow up to be Quentin Spivey, despite all the signs pointing that way, is when I was 14, I was surgically robbed of every single ounce of my self-confidence. Like my vision and the color of my left eye, it has never come back. Watch how, even in the face of imminent ass-kicking by Lance, Quentin’s unflappable demeanor never changes. His eyes say “nigga you ain’t gonna do shit.” That confidence transfers over to Q’s dealings with women—he’s a dog but a lucky bastard because a) he’s open about it and b) women love confidence. Professionally, I’m a diva (remember: Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network is White Odie the Programmer). Personally, I can’t push myself to a state of pure Spiveyness because I can’t commit to accepting the way I look. My inner Quentin knows this.

Malcolm Lee’s message for Lance, delivered by a jarring jump cut to a sex scene at a crucial moment in the film’s wedding scene, is “get over it dude. It happened, and you can’t change the past.” If only I’d listen. Until then, I’ll just have to live through Terrence Howard.

Ladies, has this ever happened to you after too much Colt 45?

A Boy, His Dog and His Daddy

2011-02-16T02:51:00.001-05:00

by Odienator

(click here for all posts)

Subconsciously, I started the first three years of Black History Mumf with pieces on fathers and sons. 2008 brought House Party, 2009 was Baadasssss, and 2010 had Boyz ‘N The Hood. My choices were not intentionally designed for this pattern; it wasn’t until last year when I realized what I had done. My reasons, I am sure, have much to do with any son’s open issues with his father. But now that I am conscious of the father-son thing, I couldn’t bring myself to start this year with this theme. Had I remained oblivious, you’d be reading this on February 1^st rather than today. No matter. Fathers and sons are a hot topic, especially if you are either or both. I am the latter and will never be the former, though occasionally a movie will make me question that decision.

1972 was a big year for Blacks at the Oscars. This year’s nominations are the universe’s way of balancing itself out, I suppose, but 39 years ago, five Oscar nominations were bestowed on Black folks. I’ve written about the work of two of those nominees: Diana Ross and Suzanne DePasse for Lady Sings the Blues. The other three nominations came from Sounder, an adaptation of the book I wrote my book report on in the 5^th grade. Sounder made several appearances on TV when I was a kid, and it’s a good thing I, unlike way too many of my classmates over the years, actually read the book instead of just watching the movie. The movie takes several liberties, despite being fairly faithful to the source material, and to be honest, I was far more affected by the movie than the book, which I found a little too willing to wallow in misery.

Lonne Elder III, who reteamed with Tyson in Bustin' Loose, made history with DePasse as the first Black writers nominated for writing Oscars. Elder’s screenplay creates a more tender relationship between father and son, and softens some of the more gruesome aspects of the novel. He also provides a different ending for the dog and the father, a missed opportunity for creating the perfect storm of a movie men could cry at with impunity. After all, if you want guys to bawl, kill the dog or a baseball player. The patriarch of the family in Sounder plays baseball when not working the fields for a White man so cheap that the father has to resort to stealing to feed his family any protein. Unlike the book, the man and the dog both survive the movie. I cried like a fool anyway.

I must have a thing for movies that feature the late Paul Winfield and a dog. Last year, I did White Dog, a movie with a different kind of both dog and Winfield. The dog here has the movie named after him, and enjoys the company of Black people rather than the taste of them. Winfield plays a sharecropper with three kids and a wife. Both he and the actress playing the wife, Cicely Tyson, received deserved Oscar nominations for their work, a feat that to this day has not been repeated by Black actors in the same picture. (Odie note: I was wrong about this--see Fishburne and Bassett in What's Love Got To Do With It?) As one of the kids, Kevin Hooks gives a sweet, natural performance as their eldest son, David Lee. In 2003, Disney reunited Hooks with Winfield on a remake of Sounder, which Hooks directed and Winfield had a part as the teacher David Lee meets.

Sounder opens with Nathan Lee and his son hunting raccoon. Sounder the dog gives chase, leading Nathan Lee to a tree where a clear shot at the raccoon fails to yield results. The raccoon escapes, and Nathan Lee returns home to wife Rebecca empty-handed. Nathan Lee’s feelings of inadequacy as the breadwinner are temporarily soothed by David Lee, but later in the evening, Nathan Lee disappears. The family awakens to the smell of sausage and ham. Rebecca and the kids are surprised, and happy to eat something more than the cold mush they’ve been eating for months. Rebecca’s questions about the procurement of this feast go unanswered.

Though Nathan Lee and Rebecca work the land as sharecroppers, there are moments of play interspersed in their lives of hard work and even harder times. Nathan Lee is a pitcher on an all Black sharecropper team, and he pals around with blues singer Taj Mahal, who also contributed this film’s soundtrack. The scenes with Mahal are as fun and loose as the score. He flirts with Rebecca and ribs Nathan Lee the way any good friend does. It would have been nice to see more of him.

David Lee loves his father and his dog. They both get taken from him on the same day. Rebecca gets the answer to her question about where that ham came from when the cops at her door come to arrest Nathan Lee for theft. Rebecca tries to put in a good word for her husband, but the sheriff could care less about Nathan Lee’s reasons. As the sheriff’s truck rides off with Nathan Lee, Sounder attempts to catch up with him. The cop sitting next to Nathan Lee takes aim at Sounder, and only Nathan Lee kicking the gun as it fires saves Sounder from instant death. Wounded, he runs off into the woods.

The White man for whom Rebecca and Nathan Lee work the land is more concerned about his crops not being tended than whether Rebecca and her kids will survive without Nathan Lee’s help. The judge in Nathan Lee’s case sentences him to a year of hard labor on a chain gang. When Rebecca inquires about the location of the chain gang, the sheriff, in a show of just how little Blacks meant to Southern Whites in Sounder’s time, refuses to tell her. Scenes like these, and when the sheriff’s deputy purposely destroys the cake Rebecca sent to her husband at the jail, made my blood boil. It’s just meanness for meanness’ sake, and director Martin Ritt heightens their power by keeping them understated. Adding to my hatred of The Dukes Of Hazzard, the sheriff in Sounder is played by Ros-COE P. Coltrane himself, James Best.

The White woman for whom Rebecca does laundry, Mrs. Boatwright, attempts to help David Lee find out where his father has been sent. Earlier, she gave David Lee a copy of The Three Musketeers when he dropped off her laundry, and she seems to have genuine affection for David Lee. Roscoe P. Coltrane refers to this as “a crush on some cullud boy” when she, at David Lee’s urging, tries to charm the information out of the sheriff. She is faced with a moral crisis when, after looking at Nathan Lee’s file while the sheriff is away, she is threatened with excommunication from the sacred church of polite Southern society if she reveals what she’s read. Mrs. Boatwright tenses up, and refuses to tell David Lee.

Eventually, her change of heart sends David Lee on a journey to find the chain gang where his father is held. Using Miss Boatwright’s directions, David Lee walks and walks and walks. Black people do a lot of walking in Sounder, and their sweaty clothes and shiny, dark skin send feelings of oppressive heat right out of the screen. After a few days, David Lee finds the chain gang but is injured (in another scene that made me mad) by a guard. David Lee’s wounds are tended by a schoolteacher, who later allows him to sit in on her class. This is a vastly different class than the one he occasionally attends at the predominantly White school closer to home. David decides this is the school he would rather attend, provided he can leave his post as the new man of the house.

Sounder’s two big reconciliation scenes are memorable. The first one is the scene you paid to see if you rented this picture. After a dynamite blast renders Nathan Lee “useless to the gang,” due to his leg injury, he is released from the gang. Since it took David Lee days to get to the gang’s location, you can only imagine how long Nathan Lee had to walk on one bum leg to get home. Sounder notices him first, in the distance stumbling home using a tree branch as a crutch. The kids see him next, and lastly, Rebecca sees him. The shot where Rebecca breaks into a run to her husband is jubilant; Tyson explodes with emotion as she runs toward us and into her husband’s arms.

Winfield and Tyson make you feel their reunion, and the scene has further payoff later when, after putting the kids to bed, Rebecca and Nathan Lee look at each other with as much hinted sexual passion as the G-rating will allow. The smile on Nathan Lee’s face breaks Winfield’s face into a mischievous, horny country boy grin.

The second reconciliation occurs earlier: A boy and his dog are reunited. Ritt shoots this from far away as man and beast reconnect. Suddenly, cin-togger John Alonzo’s camera pulls back to reveal that we have been watching this from Rebecca’s position on the porch. Ritt frames the boy and dog in the distance, and Rebecca in the forefront of the right side of the frame. It’s from this same vantage point where Sounder first sees Nathan Lee later, telegraphing the point from where Rebecca does that run to her man.

How John Alonzo didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for cinematography is beyond me. There are gorgeous widescreen shots of wide open spaces, both in the light and the dark, and effective use of close-up to convey emotion. The spaces where Sounder takes place seem like vast, wide open areas where you can walk for days to get where you need to go. Alonzo’s work helps Ritt achieve, through visuals and placement, these quiet moments of desperation and helplessness, as well as boisterous outpourings of joy.

It’s a damn shame they named this movie after the dog. He doesn’t really do anything besides bark and get shot in the face. (I guess that latter thing earns him at least a screen credit. But not the title.) Nathan Lee and David Lee, however, have two scenes where their father-son bond is reiterated and strengthened. Earlier at the jailhouse, Nathan Lee gives a strong speech that warns his son about ending up in his prison predicament. This has a follow-up in the last scenes in Sounder, when David Lee decides to give up his acceptance at the Black school in order to spend more time with his dad. Nathan Lee reacts angrily at first, and then, after finding David Lee near the river, softens his message but doesn’t deviate from it. He wants David Lee to have it better than he and Rebecca had it. Isn’t that the wish of every parent, including my own?

“Do you think we could ever be friends?” asks Nathan Lee. David Lee shakes his father’s hand, then hugs him. Ritt keeps the camera on David Lee buried in his father’s embrace for mere seconds, lifting his camera to catch Nathan Lee’s reaction before dropping them almost completely out of frame. It made me want to hug my Pops, who also wished for me to have a better life than he and my Mom do. I have that life.

I cried like a fool.

Sounder is rated G, though the language would probably get it a PG now.