Tuesday, December 24, 2013

The Big Media Vandalism Christmas Special 2013

by Odienator

Welcome to the 3rd Annual Big Media Vandalism Christmas Special. Every year, on Christmas Eve, I spin Christmas tunes while I wrap my presents. It's a tradition here at the Fortress of OdieTude. My wrapping skills remain as good as they were when I was six years old, so I need something to distract me. Big thanks to all the artists who recorded the songs in this edition, as well as the editions from 2012 and 2011.

Check those links out if you don't see your favorites here.

As far as holiday wishes go, I'll leave you with what I've said two years running: 

Surrey down to our Stone Soul Christmas Picnic and sample our Christmas playlist. Merry Christmas to the Christians, Happy Hanukkah to our Jewish audience (even if it was last month), and Happy Kwanzaa to the folks who are Blacker than I'll ever be.

1. 'Zat You, Santa Claus, by Louis Armstrong


Knock on Louis Armstrong's door unannounced on Christmas Eve, and you're likely to get busted upside yo' head with a trumpet. Unless, of course, you're Jolly Old Saint Nicholas (of the Nicholas Brothers). Even so, Satchmo doesn't trust you enough to open the door and let you in. "Would you mind slipping it under the door?" sings Armstrong of the present he's been patiently awaiting. Santa should just drop a coal-filled horn down the chimney.

2. Silver Bells, Stevie Wonder



In 2011, I posted Stevie's best Christmas song. This is a heartwarming, sweet cover of the song Bob Hope sang in The Lemon Drop Kid. Stevie gives it more soul and some impeccable phrasing (listen to his delivery on "this is Santa's big scene"). One of the most visual Christmas songs ever written, it romanticizes a city block during the Christmas season. Anyone who has ever tried to walk through Herald Square in December knows that Stevie and Bob Hope were both full of shit. It's hell out there during the holidays!

3. Children's Christmas Song, by Miss Ross and The Supremes



Let's stay on the subject of Christmas bells. I hadn't thought about this song in decades because, honestly, it scares me. But it was a fairly large hit back in 1965, and it is catchy enough to have you singing it before it ends. As a kid, I imagined Miss Ross dressed as a nun with a VERY large ruler conducting the kids who provide the cute, off-key background chorus of this song. Listen to the names of the kids she addresses--they'll be familiar to Motown fans. Two things I noticed about this song: 1.) You don't hear any of the other Supremes on this record, and 2.) Damn, Diana sounds Whiter than Perry Como.

4. Sleigh Ride, by Johnny Mathis



The quintessential version of this song was recorded by Mathis in 1958. His silky vocals are enough to melt the snow under the sleigh that carries you and your beloved through the "lovely weather." Back when I was a hopeless romantic, I took Mathis' advice and went for the titular event. I froze my ass off. Only the Salsoul Orchestra's version comes close to this one.

5. Up On The House Top, by The Jackson Five



Released the same year I was, Up on the Housetop features Michael singing a personalized version of the classic written by Benjamin Hanby 106 years prior. Each of the brothers Jackson gets a mention, with Michael asking Santa to bring a guitar for Tito, a 3-foot tall basketball hoop for Jackie, socks for Marlon and condoms for Jermaine (OK, it's mistletoe but still...) For the rest of us, Mike asks Santa to bring "love and peace for everyone." I'm still waiting for that, Santa.

6. O Holy Night, by Mahalia Jackson



OK, I need to be serious here a moment. Mahalia Jackson was (and is) the greatest gospel singer to ever walk the Earth. Readers of Big Media Vandalism know the special place in my heart she holds, even after I stopped going to church. This version of O Holy Night is incredible. It sends chills up your spine and tears to your eyes, even if you don't believe. It's so great and reverential that I must say "Sorry, Ms. Jackson," because I'm returning to sin in two entries.

7. Soul Holidays, by Sounds of Blackness



Staying on the gospel tip, Sounds of Blackness sing about "the day that Jesus Christ was born," wrapping the message in a bouncy, danceable, joyous four-minute ode to spending the holidays with one's family. This music video gets me right in my nappy soul. Try to sit still while this plays. I put it on this list solely for the moment the lead singer yells out "I know you betta have my present!"

8. Santa's Rap, by The Treacherous Three



After two unsuccessful tries, Beat Street's ode to Christmas FINALLY makes this list! The Treacherous Three masterfully execute a back-and-forth argument between two hoodrats and the apathetic, alcoholic Santa who pays them a visit. Funny, too profane for Beat Street's PG rating, and a tad too real for comfort at times, Santa's Rap does eventually have a happy ending. These kids get an awesome beat-boxer named Doug E. Fresh for Christmas. It beats the hell out of coal in one's stocking.

9.  Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, by Lufer Vandross



Truth be told, I was looking for a Luther Vandross version of "I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas." Unfortunately, he didn't cover that. Instead, here he is on Judy Garland's Christmas classic from Meet me in St. Louis. As always, Lufer makes the song his own, complete with seductive vocal and a sexy sax solo smack dab in the middle. Not for nothing is Mr. Vandross' Greatest Hits collection called The Best of Luther, The Best of Love.

10. Baby It's Cold Outside, by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan



So, so, SO many great versions of this song, from Ray Charles and Betty Jordan to Lou Rawls and Diane Reeves to the original by Esther Williams and Mr. Corinthian Leather himself, Ricardo Montalban. (If you're prefer an X-rated take on Frank Loesser's brilliant Oscar winning duet, have I got a version for you.) I chose Ella and one of two guys named Louis with whom she recorded this song because, well, it's Ella Fitzgerald, people!!!

I've never understood why Baby, It's Cold Outside is a Christmas song. But I understand even less this new bullshit notion that it's a date rape song. Really, people? "Say, what's in this drink?" is apparently the line that supports this "thesis." I always thought she was inquiring about the alcohol, not if she were being roofied. (She wouldn't KNOW she was getting roofied.) Also, it doesn't seem like the female singer is in fear for her life. Otherwise the song would have gone like this:

Lady: I really can't stay
Guy: But, baby it's cold outside.
(Sound of guy getting kicked in the balls)

I acknowledge that the guy in the song clearly wants some ass, and is trying to sweet talk his way into it. He doesn't succeed, because the woman says no. The end. At no time is the female in grave danger in this song. She's just as flirty as he is. "Well maybe just a cigarette more," she sings at one point. 


Hell, watch Neptune's Daughter and see how unthreatening the number is.

If trying to talk a woman into bed is a crime, all you straight men and bisexuals turn yourselves in. You too, lesbians! Santa's going to be visiting all our asses in jail this Christmas. Hope he brings a cake with a file in it.


Happy Holidays, Everybody!

Monday, November 04, 2013

Black Man Talk: 12 Years a Slave

by Steven Boone and Odie "Odienator" Henderson

(The following is a Google Chat conversation between Big Media Vandalism founder Steven Boone and Big Media Vandalism's proprietor Odie Henderson. It is the latest in the Black Man Talk series. Other installments include American Gangsters, Tyler Perry, Django Unchained, 42.and Lee Daniels' The Butler.)



ODIE

Another Black movie, another Black Man Talk. I say our next chat should be on the Whitest movie we can find, like David O. Russell's American Hustle or something by Sofia Coppola. For now, it's 12 Years A Slave, based on the 1851 narrative by its main character, Solomon Northup. Adapting it is John Ridley, former writer for Martin Lawrence's old sitcom, Martin. Directing it is a Black man whose first two films were about White men in anguish--and therefore more palatable to general audiences--British artist/moviemaker Steve McQueen.

Let's start with a juicy question: Where does this rank/fit in the admittedly small subgenre of movies about "Black History" aka "American History that Texas Textbooks keep whitewashing."


BOONE

I'm not sure yet. Let's say it ranks highly by default. McQueen is a meticulous researcher, so the film is teeming with brute facts. It would be interesting to see this film played as a Scared Straight for racist high school kids--particularly a certain slave-on-overseer Lookeehere Moment(TM)* that stirred the audience I was in at each of two screenings.

* LookeeHere Moment, trademark Odienator, is that moment when a Black person cannot take the aggravation any more and loses control. Generally includes an NC-17 rated cursing out and/or an ass whipping.

ODIE

With the film so fresh in our minds, that was probably an unfair question. But I'll step out on a limb to state that this film has a You are There quality I've not seen before in this type of narrative. There's a transformative power to McQueen's matter-of-fact way of shooting, a trait that burned him severely in Shame but worked well in Hunger. Watching this, there were times when I felt as powerless as the slaves roaming by as Solomon hanged from that tree.


BOONE

It does give us that sense of powerlessness, and of the lingering shock of being abducted and enslaved. Solomon spends the entire movie in shock--which is to say, the entire 12 years. Still, I think Hunger is the more confident, inspired film. There is no Hans Zimmer soundtrack to commiserate with the Irish prisoners in Hunger, and it makes their situation that much more palpable. McQueen shoots this film in that you-are-there fashion, but some of the window dressing (the score, the ungainly attempt at period dialogue) softens the blow. Even so, I have never seen an American or European film on the subject of slavery that was this immersive and this concerned with the visceral moment-to-moment experience of the slave.



ODIE

Hunger is the more confident film, because it's not an American film. Europeans are used to that kind of starkness; McQueen had to calibrate this one differently. Like Lee Daniels did in The Butler, he had to sprinkle a little mainstream-movie seasoning to make sure his message stuck with American audiences. We're brainwashed to expect certain things. In both Daniels' and McQueen's cases, neither were harmed by softening their blows a bit.

As for that florid dialogue, which I admit is a tad off-putting, that's how folks talked back then! What  are you  gonna do? It's a lot more preferable than that ignorant patois White writers put in the mouths of Movie Negroes back in the studio system days.

Plus, Ridley gets great usage out of it in two scenes:

1. The Alfre Woodard scene, which we must come back to

2. The scene where the weeping slave, Eliza, lashes out of Solomon. She's wailing far longer than a regular director would have had her wail (it made me think of the coach tormenting Jackie Robinson with epithets in 42), and when Solomon tells her to shut up, she hits him with both barrels. I loved her speech, superbly delivered by Adepero Oduye from Pariah.

"Let me weep for my children!" she tells him.

It's like a message to Black America. Weep for your children.


BOONE

Well, the dialogue was an impediment to my engagement with the film. It made me sometimes see excellent actors wrestling with the language like entry-level Shakespearean actors. I get it, but if we want to talk about "mainstream movie" necessities, I think a language that was simple and functional for the actors and the audience (with maybe a little historical flavoring a la Westerns) would have done the trick.

And, yes, I can sense McQueen, as a Black British director, addressing African-Americans in a kind of triangular conversation (similar to Tarantino on Django) involving the contemporary black underclass/wage slaves/middle class and our historical counterparts. Solomon hanging from a rope while his black neighbors go on about their business says a great deal about our history of being terrorized into complacency. Was it Stokely Carmichael who said, "All the scared niggers are dead"? [Ed: Yup. The exact quote is: "You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!"] Well, that's a flattering half-truth. Some of the scared niggers are dead but most of the dead niggers fought their fear and struck back. How many Solomons didn't survive to write a book because they'd rather have died than bargain with an evil system?


ODIE

Plenty, I am sure. Look at Patsey, the film's horribly put upon object of Massa Fassbender's affections. She begs Solomon to kill her, to save her from the horrors that visit her every day. Had Solomon done so, he would have lost the American audience for sure, but he would have also struck an unrecoverable blow to Massa.


In Beloved, Sethe kills her daughter to spare her an enslaved nightmare. When I read Beloved, I was stunned by this, but as time passed, I realized just how powerful a statement Toni Morrison was making. Patsey is far less a caricature than I’d read in some reviews; she's very real, but very much a symbol of both Blackness and womanhood. She picks more cotton than the men, even the White guy who's forced to pick alongside her ("Treat him like Jerry," as Don Johnson says in Django Unchained), yet this goes unrewarded. She also has to deal with Sarah Paulson's angry (and deservingly so, I suppose) wife. McQueen draws a sharp, straight line between Patsey and today's sista: "You may be free, but your problems ain't over."


BOONE

"Black women are the mules of this world," my sister said to me recently, doing John Lennon one better. Patsey is the jewel in this movie's crown. She's played by a breathtakingly beautiful actress with short, natural black hair.  When she first appeared in the movie, I was fine with anything she might do or say from that point on, because this kind of beauty, which we see every day, almost never makes it to the screen. A black Audrey Hepburn who looks nothing like Audrey Hepburn. Patsey's predicament is only a horror show extreme of actress Lupita Nyong’o's possible predicament in Ho'wood: What kind of mule/victim/maid/ho roles will be thrown at her in the coming years? She is clearly meant to carry any film that would go to Angelina Jolie or Kate Winslet.



What will be her compensation for being brutally stripped and whipped in lingering long take? It was effective as horror, but seeing black women physically tortured is no great shock at this point. The real shock would have been imagining a moment of tenderness and beauty that momentarily stole Massa's sadistic heart. What's eating at Massa Fassbender is that Patsey is the most alluring woman he has ever laid eyes on. That truth is something he must kill before it kills him.

ODIE

Nyong’o is STUNNING. She’s of Kenyan and Mexican descent. Her looks are completely foreign to Hollywood, and if the pundits are right, the Oscar is hers to lose (Sorry, Miss Sofia!). Her fate in getting future movie roles is probably too terrifying to consider, but this is a star-making turn. Solomon is the audience's state of shock; Patsey is our emotional core.

McQueen is on record stating that he felt some compassion for Epps, and you can see it bubbling beneath the surface. Fassbender's portrayal is a cog in a much bigger machine. Like Ford, Solomon's benevolent (by comparison) first Massa, Epps is part of a societal institution, one that Whites, even the ones who acknowledge injustice, would rather allow it to remain status quo to their emotional detriment.

It's a lot harder to fight the system when the system is giving you perks.

You do bring up a valid point about Epps, however. If he had been given some of the characteristics of Perry King's slaver in the exploitation trash classic, Mandingo, the Patsey whipping scene would have emotionally short circuited the audience. King's affection for some of his slaves (like Agamemnon, his “right hand man”), such as it were, afforded him a human quality that McQueen and Fassbender either withhold or play way too closely to the vest. A truly tender moment between Epps and Patsey would have forced audiences to feel conflicted, maybe even have the amount of pity for Epps that McQueen hints at. Imagine how explosive that would have been.

Of course, King eventually murders Mandingo when Mrs. King gets too friendly with him.


BOONE

Exactly. Epps just being rotten is too easy, and there is some complexity there, like when Epps' wife breaks up the almost-fight between him and Solomon over Patsey. Epps is stone drunk at that point, so he momentarily forgets that Solomon is his property and that his wife is not his mother or teacher or school principal. She stands between them as if they were two boys on the schoolyard. I imagined what aw shucks comedy a Golden Era Ho'wood director would have made of this moment.

ODIE

That's a Skin Game moment right there...

BOONE

But to your point about the system: That's what gives this movie its electricity, McQueen's and Ridley's fascination with everybody's moral cowardice in the face of a faceless system--an economy, really, that determines fates as unpredictably as a roadside bomb. Shame could be an alternate title for this movie. So could Husbands and Wives: the film starts by showing us domestic bliss between a free black man and wife and also that same black man later, a slave, helping a female slave steal a moment of intimacy that she might have had with her husband, who we presume is sold off somewhere, dead, escaped or never existed because she never had a chance at a proper life.


The Northups in happier times.

This film is secretly about what we are willing to do to preserve a man-woman union and a family in a time of constant terror and oppression. Which is why you were so right to single out the wailing slave woman, whose cries McQueen seamlessly extends across two scenes.

ODIE

Did you notice that McQueen has her wail under Benedict Cumberbatch's reading of Scripture? It's not the first time he juxtaposes Scripture with injustice: Epps later uses it to justify whipping his slaves as mercilessly as he does. This is some subversive shit, and another of the many straight lines 12 Years a Slave draws between its timeframe and ours. The Daily Word is used by Republicans and churches to justify treating people like second class citizens. If I didn't know any better, I'd expect Jesus' second coming to be Him showing up wearing a wifebeater and holding a Pabst Blue Ribbon, yelling about how much He hates all that isn’t straight, White and male.

"Odie, you're goin' ta Hell for that last sentence."


BOONE

Ha ha!

ODIE

12 Years' points about the system are its greatest assets. That scene of Solomon hanging has been described as a directorial setpiece that's more about McQueen than Solomon. I vehemently disagree. That scene is society in microcosm, not just the slave society, but ours as well. When that female slave suddenly comes into frame and offers Solomon water at her own risk, it's a marvelous "fuck the system" shout-out. She's like an Ebony Florence Nightingale, a ghost who's gone as quickly as she came.

And McQueen isn't done. When Epps hands Solomon that whip, the power of that transaction indicts today's society more than it indicts Solomon. I had hoped Solomon would use that whip in a repeat of the earlier scene with Paul Dano, but instead he whips Patsey. She lets him off the hook a bit (I wish Ridley had left her line out of the screenplay), but 12 Years a Slave codes this moment as a direct parallel to what I see happening every day. At times, Solomon is, dare I say, a representation of the bougie Negro looking down at the 'hood denizen. His enslavement is a brutal reminder that, to society's eyes, he's just another nigger like the rest of them.

BOONE

A piece by Rebecca Theodore Vachon at rogerebert.com called Acting Right Around White Folks: On 12 Years a Slave and Respectability Politics (and a blog post by Maurice Dolberry that it references, called "I Hate Myself!”: What are Respectability Politics, and Why do Black People Subscribe to Them?) really get into this problem. What 12 Years could have done better is dramatize Solomon's awakening, and to do that, we could have spent much more time spent with him and his family before his abduction. This would have served two purposes: we could have gotten to know his wife and children as something more than the perfect and loving clan, making the eventual terrorism sting that much worse. It's as if the "acting right around white folks" syndrome affected McQueen's and Ridley's choices in the first act.

On the plantations, we don't get much sense of tension or alienation between Solomon and his fellow slaves (who are mostly faceless bystanders). There's that lovely bit where they all pat him on the back after he's navigated down the swamp in his handmade raft, but the filmmakers' concentration was mostly fixed on Solomon vs. Slavery.

ODIE

I loved that moment, because it made me think of both my own experiences in corporate America and Sorrell Booke's Cap'n Cochipee in Purlie Victorious. In those cases, a Black idea that works is completely beyond the scope of White thinking. Those slaves were patting Solomon on the back because he made the far more intelligent overseer look stoopid. I can't begin to tell you the horrors of my early career, where I wasn't sent to customers because it was believed that a Black programmer would be rejected by the consumers of the software he wrote.

BOONE

Damn.

ODIE

As for more of a depiction of Solomon's early life: I'm glad you brought that up because I'm very conflicted about whether the film needed that.



I liked how McQueen doles those scenes out as flashbacks, but I saw the lack of them later in the film as a sign of Solomon losing his hope and humanity. I think your criticism is valid, but I brought to the movie my own shorthand. It didn't take much for me to connect the dots between his past and present. The ending, where he reconnects, held more power for me because it forced my focus on the amount of time lost, of kids growing up without their father and of a father missing out on his children's life events. The way Ejiofor says "I apologize" just hit me so hard.

Still, I need to consider the possibility that you, and others who have noted how distant McQueen keeps the material at times, are correct.

BOONE

Yeah, it's partly my failing that I wanted more of Solomon's family up front, and then nothing of them until that tremendous ending. It's a backhanded compliment, I guess, and I wanted a lot more of this movie. Give me an hour with Solomon's family, then two, three hours of the horror (it's called 12 YEARS a Slave). Let me see the shadow. Let me feel the lack. (Sorry, James Jones.) Some films grow on you.

Our friend Keith Uhlich wrote some thoughts on the film for Letterboxd that scratched at why this film grew OFF me somewhat on second viewing. It's still quite powerful and McQueen's inventiveness never rests, but in the end, this film, like Django Unchained, is merely a gate opener. As Keith put it, "The subject is not closed because someone addresses it—to your mind—as well as you've ever seen. There is always more to see." And what I'm interested in seeing next is more of what happened in the bedrooms, bathrooms and back rooms besides cruelty and exploitation--not to cast a sanitizing light on an evil institution, but to draw darker, deeper lines between then and now.

ODIE

Speaking of Keith's great review, an example of a negative take that lacks the snarkiness of other negative reviews of this film, he also draws attention to Alfre Woodard's character. He writes: "The Alfre Woodard scene is spectacular, in part because it seems that McQueen briefly handed the reins—Sin City guest-director style—to Lee Daniels."

It's spectacular for another reason too: It shows us exactly what you just stated: "more of what happened in the bedrooms, boardrooms and back rooms." Woodard is married to her Massa (the thought of her and this White man literally jumping the broom filled me with such amusement and joy) and she tries to impart to Patsey the benefits of this arrangement. They're sitting there drinking tea and shit! Woodard refers to Solomon as "Nigger Solomon," and he to her as "Mistress Shaw," which also shows some fascinating form of power structure.

Woodard's dialogue with Patsey reminded me of that similar conversation between Shug and Celie in The Color Purple. "You make it sound as if Mr is going to the bathroom on you, Miss Celie!"

12 Years a Slave is peppered with these moments of Black folks doing what they needed to do, for better and for worse, to survive. Again, yet another set of straight lines drawn between now and then.

BOONE

My favorite of these was when McQueen seized the opportunity to use the slave ship (in this case a riverboat) as metaphor for The Struggle. That amazing three shot of Solomon and two captives plotting their next move. Michael K. Williams' chiseled black face is slashed by sunlight as he makes it clear he's ready to go down fighting.


And he does. This scene has the bit of Hans Zimmer music I have no problem with: the relentless percussion based on the flap-flap of the boat's water wheel. And that swift cut to Williams' body floating away in the vessel's wake. This sequence almost belongs in the first act of a slave rebellion action-adventure movie, except that it’s not meant to set up audience expectation of revenge but to dramatize a relentless machine.

ODIE

It's the dramatic version of that Eddie Murphy moment in Delirious when he talks about slavery. “Brothers act like they couldn’t have been slaves 200 years ago…”

BOONE

"Bale that cotton! I ain't balin’ a MUFFUCKIN THING"

ODIE

“The first dude off the boat tried that shit! I ain’t pickin’ nothin’! WHAP!!”

BOONE

“The other muffuckas said I’ll bale the shit!”

[Ed: These guys can't do it the justice Eddie does it here]

ODIE

When 12 Years a Slave won the Toronto Film Festival Audience Award, the Oscar buzz was louder than a swarm of bees broadcasting through trunk speakers in the 'hood. Of course, that led to some backlash. The criticism I want to focus on is "the film is too brutal for audiences and Academy members." Hello! It’s fucking slavery, not an episode of Mary Poppins. Of course it’s going to be brutal.

Did you ever notice that, whenever a minority group tells its own story, the majority immediately complains that it's "too much?" Whether it's women, gays, or brown people, there's always chatter about brutality or feminist touches or reverse racism.

Could this notion of something being "too Black" or "too incendiary" be a contributing factor in Black directors not being able to finance or make more stories like this? I don't know about you, but I would kill to see Kasi Lemmons do a Reconstruction picture or Sojourner Truth's story, for example.


BOONE

It's a complicated tangle of discomforts. And African American filmmakers are nervous of this burden, to make something that tries to "fix" us in some way, but everybody gets around to trying it.

I think the "incendiary" part is less an issue in generally liberal Ho'wood (and its various corporate doppelgangers worldwide) than the "too black" and "too depressing" issue. The 15 year dramatic television renaissance set off by HBO has made "dark, complex" characterization and plotting a new national pastime. But when that darkness and complexity goes beyond the bounds of entertainment to become more of a practical tool or weapon rather than a gruesome plaything, there's trouble. The prelude to The Wire was The Corner, a mini-series of Baltimore drug game scenarios that director Charles S. Dutton, a seasoned black actor from the August Wilson camp, hijacked to insert earnest testimonials and interviews from the cast, speaking directly to the audience--presumably to some of the very at-risk or almost-gone ghetto-dwellers dramatized in the mini-series. Generally, when mainstream critics and audiences ooh and ahh over the "darkness" of something, they mean sexy Tony Soprano or The Dark Knight. The Wire was said to explode all those boundaries, but I still have my doubts.

ODIE

The Corner was more harrowing than The Wire, though you know I love The Wire intensely.

BOONE

In this society, when you add "black" to just about any formula, commercial or non-commercial, you increase the complexity exponentially. I always wanted to write The Last Hood Movie, the one film that shocks the ghetto into mental un-slavery. But one can go mad in the attempt.

Some Hood Movies drive the audience mad too. Works both ways, Boone.

Plus it starts to make trouble not just for white folks but for unsuspecting, culturally underfed or miseducated black audiences, too. Just ask Kanye "Yeezus" West.

ODIE

Kanye is a whole 'nother Black Man Talk altogether! But since you brought up rappers and music, we have to talk about Paul Dano. Dano, the unlucky recipient of Daniel Day-Lewis' milkshake theft in There Will Be Blood, plays Solomon's second overseer. A lot of time is devoted to the rending of Black flesh by vicious White men (Solomon's first brush with slavery entails having a paddle broken across his back). Dano is the recipient of a taste of his own medicine in the one "stand up and cheer" moment McQueen offers. The viewer pays for it later, of course, but for that moment, the movie goes all Nat Turner on us.


When Dano is introduced to the slaves (and to us), he gets a musical number of sorts. With the slaves as his percussion section, Dano sings a mad cross between country music and Dr. Dre's lyrical output. As disturbing as that song was, I could not get it out of my head. "That's horrible," I thought, "but damn if it ain't catchy." I had to find out more about "Run, Nigger, Run!" The internet led me to this great piece on the Undercover Black Man website. Turns out the song was originally sung by slaves, which changes the entire thrust of the song. Dano, and the numerous folk and country singers who've recorded this song, make the titular command a taunt. It was originally a cheer of sorts, a piece of advice from those who weren't as bold as the runner.

See, they were jacking our beats long before Rock and Roll did it!

[Ed: Listen, at your own risk, to the famous recording by The Skillet Lickers. Dano’s version is better.]

BOONE

I'm doing the Running Man to that right now, like an EPMD background dancer. That's amazing, and it extends on up to Ghostface Killah's Run!, The Last Poets' Run Nigger!, and Melvin Van Peebles' Come on Feet!

I think a similar slave song was mentioned in the book, Bullwhip Days, a collection of oral history from the slaves collected by, I believe, WPA historians and journalists in the 30's. (I read it during my own fledgling attempt at a Nat Turner screenplay.)

Dano's performance is a little burst of brilliance, and it helps the film rhyme with Django Unchained and its obsession with white male insecurity versus a black man who may or may not be "exceptional." A key phrase from Django is even reversed here. I believe Ford says to Solomon, a free man forced into a slave role, "You are one exceptional nigger!" whereas Calvin Candie in Django labeled a slave posing as a free man an "unexceptional nigger" with great doubt.




ODIE

That slave song was commandeered, absorbed, and reflected with all its subversive power intact as Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song! Except in that case, the runner vows to return.

McQueen's last shot of Patsey, seen from Solomon's vantage point as he is driven away to reclaim his freedom, left me with more sorrow than joy. I wonder how many slaves secretly hoped that the runaways or the freed would return, Django-style, to free them as well.

Someone in my theater yelled out "Take her with you!" to Solomon.

BOONE

Yes! My romantic mind leapt and had him hoisting her up into the coach and them hightailing it out of there under gunfire. (Something like a certain famous escape in The Hidden Fortress.) Upon learning that Solomon joined the abolitionists and the Underground Railroad, I imagined that he did so with Patsey and others he left behind in mind. Imagine, imagine, imagine. Imagine the reunion, the rescue. It's a fantasy, but a fantasy that defines me.

Patsey's loveliness and soulfulness and resilience and creative spark (shown in that gorgeous, quiet scene of her making dolls by hand in a grassy field) cries out for a rescuer. What Solomon is forced to do to her (or is too weak to resist) instead, kind of broke me a little. Because in the 21st century, there are still so many desperate black folks who have inherited this kind of desperation.

ODIE

Exactly. And that is why this film is so powerful for me, and why I rejected the notion that it’s just a cold, directorial art installation. It is not. It is a snapshot of the past that defines the present. This is a film about an institution that brought great prosperity on this country at the expense of the humanity of not only Blacks, but Whites as well. Warts and all, no other film has done this before.



It boldly answers the questions of where current attitudes, beliefs, and thoughts originated. The Confederacy may have officially surrendered in 1865, but Whites like Dano's overseer feared that abused, running nigger they sang about was going to return with a vengeance. So we got 100 years of Jim Crow.

That takes us through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The latter was enacted 5 years before I was born, and is currently being dismantled piece by piece because of Post Racial America™.

When people speak of a "post-racial America," it's a marketing ploy, not truth. Granted, we've come a long way, baby, but 12 Years a Slave reminds us that a lot of its harsh truths are ingrained in both the DNA of the descendents of slaves and this country proper. For that, it deserves to be commended and analyzed further for years to come.

BOONE

Well, Hunger was also not an "art installation"-- it was just so formally precise, tight like a great concept album where track listings don't matter. One brief shot of a prison guard cowering and crying in his riot gear while his colleagues were busy brutalizing political prisoners gave the entire grisly film its humanist light. I would have welcomed even more such rigor and sparseness in 12 Years a Slave, not less. It's all there in the images: The last flickers of a letter that might have saved Solomon, burning in the dark, matched by the flame light dying on his face. The iconic tiptoe lynching.


McQueen just hedges a bit by giving us music that weeps in a conventional way. It doesn't quite trust the power of the images and sounds McQueen has gathered to be their own music. But all my quibbles don't weigh much against where this film arrives emotionally--and it is through universal emotions (represented by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s  compassionate and despairing eyes) that the dehumanized view of blacks might burn off in the hearts of modern day Eppses.

ODIE

Hans Zimmer is the poster boy for inappropriately assigned musical cues, though McQueen leans on him far less than other directors. Like I said, McQueen felt the need to lean on familiar American movie tropes on occasion, but he and Ejiofor's eyes execute the film's most visually oriented indictment-slash-identification moment. When the camera lingers on Ejiofor (whose internal acting matches the physical rigors of his biggest Oscar competition, Robert Redford in All Is Lost), and he turns to directly face us, it was so painful I almost looked away. I impressed so many personal things on that moment, and other moments as well.

Final thoughts on 12 Years a Slave?

BOONE

This film is just one more gate-opener to a subject that I, like. Mr. Uhlich and others, find inexhaustible. It left me worrying about Patsey the way Fellini said he continued to worry about his greatest creation, Cabiria. As for Patsey's creator, Lupita Nyong’o, I'm not as worried as I let on earlier. There are too many inspired and capable filmmakers out there right now to think that she won't get to shine (and thus overturn a whole world of internalized oppression for dark girls everywhere) in films that match her potential. Dee Rees, Ava Duvernay, Andrew Dosunmu (and the visionary cinematographer each has collaborated with, Bradford Young) along with fascinating inside men like Lee Daniels and Charles Stone III are doing the kind of work that matches McQueen's artistry. This is a great jazz age for American cinema.

ODIE

I got nothing to add to that, outside of my complete agreement. We're done here.

Next time, a certain maligned actor who looks like yours truly gets a Black Man Talk Redemption!


 We're comin' for you, Cuba!

Monday, August 19, 2013

Black Man Talk: Lee Daniels' The Butler

(The following is a Google Chat conversation between Big Media Vandalism founder Steven Boone and Big Media Vandalism's proprietor Odie Henderson. It is the latest in the Black Man Talk series. Other installments include American Gangsters, Tyler Perry, Django Unchained, and 42.)





ODIE

Today's topic is Lee Daniels' The Butler, so named because Warner Bros. didn't want to relinquish their ownership of the film's original title, The Butler. Since this is your first Lee Daniels movie, let me provide the Cliffs notes version of what his films are all about.


This man is a freak.

I mean that in the most positive of ways. Let me give you an example: In Shadowboxer, Stephen Dorff is screwing some woman. Outside his door, people are making way too much noise. So Dorff comes barging out of the room, full frontal and wearing a condom, and starts shooting people. Also in this film, my doppelganger Cuba Gooding Jr. is a hit man getting his freak on with his stepmother, Helen Mirren.



BOONE

I love Shadowboxer already



ODIE

That in a nutshell, is Lee Daniels' style. He managed to put interracial, May-December quasi-incestuous screwing in a film with full frontal male nudity and gunfire.



BOONE

I repeat, on that summation alone, I LOVE SHADOWBOXER AND LEE DANIELS ALREADY.



ODIE


Wait! There’s more! In Precious, he has Mo'Nique playing with herself and throwing TV's. In The Paperboy, Nicole Kidman gives John Cusack an orgasm from across the room AND she pisses on Zac Efron. I haven't even gotten to the hog-tying, rape and gay Matthew McConaughey character.

So of course Daniels was the perfect guy to direct a PG-13 rated pseudo-Noble Negro movie!



BOONE

I'm over here oohing and aahing like Boomerang’s Nasty Nelson.



ODIE

The MPAA probably told Daniels what Marcus told Nasty Nelson in Boomerang: "I like the orange and I like the ice cream. You gotta get rid of the cherries, and lose the banana."



BOONE

Exaaactly. Listen: Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitars when he wasn't playing them with his teeth. He humped the air as he played Foxy Lady. We need a black filmmaker like that, not just skilled professionals. We need an uncaged freakazoid or two.



ODIE

Lee Daniels is our man. The last thing he's about is presenting bland racial interactions.



BOONE

Maybe the more precise Daniels collaboration would be with Nasty Nelson's onscreen muse, Grace Jones.



POOSEY!!



ODIE

If Lee Daniels made a movie with Grace Jones, they’d need to make a rating after NC-17.



BOONE

Which begs the question: How did they let this crazy man anywhere near the White House for a film the whole family can enjoy?



ODIE


I've read interviews with Daniels, where he said he was being driven crazy by the constraints of the rating. Remember that old In Living Color skit with David Alan Grier as Luther Campbell from 2 Live Crew trying to make a clean album? That's how I imagine Daniels shot this film.



"Oprah, pull ya titty out! Oh wait, that's R. SHIT! Just pull out the top of ya titty!"



BOONE

I am going to be first in line (at a Times Square adult video store) for the Director's Cut. Hopefully in 3-D.



ODIE

They'll have it on bootleg DVD in front of the Beacon Theater.

Daniels may have wrestled with the PG-13, but he pops up in the corners of the screen every so often to yell out "FREAKY DEAKY!" like Leon Spinks.



BOONE


I just read an interview with Ava DuVernay and Ryan Coogler where Ava complained that they, as black directors, rarely get asked questions about their technique, just the content of their work. It seems like there's a similar general blind spot happening with Daniels. This film has a lot of style and control, beyond the freakazoidality* and negritude.

*Kids, look that one up!



ODIE


So let’s talk technique. The first shot of the movie is the huge White House room where Whitaker is sitting. It’s almost a parody of the “by the numbers” opening for a message picture. Then Daniels immediately thrusts us into the harsh world of Cecil's plantation-set youth. It's as if he had to wash the gloss off with dirty reality. Throughout the film, he goes back and forth like that, as if he's saying "here's what you want to see" then flipping it to  "here's what you need to see."



BOONE

Yes!  It punched the audience right in the stomach! I heard people gasp at the plantation scene.



ODIE

He really screws with audience expectation there. When the plantation owner, who has just finished raping Mariah Carey, points his gun on her husband, Daniels waits a few beats. The audience is lulled into thinking it's just a threat. But then he tightens the frame just before the gunshot…



BOONE


And the father (David Banner) was so hesitant and docile. You wouldn't expect him to get blown away like that, just as you wouldn't expect an unarmed teenager with a bag of Skittles to get taken out.



ODIE


I immediately thought of ?uestlove's article about how he wasn't worth shit. Banner looked big enough to jump down, turn around and pick multiple bales of cotton, yet his "boss" just shoots him, as if to say "Plenty more niggers where that came from!"




Vanessa Redgrave's reaction to this would be comical if it weren't so damn sad. She tells young Cecil "you're gonna be in the house now. I'll teach you how to be a house nigger." Never mind that the kid's just seen his father get his brains blown out. Daniels frames the scene as a Great White Father moment, but with Vanessa Redgrave instead of a man. No doubt, one of Daniels' fascinations is with depictions of racial power in the compositions of his shots.


BOONE

Yeah, I was mentally cataloging various scenes as still frames as the movie went along. There are some that tell the whole story in one composition. He also boldly puts, in vibrant, high definition color, scenes we're used to seeing in very sketchy, grainy black and white: Lynchings, racist mobs attacking freedom riders, the FBI and police assaults on the Black Panthers. Not that we haven't seen these things re-enacted in full color before, but there's something really garish and disturbing about the way Daniels has them photographed here, somewhat similar to the extreme closeups of a slave being picked apart by dogs in Django Unchained.



ODIE


The cinematography is another character here. In all the scenes involving the Presidents and the rituals of serving them, the screen is lit up like Christmas. It's TOO bright.




But the scenes where Black folks convene, whether it's in the underbelly of the White House where they prepare, or at Cecil's house--those scenes are shot in an almost noirish way at times. For example, I could smell the gin, cigarette smoke and leftover collards whiffing through Cecil's house when Terrence Howard tries to seduce Oprah.





BOONE

YES!



ODIE

The only time a president is shown in a darker setting is Nixon, which was a funny visual joke. Cusack almost looks like the Phantom of the Fucking Opera coming out of the shadows.



BOONE

I find Daniels' comic book universe a lot richer, deeper and truer than Christopher Nolan's.



ODIE


Daniels is definitely the Joker in his universe, or at least the Two-Face Tim Burton promised us when he cast Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent.



BOONE


Because it's all about "two faces"--and don't we know a thing or two about that? It's even spoken of at some point, by whom I forget. The face you wear when serving the dominant group, and the one you wear at home. Some will argue that we all must modify our behavior in a professional setting, but that's something different from doing that while black.



ODIE

Exactly. Cuba Gooding Jr. makes that comment about having a face for the White man and one for the Black folks. In the world of The Butler, the Black faces are like that Billy Joel line from The Stranger. "We take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone." Not because we want to, but because, as Redgrave (and Ralph Ellison) put it, we were supposed to be invisible in "proper company."




Gooding’s Carter, by the way, is Lee Daniels' onscreen stand-in. I'm so proud my doppelganger gives a great, randy performance here.



BOONE


Cuba is a genius. He has made about a dozen shitty movies at this point and he's brilliant in every one of them that I've seen. I have witnessed him leaving an entire room full of unsuspecting viewers in stitches just by the way he uttered "vagina" in Rat Race.



ODIE


Speaking of vagina: Cuba tells the old Redd Foxx joke about the woman with the huge punany! As I said in my review, he’s the film's Black id. The PG-13 keeps censoring him, but you can read his lips. He blew up our audience when he addresses Whitaker at the White House table the way I'm sure he wanted to address all those White folks he served:

"You Black motherfu--" [FORCED PG-13 CUT AWAY]

We should talk about that White House dinner scene, where the Reagans invite Cecil and his wife Gloria (Oprah) to sit at the same table Cecil has set for 8 other Presidents. In a regular film would have been the film's "We Shall Overcome" moment. But that's not what Daniels intends. Instead, both in editing and tone, it's a mini-collision of both Cecil's worlds.



BOONE

That White House dinner scene resonated so much. Cecil was suddenly face to face with what a farce the whole setup was, and the empty, ceremonial race relations of the Reagan era, a la Nancy and Mr T on Diff’rent Strokes.


[Ed.: She should have been talking to Willis and Kimberly.]

This isn't Glory, where the ultimate honor is being given the privilege to serve in the guise of "proving" yourself.



ODIE


Did you notice how differently Daniels shoots each President? He goes from a straight on, almost 50's portrayal of Robin Williams' Eisenhower to an ass-shaking, long shot of a cameo by Jane Fonda as Mommy Reagan.



(Casting Fonda as Nancy Reagan is like casting Wesley Snipes as David Duke--it's designed to piss off the right people.)

Marsden's Kennedy (and Jackie O, post assassination) are shot with the reverential glances of the old Black Grandmother who has JFK, MLK and Black Jesus on her mantle.





BOONE

JFK is the equivalent of Benita Buttrell’s Ms. Jenkins to a certain segment of the older black population. “Can't nobody say nuthin’ bad about JFK!!”



ODIE


Exactly. There's emotional weight in the scene where Cecil observes Jackie O, still in blood soaked dress, weeping openly. If I remember correctly, it's an overhead shot of her bloodied skirt as the dialogue makes a thinly veiled reference to Emmitt Till: "She kept the dress on because she wanted the world to see what they did to her husband."

It's kind of funny that LBJ gets no credit for passing the actual laws. Ain't no Black folks got a picture of LBJ on their walls, not even in Texas.



BOONE


Well, to play mindreader to an entire race, I think black people sensed that Johnson was carrying out policy as a pragmatist whereas Jack and Bobby appeared to have true passion for civil rights. At the very least, they LOOKED more like people who could be in genuine sympathy with negroes, whereas Johnson looked like the kind of jowly redneck who would shout "nigger" at his staff while sitting on the toilet.


ODIE


Of Liev Schrieber’s constipated LBJ, Cuba says "When did he start calling us Negroes? That nigga says nigger more than I say nigga!"



BOONE

It's the killin’-est line in the whole movie! Like falling through the nigga looking glass.



ODIE


I wonder if, in different hands, we would have had a window into Cecil's home life and the camaraderie he has with other Black folks. Daniels and writer Danny Strong use Cecil's family as a microcosm for the times that are a-changing, but they also use these scenes to flesh out the characters. Without these scenes, Whitaker's Cecil would be more like Peter Sellers' Chance in Being There, that is, a blank slate for the audience to impress their own ideas.

Oh, fuck that shit! LET'S TALK ABOUT OPRAH!



"Look under my seat! It's another OSSSSS-CUUUUUR nomination!!"



BOONE


Hahaha! Oprah is so sexy and electric in this movie, as I always expected she could be. It's just a crime that she hasn't done more movies. Daniels knows how to put her to work in a scene.



ODIE

If Cuba is this film’s Black id, Oprah is its strong Black backbone.



BOONE


Absolutely. And it just points out how tragic Whitaker's character truly is, since he's clearly not weak or incompetent. He's suffering from lifelong PTSD, and it’s clear that Oprah’s Gloria understands that. She's deeply frustrated but, in the end, she is devoted to him.





ODIE


Whitaker, who I should mention is excellent, has to be so internal. It's a pleasure to see that he has a wife to back him up, to elevate her man when life is whipping his ass. It's in stark contrast to the Black Panther chick with the fucked up Angela Davis Afro who uses Cecil's son as a stepping stone. Oprah's confrontation with that girl is the “Tyler Perry jump up and cheer” takedown moment of 2013.



BOONE


Just like Oprah’s TV show, this film traffics in such raw, grand emotion and sentiment that it can be easy to OD on it. It's such an emotionally charged subject that I already have people attacking my generally positive three star review of the film essentially for not being positive--or reverential--enough. It's but one of the backlashes a film this powerful (and its commentators) will face.



ODIE


In your review, you point out how Daniels uses David Oyelowo's character to mend that riff between the older and the younger generation of Blacks. I also mention his character, Louis, in my review, because he didn't really exist and some reviewers have pounced on this "dishonesty." Yet Louis is important to the film, however clunky his insertion is.

He's the militant while Cecil is the MLK follower. In the documentary, The Black Power Mixtape, we see that distinction between Stokely Carmichael and his mother. In her time, if she made one false move, she was dead. Her generation was more in tune with Dr. King's nonviolence methodology. The same fate of "wrong move, you die" is faced by the younger generation, but they also feel more compelled to fight back. That had not been beaten out of them yet.

I also love how somebody (I think it's Terrence Howard's wife) says "I love me some Dr. King, his militant ass!” MILITANT! That's what ?uestlove calls Dr. King in Black Power Mixtape--and Dr. King WAS back then.



BOONE

Exactly. King's antiwar, anti-American Imperialism, anti-racism speech from April, 1967, a year to the day before his death, was as radical as it got. He was meeting the late Malcolm X halfway. He caught hell from the mainstream press for it. It was essentially his "ballot or the bullet" speech and could be the spiritual script of this movie. What the movie arrives at is that, fundamentally, it’s about resistance.


The way David and Cecil reconciled just physically shook me. It's a tension in the black community that still isn't reconciled and now has so many layers of new troubles and dysfunction on top of it since the Reagan Era.



ODIE


Louis had become a Senator by this time. So now he's dealing with the White House on a more level playing field than Cecil.



BOONE


Which resonated so much for me as an 80's kid who saw a lot of veterans from Civil Rights and Black Power move into politics.



ODIE


Louis also figures in the film's best montage, superbly edited by Joe Klotz. The scene where Cecil sets the table while Louis and his fellow Fisk University students are trained for the sit-in is a great visual juxtaposition. Neither Black person is allowed to sit at the table, and in both cases, it's preferred that they remain invisible.



BOONE

 Yes.



ODIE


The White person who shows the most empathy in the ENTIRE picture is the bespectacled young man who is very uncomfortable calling Louis' girlfriend nigger during the sit-in training.



BOONE

YES.



ODIE

He says "I'm very uncomfortable with that," and it felt so genuine. I felt sorry for the guy!



BOONE


I've never seen a re-enactment of young civil rights activists done so naturally, without the actors being too busy trying to convince us that they are upright, model, Poitieresque good kids. In such scenes I usually feel the filmmakers being careful to make the (white) audience comfortable with the fact that the kids aren't simply human but GOOD and CLEAN. Here, Daniels just gets them to be real people reacting to real and anticipated terrorism. The post-Django Unchained movies on American race make it plain: this was terrorism.



ODIE


The violence perpetrated on these kids is terrifying. Daniels shows a dark chocolate skinned girl getting hit in the face with the whitest vanilla shake I have ever seen. It's done with such force that I jumped. It splatters so obscenely that it looked like a violation of epic proportion. I thought "ooh, the nasty version of  Lee Daniels directed that moment!"


BOONE

Your review and your comments here get at how Daniels uses light, shadow and color values to push past our jadedness at four decades of tidy, solemn Black History Month Civil Rights Moments on TV. He might have had an easier job of it if he'd just shot in black and white, but he went the other way, putting these images we've seen so many times in high definition stereo.



ODIE

Through the brothers Charlie and Louis, The Butler also shows what options there were for Black men in the 60's. One could work either in a blue collar capacity (as Howard does), get involved in the movement as Louis does, be a servant as Cecil does, or go to Vietnam. We know of Charlie's fate as soon as he tells Louis his intentions. But what else could he have done? My Pops went to Vietnam, and when he came back, he eventually became an auto worker.

I liked the dynamic between Louis and Charlie--their brotherly banter is great and far too underrepresented in Black movies.

Cuba’s Uncle Carter also gets involved in the brotherly dynamic, as the guy one could turn to in "Don't tell my parents" situations. "Y'all better GIMME BACK MY MONEY!" he says after bailing Louis out of jail.



"Quotes about money are my stock in trade, baby!"


BOONE

That one scene of Charlie and Louis chatting at the jail  is such a rare thing. The spontaneity, the humor, the effortless way they express their loving bond. It seems so standard as I write it down, but we are still starving for this kind of thing onscreen.



ODIE


I have three brothers, and it sounded like the shit we popped growing up. "What's with all the leather, Louise?" Charlie asks Louis. Isn't it crazy that we're talking about minor dialogue in this fashion? It shows just how thirsty we are for REAL communication onscreen.



BOONE


We're in a rich time, though. The Ava DuVernays and Ryan Cooglers are seizing the moment with the new technologies and distribution platforms. They are making movies with these small gestures and pleasures, which are really everything we need. The audience at large needs to remember that people are interesting, but the black audience in particular needs to see it in the worst way.



ODIE


I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with DuVernay in Poland at the 2013 Off Plus Camera Film Festival.


(l. to r.: Odie, MaƂgorzata Radkiewicz, Ava DuVernay, MichaƂ Oleszczyk)


Her film, Middle of Nowhere, was screened in competition, and I loved how it tells its story visually. Her cinematographer on that is a brother named Bradford Young. He also shot Pariah and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Like the masters Gordon Willis and John A. Alonzo, he knows how to make Black skin GLOW. Watch out for this dude. He's gonna be big.

And jumping back to the dialogue: The Butler has some prime nuggets of Blackness! They sound improvised too. Oprah saying "Get yo' YELLOW ASS offa mah couch and go home!" to Terrence Howard almost gave me a stroke.



BOONE

That is probably second only to Cuba’s "That nigga says nigga..."



ODIE


Let's close this out with a few words on casting. I called the Presidential celebrities stunt casting, but in actuality, I thought this was Daniels' most subversive stroke of genius. It's as if he's saying, to these Negroes in my film, these high-power White folks could be anybody--aliens from Mars or some shit. Who cares who plays whom, so long as it's somebody you immediately identify as famous. At the end of the day, Cecil and company see just another White person giving orders and/or treating them like shit. "Y'all all look the same."



BOONE


Yeah, and I also think of Dave Chappelle's super-fake beards and wigs when he does famous characters. And his kabuki-makeup white newscaster. Daniels doesn't go that far, but there's a similar sense of play. He might also be giving back a little taste of the ridiculous casting for famous black people in Ho'wood movies, like light skinned brothers playing Miles Davis or some such.



ODIE

I never thought of that, but it makes perfect sense. Because I just saw a movie where Terrence Howard played Nelson Mandela. I kept looking at him cross-eyed.



 Because Nelson Mandela is not high yella.



BOONE

Hahahaa



ODIE

(watching movie) "Did he get bleached while in jail?"



BOONE

Those Apartheid motherfuckers had some cruel tortures. Took ten years to get him back ta his original color.



ODIE


I mean, Mandela has been played by Morgan Freeman, Danny Glover, Sidney Poitier…and Terrence Howard. I could hear the Sesame Street song going "One of these things is not like the other..."

So I think you're onto something. Maybe this is Daniels' way of giving back to the community that thinks Nina Simone was Zoe Saldana's complexion. It would explain why Rickman's Ronnie looked like Boris Karloff's Frankenstein.



BOONE

When I took my glasses off he looked like the Spitting Image Puppets version of Reagan.



ODIE

What was that puppet show from the 80's? DC Follies? That's what Rickman looked like.





OK, closing thoughts! You first!



BOONE


This was my first Lee Daniels film, and it came preceded by a trainload of reputation. Daniels was supposed to be either so bad he's good or so brilliant his garish style is misunderstood as unintentional. The Butler turned out to be simply a very good and rich historical melodrama made for the general audience by, as you observed so well, a lusty freakazoid who is nevertheless in control. I dig that. Not to fall into the habit of validating a black auteur by comparing him to a Euro legend, but didn't that describe Luis Bunuel? An art filmmaker who knew how to play in the commercial arena, flashing a little nylon-stockinged leg occasionally to show us he's still untamed. As much as great civil rights strides, we need that. We need minority artists who are just as free play in the mainstream film arena as they tend to be in other arts. Miles and Michael and Jimi and Isaac and Stevie in popular music always pointed up the need for similar artists in popular cinema. Lee Daniels’ The Butler is no masterpiece, but it is clearly the work of an artist, not merely a Hollywood hustler. An artist who is thinking long thoughts about the history, legacy and destiny of his people and his country. Cool!



ODIE


Absolutely. When our fellow Ebert Contributor MichaƂ went to see Lee Daniels' The Butler, he said it was preceded by about 12 trailers, all of which were for Black themed movies. I can only hope that not all 12 of them were for variants of Soul Plane 9 (the Black version of District 9). Just hearing the sheer number of Black movies, not to mention how much I enjoyed the ones I've seen this year, made me smile. We can only hope that these adventures in cinematic Negritude are undertaken by directors with strong, independent visions. And yes, they can be freaky, because regardless of what the snide society of film critics say, we need more Lee Danielses out there. Blacks and Hispanics and gays and women who are beholden to their passions, perversions and fears, and are willing to exorcise them onscreen for our edification and pleasure. Lee Daniels' The Butler will play in schools for years to come, and I just hope that none of those kids' parents rent any of his other movies thinking they have the same kind of educational value as The Butler. Unless these kids are as perverted as we were growing up, the poor bastards will probably be traumatized.

Until next time! We outta here.