by ·Comments Off on Irreversible (2002, Gaspar Noé)

It’s Cannes Fortnight 2021! I was gonna watch this anyway, eventually, then noticed there’s a new Gaspar playing Cannes this year, so “eventually” became now. In in the mood for some cinema after taking things easy post-True/False, rounding up some recent Cannes titles I missed, and some by this year’s crop of directors.

Wonked-out closing/opening credits sequence, then the camera spirals and weaves around a courtyard, Massive Attack’s La Protection Centrale. I didn’t know what was happening for a good long time, the I Stand Alone guy philosophizing with anonymous Frenchman Albert Dupontel (a war survivor in A Very Long Engagement), but it becomes clear as the movie woozily whips us through the rest of the story in reverse order. I was gonna say it takes us from one sordid scene to another, but that’d be underselling one of the most extremely sordid films of the last twenty years. I read a piece recently, thought it was by Charles Bramesco but can’t find it now so who knows, calling Promising Young Woman a weaksauce take on the rave/revenge story, and it came to mind a few times while watching this, a decidedly strongsauced rape/revenge story, because is that such a desirable thing? Is the point to seek out the most extreme rape/revenge cinema? Ultimately, the “time destroys all things” thesis, the film title and the reverse-action gimmick framing the horrors had me appreciating this much more than, say, Revenge, though I can’t feel naughtily transgressive about liking a movie that comes highly recommended by every critic I respect.

by ·Comments Off on The Day Shall Come (2019, Christopher Morris)

“Lenny’s a racist, but he’s one of the good ones.” Filipe’s short letterboxd review kept coming to mind, “the overall absurdism does have its moments and Morris’s anger comes through,” especially when the movie ends with cops and feds getting cheerfully promoted for destroying the lives of cool weirdos. Lead weirdo is Moses, who runs a black militant duck farm. Agent Anna Kendrick is looking for people to set up to take credit for saving the world from terrorism I guess. The feds determine Moses’s crew is no threat, but after Moses sells fake uranium to nazi cop Jim Gaffigan (!), the higher-ups get involved and everybody below goes to jail.

Moses presides:

Danielle Brooks (Clemency the same year) gives Santa a touch-up:

Afrika nails informant Kayvan Novak (Four Lions):

by ·Comments Off on Between the World and Me (2020, Kamilah Forbes)

Sometimes when you’ve fallen behind on the ol’ blog, you realize that thirty movies ago, you took no notes on a movie that consisted mostly of essay readings by powerful actors, with newly photographed and stock footage visuals, written as a letter to the author’s teenage son about systemic racism. Katy wanted to watch it in case her students, assigned the book to read, try to get away with only watching the movie. Good film – Forbes had previously worked on a doc miniseries on a slam poetry competition, and appeared in a Grand Theft Auto game.

by ·Comments Off on Mangrove (2020, Steve McQueen)

Frank (Shaun Parkes of the current Lost in Space reboot) is the restaurant owner and social center who gets all the soulful closeups, Altheia (Letitia Wright) is the requisite movie star, a pregnant Black Panther, Darcus (Malachi Kirby of the latest Roots reboot) is a self-representing defendant who gets all the best speeches, and Barbara (Rochenda Sandall, who used to play a character named McQueen) has the best hair, and a spiel about how the children are our future. That leaves whiteys Jack Lowden (Dunkirk) as their lawyer who looks like Austin Powers’ buttoned-up brother, and Sam Spruell (Russian baddie of Taken 3) as the racist pig leader.

Kirby:

First half is in the streets and the restaurant, figuring out how to make a life without getting hassled by the pigs (impossible), second half has real based-on-a-true-court-case energy, as indeed it was. The lines aren’t as head-smacking as they were in Widows, and McQueen finds some evocative visuals every so often, but mostly powering through this to get to Lovers Rock.

by ·Comments Off on Tales from the Hood (1995, Rusty Cundieff)

Every SHOCKtober you’ve gotta watch an anthology horror… this played at the Plaza this month, but I didn’t feel like going out during the apocalypse so I watched the blu-ray at home.

Three drug guys have heard that there’s a package for them at a funeral home, but before he’ll give them “the shit,” the mortician shows some bodies and tells how each met their demise. So far, so anthology-horror, but the difference here is that the framing story is the best part, due to an incredible performance by mortician Clarence Williams III (Prince’s dad in Purple Rain, a lead on The Mod Squad, and hey, this is my second movie in a row with an actor from The Cool World). He plays it big and campy, with a comic unpredictability without losing his menacing edge, and whenever the three guys ask for their shit, he repeats “the shit” in the craziest way.

Anyway, story one: Anthony Griffith (of Panther the same year) is a rookie Black cop whose white partners beat a Black political rival (Tom Wright, also star of an anthology segment in Creepshow 2) to death while “Strange Fruit” plays – so it’s gonna be an unsubtle social issues movie. Anthony can’t take the heat and leaves the force, but that’s not good enough. “Where were you when I needed you?” After hunting down and killing the three cops as brutally and ironically as possible, the vengeful ghost frames Anthony for their deaths. One of the white cops was in The Crow, another in Texas Chainsaw Massacre III.

The next story involves extreme domestic abuse mixed with It’s a Good Life. I dunno what made them cast David Alan Grier as a violent monster stepdad, but it works out. The writer/director plays a concerned teacher who comes to student Walter’s house, meets his hot mom (Paula Jai Parker of She Hate Me and Friday), and they all get tormented by wicked Grier until Walter (who later played Young Michael Jordan in Space Jam!) takes his psychic revenge.

A racist white southern politician named Duke (heh) is running on an anti-affirmative action platform while living in a house where a lot of bad historical shit went down, until a small army of stop-motion dolls imbued with the souls of murdered slaves take him out (this has better puppetry than the Puppet Master movies). Corbin Bernsen (between Major League II and The Dentist) is the main racist, and Roger Guenveur Smith (Do the Right Thing‘s Smiley) is his image consultant (who is also murdered).

Starting to bring things home for the framing-story boys, the fourth body is a guy they knew. Jerome (Lamont Bentley of TV’s Moesha) is a crazy murderous gangster paired up with a klansman in prison by “experimental” doctor Rosalind Cash (Buckaroo Banzai, The Omega Man) under the logic that they both killed a lotta Black people. Jerome is tormented, but won’t repent, and all this turns out to be a years-long dying fantasy as he’s killed in the street in the first, pre-prison scene.

Cash died of cancer just months after this film’s release:

Obviously at this point the three dudes are gonna discover coffins of their own in the funeral home, though I didn’t need the mortician to turn into a literal demon, he was fine as he was.

Rusty also directed Chappelle’s Show and made Fear of a Black Hat, which suddenly seems essential. One of his two belated sequels stars Keith David in the mortician role, which could work, and the other stars Tony Todd. Rusty’s cowriter on all three films is Darin Scott (also: Vincent Price anthology From a Whisper to a Scream, Danny Trejo anthology Mr. Malevolent, and he directed Jeffrey Combs in Dark House).

by ·Comments Off on Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019, Matt Wolf)

“She was extremely fearful that america would replicate nazi Germany,” so these things come in cycles. Marion started recording the news during the late ’79 Iran hostage crisis, didn’t stop until her death in 2012, and this doc was made years later so we get interviews (with her two families and the nurse and chauffeur) and re-enactments. Most of the tape footage shown is news highlights of major events, not necessarily something you’d need a comprehensive archive for, but a couple of obscure gems are thrown in. Centerpiece of the doc is a split-screen of four networks in real-time watching the WTC disaster. Marion produced a talk TV show in Philly – her favorite topic was the open exchange of ideas, though at home she was extremely controlling. Guess it’s hard to fit the life of a complicated person and 30+ years of news coverage into ninety minutes, but I look forward to the projects that’ll come out using the digital archive of her tapes.

Choice footage of this guy getting scolded for being racist:

by ·Comments Off on What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (2018, Roberto Minervini)

Louisiana and Mississippi, cutting between different threads. After the lovely and gentle Stop the Pounding Heart led to the intimate look of The Other Side led to the racist militia at the end of that movie, it’s nice to reset and spend time with the New Black Panther Party. And after a month of watching movies on the laptop screen, it’s nice to see this on the big(ger) screen, experiencing as close as I’ll get to cinema this summer.

Michael Sicinski on Mubi via letterboxd:

As with Minervini’s previous films, there is something both startling and a bit disconcerting about the degree of access he achieves, as well as the fact that his camera crew is almost never acknowledged. How does he get so close, capturing key emotional moments like Judy’s cousin Michael finally visiting his mother’s gravesite, or Judy herself meeting a fellow addict and describing her years of abuse? One of the things that Minervini accomplishes in What You Gonna Do…, both with these scenes, the New Black Panther meetings, and in some consciousness-raising moments in Judy’s bar, is a careful depiction of free black discourse, the kind of discussion about identity, politics, and culture that a community can have when they are not worried about how outside listeners will misconstrue their words.

by ·Comments Off on Hollywood Shuffle (1987, Robert Townsend)

Satire about the limited/terrible roles for black men in hollywood movies – Townsend’s directorial debut, a few months before his film of Eddie Murphy Raw (and containing some hilarious Murphy impressions). Sometimes it’s clunky and low-budget, but overall a winning comedy. There’s a main plot, where aspiring actor Townsend gets cast in a demeaning role and takes the moral high ground by walking out, but half the movie is sketches and parodies, reimagining Hollywood hits with black actors. This was a couple years before cowriter Keenan Ivory Wayans would create In Living Color. Townsend’s girl is played by Anne-Marie Johnson of Robot Jox, and Paul Mooney plays the head of the NAACP.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts by Arthur Jafa

Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016)

Watching the Alsarabi youtube bootleg since this is only playing in museums. It’s a news and history dance video to a Kanye West song, footage sourced from all over, some with TV station and Getty Images watermarks. Lots of new-to-me clips with some very familiar images interspersed. Really great, powerful montage though (and I don’t call movies “powerful” often, search the blog and see).

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Ms. Hillsonga (2017)

A minute of still images set to a fast beat by Jeff Mills, cut almost too quickly to be identifiable (including the shot my letterboxd avatar is from), then the images repeat but motion video footage is added, then it repeats again with new clips or stills substituted to keep things lively. More great montage, again full of imagery of Black freedom and oppression, the footage replacement reminding me of Zorns Lemma in a good way.

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Deshotten 1.0 (2009)

Another one with repetition and variations. Young man gets shot in a busy street scene, ends up in hospital with friends and family, then it keeps rewinding and playing out differently, maybe just in his own mind. I love the music, sounds like a Squarepusher song heard from a couple blocks away. Codirected with his TNEG film studio partner Malik Sayeed (TNEG has a lofty mission statement)

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Dreams are Colder Than Death (2013)

Artists comment in voiceover about the risk of losing black culture and connection… where things stand on “the goals and ambitions of the civil rights movement in the United States… does the dream live on?”

Statements range from the personal to the academic – I liked the bit comparing jazz musicians to the tension between legality and criminality – a low, constant doom-rumble on the soundtrack beneath the words.

Much more calmly paced than his other work. His most Khalik Allah-like movie, what with the street photography and unsynced sound. Stock photography (that red-sun image I’ve seen in all his films, MLK, war and slavery scenes) and slow-mo shots of the speakers (who include Charles Burnett).

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One gallery says Jafa’s artworks “question prevailing cultural assumptions about identity and race,” which is pretty generic – they also say “he is a filmmaker with a unique understanding of how to cut and juxtapose a sequence to draw out maximum visceral effect,” which sounds right. Aha, he has shot Spike Lee movies and Daughters of the Dust and some music videos. I was just the 26 millionth person to watch Solange’s “Don’t Touch My Hair” video, and all those people are onto something, this is good.

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I tried listening to the ICP panel discussion, but academics are hard to listen to while at work, so I skipped ahead to Jafa shitting on 12 Years a Slave, haha. He outlines a script he’s written tying together the Birmingham church bombing, Coretta Scott and Michael Jackson through alternate timelines.

On Daughters of the Dust: “There’s an alternate universe in which Julie Dash is the Toni Morrison of film. It’s not this one, cuz this one is kinda fucked up.”

“We have to transform the understanding of the real” through film.