Watchmen

HBO's Watchmen is conceptually thoroughgoing -- as well constructed as the best among pay television's offerings. Its narrative is complex and its visual aspects spectacular. It also features an unsettling undercurrent of distrust that probably reflects the view many people of color have of law enforcement and elected officials, especially in the South but not exclusively. Skepticism is not solely the province of graphic novels and speculative fiction but here it runs especially deep, etched in the face of Sister Knight (Regina King) and her mysterious grandfather (Louis Gossett Jr.). Her husband Cal / Dr. Manhattan (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) offers placating embraces that run as counterpoint to Knight's battering instinctive rhythms, but then he stands to be destroyed by his passivity. Message? Fight or get beat.

Below is the Peabody committee's citation for the series' award. It refers to the series' depiction of how Americans understand their place in the world. To some, the series reflects uncertainty more than anything definitive or enduring.

"...Watchmen provides new answers to classic genre questions such as what it means to mask one’s identity and who gets to be a superhero, but more than that, it offers a frank and provocative reflection on contemporary racialized violence, on the role of police, and on the consequences of a large-scale disaster on the way Americans understand their place in the world. For world-building and storytelling that fuses speculative fiction with historical and contemporary realities, Watchmen deserves a Peabody."

Lee and Scorsese

Spike Lee may actually be a better documentarian than he is a feature filmmaker -- at least, to me, his non-fictional works are routinely superb. Especially noteworthy is his filming of stage productions -- his recording of the final performance of the relatively little-seen Broadway show Passing Strange (2009) is a favorite of mine. That is why I'm so eagerly awaiting his film of the David Byrne concert / performance piece American Utopia.

Lee, born in Atlanta but reared in Brooklyn, is friends with fellow New Yorker Martin Scorsese, whom he clearly admires. Both Lee and Scorsese are tireless and prolific, projects continuously rolling out of their studios. One of Scorsese's early triumph's was 1978's The Last Waltz, the final concert by The Band, which last year was added to the National Film Registry.

The Last Waltz has been mentioned in previews of Lee's upcoming film, no doubt because they are both about music and iconic figures. Those of us who know The Last Waltz no doubt have favorite performances. This is mine -- The Weight -- where we go to church. Stick around for Mavis's benediction right at the end. "Beautiful!"

The Weight from The Last Waltz

Woke

 

Hulu's new original series Woke puts a bit of Atlanta's struggling millennials wrestling with race and class consciousness and blackAF's plain-spoken irreverence to work in the story of an accommodating Black San Francisco cartoonist, Keef, who is just about to break into syndication with his popular series Toast 'n' Butter when an encounter with profiling police derails his plans, and his self-concept, and he begins the hard work of finding himself and his creative voice. Yes, it's a comedy. And, yes, it's wonderfully insightful. It's not as glib as some other trendy streaming series and has the added value of inanimate objects speaking truth to Lamorne Morris's Keef and the world. Morris gets hilarious assists from T. Murph and Blake Anderson as his woke and wasted roommates Clovis and Gunther, respectively, and from Sasheer Zamata as the editor of an alternative publication who pushes Keef's buttons.

Narratives and Static Images

As you closely read the two photographs above -- Sally Mann's "Candy Cigarette"(top) and Diane Arbus's "Identical Twins" -- think about the narratives these photographs suggest. How do the two worlds differ? What stories do they evoke in your mind as a viewer of these static images?  

Project Power

Jamie Foxx's lastest film, Project Power, is high-concept and derivative but not lacking in entertainment value. The story is about an international cartel peddling regime change in the form of glowing yellow pills that really pack a wallop. The movie's action sequences usually involve characters taking a capsule that will genetically modify them into super humans for about five minutes. That's clearly where the film's substantial Netflix budget was invested and not to A-class narrative scripting. The film has the feel of a series pilot -- just that many unanswered questions remain after the last epochal explosion. Still Foxx, who plays a murky ex-commando on a righteous mission, is always watchable, and he gets decent support from Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a good but sketchy New Orleans undercover cop with a power obsession and Dominique Fishback as a spunky but pouty low-level "power" dealer doing the wrong things for the right reasons.

Chadwick Boseman

I think what has pushed the outpouring of grief for Chadwick Boseman's passing into another realm for me was the South Carolina governor's order to lower the flags for Sunday, and perhaps my knee-jerk skepticism that the gesture was meant to mollify critics among the state's black population. I cannot recall the last time such an order was made at the death of a native son who was an entertainer.

It seems to me that Boseman's death comes at the intersection of several national crises -- conflict, violence, distrust, disease, uncertainty. We were raw, and losing one so suddenly, at least to the public eye, was deeply wounding.

Though Boseman had been a television actor for years before celebrated roles as Jackie Robinson ('13), James Brown ('14) and Thurgood Marshall ('17), those films rode a crest of public interest in stories of great black men (no doubt buoyed by the Obama presidency). His performance as T'Challa in Black Panther (2018) was actually the second time moviegoers had seen the character as he was introduced in the Captain America film two years before. But the world Black Panther the film explored was so different from that promoted by pervasive racist narratives that it sparked a sort of spiritual black nationalism that was not unlike the posture of Black Lives Matter, which was founded several years before, and other movements trying to counter not only anti-black violence but to inspire a spiritual awakening reminiscent of the Black Power movement of the '60s.

The Wakanda salute -- crossed forearms (right over left) pulled against the chest created by Black Panther director Ryan Coogler -- seemed to echo the power salute of earlier black protest but, interestingly, combined ancient African pharaonic poses and the American Sign Language's symbol for "hug" into an affirming resolution.