Sinners

 

 

One-third of the way into Ryan Coogler's masterful world-unification, consciousness-raising vampire flick, Sinners, he and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw stage a jaw-dropping dance hall spectacle that is a testament to the creative verve of these frequent collaborators.

The film is set in 1932 during the opening of a new juke joint set up by twin gangsters Elijah and Elias / Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) in a barn acquired from a white landowner (David Maldonado), who assures the battlefield-hardened duo the Klan was no longer around to terrorize folks. Of course, we'll discover this is not true.

Smoke and Stack left their home in Mississippi as boys looking for better opportunities, but as they tell young sharecropper / bluesman Sammie / Preacher Boy (a terrific Miles Caton), Chicago was Mississippi with tall buildings and no plantations. They've come home to fight the devil they know. Of course, we will take this tossed off remark literally before the film is over.

The opening night gutbucket (the soundtrack for Sinners is a full-blooded character) is interrupted by a white trio led by red-eyed creeper Remmick (Jack O'Connell), who the audience was introduced to earlier when he descended on the home of a Klansman (Peter Dremainis) and his wife (Lola Kirke).

Remmick asks to come into the party but he gives off enough bad vibes to be refused entry. He and the others will eventually find their way into the compound, of course, after much blood is shed and after Coogler, who wrote the screenplay, lays out some intriguing ideas about how best to identify and respond to an existential enemy.

Sinners spans genres, audiences and tastes, but will undoubtedly be appreciated on its deepest level (and there are many levels to this story) by those familiar with the adage "every closed eye ain't sleep, every goodbye ain't gone."

And, of course, are ready to take this quite literally.

Jay North

 

Jay North, who died yesterday at age 73, was one of the scores of child television stars from 60 years ago who could not outgrow their characters. Some did not survive to see adulthood.

Domestic comedies like Dennis the Menace were the staple of Kennedy-era America. They offered gentle humor as counterpoint to hard-boiled crime dramas and dusty westerns. Performers became household names because there were so few networks creating product, and North along with the child stars of Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, Donna Reed, Family Affair, etc. were familiar faces, plastered on the cover of TV Guide. They were members of our mediated community.

It's tragically ironic that these shows so often created upheaval in the lives of young people on the screen.

North, who reported suffering abuse at the hands of his guardians, was Dennis Mitchell for four seasons from '59 to '63 and finally moved on from the towhead in overalls to star in a very different and wholly unsuccessful TV adaptation of the motion picture Maya, in which he starred in 1966. North was one of two young lads, the other being a Hindu boy played by Sajid Khan, traveling India on the back of the eponymous pachyderm.

I remember little about the series except feeling at the time that it reminded me of another NBC series, Tarzan (1966-1968), and the CBS jungle show of the same period, Daktari (1966-1969). Looking back, I guess I would describe them as "white folks in the wild."

By all reports, North was a good guy with a good heart. He served in the Navy, briefly, and did some TV and stage work, guest appearances and such, but finally became a correctional officer for juveniles in the Florida prison system.

I hadn't thought about Dennis Mitchell in years. Reports like this make me wistful but then I recognize I never actually knew Jay North, just what the entertainment factory showed me he was. But I suppose that's true for everyone. We're so much more than what's on the outside.

The Residence

 

As thoroughly delectable as Paul William Davies' White House murder mystery The Residence is, Episode 7, The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb, is the most brilliantly written and performed.

The miniseries' wonderful wit is delivered by Uzo Adubo as savant birdwatcher / detective Cordelia Cupp and her FBI sidekick Edwin Park (Randall Park) as they try to piece together the disparate clues and toss out the red herrings in search of a killer. It's a cagey story about the death of the White House Chief Usher (Giancarlo Esposito), who died during a State Dinner, where nearly everyone on the White House staff is a suspect in his demise.

The penultimate episode, though tremendously funny like the others, is tender in its treatment of love in the time of chaos. It is presented in the persons of Julieth Restrepo and Mel Rodriguez, the amiable housekeeper and long-suffering maintenance engineer, respectively, who may or may not have killed Esposito's officious A.B. Wynter, who may or may not have had it coming.

The section of the episode that recounts the unfolding of their chaste romance is marvelous and sweet and totally beguiling as it also might contain the answer to the question that's boggled both the executive and legislative branches -- Who killed the chief usher and why did they do it?

The show earns every accolade that has been showered on it, and much of its beauty -- the intricacy of this production -- is on display in Episode 7.

 

Repulsion (1965)

 

A senior theater kid at the university told a group of us back in '76 we HAD to see the film playing at the Russell House. She'd seen it for her film studies class. It was about a white woman in Paris who goes mad and thinks all men are after her. 

"There's one scene where the walls reach out to grab her, " I recall her saying.

Not familiar with art house pictures or know Polanski from Tchaikovsky at that point, I was game. Hell, that's what's great about universities! Exploring the unknown and unfamiliar. Being open to experiences. Even if we ended up not caring for it.

And it was free!

Needless to say, I loved Repulsion (1965) -- everything about it was wild and provocative and messed up and meaningful. 

Catherine Deneuve is not just a sexually repressed young woman having a bad weekend; she is all of humanity in a paranoid, untrusting world, isolated, victimized by our own dark distrust, abandoning sanity and goodness and letting them rot as we wander about in fearful delusion.

Of course, I didn't see that then. I just saw it as strange and sophisticated, as a child would, through a glass, darkly.

But as I have matured, I see it better. Even more clearly 50 years later.

That's how life works -- if we're lucky.

The Amateur

 

 

British director James Hawes moves out of his usual terrain of series television to tackle the globe-trotting revenge thriller, The Amateur starring Rami Malek. A picture that is undermined by the thinness of its premise and the thoroughness of its trailer. 

 

Every big moment in the story of a CIA analytical genius's quest to hunt down the people who killed his wife is contained in the picture's 2-minute trailer, including most of Laurence Fishburne's featured turn as a trainer of agency assets who tells Malik's Charlie Heller he doesn't have the heart of a killer. Heller, of course, spends most of the movie showing there's more than one way to kill a black-ops spy. 

 

The Amateur is a bit of fun at times and owes much to the Bourne catalogue but could use a bit more derring-do, another car chase or two and villains that snarl better than Holt McCallany and Danny Sapani.

 

Appropriate

 

I read Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' award-winning play Appropriate some months back and have let its searing story of race, retribution, familial dysfunction and denial marinate.

The 2023 Broadway revival of Appropriate, which was first staged in 2013, won a Tony. Jacobs-Jenkins is a MacArthur Fellow, a true genius. I've not read Jacobs-Jenkins' other works but his status as a theatrical savant is supported by this one piece alone.

A white Arkansas family meets at the homestead to settle accounts on the property, divide up whatever spoils they are able to realize, and go their decidely separate, bitter ways. While going through the detritus of the life of their recently departed patriarch, they discover hideous photographs of lynchings in an album. Additionally, unmarked graves are found on the property.

The already fractured family grows even more so as they debate what's to be done with the property in light of the discoveries. Old resentments are resurrected, and the three central siblings -- a domineering older sister and her two brothers -- spin out of control -- their spouses, companions and children tossed about and variously used as shields and deflectors.

It's a brutal and devastating work that Jacobs-Jenkins closes with the set falling into ruin in front of the audience.

The metaphor is stark and pointed and brilliant and real -- and now.

I love that the play's title, Appropriate, can be read as either "proper" or "theft," depending on one's disposition, where one stands in relation to what is going on.

Again. How fitting.

 

Magazine Dreams

 

 

When critics say Jonathan Majors gives a "committed" performance in Elijah Bynum's brutal character study Magazine Dreams, they mean the actor plows through physical, emotional and psychological terrains with a competence and complexity lesser actors would only get partly right. 

 

Majors -- whose bright career was scuttled by his conviction two years ago on charges of domestic abuse -- convincingly sells the whole persona of his damaged bodybuilder, Killian Maddox, and the man's pursuit of perfection, recognition, acceptance, maybe even human connection despite not wanting to be touched.

 

Majors spends much of the film in his skivvies, posing in front of the mirror, recording clunky workout reels for social media, or in the gym, pounding out reps and cursing himself. He pushes steroids into his hip and does lines of cocaine to get him through his training, all while caring for his ailing, war-veteran grandfather, played by Harrison Page. Maddox is a loaded, imposing powder keg, and audiences will sit anxiously waiting for the explosion. The brilliance of the film is the blast doesn't come in the expected ways. 

 

Maddox's mental illness will be immediately clear to observant audiences, but nonetheless it is affirmed by his counselor (Harriet Sansom Harris), who can barely contain her painful worry about the young, likely schizophrenic who struggles with murderous ideation. 

 

His attempts at outreach are cringe-inducing -- he sends mash notes to his bodybuilding idol (Michael O'Hearn), whom he eventually meets, and moons over a young supermarket cashier (Haley Bennett), a co-worker Maddox asks on a date in THE most awkward proposition I've seen on film in quite some time. Both of these explorations are bruising disasters for very different reasons, but each pushes the volatile Maddox close to the edge. 

 

Bynum's film, his first major feature, is being compared, favorably mostly, with Scorsese's classic Taxi Driver (1976). Magazine Dreams simmers and steams and occasionally boils over. Majors delivers every level of intensity, leaving audiences pummeled and breathless.

 

It's a bravura performance in an unnerving and exhausting film, tough going from start to finish.