Backrooms

 

Writer/director Kane Parsons' Backrooms offers moviegoers reprieve from real-world craziness by ushering them through the ocre-colored liminal spaces "under" Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire furniture store in Santa Cruz, where interiors appear to have been designed by M.C. Escher.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is Clark, the beleaguered proprietor of the furniture store, who discovers an alternative universe of interconnected rooms beneath his store. He entered through a dimensional portal, and the spaces appear to be both vacant and inhabited. Some contain remnants of lives and consciousness, products of either the supernatural or the psychotic.

Clark tells his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), about what he's found, but she greets his news about mysterious, abandoned rooms with anxious skepticism. Unknown to Clark, Mary's history with both abandonment and empty rooms has been traumatic. Clark, disappointed in her responses, storms out, promising to bring her proof.

Clark enlists his assistant manager, Kat (Lukita Maxwell), and her boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), to help him document on camera the strangeness he's found. This, as one might expect, is a really bad move, as the picture's cold opening of found footage suggests.

After leaving a cryptic message on Mary's phone, Clark disappears. Mary goes to the store to check on him. She finds Clark and much more in the cavernous, disorienting backrooms.

I was not familiar with Parsons' YouTube series The Backrooms, created under the name Kane Pixels, and so I am not sure if having that background would help me better parse the movie's themes of disconnection and detachment and the fabrication of nightmares from lived experiences.

Backrooms might best be viewed as akin to the work of absurdist filmmakers like Buñuel and Lynch, where trying to make sense is, well, nonsense.

Just go with it.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

 

Fans of the enormous Star Wars franchise might feel actor/writer/director Jon Favreau's latest entry in the exuberant series, The Mandalorian and Grogu, spent most of the picture's $165 million budget on spectacularly creepy creatures rather than narrative. The movie is predictably and unquestionably eye-popping, but it also feels a bit like a retread.

In this installment, the helmeted bounty hunter (Pedro Pascal when unhelmeted) and his cuddly omnivorous baby buddy Grogu (a green animatronic puppet that is movie marketers dream) are commissioned by an officer of the New Republic (an always welcomed but regretably wasted Sigourney Weaver) to rescue Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), the son of the beastly Jabba the Hutt (first seen 40 years ago in Return of the Jedi). Rotta is reportedly the prisoner of Lord Janu (Jonny Coyne), a competing scoundrel who runs a gladiator circus.

As usually happens in these tales, the mission hits a few snags and reverses, and the Mandalorian himself gets sidelined for a while. At this point, the film shifts into a sweet but draggy gear featuring Baby Grogu. This gives the audience a bit of a breather after a non-stop 60 minutes of flight and fight before the final reel's showdown.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is replete with Jon Favreau signature wit and the occasional tender moment. It will undoubtedly be an enjoyable snack for moviegoers who might be more eagerly anticipating Ryan Gosling's Starfighter to be released next May.

I Love Boosters

 

The second feature film by Hip-Hop's most colorful Marxist, writer/director Boots Riley, I Love Boosters, doubles up on the surreal aspects in Sorry to Bother You (2018) and doubles down on its messages of worker outrage and collective revolt.

For this outing, Riley -- who is also the frontman and creative force for The Coup and co-founder of rock/rap hybrid Street Sweeper Social Club with fellow corporate critic Tom Morello -- has fashioned a trippy tale of resistance set in his beloved Oakland that skewers many of capitalism's sacred cows.

KeKe Palmer (Good Fortune, One of Them Days, The 'Burbs) is the leader of a trio of haute-couture thieves who swipe clothing from stores, the "boosting" of the title, for reselling at considerably reduced prices.

The scheme -- which hasn't paid off in the way Palmer's "Corvette" dreamt it would -- gets complicated when Corvette targets a local high-end designer, Christie Smith (a especially brassy Demi Moore), whose work aspirant designer Corvette admires.

When Corvette and partners Sade (Naomie Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) decide to stage a hit from inside one of Smith's Metro Design stores, their plan is thwarted by another booster, a young Chinese woman with a futuristic device whose programming is a hilarious goolash of physics and political philosophy. The film is ingenious in its convolution and one either goes with it or not.

With cameos from Don Cheadle and Boots Riley regular LaKeith Stanfield, truly outlandish costuming, radical polemics, whiffs of new age hucksterism and demon possession, and an unbelievable vehicle chase through an urban mall, "I Love Boosters" is an irresistible old-school "freak-out" for those hip enough to hop on.

Obsession

Writer/director Curry Barker's romance nightmare, Obsession, will be a treat for Blumhouse horror fans who like their love gooey and their gore with heaping helpings of humor.

After making a wish using a new age-y magic stick, the lonely and seemingly vacuous music store clerk Baron (a terrific Michael Johnston) becomes the fixation of his lovely and vivacious co-worker Nikki (an amazingly unhinged Inde Navarrette), to the shock and awe of their besties Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless).

The night the spell is cast, the formerly independent Nikki moves in with Baron, called "Bear," and they begin an intense though fairly conventional courtship that in short order gets spiced with clingy Nikki's lies, outbursts and threats. 

Baron, who was out of his depth even while longing for attention from the self-assured Nikki, finds himself in the course of a few weeks gasping for air and grasping for sanity in the smothering, suffocating relationship. Barker presents this journey to discovery with moments of genuine, dark hilarity and cringe.

Maybe in crafting this fangoria, Barker reached into his past to relationships that started blissfully and ended badly or worse, or maybe he reflected on personal moments when failing to act or acting rashly meant an escalation of troubles. 

Whatever the case, Obsession offers a deliciously warped turn of that weepy cinema slogan from 1970, "Love means never having to say you're sorry."

Is God Is

 

Writer/director Aleshea Harris's Is God Is joins the work of Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler, Steve McQueen, Barry Jenkins, Melina Matsoukas and J.D. Dillard, among others, in the growing catalog of post-modern Black filmmaking.

Harris has turned her stage play into a wonder of a road trip/quest/phantasmagoria that doubles as a womanist musing on rage and retribution.

The movie stars Kara Young (of the recent celebrated Broadway restaging of Proof) and Mallori Johnson as twins Racine and Anaia, respectively, who are survivors of a childhood fire set by their psychopathic father (Sterling K. Brown) to punish their mother Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) for some perceived slight, leaving them and their mother scarred.

The inseparable twins, who long before moved from their home, are summoned to their mother's deathbed to receive her final wish -- find and kill their father and anyone currently in his life as payback.

The comparatively less scarred Racine has been her disfigured sister's defender for years, so she accepts her mother's commission with enthusiasm; Anaia is not so driven.

The twins follow their father's fairly cold trail to the home/church of the preacher/healer Divine (a refreshing turn from the always-welcome Erika Alexander), for whom he torched and abandoned Ruby and the twins. He eventually dropped Divine, as well, after impregnating her.

From there, Racine and Anaia find their father's lawyer (Mykelti Williamson), who, too, was attacked by his murderous client and is waiting for him to return to finish the job. He warns the twins of the self-destructive force of revenge, but they head out to their father's current home, where he lives with his wife Angie (Janelle Monae) and their twin sons, Riley and Scotch (Justen Ross and Xavier Mills).

The final showdown contains the much-anticipated face-off, but also important revelations about the sisters that might invite audiences to re-evaluate much of what has come before.

Maybe some will ask if there can ever be such a thing as "righteous indignation," and if there is, who does it belong to? God?

Dame Helen Mirren

Seeing Dame Helen Mirren with King Charles at the Royal Garden Party reminded me that I was "introduced" to the celebrated actress, who is now 80, via movie puzzle-master Peter Greenaway's beautiful, bawdy and brutal The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) -- a film that's quite a mouthful, in more ways than one. 

Mirren plays the titular wife to Michael Gambon's Thief, a bitterly boorish and brutish man who is a nightly patron of what must be the most remarkable restaurant in England, where the Lover, the proprietor of a bookstore, is also a frequent diner.

Because the Cook and his crew secretly despise the Thief, they help the Wife and her bookish Lover (Alan Howard) "get busy" in various spots and at various times during the Thief's interminable dinners.

As the Fates would have it, the Lovers are eventually discovered. The Thief's thugs torture the bookish Lover in a horrible and grossly poetic fashion. The Wife, enraged by the death of her Lover, works with the Cook (Richard Bohringer) and his crew to avenge the Lover's death in the most "delectable" way imaginable, putting an end to the Thief's reign of terror.

It's a tour de force that is not to everyone's taste, but was a wonderful "howdy do" to Helen Mirren, whose work never fails to fascinate. She won an Oscar for playing Charles' Mum in The Queen in 2006.

The Sheep Detectives

 

Kyle Balda's The Sheep Detective is a marvelous whodunit in the style of Knives Out but with CGI sheep as the lead investigators.

The human-to-animation ratio is about 50:50, with the most "human" aspects of the movie's clever story in the care of the sheep.

When Hugh Jackman's gentleman shepherd George is found dead outside of his trailer in a lovely little English village one morning, his loyal flock -- led by whipsmart Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfyus) and Mopple with the encyclopedic memory (Chris Dowd) -- go on the hunt for the killer, basing their investigation on the murder mysteries George read to the flock every night.

The sheep uncover clues missed by the town's lone and hapless police officer, played by Nicholas Braun. How they lead the officer to these discoveries is rich and imaginative. He finally gets it together, and in true Christie fashion, each of the possible suspects -- the local butcher, the town vicar, a neighbor farmer, the owner of the town's inn, the victim's estranged daughter -- is revealed to have reason to see gentle George dead, but, as with the best of these pictures, their true means and opportunity are not revealed until the last reel.

The Sheep Detectives is a surprisingly fresh and enterprising treat that even though it features some terrific animated furry critters is not a kid's picture. It is a murder mystery, after all.

Doing Good, Being Good

 

Why do institutions of religious systems appeal to folks wanting cover for their misdeeds?

Why do thieves and predators so often profess belief in divine goodness and morality? Is it just hypocrisy? If so, you don't need to be in a church to be a hypocrite, you just need to say one thing and do the opposite. Why get God involved?

The answer is no doubt quite complex, pulling from the behavioral and social sciences, lots of variables, and there probably isn't one answer that fits all cases. But I think one thing might tie most cases together -- society's assumptions about "people of faith."

Having belonged to more than my share of churches over the years and across the spectrum, I think inquiries could start with the buildings.

Domes, steeples, statuary and emblems of faith in wood, stone, glass and steel show affiliation, but they are also indicators that "good things" are going on inside God's house.

Sanctuary codes come to mind. For centuries, wrong-doers were protected from arrest if they made it to the altar. Lawmen would not pursue them for fear of their own eternal damnation. (This thinking was more common before the era of separation of church and state but might be resurrected in this new age.)

Today's thieves and sex offenders aren't seeking sanctuary from the police and solicitors, but I do think they believe agents of the law don't question church-going people (especially clerics) because a person who draws close to the Creator can't do bad things at the same time. (This might be the primitive thinking behind hanging the Ten Commandments in schools.) Some might also be thinking that miscreants who hide behind God won't escape Final Judgment.

Believers themselves show markers in their clothing, speech and behavior and recognize one another by them. This is that in-group and out-group thing we seem to be so fond of. And, people being people, in-group folk are not scrutinized because they are saying and doing the right things. Once thieves and predators have mastered the code -- the passwords and high signs -- they can get away with a lot.

And do.

The Devil, You Say?

The inside front cover ad in the May 1973 issue of After Dark: The National Magazine of Entertainment was for director Gerard Damiano's The Devil in Miss Jones, a picture that folks in-the-know say bridged the gulf between art house cinema and pornography.

I've never seen the movie, despite it being christened with legitimacy by mainstream critics like Judith Crist and Bruce Williamson, so I can't attest to its artfulness. I did watch the trailer though, and the movie sounds intriguing.

Miss Jones stars Georgina Spelvin (last name misspelled in the ad, but no matter, it was a common adult film starlet moniker) as a dead woman who makes a bargain with the devil's minions that were she allowed to return to the living she would commit every waking moment to lust and carnality. Satan could not resist that deal and off she went to do just that.

Spelvin -- nee Shelley Bob Graham -- turned 90 in March. According to her bio she appeared in more than 70 adult films during the 70s and early 80s (that's sort of hard to believe but whatev). Spelvin also appeared in mainstream pictures and on television, often in cameos as herself.

With such an impressive record of adult film performances, I am tempted (sic) to dub her "Porn's First Lady," but alas that title is already taken. 😆

Midas and the American Dream

For many of us, when greed is mentioned, the cautionary tale of King Midas springs to mind. Midas wished to be able to turn all he touched to gold, but in the end gained unimaginable wealth and lost his humanity.
On its surface, that ancient story might set tragic avarice in the world of powerful men, but that's not reality, is it?
Greed is not restricted to those who have already accumulated wealth or prosperity and just can't get enough.
Folks who don't have the proverbial "pot to pee in" or "window to throw it out of" can also be fixated on having more and more and more -- not necessarily more of what they need, just more.
Economists say U.S. citizens are currently carrying nearly $1.3 trillion in credit card debt, and I suspect that figure will skyrocket in the coming months. I also suspect most of this debt is borne by people living beyond their means.
About half of all monthly credit card balances are carried by people who earn less than $50,000 a year. Economists say they lack the necessary reserves to pay for emergencies or are responding to impulses triggered by Madison Avenue pitchpeople or social media influencers or their need to have more than the Joneses across the street.
Both the financial burden of daily living and the spirit of acquisition drive the American economy -- and make communitarianism, socialism, egalitarianism and related theories so threatening. This is also why concepts like "affordability" seem so foreign to the executive and his ilk, a class of people defined by accumulation and impulsiveness, whose god is capitalism wrapped in a thin democratic veneer.
The spirit of Midas is at the core of the executive's appeal, a man fans say has a magical touch, even fans whose existence is defined by their inability to pay their bills, save for emergencies, afford health care, suitable housing, etc.
And yet this need to have more -- especially more than the neighbors across the street, across the state line, or across the ocean -- is deep in American soil and water.
That slogan "America First" is not just a nationalist's battle cry -- it's a siren song for the greedy and selfish that too many of us rally around.

Labelle at Carnegie Hall 1973

 

Fifty-three years ago, Labelle performed at Carnegie Hall, a single-night performance that served as a marker of the group's transition from R&B "girl group" stylists to mistresses of funk, belting out Nona Hendryx's original compositions and dressing like David Bowie.

The year before Carnegie Hall, the trio -- Hendryx, Sarah Dash and leader Patti LaBelle -- released Moonshadow, a decent record that featured a nearly 10-minute rave up of the famous Cat Stevens song. I saw them perform that song and other numbers from Moonshadow as an opening act for Al Green at the Carter Barron Amphitheatre in D.C. in Aug. '72.

In '73, Labelle released the lukewarm Pressure Cookin' album, but the following year was their megahit Nightbirds, and that Grammy Hall of Fame anthem to Creole hoochie, "Lady Marmalade."

The 8 p.m. Carnegie Hall appearance included readings by poet Nikki Giovanni and only a half dozen songs -- Wild Horses, I Sold My Heart to the Junkman, Over the Rainbow, (Can I Speak to You Before I Go To) Hollywood, Four Women and Moonshadow.

As we can see from this ad in After Dark, tickets ranged from 3.50 to 6.50, or 30 to 60 bucks today. And, interestingly, tickets to shows at the Carnegie Hall do generally run about that according to the venue's website.

The Attention Economy

 

The regime's takeover of media enterprises is rooted in the general public's "need for the feed."

The executive, himself, is sustained by media creation and consumption. His media diet is like his actual dietary intake -- fast, highly processed, nutritionless. And he and his Cabinet -- an assortment of Twinkies, Moonpies and Yoo-Hoos -- are fine with that. After a full day of consuming trash on Fox News, he graces us with his nightly flatulence on Truth Social.

And now, the emptiness of media messages from properties already under the regime's influence/control is evident in once-respected CBS's reporting mandates that bear the strong odor of hands-off/hands-up to keep MAGA nation engaged.

None of this is completely new; some part of the developed world's economy has been based on selling public attention since mass media were invented.

But, one of the reasons -- perhaps the main reason -- legacy media struggled after the arrival of "new media" is advertisers discovered a more reliable, quantifiable way to monetize consumer attention. Advertisers -- who knew they were wasting money on media buys but were never sure how much -- no longer settled for newspapers' coverage and reach reports, which were wishful approximations, at best. Ad space/time buyers could actually measure which ads readers viewed and for how long. Eureka! When these measures were refined, print media revenue pipelines dried up.

Newsrooms responded with staff layoffs and the gradual shift from product thrown on lawns and delivered to mailboxes to that delivered via computer screens. And that, to quote the poet, "has made all the difference."

Now, information and news compete with scantily clad influencers pushing protein powder and Ozempic for some portion of those 960 waking minutes the average person has to give their attention to something. More and more that something is online.

Researchers tell us that from 2004 to 2023, pleasure reading among Americans declined by 40 percent -- 40 PERCENT. How do we get out of this?

I asked AI how one leaves the "attention economy," and it offered, without irony, "Leaving the attention economy means reclaiming your time, focus, and cognitive autonomy from the constant pull of algorithm-driven platforms. It’s not just about avoiding social media — it’s about reshaping habits, environments, and values so that attention is no longer commodified for profit."

Maybe pick up a book?

As Stephen King famously said, “Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”

Amen.