Don't Breathe 2

 

Uruguayan writer / director Rodo Sayagues takes the helm in the sequel to 2016's home invasion thriller Don't Breathe. In that picture, a blind former Navy Seal thwarts a trio of adolescent thieves who break into his home to steal the man's insurance settlement for a wrongful death. Stephen Lang played the blind man whose combat training is more than a match for the three, who are not without their own set of skills. It was a pretty good ride.

In Don't Breathe 2, Sayagues amps up the gore considerably and ratchets down the plausibility substantially, as a grungy gang of organ harvesters led by the psychopathic meth dealer Raylan (Brendan Sexton III) go after Lang's daughter Phoenix (played by Madelyn Grace) in an exhaustingly depraved series of attacks where every sharp weighted object will be turned into a weapon.

The picture has little real cinematic value, if you don't count the imaginative ways Sayagues has devised of snuffing out human life when all the bullets have been spent.

Respect

Singer/actress Jennifer Hudson shoulders the weight of audience expectations as Aretha Franklin, the iconic subject of Respect. Hudson (who won an Oscar for Dreamgirls) acquits herself through force of will and vocal performances that are so much better than the film's narrative, which feels like a pastiche of religious and secular tropes.

This feeling is present from the start, in the film's first scene, when 10-year-old Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner) is roused out of her bed by her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), to sing for the crowd of luminaries assembled downstairs, whom she greets as Aunt and Uncle. She performs a sassy blues for the likes of Dinah, Ella and Duke, and is accompanied on piano by Art Tatum. This fantastic scene capsulizes not only the child Aretha's verve but her father's vise grip on her body and spirit.

The theme of domination and control is carried through the picture, and epitomized later by her abusive husband Ted (a terrifically menacing Marlon Wayans) and alcohol and ultimately became the clarion call for her own liberation. They're infused in the lyrics of her biggest hits.

With Franklin as the subject, music must be a central element of the story. Director Liesl Tommy -- in her first feature -- stages wonderful showcases for Hudson's pipes and fans of Franklin will not be disappointed. And yet tissue connecting these stellar moments often feels incomplete, scattered, wispy. For example, aside from the young Aretha, the half-dozen or so other children in the film are never fully placed within the story world, the ages of principal characters are poorly defined, locations are suggested and not firmly planted, except for Aretha and Ted's trip to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for an early recording session. That segment of the film has substantially more color and flavor than the rest of the film. So much important stuff seems to be going on beyond the frames, in different spaces. And that's frustrating.

The film weaves together love and sexual frankness, domestic violence and tenderness, vulgarity and Jesus in ways that will likely be familiar to many moviegoers, who will compartmentalize the disparate elements of the picture. They will heed the wisdom of Rev. James L. Cleveland (Titus Burgess) who counsels a dejected Aretha to set aside her demons (they never existed anyway) and just be in church.

That might be the best way to fully enjoy a movie that shines but not nearly as brightly as it could.

Free Guy

 

Ryan Reynolds has real bankability. Not only is he tall, square-jawed and handsome, he chooses roles that call for full-bodied expressiveness. In that way, he's like a latter-day Buster Keaton, whose commitment to physical comedy during the Silent Era is legendary.

Reynolds' most celebrated role is as Deadpool, a costumed crime fighter who put both the "smart" and "ass" in the Marvel Universe as a horribly scarred but seemingly indestructible bad boy / good guy. To my mind, Reynolds IS Deadpool; both seem to be indifferent to others' expectations, plowing ahead, cracking heads and cracking wise.

In Shawn Levy's Free Guy, Reynolds is a non-player character named Guy in a popular video game, Free City, who, following an encounter with a winsome avatar Molotov Girl (Killing Eve's Jodie Comer), discovers he has a mind of his own and does not have to settle for being highly dispensable fodder for virtual gunplay.

Guy's journey to individuation tracks along with the "real world" story of Millie (the player behind Molotov) and her game-writing partner Keys (Joe Keery), who are trying to wrest their original game design from the clutches of a greedy corporate clown played by the always reliable Taika Waititi.

The game-world machinations involve eye-popping visual effects and some pretty heavy social commentary -- mainly personal liberty and freedom of choice. A cameo by another fully committed actor -- Channing Tatum -- is a high-point of the film's second reel, when Reynolds' Guy and his best friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), meet an adoring avatar (Tatum) who is taken with Guy's liberation crusade.

It's two enjoyable hours of smirks, slapstick and satire.

Nine Days

 

In his first feature film, Nine Days, writer/director Edson Oda reframes ancient questions about life and conscience into an original meditation. Set in a lonesome house in the middle of what appears to be desert salt flats, the story (an extended allegory) depicts the work of a solemn, humorless man named Will (Black Panther and Us's Winston Duke in an award-caliber performance) who must choose which of five unborn souls (played by Zazie Beetz, Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgård, David Rysdahl, Arianna Ortiz) will get a chance at life.

In retro form befitting his character's personality and previous existence, Will has his subjects watch television screens that are windows into the worlds of previously selected souls. The unborn must take notes on what they see. Will reviews the notes, looking for evidence not that the unborn souls are spiritually worthy, as one might expect, but that they will survive the harshness of human existence, which Will himself was unable to do.

Will's companion in the selection is Kyo (Benedict Wong of Doctor Strange), who is sunny counterpoint to his friend's darkness. Kyo is also concerned about Will's peculiar obsession with one long-ago selected soul who seemed to have everything but committed suicide. This seems to be making Will even more tentative and guarded in his selection process.

Yes, much of the film is brooding but there are also moments of joyfulness, channeled mainly through Zazie Beetz's (Atlanta) wonderful character Emma. The final three minutes of the film -- an extended monologue by Will -- is the most remarkable exhibition of pure acting craftsmanship I've seen so far this year. The script is a melding of Whitman and Shakespeare; and Duke is exuberant and thrilling.

Highly recommended.

The Green Knight

 

Writer / director David Lowery's The Green Knight is a beautiful puzzle, whose visual elements might over-power the 700-year-old legend's core allegory of triumph over baser concerns. The term "trippy" has been aptly attached to the film.

Dev Patel, who never fails to engage, stars as Sir Gawain, a member of the household of King Arthur (Sean Harris) who is elevated to a seat at the Round Table one Christmas. Emboldened by this demonstration of the king's favor, Gawain accepts a blow-for-blow challenge from the mysterious Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), beheads him, and promises the revivified corpse that he will submit to the same blow the following year.

Most the film is about the journey to the knight's Green Chapel, and Gawain's encounters with the mystical and the mundane. Some sequences are opaque, quite disorienting, and will likely leave audiences scratching their chins to parse the meaning. Gawain's visit with the spirit Winifred (Erin Kellyman) and a generous Lord and Lady (Joel Edgerton and Alicia Vikander) are important, dreamy encounters whose meanings may become more apparent as time passes.

The film is stunning and frustrating, taking viewers on a quite a trek but we're not sure where we are once we've arrived.

Old

 

M. Night Shyamalan may not always hit it out of the park but he always swings for the fences. The auteur of twisty thrillers evokes eye-rolls from many serious movie goers, but I'm usually entertained by the audacity of his ideas -- when they work and when they don't.

"Old" doesn't work completely -- the dialogue is stilted and implausibility (something Shyamalan is rarely burdened by) rules the day -- but it's not as bungled as other pictures in Shyamalan's oeuvre. Maybe having source material kept the movie from going off the rails.

In the film, a group of resort vacationers are taken to a secluded beach to spend the day. Soon, the youngsters in the group begin to show signs of aging, the oldsters start dying, minds get muddy, wrinkles settle into brows, and hearing and vision begin to fade. And there's no way to leave.

Shyamalan is a stagey creeper who knows how to balance nuance and grotesquerie, so his films are not full-blown horror blood-fests but they have enough gruesome spiciness to jolt callous viewers and enough out-of-frame suggestiveness to unnerve the rest.

"Old" cast is led by Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps as a feuding couple and parents to two children. It is through this quartet that much of the movie is told and through whom the big reveal is delivered.

Stillwater

 

In Tom McCarthy's Stillwater, a bulky Matt Damon plays Bill Baker, an Oklahoma roughneck on a mission to free his daughter, Allison (a fine Abigail Breslin) from a prison in Marseille. While studying at university, Allison was found guilty of killing her Arab girlfriend. During one of their visits, Allison asks her father to pass along a tip to her lawyer that might clear her of the murder. The information is not persuasive to the lawyer but leads Bill to enlist the help of his neighbor, Virginie (Camille Cottin) in finding the real killer.

Damon's Bill is a dutiful but dour mass of regret, as he lumbers through the winding streets of Marseille, hoping to prove his daughter's innocence and earn her respect, which he lost during his years as a drunken ne-er-do-well. Damon's performance, and he appears in nearly every scene of this beautifully shot film, feels measured and meticulous, and lends gravitas even to some of the narrative elements that don't quite square. Damon's scenes with Breslin are especially compelling.

Despite its length (2:20), Stillwater is does not drag; the narrative, while ostensibly a murder mystery, is mostly an insightful exploration of the foreign in the age of raging nationalism.

Pig

Michael Sarnoski's debut feature film Pig slowly and deliberately ponders human emotions without being ponderous.

The story, which he co-wrote with Vanessa Block, is a quest tale about a loner truffle hunter named Robin (Nicholas Cage) searching for his hunting partner and companion, a beloved pig, who is kidnapped one night from Robin's cabin in the wilderness outside of Portland. Assisting Robin, albeit reluctantly, is Amir (Alex Wolff), a flashy young striver with "Daddy issues" who peddles Robin's truffles in the highly lucrative gourmet restaurant supply chain.

In many ways, the evolution of Robin and Amir's relationship can be anticipated. That's not to say watching it develop is dull; as Cage's taciturn wild man clashes with Wolff's brash urbanite. Both actors are terrific.

What was more surprising to me was the elegance with which Sarnoski, whose camera blends tones and temperatures throughout, discloses the truths that are driving the unlikely pair -- Robin's past notoriety and enduring pain and Alex's essential emptiness that Robin's mix of genius and madness seems to fill.

Noah Reid of Schitt's Creek

 

When Noah Reid's character Patrick Brewer was introduced in the third season of the highly celebrated Canadian comedy Schitt's Creek (nine Emmy wins last year), viewers no doubt wondered if the kind, understated and disarming business consultant, who was also closeted, could survive the lunacy that is life in the Creek, much less stoke a romantic spark he felt for the cluelessly affected and self-absorbed budding entrepreneur David Rose (series co-creator Dan Levy).

The casting and storyline was a calculated risk that paid off; that spark turned into an inferno among Creek chat room fanatics, both queer and straight, who pulled for the couple and, by extension, David's transformation from a wounded warrior scarred by big city romance into someone open to happiness and fulfillment.

Noah Reid is a triple-threat (as the aging soap opera queen Moira Rose would aver) -- actor/singer/dancer -- and his reworking of Tina Turner's "Simply the Best" in the fourth season episode "Open Mic" was for many viewers a high point of the show's six seasons. It is a thoroughly engaging and tender moment that is wonderfully affirming.

Despite the utopian openness of little Schitt's Creek to the relationship of these two men, many fans, straight and queer, set aside cynicism and posted that everyone deserves a Patrick. Which is to say, everybody deserves to be valued and loved.

Black Widow

 

If Cate Shortland's Black Widow was as sure-footed as its leading character, the film might have more staying power. For a Marvel "origins" picture, it spends most of its screen time on Natasha Romanoff's discovery of her past through present battles with old foes and new (or rediscovered) allies. Shortland has assembled a half dozen exciting action pieces on both sides of the human story, which gives the movie tones that are mixed but not necessarily well-matched.

We're told that Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) was one of many "widow" soldiers bought or kidnapped as children and turned into lethal weapons by the diabolical Dreykov (Ray Winstone) for purposes that are not entirely clear, although one might assume, this being a Marvel story, it has something to do with vanquishing Shield or the Avengers.

In its strange prologue, we're introduced to the 10-year-old Natasha, her younger sister, Yelena (played as an adult by Florence Pugh), and their parents, Russian agents Alexei (David Harbour) and Melina (Rachel Weisz). It's strange because it spends no time establishing for us the connections shared by this quartet, choosing to rely on familiar narrative constructs as shorthand and devoting most of the opening to a daring airplane escape (from whom is not clear) to Cuba, where the girls are delivered to Dreykov.

The picture's two hundred million dollars bought a lot of locations and vehicular destruction, but the banter (what would an MCU film be without banter) between Johansson and Pugh and Harbour's scenes as the regretful, washed-up, incarcerated former Russian Super Soldier the Red Guardian are priceless.

Roadrunner

 

Morgan Neville's Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain -- despite its questionable but generally undetectable AI enhancements -- offers a thoughtful reassessment of the public and private life of the eponymous media icon, celebrity chef, gourmand and world traveler. The audience will undoubtedly know that the charismatic Bourdain committed suicide in 2018, after a period of international celebrity as the author of Kitchen Confidential and host of CNN's culinary travelogue Parts Unknown. That knowledge does not dull the edge of the film's point that his death was painful to many, made more so because Bourdain lived with gusto and daring.

Neville pairs archival footage of Bourdain with accounts from friends and family, all of which depict a man with an unquenchable thirst for exploration and, perhaps, distraction. A recovered drug addict, Bourdain discovered new obsessions in his work, exploring and writing about the folkways of people around the globe, particularly in unfamiliar corners and quarters. 

Failed romances, late fatherhood and a grueling travel schedule took a toll, unnoticed at that time, on Bourdain's mental and emotional health. His fall, in the last year of his life, was precipitous and puzzling, involving the idolization of a new muse, actress and women's rights activist Asia Argento, and the rejection of old friends, who, the film suggests, feel not only loss but betrayed by a man they loved dearly but who didn't love himself enough.

Respect trailer

I've seen the trailer for the Jennifer Hudson-starring Aretha biopic, Respect, several times now and am always left feeling uneasy about this film, which will be released next month. The art direction, costuming and hair all appear top notch, but some of the lines are clunky and land harshly on the ear. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTtxoz3OIlU)

For example, the flawless Audra McDonald's instruction to the child Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner) to demand "respect" from others is so lacking in nuance that it might as well have been carved in the side of a mountain. Forest Whitaker plays Aretha's father C.L. Franklin and delivers a line that reads "You have a talent that folks call genius," which is so awkwardly phrased it nearly doesn't make sense. Marlon Wayans plays Aretha's husband/manager/controller Ted White, with whom Aretha butts heads over her "bidness," a word she spits with a Sistahgirl neck swivel, though the scene is set in the '60s. And her clap back to Daddy Franklin when he accuses his daughter of losing her mind is pure Sapphire: "Maybe I found IT!" 

The film will undoubtedly snap and crackle and I'm saying a little prayer the music will sweeten what the trailer suggests will be some sour notes.

I've seen the trailer for the Jennifer Hudson-starring Aretha biopic, Respect, several times now and am always left feeling uneasy about this film, which will be released next month. The art direction, costuming and hair all appear top notch, but some of the lines are clunky and land harshly on the ear. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTtxoz3OIlU)

For example, the flawless Audra McDonald's instruction to the child Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner) to demand "respect" from others is so lacking in nuance that it might as well have been carved in the side of a mountain. Forest Whitaker plays Aretha's father C.L. Franklin and delivers a line that reads "You have a talent that folks call genius," which is so awkwardly phrased it nearly doesn't make sense. Marlan Wayans plays Aretha's husband/manager/controller Ted White, with whom Aretha butts heads over her "bidness," a word she spits with a Sistahgirl neck swivel, though the scene is set in the '60s. And her clap back to Daddy Franklin when he accuses his daughter of losing her "damn mind" is pure Sapphire: "Maybe I found IT!" 

The film will undoubtedly snap and crackle and I'm saying a little prayer the music will sweeten what the trailer suggests will be some sour notes.

Zola

Television director Janicza Bravo's first feature film, Zola, which stars Taylour Paige in the title role, is based on waitress and part-time pole dancer A'ziah King's now legendary 2015 "Ho Trip" from Detroit to Tampa with a young woman, Stefani (Riley Keough), a sketchy dancer/stripper she waited on one day, Stefani's menacing "manager" (Colman Domingo) and her clueless boyfriend (Nicholas Braun). King posted 148 viral tweets during the weekend escapade, which involved prostitution, extortion, gun play and an attempted suicide. The story is told almost entirely in "hood rat" and features "internetual" embellishments -- emojis, bells and whistles -- for added spice. While the picture is most assuredly a hilarious "pitch black" comedy of the ill-mannered, it is also a pretty astute study of cultural appropriation, sex trade economics and the truly hard work of knowing one's worth.

F9: The Fast Saga

Justin Lin's F9: The Fast Saga is an unbelievably expensive and shameless exhibition of all that has made this fearless fast-car franchise so bankable --  a negligible storyline (which I won't bother to recount here), neo-family values sanctimony, multi-culti casting and preposterous vehicle chases that defy the laws of physics. It's gotten so bad (or good, depending on your POV) that characters are now commenting on their own indestructibility. All of the bruising insanity is held together by Vin Diesel's inscrutable visage and his ability to maintain his composure (and facial expression) from the first implausible racing set piece to the big family dinner that has become the epilogue for the series. Wonderfully explosive stuff.

Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It

 

Mariem Pérez Riera's loving documentary on the life and career of actress / activist Rita Moreno is an often-revealing tribute that occasionally wanders into cringe as Moreno, a self-described "attention seeker," hams and mugs for the audience between the tears. The stronger elements of the film are the stories of Moreno's nearly exclusive early casting as "island girls" and "dusky beauties" and her victimization by Hollywood's studio machinery. The maltreatment included a sexual assault by her agent (whom she does not name) and publicity pairings with movie actors, one of whom she disastrously married -- Marlon Brando.

Moreno's on-camera recollections are supported by friends and admirers, many of whom are also Puerto Rican, and scholar / historians who provide the important backdrop of racial and sexual discrimination that will inform viewers' understanding of Moreno's bouts with self-doubt and self-destructiveness.

Moreno, 90, has worked steadily in film and television for 70 years. Though perhaps best known by some of us as the fiery Anita in 1961's West Side Story (she will also appear in this year's remake), younger generations will know her work on The Electric Company, HBO's OZ and most recently Netflix's One Day at a Time. Moreno was first billed as Rosita Moreno in 1950, and the story of her evolution from that star-struck "island beauty" to an EGOT-winner is an important part of the intricate fabric of America's cultural history.

In the Heights

 

Fans will hear and see musical and narrative similarities between Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton" and his earlier Tony-winning work "In the Heights," both now delivered as motion pictures (though Hamilton was a filmed stage production and In the Heights fills city streets).

Both shows blend musical genres (hip-hop, Latin and more conventional theatrical structures) and weave together stories that explore how families (broadly defined) fight for self-identity and validation, albeit against vastly different backdrops.

Hamilton's sweep was grander -- America's liberation from Britain -- and In the Heights covers more intimate ground, the indomitability of the human spirit, represented here by immigrants and Dreamers from the Caribbean living in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Audiences will likely be moved to laughter and tears by these denizens and their dicey dilemmas.

Director Jon M. Chu's color palette is saturated; reds, greens, blues and yellows run down the sides of the screen (figuratively speaking) and wash over the audience, as his camera trots along with and flies above the film's wonderfully winning troupe of principals (Anthony Ramos, Corey Hawkins, Leslie Grace, Melissa Barrera and Gregory Diaz IV) and scores of dancers over the course of three steaming summer days in New York, before a citywide blackout.

The film's pacing is vigorous and, like Hamilton, the score is nearly through-sung; long passages have nearly no spoken dialogue. Also, like opera, the songs are heavily expositive, bearing the characters' own stories (Breathe, Paciencia y Fe), rousing anthems for community and solidarity (In the Heights, Alabanza, Carnaval del Barrio) and bawdy romps (No Me Diga).

In the Heights is an unquestionable cinematic achievement, which, as I shared with my screening partner today, will likely sweep during award season. It's biggest competition will no doubt be Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, scheduled to open during the winter holidays.

Cruella

 

Aussie director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya; Lars and the Real Girl) takes the villainess from Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and turns her into the mad and misbegotten title-heroine of Cruella, and uses a vaultful of cinematic feats and flights of fantasy in doing so.

This high-dollar / high-concept battle of the Emmas (Stone as the ambitious Estella and her devilish alter-ego Cruella and Thompson as the wicked Baroness) is set in the world of haute couture of London in the '60s and '70's. The picture follows Estella/Cruella as she fights to be noticed by the celebrated Baroness but discovers, as it were, the empress was naked.

Cruella is tuneful (huge soundtrack but is not a musical), campy and energetic. And, as one might expect from Disney Studios, the movie contains a bounty of elaborate set pieces, each more daring than the one before. The script contains many clever passages and is well-served by a cast of pros -- Mark Strong as The Baroness's Valet, Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser as Estella's grifting mates. But, Cruella, though often delightful, is longwinded, clocking in at two-and-a-quarter hours.

Spiral

 

The Saw franchise of eight (or nine) splatter films (depending on if you count Chris Rock's latest movie, Spiral) were successful because they walked the line between the plausible and implausible in the games of deadly entrapment the homicidal maniac Jigsaw devised to test or punish his victims (again, depending on your POV). Darren Lynn Bousman directed three pictures in the original series and has returned to tweak that winning formula while keeping the ironic sadism front and center. The results are mixed and if the ending is to be believed, this might be the start of another bloody series.

Rock plays an exasperating city detective who is also the son a former chief of police (Samuel L. Jackson). He has found himself on the bad side of nearly every cop in the department because of his renegade, showman ways. Rock's cynical Zeke Banks is teamed with rookie William Schenk (Max Minghella) , whose eager young lawman Banks finds annoying. This allows Comedian Chris Rock to riff on a few of his favorite topics -- himself and his marriage, sex, infidelity, divorce and porn (they are not unrelated). I feel this is the film's biggest weakness: It does not ask Rock to drop the stand up and fully invest in this other persona. This lends the picture an uneven tone. This is not a buddy cop dramedy.

The Banks / Schenk team, a familiar pairing to even casual moviegoers, is assigned the investigation of the contraption murder of a fellow detective, one of the few officers who didn't hate Banks. Soon, the investigation starts to sprawl as other cops are killed horribly and the murderer sends bait to Banks to keep him engaged. It's not just the killings that are messy here. The pacing of this story is strange, the narrative arc pitted with holes and shortcuts. Too much of the story relies on flashbacks and backstory reveals and not enough on actual detective work. That Banks eventually comes face-to-face with the killer is not because he's a skillful detective but because the puppet master knows his victims so well.

Dream Horse

 

Welsh director Euros Lyn has composed a triumphant love letter to his homeland in Dream Horse, the true story of a group of Welsh villagers who pool their meager funds to breed and train a thoroughbred that goes on to win big at the races. Toni Collette, who is Aussie, and Damian Lewis, a Londoner, lead the wildly engaging cast of characters, many of the actors are Welsh, who buy into the daft scheme by Jan Vokes (Collette) and stifled tax adviser Howard Davies (Lewis) and by doing so revitalize themselves and their bedraggled town. Collette is winning as always as the spirited wife / daughter/ store clerk who dares to see more in life than the predictability of her marriage and her job by looking into the eyes of fiercely competitive steed named Dream Alliance. Yes, the story arc is familiar but the execution is sure and delightful..

A Quiet Place Part II

 

Actor/director John Krasinski borrows from James Cameron's oeuvre of crisis cinema to build on the dreadful foundation he laid in the superb A Quiet Place (2018). Part Two begins where One ended, forcing audiences to overlook some obvious growth in the children, who are the stars of this chapter. Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe as sister Regan, who is deaf, and brother Marcus, who is traumatized, do heavy lifting in their parallel subplots. She strikes out to investigate a broadcasted message that may be a signal to safety as he recovers from a disastrous injury and tends to his infant brother while mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt) is away gathering supplies. The compounded calamities as the Abbots try to avoid the voracious aliens hunting humankind by sound for sport recall Cameron's deftness in building suspense as troubles come cascading down around the players. The final standoff between the Abbott sibs and the toothy invaders is a true nail-biter.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)

 

Fifty years ago, Melvin Van Peebles dropped an incendiary cinematic bomb with the release of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, a film that is often misclassified as blaxploitation. Blaxploitation is the label given to '70s films with Black themes that were created by white filmmakers, targeting Black audiences. Sweet Sweetback was an independent satirical protest film, funded and directed by a Black man, that has relevance two generations after its initial release.

The film was written and directed by Van Peebles, whose earlier film Watermelon Man (1970) was trashed by The New York Times as a messy, unfunny waste of his talent. Sweet Sweetback is a disjointed and uneven tale of political pandering, police corruption, community disintegration, religious fraud, false arrests, narrow escapes, violent retaliation and sex. Van Peebles is the title character, a man raised and exploited by prostitutes, who finds himself friendless after he is targeted by police needing an arrest after the murder of a Black man. Van Peebles's character spends most of the film running from the police.

Sweet Sweetback was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry last year, and, to my mind, is more important for what it says than how it says it. It is not a model of great filmmaking, but, in many other ways it is a great film to see and discuss, to wrestle with Van Peeble's sardonic vision and dark defiance and the picture's warning that those wronged will eventually return to "collect some dues."

The Black Network (1936)

A recent discovery, The Black Network (1936), is a fascinating cinematic curio, a short film set in a Harlem radio studio and its environs during the Depression. The film's headliners were Nina Mae McKinney (the Dusky Little Diamond Lil of Lancaster, South Carolina) and youthful Nicholas Brothers, in what may have been their first screen appearance as characters and not just specialty dancers. The story is slight and silly and some of the mugging and line delivery is cringe-inducing but I think the 20-minute picture, link below, is a valuable historical and cultural artifact. It was directed by the prolific creator of light film fare Roy Mack.

Wrath of Man

 

Guy Ritchie's latest collab with Jason Statham's "great stone face" adds to the Brits' bulging filmography of bruising, bromosexual caper films that feature an array of thuggish fiends, pulling heists and triggers. Because Ritchie has mastered this turf as well as any has (or perhaps should), the narrative is spiced up with a serpentine timeline and a murky internecine element that isn't fully explained or explored. Still, fan kids don't love Guy or Jason for their minds and will undoubtedly love this quippy, hi-NRG tribute to the evils of greed and the joys of red-meat revenge.

The Staggering Girl

 

"Once the world was deliberate, and now there's randomness, and no one seems to mind." ~ Bruno (Kyle MacLachlan), The Staggering Girl (2019)

Julianne Moore won an Oscar for playing a middle-aged linguistics professor struggling with early-onset Alzheimer's in Still Alice (2014). A personal favorite of mine whose on-screen breakdowns are like emotional hurricanes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-A-L9LmQmU), Moore later starred in the puzzling, impressionistic short film The Staggering Girl by auteur director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name). In it, Moore plays Francesca, a blocked writer who returns to Italy to collect her blind, aged but still willful mother Sophia (Martha Keller) -- an artist of some renown -- and bring her back to New York.

The film runs a bit over 30 minutes and is a whirlygig of Francesca's fragmented memories of her childhood -- she's supposedly working on a memoir. The pieces are ghostly and elusive. And, on reflection, that's all probably intentional.

It is beautifully shot by Guadagnino's frequent cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Suspira, Call Me By Your Name) and contains many striking tableaux and portraits. All of the women are draped in Valentino's capacious gowns and cloaks because the film was created with the help of the designer's production director. Its stunning interiors and Italianate architecture lend the movie the feel of a fashion shoot.

The quote from Bruno about the world's abandonment of order was descriptive of Sophia's latest art work -- scrawls and slashes of paint on canvas -- but it also describes this picture -- a movie that is about sense and not substance.

The Truman Show, Redux

 

I found a lot of truth in Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), an allegorical film whose premise is the ubiquity of fabrication.

When Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) hit the wall during his escape attempt at the end of the picture, many viewers no doubt felt the impact, watching him mount the stairs to see the world as he had never seen it -- as it really was. What a moment!

Non-cinematic epiphanies aren't nearly as grand as Truman's but they can be earth-shaking. Discovering a lying friend or cheating companion or one's own petty cruelty can be upsetting and call for action.

It's not always a total surprise, right? As with Truman, sometimes we've seen the cracks, the inconsistencies, the wires, and eventually pull all of the threads together and ... voila! Ed Harris has been calling the shots.

If we're lucky, discovering manipulation, deceit, disappointment will not destroy us; it will lead to better things -- a loyal friend, respectful companion ... maybe talk therapy.

But perhaps THE most significant pull from Weir's weird world was Truman's discovery that only a fake universe is all about us. And who wants that?