Movies
A fairly typical idea in stories of revenge is the old "when you seek revenge, dig two graves" adage—i.e. you're going to destroy yourself, too. But by framing a rape-revenge story within the hell that was British colonialism, Jennifer Kent does something pretty interesting in The Nightingale; the protagonists—one an Irish convict who has been serially raped by British officers who eventually murder her husband and infant child (all of which is shown in brutal, explicit detail, btw, so viewers beware), another an Aboriginal man who as a child was kidnapped from his people by the British—have already had their lives effectively ruined by colonial forces, so they care very little for their own lives as they go to take the lives of the men directly responsible for the Irish woman's trauma, making the "two graves" cliché moot. But the genre conventions still mean that whatever catharsis revenge offers be ultimately hollow, so Kent's approach is to make the film's ultimate bloody encounter not only psychologically but systemically unfulfilling, and the film ends with the Aboriginal protagonist screaming futilely to an unmoved ocean about his human dignity. Those responsible for the specific rape/murder at the beginning of the film have been punished, but even before that happens, it's made abundantly clear that punishing these specific men will do nothing to stop the colonial brutality that caused that rape/murder (and the Aboriginal genocide) to begin with—the protagonist's entire trek to find revenge is frequently punctuated by encounters with one colonialist atrocity after another, rarely ones that the individual villains of the film are directly responsible for, and at both climaxes of the film in which each protagonist gets to respectively attack (one verbally, the other physically) the offending officers, a sea of white, British faces looks on in the background—fellow conspirators in the entire cruel project of colonialism. Kent's observation is not the old chestnut about revenge's self-destructive component, as if the victims of colonialism had any destruction not already experienced; instead, it's basically revised for revenge against systemic atrocities: not that you'll have to dig two graves but that you as an individual will never be able to dig enough graves. The narrative glamor of individual acts of resistance will never be an adequate replacement for a collective dismantling of oppressive systems. The movie is way too long and can never seem to make up its mind if its a slow-burn character piece or a shocking exploitation flick, but there's a compelling power to the bleakness of its core idea. Grade: B
I used to read a ton of alien abduction stories when I was younger (nonfiction library call numbers from 000-100, what's up!!), which generally terrified me for two reasons: 1. the idea of the totalitarian government conspiracy to keep the aliens secret from the public, and 2. the sheer otherworldliness of the aliens themselves and the unknowable experiments they conducted on their abductees. Something like The X-Files does a really great job of exploring that first fear, but until Communion, I hadn't seen too much media that really digs into that second fear; most of the time, the thing that's scary about the aliens is the invasion part (e.g. War of the Worlds), and if there's no immediate colonial threat, we get stuff like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is somewhat unsettling at parts but mostly just awestruck. Ah, but Communion on the other hand: the sequences with the aliens are bugged-out freaky, man! There's a kind of dreaminess to those moments that veers wildly from stuff that's pretty overtly goofy (the conspicuous rubberiness—even muppet-ness—of the alien creatures, the way the aliens give Christopher Walken a high five) to the almost incomprehensibly horrific cosmic unknowability of the "true" face of the aliens or the way the Walken doppelgänger's voice decays into robotic static as he talks, and somehow, in an effect I've not seen anywhere besides the work of David Lynch, the juxtaposition of goofy artifice and unknowable terror somehow only bolsters the terror half of the equation. It's wild. The rest of the movie isn't nearly so out-there, but it's still pretty weird—you've got Walken giving a very Walken performance that feels often dissonant from what else is going on onscreen, for example, and also a score composed by Eric Clapton(??), as well as a pretty unconventional editing rhythm, too. There's also the way that this movie understands the proximity of the culture of alien abduction narratives to New Age spirituality. The movie eventually turns into an off-center search for meaning in the presence of all this fear, embodied best by the support group Walken visits in which abductees talk about being survivors or "participants" of abductions—cool that the movie goes into this, because not a lot of media about alien abductions does, and also cool because I can't think of another New Age horror movie. This movie probably won't work for everyone, but I totally understand the cult fandom surrounding it. Grade: A-
A lot of Ralph Bakshi's work has an edgelord sensibility where transgression is an end to itself, and even when he does social commentary, it usually gets caught up and muddled and sometimes even lost in the whole whirlwind of intentional ugliness and risibility. Coonskin doesn't lack for transgression—I don't think it would be an exaggeration to call this the single most transgressive movie I've ever seen, both in terms of social mores (which wantonly pisses on good taste and chases racial stereotypes with a corrosive abandon) and style (which mixes live-action and animation indiscriminately). But it's also the most focused Bakshi movie I've seen in terms of the target of that trangression: that target being American racism and specifically the racism perpetuated by one Walt Disney's Song of the South, which this movie viciously satirizes at every turn. The plantation frame story turns into a prison; the rural adventures of Br'er Rabbit and co. are transposed into a '70s NYC, where they take up the tradition of minstrel children like Bugs Bunny and play tricks on white cops and ethnic Europeans and Uncle Toms and everyone who perpetuates systemic racism; the animation-mixed-with-live-action becomes a vehicle for juxtaposing the grotesquely stereotyped cast with a grimy, teeming, crushingly realistic New York urbanscape. For as improvisational and sloppy a storyteller and stylist as Bakshi can be, it's an astoundingly tight execution of an already tight idea, and the result is an acid bath of a movie. This would probably be flat-out great if it weren't for Bakshi's usual misogyny; the idea of America personified as a woman who seduces black men before killing them is at least thematically resonant—but why literally every woman who comes onscreen gets sexualized and usually stripped of clothing is beyond me, except that Bakshi is a gross, leering dude. Anyway, even considering that, this is probably Bakshi's masterpiece, grading on the curve required for this guy's work. Grade: B
I know nothing about the Japanese New Wave, but if this movie is any indication, I need to seek out more, pronto. Like some sort of gonzo blend of Andy Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard, it radiates an intoxicating sense of late-'60s "cool" as it chronicles its sometimes silly, sometimes deadly serious vignettes from the underground queer scene in Tokyo. But it's also far more emotionally forthright than either of those two influences—especially with the documentary sequences that pull back to show the production of the film itself and interview the actors about their involvement, a meta flourish that might have given the movie a chilly distance if it hadn't shown to much care for the human beings involved: checking to see that they were comfortable in the filming of the sex scenes, asking them about their journey with their gender identity. It is, more than any other "counterculture" movie I've seen, ultimately sweet in addition to the playfully transgressive and tragic modes I'm used to. Grade: B+
Thoroughly charming—of course it is; it's a Demy musical. I like the music a lot better than the music in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (no surprise: I generally prefer musicals with distinct songs rather than the sung-through thing that Umbrellas does), but Young Girls's wafer-thin story has exactly zero of the resonance that Umbrellas's deeply melancholy one has, so who knows which is the superior film in the Great Demy Musical ranking. I will say that I admire this movie's ballsiness in casting Gene Kelly and then having him barely dance. Stone-cold IDGAF energy, that. Grade: B+
Television
Spike Lee's documentary series on Hurricane Katrina and its impact and aftermath on New Orleans is probably the essential media on that tragedy, whipping between visceral grief for the lives and culture lost and the furious anger at the systemic neglect experienced by the city not just in the decades leading up to it but in the days and months that followed the storm that allowed for that loss to happen at the scale that it did. There's an enormous amount of human suffering to take in here, and Spike doesn't softball any of it—the same conversation that people are having around the exploitativeness of the archival footage of death in BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods might also be applicable to this work, too, especially one particular montage of neglected and distended dead bodies about midway through. But I dunno, having experienced the media coverage of Katrina in real time (and having had some very bad takes on the whole situation—I was dumb and uncaring as a teen), nobody was covering this like Spike does here just a few months after the events in question, and there really is something to be said for shocking your viewers into having some measure of compassion by forcing them to see misery after misery and loss after loss until they break. It's also has an eerie amount of foresight, too, predicting with pretty stunning accuracy the gentrification that would reshape New Orleans in the years following Katrina and the other coastal cities that would be impacted by hurricanes in the future. Also, a young Kanye West makes an appearance, and RIP the thoughtful and lucid gentlemen seen here. Sobering and essential viewing (for way more than just Kanye, obvs). P.S. It also features some of composer Terence Blanchard's best work with Spike Lee—perhaps no surprise, given his personal connection to New Orleans. Grade: A
Books (all plays, in this case)
It's an incredibly ambitious idea to embody the entire African-American experience within a single boarding house, which is what this play does, and I admire that ambition even though I don't think the play quite lands it—and I have my doubts about what the play is trying to do with Harold Loomis learning "the song of self-sufficiency" at the end. In bits and pieces, this is great, especially the religious ecstaticism that undergirds the whole thing, but I don't think the whole comes together as well as it should. That said, I would pay good money to see Delroy Lindo and Angela Bassett respectively play Loomis and his wife. Grade: B-
Molten-lava theater. An uncompromisingly brutal allegory of American racism, as told within a single subway car. It's all kind of inscrutable at first, but by the end, it snaps into sharp focus. Of course this is exactly my thing. Grade: A
The Slave by Amiri Baraka (1964)
Not nearly as successful as Dutchman, in my opinion, especially considering the rather intense homophobic language used throughout the first half of the play (I realize that Baraka may have himself been gay and trying to deflect, but this only makes me sad, not any more interested in the device). But the play is no less incendiary than its immediate predecessor. You can see the simmering of Baraka's early Black nationalism here, and the context of the race war in the play's background (and the bits and pieces we get of the history leading up to the war—the alluded-to white-liberal betrayal is poignant and searingly spot-on) feels as contemporary today as it no-doubt did in 1964. But these characters never become more than opaque, and I don't think they even rise to the level of symbolism like they do in Dutchman. There's a lot of great material to recommend in the play, and I'm willing to accept that I Didn't Get It. But on the whole, this feels a lot shakier in execution than I'm comfortable with. Grade: B-
No comments:
Post a Comment