Big Media Vandalism

Wolf Like Me

2009-11-24T01:50:00.014-05:00

by Steven Boone
Hippy dippy Woodstock director Michael Wadleigh made only one narrative feature film, the majestically weird horror fable Wolfen. Having not seen it since Late Late Show screenings in the 1980's, I remembered Wolfen, faintly, as that other, lesser, wolf flick of 1981.

Not until screening it recently with a horror afficionado pal did I come to understand it as a reeling peyote vision of New York City's Third World future, the one I'm staggering through presently. Damn. This video is my parting shot as I prepare to join a sad, strange exodus from the city that used to feel like home.

Wolf City High and Low from Steven Boone on Vimeo.

MOONWALK: THE ADAPTATION

2009-10-30T00:00:00.017-04:00

by Steven Boone

It all comes down to what you believe, because none of us knew the man.

I believe Michael Jackson was a good guy. I believe he never harmed anyone's child. I believe he was one of those rare people who tried to apply his otherworldly talent to healing some of the basic, eternal problems of humanity. I believe he was a great man of strong constitution and boundless vision. I believe that the incessant lies told about him were his indirect murderer.

MOONWALK is the autobiography he wrote in 1988.

I believe David Lynch is the filmmaker who should make the inevitable MOONWALK movie. Lynch's capacity for empathy; his ability to describe alienation, suffering and loneliness in spiritual, visual terms; his American ear; his understanding of corporate show business as a place where dreams are nourished with candied arsenic... make Lynch the best equipped among marquee-value auteurs to say something vital about Michael's life and death.

Here are some notes and sketches for the Lynch adaptation:

Wasn't going to pay any attention to this "story" but, well, this is it.

2009-10-17T22:00:00.000-04:00

by Ryland Walker Knight

Heene: Just keep talking. Just keep talking. Don't throw up. Wait, am I making my son throw up? Am I making myself throw up? Who believes this? Are they believing this? C'mon boys, be my boys; get us to commercial break.

Viera: Just keep talking. Just keep talking. Did he throw up? Wait, am I making that boy throw up? Am I making that dad throw up? Who believes this? Does he really believe himself? C'mon boys, ignore it, keep talking; get us to commercial break.

INGLOURIOUS SNATCH

2009-09-17T22:48:00.020-04:00

by Steven Boone
2009 is the year I quit film criticism for the fourth or fifth time. It was sort of like the local crazy homeless guy quitting his post as honorary mayor of the corner. Big whoop. I keep coming back to the block, hoping somebody heard my cry of doom and responded accordingly. The cry goes something like this: Cinema as a popular art form has lost the fundamentals that make its expensive products worth our time. Critics, content that a stubborn minority of classically trained filmmakers still endure at the arthouse and on the festival circuit, happily chalk up the disaster at the multiplex as Other People’s Problem. In other words, caviar for us, scraps for the rabble. It's the blithe attitude of Whole Foods shoppers toward the Food Stamp set, and it's disgusting.

And yet, until recently, virtually every film that made it to the multiplex, sublime or atrocious, was constructed of the same sturdy material: the shot.

I quit film criticism because somebody has banished the shot from mainstream commercial cinema.

The shot, man.

That unit of film composition which lends film its cumulative power and structural integrity.

In place of the shot, like a leaky sandbag in place of a brick, somebody put... Well, what to call it, this fragment of film that has more in common with a spontaneous cutaway during Monday Night Football than with the ruminative, kinetic moving image discovered by Kuleshov, Porter, Griffith, et al? I once jokingly called it a gotcha-fragment, but that doesn't quite get it. The word for “shot” in the new century shall be…

Snatch.

No further explanation necessary, but it might be helpful to provide some examples. Here are some blurbs from your favorite cultural authority, revised:

"No matter how cynical you feel about Hollywood, it is hard not to fall for a film that makes room for a snatch of the Joker leaning out the window of a stolen police car and laughing into the wind, the city’s colored lights gleaming behind him like jewels."-- Manohla Dargis, The Dark Knight review

"A busy opening flurry of mock-news snatches and talking-head documentary chin scratching fills in a grim, disturbingly plausible scenario."-- A.O. Scott, District 9 review

"Snatch" is perfect because it describes the image, the manner in which the image was acquired and what the image does to you. Snatches are snatched and they snatch you. By the waistband of your drawers. So, until equality returned to cinema and the average Joe viewer could enjoy shots again, I was determined to stay on strike.

With Inglourious Basterds, the strike has ended peacefully. Quentin Tarantino’s divine slice of movie love is gloriously snatch-free. Every shot, even the ones that whizz by in a blur of violence, is set in stone, not graphite. Tarantino brought the might and resources of big budget commercial filmmaking to bear on the snatch malaise. No critic could attack the problem any better.

This isn't the first time Tarantino came to the rescue. In fact, each new QT feature rebukes snatch culture. Pulp Fiction arrived in 1994, the same pivotal year that Natural Born Killers, one of the first ever snatch features (ironically from a QT script) gave us a glimpse of the future in big screen storytelling.

Pulp Fiction's success over Natural Born Killer's mediocre run should have told the studios that people go to the darkened theater not to be snatched up but to be lured into a delicious trap. Trouble was that Ho'wood attributed Pulp Fiction's popularity only to the jokes and grisly killings, so it commissioned more smirky, bloody potboilers. As editors began to abandon rules developed over a century of filmmaker-audience call and response in favor of lazy shortcuts their AVID editing consoles enabled, shots morphed into snatches. Directors adopted multiple camera coverage, not for any inspired artistic reasons like Akira Kurosawa on High and Low or Spike Lee on Bamboozled, but merely to burn through script pages more efficiently, a la Richard Donner on the Lethal Weapon series.

Another pop power player, Robert Zemeckis, caught hold of audience attention spans that same year with Forrest Gump and later with Cast Away. (Dave Kehr on Zemeckis: "Like the classical Hollywood filmmakers he studied in the 70's as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California's pioneering Department of Cinema, Mr. Zemeckis is well attuned to the nuances of framing and camera movement. He stands as one of the very few filmmakers in contemporary Hollywood who are fluent and innovative in the visual language of the movies.") Also in '94, Frank Darabont's sleeper Stephen King hit The Shawshank Redemption told a grim prison tale in the manner of Frank Capra, full of Capra hokum but also Capra's patient, cajoling camera.

DVD arrived the following year, and such storytelling was suddenly marked for death. When the DVD market exploded, snatchery went into overdrive. The random access of DVD's primed audiences to accept and expect a steady deluge of gotcha-fragments in virtually any genre. (David Lynch waged a small protest in his Mulholland Dr. DVD by refusing chapter stops. If you wanted to skip ahead to any "good parts" you had to fast forward VCR-style at best.)

Portable media devices and web 2.0 further accelerated the spread of snatch, as editing became a matter of assembling shots intended for screening on a 320 x 240 px screen rather than the 20-footer at your local Loews.

None of these technologies are evil. They have freed consumers and media makers in countless ways. But it’s a post-colonial Africa kind of liberation: How to manage an inherited government and infrastructure without proper instruction, or with corrupt tutors?

Among the snatch criminal elite: D.J. Caruso (Disturbia), Paul Greengrass (the Bourne sequels), Peter Berg (The Kingdom), J.J. Abrams (Star Trek). (Michael Bay, often misidentified as a felony-level purveyor of snatch, is actually as classical in his mise en scene as Spielberg. As with juvenile classicist Robert Rodriguez, he just likes to cut fast.)

Along the way, some filmmakers held fast to the tried and true. Many aging ‘70s auteurs (Spielberg, Coppola, DePalma, Malick, Scorsese, Lumet), of course, kept their cinematographic wits. Bankable directors like Joel Coen (Fargo), Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Craig Gillespie (Mr. Woodcock), The Wachowskis (The Matrix), Sam Raimi (Spiderman), Sam Mendes (American Beauty), Steven Soderbergh (the Oceans films), Spike Lee (The Inside Man), Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) could be counted on to retain the power of the frame and the well-considered cut. On the lower frequencies, Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Alexander Payne (Sideways), David O. Russell (Three Kings) and Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited) also kept to the old rules, even as they bent them ever so gracefully to their singular visions.

Even masters of epic bombast like James Cameron (Titanic) and Mel Gibson (Apocalypto) knew that loony borderline kitsch didn't preclude lucid framing, while craftsmen like Ridley Scott suddenly took up the snatch trade in earnest (see the drive-by war flicks Black Hawk Down and Body of Lies). In a universe of his own, Michael Mann spent the aughts getting looser and jazzier on digital video (from Ali to Public Enemies), but never losing an intimate understanding of the rhythms he was subverting.

But it has taken Tarantino, with his infectious love of violent scenarios and grindhouse grand guignol to sell classical film technique not as a quaint alternative to snatch cinema but as the most vital, elastic and essential use of the form. Without shots, cinema disappears, and the movie house becomes just another noisy rec room.

In the 1980's, cineastes lamented the loss of the grand old movie palaces, whose architecture communicated a sense of cinema as a hallowed sanctuary. But the rise of the multiplex couldn't demolish the screen architecture that makes cinema a form of spiritual transportation, dream play and communal understanding-- the shot. Only the death of the shot has burned down the cinema. This hasn't stopped folks from attending movies in record numbers only because, let's face it, multimillion dollar marketing can sell you anything.

In a summer still reacting to last year's snatch apotheosis, The Dark Knight, Inglourious Basterds stepped in to assume the role of proper tutor. Whatever Tarantino's intentions, I happily project onto his film profound outrage at TDK’s senseless, anti-human use of screen time and space, along with an apostle's commitment to sharing his enlightenment with the deprived.

Children, if you want to know how movies, real movies, the kind you heard your great great grandparents wax nostalgic about.... If you want to know how those films deliver visual and narrative pleasure, then pop a Ritalin and watch Inglourious Basterds. Me, I'm going back to work.

Gone Too Soon

2009-06-26T09:34:00.006-04:00

By Odienator

I was sitting in Tom's Restaurant on 112th and Broadway, showing my friend, Jeff, where they shot the exteriors for Seinfeld. I heard an older Black woman sitting opposite me say "did y'all hear Michael Jackson died?"

I thought she was kidding. She was on the phone with her daughter, and she kept going back and forth between her phone conversation and us; she became our Brenda Blackmon. The owner at Tom's turned on CNN and the reporter said "Michael Jackson had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. He was not breathing."

"Thank God," I said, "at least he's not dead."

"My daughter says Fox News says he's dead," interrupted the woman.

"Fox isn't news!" I said. "They're never right about anything!"

I was just willing the truth away. Subconsciously I already knew he was gone: Both the woman on the phone and I heard the words CNN used to describe Jackson's condition: "Michael Jackson has been taken to the hospital...and he was not breathing."

"They never said he restarted breathing," I said, looking into that woman's maternal eyes for any sign of disagreement. She nodded affirmatively, and looked at me the way only a mother could, with firm sadness tempered with clear comforting. Her eyes were saying "No, honey, I can't lie to you."

I looked at Jeff, who said "that would be insane if it were true."

This was insanity.

I looked at the TV and on the bottom of the screen, CNN had chosen to do something it rarely does: It agreed with Fox. "Michael Jackson is dead," read the bottom of the screen. I felt like I'd been hit with a brick.

When my Mom was pregnant with me, one of her intense cravings was for ABC by The Jackson Five. I don't know if this is the reason, but I've never been able to get enough of that song. Whenever it comes on, I want to get up and dance, to the point of relying solely on my will power to restrain me as I have no shame. Naughty By Nature sought further to entice me when they sampled that song for the first and still only rap song my Mom likes. So even before I put on the mortal coil Mike has just shaken off, I knew his music. Ironically, the first song I heard on the radio after this news was "I'll Be There," a song I always thought Mike was way too young to sing (though he does so convincingly). All I could do was nod at his sentiment. He'll be there. Even though he is physically gone.

R.I.P. Mike.

A Black-Irish Tale: Odienator in Dublin

2009-06-16T17:06:00.010-04:00

By Odienator

Since I will be going to Ireland tomorrow, I thought I'd publish this mini-travelogue from my first visit to Dublin back in October, 2008. This is a true story, with little embellishment on my part. I did change the names to protect the innocent, or more truthfully, because I didn't get the other character's name. I wish I had.

The people I met on my excursions to the Emerald Isle were all wonderful, colorful characters. It felt stereotypical at first, but then several folks I spent time with told me I sounded just like the people they met in New York City, yet I seemed too nice to be an American. I guess we're all stereotypes at first glance.

When I was in Dublin in February of this year, I wrote four pieces for Black History Mumf. I felt a kinship with all the writers Ireland has turned out over the centuries; I felt true inspiration. Or maybe it was just the Guinness and Jameson talking. In either case, I made a second attempt to do what this tale describes. I failed below, and I failed again in February.

Dublin is a great town, and I'm looking forward to getting into more trouble there. Perhaps I will be successful in the following endeavor, for as they say, the third time's the charm. Let me tell you about the first time.

I think I know where the Irish-born John Boorman got his idea for Zardoz. In Dublin, I kept encountering James Joyce, or rather, James Joyce's disembodied head. Most cities have statues and sculptures of their favorite sons, but Dublin is enamored with Joyce's head. In the rare instance they put it on his body in sculpture, it's never in proportion. Never having seen Joyce's full body in a picture, I can't say if this is accurate. I would certainly hope not.

Every time I encountered James' head, I saw Sean Connery in a diaper. I imagined Joyce saying, in a soft Irish lilt, "the pay-nis is evil! The pay-nis shoots seeds!" before spewing out an entire stack of Finnegans Wake novels all over the place. James Joyce knew this, so he decided to have fun with me from beyond the grave in Dublin.

My Ireland tour book told me I needed to go to James Joyce House. It provided some rather crappy map directions, but nothing in Dublin is easy to find, at first. I'd gotten lost every time I tried to find something, and kept running into James' head. This time, however, the powers that be offered some direction in the guise of signs that said "James Joyce House" followed by an arrow and the distance from my current point. As I followed the signs, they seemed to encourage more and more unusual direction. "James Joyce House" read a sign, followed by an arrow that pointed in the direction of a sinister looking alley. Is that right? I asked myself. I looked on the map. The entire area I currently stood in wasn't even ON the map. It was like it had been skipped, blacked out by Rod Serling. Not one street in the vicinity was on the map.

I approached the alley cautiously, thinking I'd be mugged by the ghosts of Irish writers past. After all, I haven't exactly been nice to Joyce, mocking his writing repeatedly in places like The House Next Door. In that alley, I imagined I'd get kicked in the balls by Brendan Behan and bitchslapped by Samuel Beckett. I put on my tough NYC Subway face and entered the alley. "C'mon ghosts," I said in my Al Pacino voice, "GIMME WHATCHA GOT!"

Fortunately, there were no pissed off and/or pissed ghosts of Irish writers in the alley. There was, however, pissing in the alley. A young Dubliner was relieving himself, in full view of passers-by (or rather, passer-by, as it was just him and me in the alley). Dublin is full of blokes emptying their baloney ponies on the cobblestone streets. I saw so much Irish dick that my tour book should have mentioned it as one of the sights I'd see more frequently than Joyce's head. Leaking guys with little sense of modesty are legion, but usually at 3 AM on Friday and Saturday nights. It was 12:30 on a Sunday afternoon.

I couldn't have gotten a better Hollywood-central casting Irishman if I'd ordered him from God's Sears catalog. Red hair? Check. Pale skin? Check. Cheery Smile? Check. Vocal inflections and a tenor's voice? Check. Green attire? Check. Soccer scarf? Check. All he needed was a shamrock and a shillelagh. He certainly wasn't holding a shillelagh in his hand. Irish Curse? Check.

"Cheers, mate!" said Seamus McPee in a cheery brogue. He waved at me, smartly not using the hand holding his uncircumcised pecker. "That's not in my sightseeing guide," I said, holding up my book. "It should be, mate!" he yelled back. "It's the most famous cock in Dublin!"

The alley led, as many Dublin alleys do, to a more populated open area. Awaiting me was another signpost: "James Joyce House" with an arrow that looked as if it were square dancing. The arrow seemed to imply it wanted me to go up, then right, then straight, then right, then straight. "What the hell?" I said out loud. "Could they have bent this fucking arrow in any other directions?"

"You lookin' for James Joyce House?" said a familiar voice from behind me. It was Seamus McPee.

"Yeah, I am," I said.

"Foock that sign," he said. "turn right two blocks down."

"Thanks a lot," I said.

"No worries!" he said, extending his hand for me to shake. I looked at it. My brain raced. Was that the hand he was holding his dick with? Suddenly, an image of Seamus appeared in my head, replaying the earlier scene. In slow motion, Seamus raised his left hand to wave at me. My eyes lowered to the right hand he was currently extending to me.

"C'mon, mate! Don't leave me hanging!" said Seamus.

Forrest Whitaker's Crying Game character, Jody, popped into my head. "It's just a piece of meat," he quoted from the film. "It's got no major diseases!"

I read somewhere that the fist bump was invented by baseball players on (I believe) the Oakland A's. They had a pitcher who peed on his palms as some superstitious pre-game ritual. His teammates would fist bump him to keep from touching his piss palms. Quickly, I balled up my fist and extended it in for Seamus to fist bump me. Instead, Seamus wrapped his hand around my fist and held it; he wasn't familiar with the concept of fist bumping. "I hope you Americans elect O'Bahmer!" he said as he held my hand. The Irish I met always called Obama "O'Bahmer," which sounds wonderful, and everyone I met had the same sentiment when my harsh Joisey accent greeted them.

I'm sure Seamus held my hand about 10-15 seconds, but time seemed to slow down as my brain grasped the concept that, by the distributive property, I was holding Seamus McPee's wang. Seamus flashed a friendly smile at me, and I swear to God his eyes twinkled. The Irish Rovers were singing in some windmill of my mind.

"I'm voting for him," I assured him. I started to retrieve my fist, but he didn't let go of my hand. "Seriously, mate, that George W. Bush is a foockin' arse!" He grabbed my fist tighter. "Jay-sus, what a foocked up situation!" I nodded. He smiled. "You're probably sick of Irish pricks like me yelling at you about America!" he chuckled. I smiled. "Nah, it's cool."

A few people passed by, walking around the two guys standing on the sidewalk in some kind of arm wrestling pose. Seamus let my hand go.

"Two blocks down, turn right!" he said. He waved at me and went the opposite direction. "Thanks again!" I said to his back. He gave me a thumbs up.

Two blocks and a right turn later, I found myself at James Joyce House. It was on a street with a lot of other inconspicuous houses. In the window was—you guessed it—James Joyce's head. A big picture of him from the shoulders up stared at me from the window of the building. Also staring at me, and a few others who had gathered on the stoop, was a sign that said:

"James Joyce House is closed today. We are sorry for any inconvenience!"

I looked at Joyce's face staring at me from the window. I could hear my interpretation of James' voice, negating the final words in Ulysses: "And I said no and he said no the sign said and we said no no oh no oh no oh no."

"Bollocks!" I yelled. I wanted to go Mookie on that window containing Joyce's picture, tossing a trash can through it. I was mad as hell. I walked, like two miles to get here, and the bastard wasn't even home!

My first exposure to James Joyce was in freshman year of high school. We read a story called Araby, which is from his Dubliners book. I thought it was one of the most beautiful stories I'd ever read. It didn't end happily, I recall, but there was some form of bitter acceptance at the end of the story. It was Joycean that my journey would end with my petty hopes of doing something I looked forward to being dashed.

I am sure that the tourists around the James Joyce head in St. Stephens Green that Sunday afternoon will tell their grandkids about the time they saw some pissed off looking Black guy from Joisey going upside it with a plastic water bottle.

Noé Justice: Remembering a Brilliant But Cancelled Show

2009-05-18T21:57:00.011-04:00

by Steven Boone
In the summer of 2000, Gaspar Noé's I Stand Alone, a spinoff of his notorious art film about an unemployed French butcher righting all the wrongs in his life, came to American television. The short-lived FX channel series was a vast improvement over the movie. A raft of brilliant scenarists (including Alexander Payne, Stephen Gaghan and Roger Avary) crafted propulsive tales of vigilante justice, family drama and, in its post-9/11 second (and final) season, the myriad complexities of homeland security police work. The story of The Butcher's rise from disgruntled meat-cutter to homicidal anti-hero to Paris' top cop riveted a small but devoted cult following.

The critics were slow to catch on. Salon's dismissive blurb, "Taxi Driver meets Highway to Heaven," actually counts as a startlingly precise encapsulation of what made the show such a heady, provocative clash of styles. It paved the way for other, far more successful (but less gutsy) FX shows, like The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me.

I'm posting a VHS rip of the show opener as a small attempt at drumming up support for an I Stand Alone: The Series revival via either syndication or DVD. If you miss (or missed) this show, email the geniuses at FX and tell them bring back the butcher. In these recessionary times, we need him.

We Haven't Finished Yet

2009-03-02T01:56:00.022-05:00

By Odienator (click here for all posts)

Last year, I went after some of the movies Black folks love, taking them to task for various offenses. As the 2009 Black History Mumf draws to a close, I offer my readers the chance to take me to similar task. Miss Ross and I made up earlier this month, but I got a lot of hate mail for dissing Irene Cara’s dress. So for those who thought I was mean to Sparkle, here’s your revenge. The Five Heartbeats is MY Sparkle. Much has been written about the film, most of it negative, but when I first saw it in 1991, I fell in love with it. I own a copy of the soundtrack which, excepting School Daze’s soundtrack, is the most played soundtrack in my collection. I own the 15th anniversary DVD as well. For those unfamiliar with the film, this next sentence may send you running for the exit:

Tyler Perry must have seen this movie.

The Five Heartbeats has a lot in common with the films and plays of Tyler Perry, though it is far better crafted than anything with Perry’s name on it. It has elements of comedy, drama, melodrama and music, plus a brief foray into a Christian theme of redemption. It is peopled with actors who, for the most part, were not household names in 1991. Heartbeats makes no attempt to disguise that it’s an audience pleaser, and the audience it aims for is similar to the one that bought Tyler Perry his mansion. As it spins its tale, many plot elements are historical shorthand for events that befell numerous soul singers and groups during the film’s 30 year time frame; the more one knows about the trials and tribulations of Black music, the more entertaining The Five Heartbeats becomes.

After Hollywood Shuffle, writers Robert Townsend and Keenen Ivory Wayans scripted a story about a fictional singing group’s rise to the top. It started out as a comedy, but as Townsend and company did more research and interviews with musicians of that era, they added dramatic elements to the film. Townsend wrote himself a part as the group’s original songwriter and replacement fifth member, then cast a few veterans and members of his acting troupe amongst his newcomers.

Each of the Five Heartbeats is given a personality that carries throughout the picture. Duck (Townsend) is the group’s mediator, songwriter and leader. His brother JT (Leon) is the ladies man who can’t seem to commit. When JT tells him that he can’t stop sleeping with different women, Duck tells his brother he needs help. “They have Alcoholics Anonymous. You need Dick Control meetings.” The band’s David Ruffin lead singer clone, Eddie, could use the former self-help group. As embodied by Michael Wright (the crazed Omar White on Oz), Eddie is the film’s tragic figure. Rounding out the group are the high-note hitting Choir Boy (Tico Wells) and his counterpart at the other end of the scale, bass singer and group choreographer Dresser (Harry J. Lennix from Titus--someone cast him as Barack Obama stat!).

The film’s chaotic opening set piece is a premonition of things to come. It combines several musical numbers, a poker game gone wrong, a shooting, some verbal and physical comedy, a sex scene and a last minute entrance. Three of the Five Heartbeats are at a talent show, awaiting the arrival of Eddie and the original fifth Heartbeat, Bobby. Eddie and Bobby are playing a loaded poker game, and have to run when they’re exposed as cheaters. In the escape, Bobby is shot in the leg and never seen again in the movie, and Eddie comes sliding across the stage to take the lead at the last possible minute. Duck has JT take Bobby’s part, and he assumes JT’s part in their first musical number, “Nothing But Love For You.” The song’s Motown influence is evident in the lyrics.

Ain’t got no money.
Ain’t got no fancy car.
Don’t live the life of a millionaire
Or a movie star.
There’s nothing in this world that I possess
To equal your lovin’ and tenderness.
‘Cuz I got nothing but love for you baby
Got nothing but love for you baby.

The group loses to Flash and the Ebony Flames, a group headed by John Canada Terrell’s Michael “Flash” Turner. Flash is full of his nickname—he strips onstage, then rubs an audience member’s leg while singing “Shimmy shimmy yum yum, come on girl give me some!” The girl passes out as he sings “Are you ready for me?” I guess she wasn’t.

The Heartbeats’ loss doesn’t deter Jimmy Potter (Chuck Patterson) who wants to manage the group. Potter’s wife Eleanor (Diahann Carroll, looking stunning here) is skeptical. She points out that all the groups Potter has fallen for have all left him when they got famous. Potter has a good feeling about this group. After winning a few talent contests, including one sabotaged by a group led by Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle nemesis, Roy Fegan, Potter wants to press Nothing But Love For You onto vinyl. He finds a record company who wants to instead have the song recorded by his White artist, The Five Horsemen. This is an allusion to what actually happened to Black music more than a few times. The Five Horsemen are completely devoid of soul, just like Pat Boone. Unlike the horrific Tutti Frutti cover by Pat Boone, which went to number one on the charts while Little Richard’s version didn’t even chart, Jimmy refuses to have his record ruined by The Five Horsemen. Enter Big Red Davis.

Big Red is the proprietor of Big Red Records, which signs The Five Heartbeats, records Nothing, their signature song, and sends them on tour in the South. He is the film’s chief antagonist, a dangerous and corrupt record owner out to cheat any group he signs. But Hawthorne James plays the character so broadly that his every appearance sends the movie perilously close to self-parody. With his toothy smile and shock of conked red hair, Big Red looks like he stepped out of a comic book. His actions manage to be menacing, but James never is. When he hangs Roy Fegan out of a window over Fegan’s complaint about royalties (is this Townsend’s revenge for Fegan’s torment in Shuffle?), Fegan’s panicked reaction (and his split pants) sells the scene better than James’ menacing. James is as subtle as Madea, and just as important to his film’s storyline.

Now that the guys are going on tour, Potter hires a choreographer to give them some new moves. Dresser is offended, and challenges the new choreographer, a short older man named Sarge Johnson, whom Potter knew in the Army. Unfortunately for Dresser, Sarge is played by the late, great Harold Nicholas from the Nicholas Brothers, the greatest tap team to ever put on tap shoes. Nicholas sizes up Dresser’s moves and then, true to his former screen incarnation as Uptown Saturday Night’s Little Seymour, barks out “see, that wasn’t shit!” Nicholas then does a brief number which brought joy to my heart; anytime this man dances on screen I want to jump up and down. The gruff Sarge has only a few scenes in The Five Heartbeats, but Nicholas makes the most of his screen time. Whether asking for a verboten cigarette or threatening to whip two people’s asses at once, Sarge grabs your attention and doesn’t let go.

Townsend and Wayans give each character little mini-dramas to showcase the actor. Dresser frets over being able to afford his pregnant girlfriend. Eddie’s constant need to be loved and adored by fans leads him down the path of alcohol and drug abuse, leading to the departure of his girl-group singer significant other, Baby Doll (Troy Beyer, who unlike the Heartbeats, does her own singing) and his eventual replacement in the group by John Canada Terrell’s Flash. Eddie’s insubordination inadvertently leads to Big Red’s murdering of Jimmy Potter after the latter refuses to sell his share in the Heartbeats. Eleanor Potter loses her husband and both she and Dresser hold a grudge against Eddie. Duck and JT have a falling out over a woman. All of these subplots are well acted and, though they are predictable, manage to be compelling nonetheless. We’ve invested so much in the characters that the melodramas work.

Michael Wright has the most difficult part to play, and he brings grit and intensity to it. Had Eddie Murphy’s similarly plotted Jimmy Early in Dreamgirls been allowed the same rough edges as Wright’s Eddie, Murphy would have won his Oscar easily. Like Dreamgirls’ treatment of Effie White, Heartbeats skirts the narrative’s logical progression toward the death of its doomed character; here Eddie is rehabilitated through Narcotics Anonymous and the church, but not before a painful scene of Eddie hitting rock bottom. Wright is agonizing and sad as Eddie attempts to rejoin the group while strung out on drugs. Choir Boy offers him money, which Eddie refuses. Choir Boy later offers Eddie a chance to sing in his church choir, which he accepts. Townsend turns it into a rousing gospel musical number.

Speaking of the music, The Five Heartbeats is full of original material sung by session musicians such as Billy Valentine (who does lead on the Heartbeats’ signature tune) and The Dells, upon whose life story some of Heartbeats’ events are based. The songs are excellent and their presentation, with costume changes and full choreography, is a sight to behold. The best number, for a song called We Haven't Finished Yet, comes from Tressa Thomas, who plays Duck’s little sister. While Duck tosses balled up wads of paper with failed lyrics onto the floor, his sister picks them up and starts singing them. As she goes along, Duck tears up their room looking for other pieces of paper with lyrics on them to string together. Townsend and Thomas really sell the number; it works despite its cheesy nature and seemingly inappropriate staging (this isn’t THAT kind of musical). Patti Labelle sings the song over the end credits, and, sorry Patti, I liked the movie’s version better.

The Five Heartbeats is told as one big flashback, but the film goes in chronological order once it hops back in time. As each decade passes, we bear witness to some of the fates that befell real life artists. The Dells’ story about being stopped by racist cops in the South, and forced to sing to prove their identity, is recreated here, as is the robbery of soul artists’ royalties and pay by record label owners. Payola also appears here, as does the career-long battles between groups for fan appreciation and the refusal to put Black artists' pictures on their album covers. The film also tackles how inner group turmoil can cause its breakup despite seemingly lifelong bonds of friendship being forged early on. Townsend and Wayans sprinkle liberal doses of humor in the movie (watch the TV late in the film to see what happens to Flash’s solo career), but give these tragic items the dramatic weight they require.

Much of The Five Heartbeats’ criticism sounds similar to the reviews of Perry’s works: Too many jarring elements are put together in one film. I argue that, in Townsend’s case, his stitching holds the movie together. As writer, he lets us get to know the characters, and as director, he never loses his grip on the material’s sometimes bizarre mixing of elements. There’s a great movie inside of Tyler Perry, and it’s coming sooner rather than later (mark my words). And when it comes, it’s going to look like The Five Heartbeats.

This is the most ghetto product placement I have ever seen.

And that, dear readers, marks the end of this year’s Black History Mumf series! Thanks to everyone who posted out here with comments, and to everyone who took the time to read my ramblings. Stay tooned for a few BHM extras unveiling in the next few weeks. I promised 29 pieces and you’ll get them, officially or not.

This is Townsend's thank you list from The Five Heartbeats. I also share that first credit's sentiment. Steven Boone, why are you in the credits of this movie?

The Content of Their Character Actors: Juano Hernandez

2009-02-28T14:50:00.005-05:00

By Odienator (click here for all posts)

Odie note: Black History Mumf officially ends tomorrow, with the one movie for which you can get revenge on me. Tomorrow's movie is what I planned on finishing the series with, but I committed to a few more pieces than I've delivered. So I will provide them over the next week or so.

I knew Juano Hernandez from the small, beautiful and sad role he had in Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film, The Pawnbroker. I’d never seen a Black man talking about Voltaire onscreen, nor had I witnessed a man who would pawn his items not in exchange for money, but for a few minutes of human connection. Hernandez has big, expressive eyes, and even as he rambles on, somewhat incoherently at times, the pleading in those eyes stays with you. Unfortunately for Hernandez’s Mr. Smith, he is attempting this exchange with Rod Steiger’s Sol, a Holocaust survivor who has completely shut down emotionally. Sol is incredibly mean to Mr. Smith, and finally, Hernandez addresses him with devastating dialogue. I never forgot this performance; not even Steiger’s brilliant work in the picture could erase it. Pauline Kael wrote, The great old Juano Hernandez, as the man who wants to talk, gives the single most moving performance I saw in 1965.” Kael and I disagreed quite a bit, but she’s on the money here.

I had only read about Intruder In the Dust, the 1949 Clarence Brown film marking the debut of Juano Hernandez, in Donald Bogle’s book, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks. Bogle writes:

“Hernandez plays his character with skill and insolence. He strode through the film with a haughty arrogance that made him seem like a wise, many-faceted version of Hattie McDaniel.”

Turner Classic Movies ran Intruder in the Dust a few months ago, and I recorded it. As a first, I’m writing about something here at Black History Mumf with which I was not familiar beforehand. I watched the movie for the first time last night.

Running at a short 87 minutes, Intruder is part murder mystery, part coming-of-age story, part slice of Southern life tale, and part lawyer picture. William Faulkner’s book, and the subsequent film adaptation, have some of the same aspects of To Kill a Mockingbird: The pipe-smoking lawyer who takes the important case, the kids who observe, and the Black man who may or may not be wrongfully accused. Both also show a large slice of White Southern life, that is, of the things that concerned citizens in the segregated South. That’s where the similarities end.

I have not read Faulkner’s book, though the movie version has made me invest in a copy. I have read To Kill a Mockingbird, as most of you probably have, and am quite familiar with the film version made in 1962. As a high school junior, I was less than enamored with Harper Lee’s book, finding it too long and meandering. She was telling the side of the story that didn’t interest me. I recall our teacher telling us that Harper Lee’s original story was considerably shorter, which explained why it felt so padded. Oddly enough, the character of Scout, the narrator of the novel and the daughter of Atticus, shares some similarities with Eve’s Bayou’s narrator in that both of them use childhood memories to paint a very idealistic and somewhat unreliable portrayal of their father. It’s daughter’s love for daddy distilled down to its essence. Atticus seems perfect, because to his daughter, he is.

As much as I love Gregory Peck’s performance in the film (he truly IS Atticus Finch, and it’s one of the best performances ever given), I don’t have the reverence for the movie most people do. It’s never about the Black character on trial (Brock Peters, who would team up with Hernandez on The Pawnbroker two years later). He’s just the Noble Negro who earns Atticus his wings. Peck never makes it about being taught Soul(TM), but the movie makes no attempt to hide its intentions, carrying the novel’s flaws to the screen. Roger Ebert sums it up:

“The problem here, for me, is that the conviction of Tom Robinson is not the point of the scene, which looks right past him to focus on the nobility of Atticus Finch.”

How I would have loved if Atticus had turned to the jurors and cussed their asses out, or if Tom had let out a Chris Rock-worthy yell of “You Cracka Ass Crackas!!” He’s doomed anyway, so why not? But no, this is 1962, and Hollywood was still so scared of the South. I’ve beaten that dead horse before. Let’s move on.

The similarities between the cinematic interpretations of Lee and Faulkner end with the portrayal of the accused. Clarence Brown shows his first full shot of Lucas Beauchamp (Hernandez) by panning up from his boots to his hat. He is standing over a frozen creek helping a teenager who has fallen in. I immediately realized what Hernandez had done with his body language in The Pawnbroker. Hernandez is HUGE. In the Pawnbroker, he seemed so small and inconsequential; here he seems to tower over everybody. Beauchamp’s character had appeared in Faulkner’s work before, in Go Down, Moses (which I have read). Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman, Jr.), the character whom Beauchamp saves in this scene, and whom he addresses when they first bring him to the jail, has also appeared elsewhere in Faulkner.

Lucas asks Chick to bring his uncle to the jail. Chick’s uncle, John Stevens (David Brian) is a lawyer, but he’s no Atticus Finch. Stevens offers to take the case, but he believes Lucas is guilty of the crime. After all, a White man named Crawford Gowrie tells him he saw Lucas standing over his brother, Vinson, with the smoking gun used to shoot him in the back. Lucas has a hot gun, and he is seen standing over the body, but that doesn’t make him the killer. Stevens takes the case because Chick asks him to, though Chick’s motivations are a little complex.

Chick tells Stevens that, after Lucas saved him from the frozen creek, Lucas took him home to feed and clothe him. Chick attempts to pay Lucas and his wife for their troubles, but Lucas asks “What are you doing?” Chick throws the money on the floor and demands that Lucas pick it up. It’s almost absurd, this young punk disrespecting his elders in such a fashion, but it portrays Chick’s sense of entitlement; he wouldn’t have done that to Miss Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson), the revered old White lady in town.

Lucas tells Chick’s Black teenage pal/servant boy to pick up the money and give it back to Chick. Chick is infuriated—he owes this Black man for helping him and that’s a pox on both his houses. He tries paying Lucas back numerous times, but Lucas knows his game and keeps doing things to keep the “debt” unpaid. Lucas never saw a debt in the first place. Perhaps Chick’s delivery of Lucas’ message to his uncle will settle the debt.

Chick also mentions to Stevens the altercation that gave motive to the crime. Lucas had come into town to do his weekly shopping. In the store is Vinson Gowrie, who, along with the other Whites, hates Lucas’ sense of entitlement. Hernandez plays Lucas as a proud Black man, bending to no one. He doesn’t acknowledge the Whites’ presence in the store, and when Vinson attempts to attack him from behind, Lucas shows absolutely no fear. He doesn’t even turn around to give Vinson the satisfaction. Chick yells out “RUN LUCAS,” but Lucas just stands there, eating a candy bar, before walking away. The Whites in the store, all of whom (wisely, considering the size of Lucas) restrain Vinson, look at Lucas with that hatred reserved for a Black man who considers himself in the same human race they inhabit. Chick wonders why Lucas would shoot in the back a man he wasn’t afraid of, because only cowards strike from behind.

At the jail, Lucas refuses to tell Stevens the entire story. Stevens is frustrated, but Chick feels that Lucas may tell him. It’s Sunday, which, according to the movie is a no-lynching day in Oxford, Mississippi, so Lucas will at least be able to survive in the jail until after midnight. The townsfolk will wait for the signal from the Gowries before attacking, which buys Chick a little time to do what Lucas asks him to do. Lucas tells Chick that he’s innocent, and if he’d go look at the body, he’d see that the bullet hole in Vinson Gowrie couldn’t have come from Lucas’ gun.

The townsfolk could care less whether Lucas is innocent, even John Stevens, but Miss Habersham does. She’s an elderly woman, a fascinating character in the film, who helps Chick go up to the gravesite to see if Lucas is right. Assisting the odd couple is Chick’s Black servant friend, Aleck, whom the cin-togger shoots like an ace of spades with eyes. Chick and Aleck dig up Vinson’s grave to find out that he isn’t there. They hear a mule in the distance, and hide. Our detectives avoid detection, but that mule will provide the key to this mystery.

I’m not going to tell you how this mystery is solved. Instead, I want to focus on the depiction of the town on the day the lynch mob plans to storm the jail. The town center is full of cars, people playing cards and dominoes, kids eating ice cream—it’s a fucking carnival! Brown pans his camera over an endless series of faces, all anxiously awaiting the show. It’s a chilling moment that Brown takes his time to show.

The menfolk get restless as they await patriarch Nub Gowrie’s OK to storm the jail. Nub (so called because he only has one arm) is away, but his son is at the front of the jail. Impatiently, he decides to storm the jail, only to be met by Miss Habersham. Miss H.’s job is to keep people out of the jail while Chick and Stevens work out a plan to clear Lucas before he’s murdered. While the rest of the menfolk won’t storm the jail while she’s sitting there (homegirl has that much dap in this town), Crawford Gowrie doesn’t care. He tosses gasoline at her feet and strikes a match. But Miss Habersham is gangsta. She doesn’t move. “You’re in mah sewin’ light,” she tells Crawford. He backs down.

After Lucas is freed (and trust me, rent the movie because it’s a good mystery), he shows up at Stevens’ office. Stevens is just telling Chick that he’s expecting Lucas to show up to rub his face in the fact he was wrong. “He’ll stand there, expecting his apology,” says Stevens, as if the mere thought of a Negro expecting an apology is a slap in the face to Southern pride. Lucas does show up, to pay for the lawyer services. Stevens charges him 3 dollars (he’s cheaper than Johnnie Cochran). Lucas pays, and then stands in front of Stevens’ desk. “Well what are you waiting for?” demands Stevens, fearing that Lucas will ask for that dreaded mea culpa.

“My receipt,” says Lucas.

Juano Hernandez’s portrayal of Lucas sticks with me because I don’t believe I have seen a stronger depiction of a proud Black man onscreen, one whose thought process didn’t allow for a single moment of feeling inferior because of his skin color. He never bends to any White character in the film, and in 1949, this must have been shocking to witness onscreen. When Stevens suggests Lucas bring Gangsta Granny Miss Habersham some flowers for staring down that crazy lynch mob, he reluctantly agrees. I wanted to see another movie with Hernandez and Patterson, the proud Black man and the tough as nails grandmother. Based on the personalities, she’d probably drive him!

After Intruder, Hernandez played in a few other movies, including John Ford’s similar Sergeant Rutledge, but outside of this and the Pawnbroker, he didn’t do too many memorable roles. What was Hollywood to do with him? Hernandez, a former vaudevillian and actor in Oscar Micheaux movies, died in his native Puerto Rico (he was of Puerto Rican and Brazilian descent) in 1970.

Getting Creamed By Coffy

2009-02-26T13:10:00.014-05:00

By Odienator (click here for all posts)

Women in Blaxploitation pictures were disposable characters who usually served two purposes: Screw the hero, and bring him information or a weapon. Youngblood Priest is seen in bed with White girls, but they get far less screen time than The White Girl (ahem, cocaine) in his movie. Shaft’s women are memorable for having a hand clenching orgasm and for telling him to “get it yourself, shitty!” Rudy Ray Moore’s “Kung Fu hos” assisted him in fights and love scenes, both of which were horribly choreographed. As in most B-movies of the era, women were there to be seen and not heard, regardless of race.

Pam Grier changed all that. Already a veteran of B-movies by 1973, she was cast in what seemed like the typical Blaxploitation female. In Coffy, she picks up two drug dealers with the promise of crack and smack. As one guy strips down to his purple boxers, and the other watches while prepping for his fix, you might be thinking that the guys are the heroes of this picture. After all, Youngblood Priest was a dope pusher and he’s the hero of Super Fly. Pam changes your opinion quickly: She calls Mr. Purple Drawers a word that rhymes with blubbermucker, pulls out a sawed off shotgun and shoots the guy point blank in the head. BLAM!! Then she turns to the other guy and demands he shoot up with a Secretariat sized portion of horse. “This will kill me!” he tells her. “Maybe it will and maybe it won't,” says Pam. “But if it do, you gonna fly through them pearly gates with the biggest fucking smile St. Peter ever seen!”

Director Jack Hill’s third collaboration with Pam Grier wastes no time in establishing its premise. Coffy has a problem with drug dealers, and she’s willing to lure them to their violent ends by any means necessary. It isn’t difficult when you’re tall, sexy, confident and have double D guns to go with your actual guns. This wasn’t the typical Blaxploitation hero. Shaft spent the first five minutes of his movie walking through Times Square. In the same amount of time, Coffy sends two bad guys to their Maker, one of them without a head. The poster was right: Coffy will cream you!

Before Coffy, Pam Grier appeared in chicks in chains movies like The Big Bird Cage, its sequel, The Big Doll House, (both by Hill) and Black Mama, White Mama. Mama, a personal genre fave of mine, pairs Grier with leggy blonde Margaret Markov in a sleazy update of The Defiant Ones. They’re handcuffed together, but it doesn’t stop them from having cat fights. Grier was tough, both as hero and villain in her earliest films, but they didn’t start writing her legend until she put on Coffy’s nurse outfit and took on the drug world.

Having a kick-ass female for a hero isn’t Coffy’s only deviation from the genre. The negative portrayal of drugs was also unusual, especially after Super Fly. Super Fly’s hero snorted so much cocaine I’m surprised he was able to stand up. It looked cool, the way Bette Davis’ cigarettes looked cool. Curtis Mayfield said that the film was “a giant commercial for cocaine,” and used his music to counter that. Mayfield’s Pusher Man is a boastful number, but the fool he’s besting in the song is the junkie he holds sway over with his product: He’s your Mama and your Daddy, that is, he owns your ass. It’s telling that Mayfield appears in the film singing this song. Later, he sings on the soundtrack “my life’s a natural high, The Man can’t put no thing on me.” Meanwhile, the people onscreen make Tony Montana look like a newbie.

Coffy has an anti-drug plot. Coffy’s 11-year old sister has gotten hold of some bad smack, and is now incapacitated. Coffy takes her cop ex-boyfriend, Carter (William Elliott), on a tour of what passes for the pediatric ward of the Betty Ford clinic. She points out that some of the patients are under 10 years old. Unbeknownst to Carter, Coffy has been roaming the streets at night, a year before Chuck Bronson would do the same, seeking revenge on the pushers who hurt her family. Unbeknownst to Coffy, Carter’s involved with some shady police dealings with the Mafia. When he backs out, they treat him like a piñata while Coffy helplessly watches. This is a bigger Mafia mistake than Godfather III; Coffy knows how to keep—and settle—a grudge.

Meanwhile, Coffy’s current boyfriend, Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw), is running for Congress. He’s not right for our heroine; he’s corrupt as shit and stupid to boot. He, like most of the men in this picture, underestimates Coffy. She thinks he’s busy, but honest. His campaign race gives Coffy time to execute her plan undetected. Little does she know it’ll all end up back at Howard’s.

Coffy goes undercover (and under the covers) as a prostitute for King George (Robert DuQui), the pimp whose bad heroin her sister injected. King George (his theme music goes “George…KING GEORGE!”) dresses in colors that will burn holes in your retinas, and he has a rainbow coalition-worthy stable of women. Coffy pretends to be a Jamaican ho, complete with an accent so bad it makes Miss Cleo sound like Rita Marley, so she can find his stash. She learns of its whereabouts from a hooker named Priscilla, who makes the mistake of threatening Coffy with a knife. Coffy returns the threat with a broken bottle. Check out some of the dialogue in this scene to find out why Grier says she’s a lesbian icon.

Priscilla: Now, listen. My old man's coming back any minute, and if SHE catches you here, she's gonna wanna kick your ass!

(after the bottle gets pulled by Coffy)

Coffy: Now I'm gonna give you another slice to match the one you got from that dope-pushin' pimp, unless you tell me where he keeps the stuff!
Priscilla: No, please! He'll kill me! Ow... ALRIGHT, alright! He's got a fireplace! It's in a box under the ashes!

(Priscilla's tough-looking black lesbian lover/pimp returns suddenly)

Priscilla: Harriet! Harriet!
Harriet: What the hell is going on here?
Priscilla: She busted in here tryin' to make me! Get her outta here!
Harriet: Come on, bitch!

After Coffy escapes Harriet’s clutches, Harriet turns her anger on Priscilla:

Harriet: I go away for half an hour for you to turn a trick... and I come back and find you ballin' some nigga bitch! You WHITE TRAMP!

Back at King George’s, Coffy gets into the greatest cat fight ever committed to celluloid. Titties and broken glass fly everywhere as Coffy’s Afro gives new meaning to the word nappy: One unlucky vixen grabs Coffy’s coif, only to discover it’s loaded with razor blades. (In another film, if memory serves, Grier pulls a gun from her Afro, making her hair the ghetto equivalent of Felix the Cat’s bag.) This display of feminine ferocity gets Coffy her first client for George, a freaky Italian guy named Arturo.

Grier’s Blaxploitation output has been accused of being misogynist, an argument I understand to a point. In all her films, Grier gets abused in ways far worse than the scene I’m about to describe. However, I counter that Pam always gets her payback. James Brown once sang that a woman has to use what she got to get what she wants, and Grier’s characters understand that it may come at the expense of luring the objects of her wrath with her sexuality. In her films, she gets slapped around, abused, and in a Foxy Brown scene her Jackie Brown director would lift for Kill Bill: Volume I, repeatedly raped while unconscious. It’s manipulative, yes, and even distasteful, but this isn’t Merchant Ivory. Without exception, Pam turns the tables and exerts her empowerment on her tormentors. I understand the claim, but it was par for the course in order to see the kind of Black feminine empowerment I enjoyed so much in these pictures.

Arturo is a sick son of a bitch. He spits on the half-naked Coffy as she’s on the floor. I give the film credit for deglamorizing johns, but the racial aspect is truly cringe-worthy, at least until Pam pulls that gun.

Arturo: Crawl, nigger!
Coffy: (pulls gun): You want me to crawl, white muthafucka?
Arturo: What are you doing? Put that down.
Coffy: You want to spit on me and make me crawl? I'm gonna piss on your grave tomorrow.

Speaking of uncomfortable racial aspects, King George is certainly not a nice guy, but what happens to him at the hands of Grier’s frequent co-star, Sid Haig (Captain Spaulding to you Rob Zombie fans) is truly disturbing. Coffy has set him up, first by replacing his heroin with Domino sugar, then by telling the Mafia that King George set her up to assassinate crazy ass Arturo. The mob gets its revenge by tying King George behind Haig’s car and dragging him down the street for a long, long, long time. I feel a tad hypocritical, baying for blood whenever Coffy gets the upper hand, yet cringing when the guy who set her revenge plan in motion gets his. The scene doesn’t look completely convincing, but its premise and imagery shake me every time I watch Coffy. (Full disclosure: I watched Coffy for the 7,000th time last night, and I punked out. When that scene came on, I went to do the dishes.)

As aforementioned, it all ends up at Howard’s. Coffy learns that her man is, like all politicians, corrupt. Howard, unlike Arturo, knows how to talk sweet when faced with Coffy’s wrath:

Howard: Now, maybe I have done a few bad things, but that's the way the world is today. Sometimes you have to do a few, little wrong things in order to do one big right thing and that's what I'm trying to do for you and for our people: that big right thing!
Coffy: You always were a good talker, Howard.

If you think Coffy’s going to let Howard off the hook, you haven’t been paying attention.

Coffy is the best of Grier’s run of starring roles in the Blaxploitation era. Hill keeps the film tightly constructed and paced, and it delivers the goods in a savage howl of fury. Grier channels her character’s anger and vengeance right through the screen and into the deepest animal recesses of your being. People have complained about her acting (outside of her accent in the Jamaican scenes, I think she’s fine here), but nobody can deny that this woman knows how to convincingly kick ass.

In the Blaxploitation book I assigned for homework yesterday, Jack Hill expresses regret for making Coffy’s pseudo-sequel, Foxy Brown. Foxy is almost a Coffy remake, but it’s meaner, more graphic, and less tightly paced. One plus of the film, besides Pam’s creatively disgusting use of an airplane propeller, is Kathryn Loder’s performance as a dick-crazy psycho White woman, Foxy’s nemesis. Loder chews the scenery better than Shelley Winters in the prior year’s Cleopatra Jones (which is a must see), baying for her man Steve’s love rocket throughout the picture. When Foxy brings it to her, minus Steve, she recognizes it immediately and drops it on the floor. (It’s that kind of movie, folks.) As the kiss off, Grier delivers the best line she has in the series that includes (in the order I like them) Coffy, Friday Foster, Foxy Brown, and Sheba Baby:

Katherine: Why don’t you kill me too?
Foxy: Death is too good for you, bitch. I want you to SUFFER!

See why I’m in love with this woman? Even today, where you’ll find her on The L Word, Pam Grier is still a looker, and the only woman tougher than my mother! No wonder QT is in love with her, and wrote her best performance in Jackie Brown, the movie that put Sam Jackson where he belongs, in Blaxploitation!

Hurt me. Hurt me good, Ms. Grier! Wham, Bam, Thank You Pam!

Your Blaxploitation Homework Assignment

2009-02-25T13:27:00.006-05:00

By Odienator

It’s Blaxploitation Day here at Black History Mumf. I’ll be back later to drool over a certain famous player from the era. For now, here’s another homework assignment for you.

Run out and get a copy of Josiah Howard’s Blaxploitation Cinema: The Essential Reference Guide. Howard has interviews with directors like Larry Cohen, Arthur Marks and the man whose name I just love saying, Jamaa Fanaka. He also has reviews of practically every single Blaxploitation movie ever made, plus color posters from many of them. You’ll see posters for Sweet Jesus, Preacher Man, which I’ve seen, and The Six Thousand Dollar Nigger, which I ain’t nevuh HEARRRRRRD of before. The only Six Thousand Dollar Nigga I know is Old Man Johnson that day he hit the number.

If you remember that Leon Isaac Kennedy movie where a bruva gets bloody revenge by using the samurai skills he learned from a Japanese dude on some remote island, but you don’t remember the name, you’ll find it here. Do you remember that flick where the guy strangles The Man with his humongous penis, but don’t remember its name? It’s here too. Looking for Jayne Kennedy on a prison island trying to escape with two other chicks? It's in there. And if you’re stuck for the title of the film where a sistah gets screwed by a cloud of green mist and has to dodge flying beer cans, you’ll find it in Howard’s book.

Alas, if you’re looking for that movie where the extremely busted-looking church lady buys the possessed Stevie Wonder puppet that forcibly eats her out and gets her hooked on the kind of lovin’ only Willie Tyler and Lester could understand, I’m going to have to tell you the name of that one: Black Devil Doll From Hell. Howard can’t tell you everything! But between the interviews with several players in Blaxploitation (including Jonathan Kaplan, director of The Accused), he tells you enough to warrant the price I paid for this book.

Come back later for the Odie Luvs Pam post! Wikipedia should have their ass beaten for not even providing a picture of her with that link. Bastards.

Get to Know Your Movie Negroes: Part II

2009-02-24T11:24:00.006-05:00

By Odienator (click here for all posts)

It’s the return of Get to Know Your Movie Negroes, the show that tells you, through the power of song, a Who’s Who of Blackness on your screen. Like last year, Bob from Sesame Street is inadvertently helping me by providing the melody I sampled.

Sing along!

Ohhhh oh!
Who are the Negroes in your cinema?
In your cinema?
In your cinema?
Yes, who are the Negroes in your cinema?
They’re the people movies make us play!

Now the Boss Negro yells at you!
He’ll take your badge and say you’re through.
He thinks he’s the H.N.I.C.
But no one takes him seriously.

Cuz the Boss is a Negro in your cinema.
In your cinema.
In your cinema.
Boss Negro’s hollering in your cinema!
He’s the boss who never gets his way.

Look at police chiefs in movies, and I’m sure you’ll find some Boss Negro screaming at White folks (or even Black folks) demanding their badges and then having to eat their words when their underlings prove to them that they overreacted. Look at Gilbert Hill in Beverly Hills Cop for an example. I bet if Norman Jewison showed Sidney’s boss in In The Heat of The Night, he would have been yelling “Tibbs, if you help that racist Southern cracka, I’ll have your goddamned badge!!” Next verse!

Now the Token shows up with Whites,
But never gets character’s rights.
Whether film or animation,
He’s the one spot on that dalmation!

Cuz the Token’s a Negro in your cinema!
In your cinema!
In your cinema!
Ask “Who is this Negro in my cinema?”
He has no character to play.

Ever watch a movie and there’s a group of people, like 18 White folks, and then out of nowhere there will be a smiling Black or Asian person in the group? He or she never says shit, or if they do, it’s completely worthless dialogue that could have been cut out of the movie quicker than Lena Horne in the South. Why is this person there? It’s pure pandering! I can accept that there are plenty of places where you won’t find minorities. I’ll always hold it against Charles Schulz for putting Franklin on those Peanuts TV specials. He could have at least given the bruva an Afro. Or a line to say. Final Verse.

Now the hoochie she shows her ass.
She’ll jump in bed with men quick-fast.
She’ll shake what her mama gave her.
Black image she does no favors.

Cuz the hoochie’s a Negro in your cinema,
On your videos
And on BET.
And The Boss and the Token are in cinemas
They’re the people that you meet
When you’re in your theater seat
They’re the Negroes Ho’wood makes us play!

Musical Mondays: Me and Miss Jones

2009-02-23T16:57:00.008-05:00

By Odienator (click here for all posts)

Suppose you bought a copy of Carmen: A Hip Hopera on DVD. I’ll attribute this choice to your drug use and your improper fixation on Beyonce Knowles. I won’t judge you; she IS Sasha Fierce. You get home, fire up your DVD player and start the movie. Beyonce shows up, looking as tasty as yo’ Mama’s baked macaroni and cheese. Even better, this is a musical so you’ll be privy to hearing Foxy Cleopatra sing her heart out. And sing her heart out she does, along with Mos Def, Lil Bow Wow and Wyclef Jean. But something’s wrong. That figure on the screen LOOKS like Beyonce, and it’s definitely her ass in the ass clap sequences, but every time she opens her mouth, she sounds like Paul Robeson.

You think it’s your weed. Didn’t you tell your roommate not to buy that shit from that dealer who looked like Bea Arthur? But your roommate, who didn’t inhale, points out that Rah Digga sounds like Busta Rhymes and Wyclef Jean sounds like Aretha Franklin. You both note that Lil Bow Wow sounds like Lil Bow Wow. “Is this from in front of the Beacon Theater?” your roomie asks. “Nah, I bought this from Amazon,” you reply. “Maybe it’s the TV.”

You tweak every single knob on your TV. Nothing changes. You’re looking at people whose singing voices you know well, but when they open their mouths, somebody else’s voice comes out of them. Beyonce as Paul Robeson is ESPECIALLY jarring because now you’re envisioning him in that Single Ladies video. “If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it ohh oh ohh!” sings Paul, jumping around in Sasha Fierce’s skimpy outfit and heels.

What I have just described is ridiculous. It is also exactly how it feels to watch Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones. Preminger cast a bunch of singers and then had them all dubbed, with one exception, in other people’s voices. How the hell do you dub Harry Belafonte and expect no one to notice? The dubbing is so distracting that it destroys the film, which is a shame because this movie has one of the sexiest depictions of a Black woman ever put on the screen.

Carmen Jones is based on Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen. Carmen holds a special place in my heart as the first (and thus far only) opera I have ever seen performed live. I’m not an opera fan, but Bizet’s music is irresistible, full of passion and perfectly suited for its temptress of a titular character. Before we went to see the opera, the great love of my life played a CD of it for me, translating every lyric as it was sung. She sat next to me, almost whispering in my ear what was being said, like my own personal Babelfish. It made me love the opera even more.

I’ll bet the lyrics I got were a lot better than the ones written by Oscar Hammerstein II for Carmen Jones. Keeping Bizet’s music, Carmen Jones updates the story, translates the lyrics to suit it, and then casts it with an all-Black cast. The all-cullud cast treatment wasn’t a new phenomenon when Jones debuted on Broadway in 1943; 13 years earlier, The Green Pastures adapted Bible stories, colorized them on Broadway and won the Pulitzer. Eight years earlier, DuBose Heyward and George and Ira Gershwin unveiled Porgy and Bess, whose success Oscar Hammerstein II must have been trying to duplicate with Carmen Jones. Both are operas and both contain that ignorant pseudo-patois White writers put into the mouths of Black characters for decades. I’ve known plenty of dumb Black people in my time, but I’ve never heard any of them sound as unnatural as this.

Carmen Jones was a hit on Broadway in 1943, and in 1954, director Otto Preminger brought it to the screen using the new technology called Cinemascope. As Carmen, Preminger cast perhaps the finest Black woman to ever grace a Hollywood screen, Dorothy Dandridge. Preminger also cast Harry Belafonte as Carmen’s doomed lover Joe (why is the guy’s name ALWAYS Joe in these all-cullud musicals? See Cabin in the Sky) and Pearl Bailey and Diahann Carroll (in her debut) as Carmen’s friends. These are all singers, and excepting Pearl Bailey, they are all dubbed. The first time Harry Belafonte opens his mouth, and some opera dude comes out of it, the movie lost me.

As a lover of musicals, I know actors are dubbed all the time. But this is different. Deborah Kerr could have sounded like a deranged nightingale on crack when she sang, but I wouldn’t know because I never heard her. I always heard Marni Nixon. I do know what Audrey Hepburn sounds like (that’s her singing Moon River), but her dubbing in My Fair Lady didn’t bug me because she isn’t a singer. Julie Andrews IS a great singer with a distinctive voice, and if she were dubbed, it would result in the same uncanny valley-esque feeling I got watching Harry Belafonte and not hearing the voice that yells out “DAY-O!” I understand that this is an opera, so they should have cast someone who could handle the singing, or cast an actor like Sidney Poitier and dubbed him (Preminger did exactly that, in Porgy and Bess).

Dorothy Dandridge was also a singer, but when I saw Carmen Jones the first time, I wasn’t very familiar with her work as such. Her dubbing bothered me less, especially since she gives a fantastic performance, one that garnered her the first Best Actress Oscar nomination ever bestowed on a Black woman. In 1954, the censor still had a tight rein on how sexy a woman can be, and a woman of color this hedonistic and unbridled must have ruffled some feathers. Carmen Jones is one HOT mamacita, burning as hot and bright as the red flame that flickers in Saul Bass’ opening credits. You can always tell when the director is screwing the lead actress, because she seems to burn a hole through the screen when the camera is on her. Preminger and Dandridge carried on an affair for four years, which started during the making of this film. It must have been a hot one.

The plot is something like the opera. Carmen is a free spirit who is attracted to men she can’t have. If they pursue her, she’s not interested. As a parachute maker, she’s surrounded by men, one of whom is Joe, a pilot-in-training. Joe is betrothed to Cindy Lou, a girl who looks busted compared to Carmen but who loves Joe and will be true to him. Like the Mounties, Carmen always gets her man, so Joe’s attempts to resist her are futile. Once she gets Joe, as her song says, she grows tired of him, preferring to move on to boxer, Husky Miller. Joe’s jealousy gets the best of him, leading him to fulfill the prophecy Carmen foresees when her cards are read.

Preminger was notorious for giving the finger to the Production Code. The year before Carmen Jones, his film The Moon is Blue was condemned by the Legion of Decency and refused a seal. Preminger put the movie out anyway, which was unprecedented. In Carmen Jones, he’s really poking his finger in the proverbial eye. Dandridge is allowed full range and control of her seductive wiles, getting involved in a vicious catfight, flirting with Belafonte in front of his steady Cindy Lou (Olga James), and stripping down to reveal a black bra and zebra striped panties. “Zip me up,” she tells Belafonte as she thrusts her ass in his direction. Her seduction of Belafonte involves her reaching to undo his pants, something I’d never seen done in a movie of this era, and the film’s dialogue about her way with soldiers is surprisingly frank. For the ladies, Preminger shoots Belafonte shirtless and oiled up (at least it looks that way) for several minutes as he lip-synchs his love for Carmen.

Dandridge delivers her dialogue like a serious Mae West. It’s kind of funny to hear, but it’s also completely believable and quite arousing. Belafonte does a fine job of showing his lapse into obsession, though his last scene is rushed and doesn’t work. Carroll and Bailey are funny as gold-diggers latching on to the boxer who vies for Carmen’s hand, and Bailey, just by virtue of singing it herself, gets the film’s best musical number. Singing about drums (RAGING STEREOTYPE ALARM!!!), Bailey dances in the most energetic number the film offers.

Hammerstein’s lyrics are rather dismal, sounding more like the parodies I do here at Big Media Vandalism than a serious musical. Occasionally, he surprised me with a great lyric or two, and his take on Habanera is good because it’s pretty faithful to the original. Most of the time, his attempts to make it sound ethnic fall horribly flat. When Carmen gets the card of death during her reading, Dandridge opens her mouth and this panicked White mezzo-soprano sings out “DE NIIIIINE! LAWDY DE NIIIIINE!!!” Hammerstein’s version of the Toreador song, here called “Stand Up and Fight” is a travesty.

Dorothy Dandridge holds Carmen Jones together, and since she’s onscreen for most of the movie, the film is watchable despite its flaws. She certainly deserved her Oscar nomination, and I wish Hollywood had found better things to do with her. As a side note: Halle Berry, who not only resembles Dandridge (Dandridge is hotter) but also hails from Dandridge’s home town of Cleveland, Ohio, does a wonderful job in the HBO movie, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. I’ve never been high on Berry as an actress, but both she and Brent Spiner are fantastic in this movie. Check it out after you watch Ms. Jones.

The Content of their Character Actors: Taraji P. Henson

2009-02-22T19:21:00.008-05:00

By Odienator (click here for all posts)

Sports Illustrated has the Cover Jinx, and Black History Mumf has the Oscar night curse. Last year's Oscar night post asked "Can Ruby Dee Win Tonight?" Dee pulled a surprise upset at the SAG awards, and my rationale was that, as the only active Black actress from the old Hollywood days, the Academy would see the symbolism in giving her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. She's only in American Gangster for a few minutes, but this was the category of people winning for short performances. I felt that if she'd had one more scene in the picture, she'd be more of a lock, but I predicted she would win. A few hours later, Dee lost to Tilda Swinton, an actress who admittedly gave an excellent performance in Michael Clayton. But what if my mentioning Dee here on Oscar night cursed her in some way? Someone wrote me with this very accusation.

I don't possess that kind of magic, because if I did, I'd fill this entire entry with two words repeated over and over: Kate Winslet. Winslet, a usually fine actress who can't keep her top on to save her life, is up for one of the worst movies to ever get a Best Picture nomination, The Reader. Winslet's performance is nowhere near as useless as her nominated role in Iris (where she did absolutely nothing but show her tits—where are Sybil Danning's Oscar nominations for doing the same thing?), but as bad as her illiterate, pedophile Nazi performance is in The Reader, I'm forced to believe the Academy nominated her because she has the last real pair of juicy White hooters in Hollywood. They're fantastic, and they get more airtime in The Reader than in any of her pictures. They just can't act, and therefore should not receive Oscars. If it were about acting, they'd have nodded her for Revolutionary Road, which isn't a good movie, either, but at least she's not relying on her fun bags to gain sympathy. But I digress.

To keep angry folks from writing me if Taraji P. Henson doesn't win the Oscar tonight, I've stuck her in my character actor bucket here at Big Media Vandalism. She deserves to be discussed for the other performances Oscar ignored, as well as the one to which it paid attention. If the Oscars were like the Grammys, Henson would have an Oscar already. The last time she appeared on the show's stage, she sang the hook in Three 6 Mafia's Oscar winning song, It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp.

When I saw the scene in Hustle and Flow where she hears the playback on the hook in Terrence Howard's version of the song, I said to my friend, "that's her Oscar nomination scene right there." The Academy thought differently. After watching her quiet scene with Chiwetel Ojiofor late in Talk To Me, I said to another friend, "there's her Oscar nomination scene!" The Academy thought differently. After watching Benjamin Button, and wondering about the Curious Case Of Odie's Numb Butt, I asked myself "where was her big Oscar nomination scene?" BAM! The Academy nominates her.

Henson deserves her Oscar nod for Benjamin Button, if only for bringing warmth to the cold, emotionally detached world David Fincher and Eric Roth trapped me in for three hours. The film is beautiful to look at (I like dark cin-tog), and the effects are first rate, but you can't sell a love story where the filmmakers are afraid of genuine emotion. There is a credible, emotion-filled love story in this picture, and it's the maternal one starring Henson and a shitload of special effects posing as Brad Pitt, not the one between Cate Blanchett and the actual Brad Pitt posing as a special effect. If she loses tonight, and I believe she will, it will be because David Fincher and company failed to provide her lovely character with a worthy exit. She gets figuratively slapped out of the picture, much like Marisa Tomei did in her nominated turn in In the Bedroom (except, well, Tomei literally got slapped out of that picture). SPOILER ALERT: Her character dies, and nobody even mourns for her. Pitt is told that Henson is dead, and the movie just hops back to its shitty love story. I was infuriated.

On paper, Henson's roles look stereotypical and potentially offensive. I submit into evidence Exhibits a through d:

a) A ghetto girlfriend who loves her immature asshole of a boyfriend too much.
b) A pregnant hooker in love with her pimp.
c) A loudmouthed, sassy, ostentatious and sexy Black woman with a prisoner boyfriend and a taste for revenge.
d) A barren Black caretaker tasked with dealing with raising a deserted White kid in 1918 Louisiana.

Just reading these descriptions make me itch, until I think about Henson's take on the material. a, b, and c are all better than d, her nominated performance, and I'm not the only person who noticed this. Perhaps Benjamin Button's nod is to rectify past Oscar wrongs; if so, Henson's nod is in the same boat as Kate Winslet's Reader win will be if my constant mention of her name doesn't work here.

Exhibit a: Baby Boy. In John Singleton's movie, Henson plays Yvette, a round the way girl involved with a trifling Mama's Boy played by Tyrese Gibson. Yvette loves Baby Boy so much she's willing to get an abortion to keep him, and right after the procedure he takes her car to cheat on her. Yvette is tougher than she appears, however, and Singleton gives her great dialogue and a powerful scene where she, in one line, talks her ex-boyfriend (Snoop Dogg) out of raping her, an event Yvette then uses to shock Baby Boy into offering her some sympathy. Yvette is smart, has a job, and should be running like a bat out of Hell from Baby Boy. Everybody knows an Yvette, and since I'll never be a woman, I'll never understand why they do the stupid things they do to keep a worthless-ass man. Henson brings so much realism to Yvette that, of all the characters she's played, this is the one every hood denizen I know loves most.

Exhibit b: Hustle and Flow. Once again, Henson is cast as a woman who knows just how bad the guy she pines for is, yet sticks around. She's pregnant and hormonal here, and at times seems in fear of Howard's Djay. She's almost petrified when he scares her into projecting her voice to sing the hook in his rap song. Such ironic lyrics—here's a hooker singing about how hard it is out there for a pimp—and Henson nails them. However, it's the scene where she hears her voice back, and she realizes how good she sounds, that is the film's sole scene of realism. Her facial expression, her surprise and her joy wordlessly push an influx of self-esteem into her being. Her line "letting me sing on the demo made me feel real" sounds cheesy, until you hear her say it.

Exhibit c: Talk to Me. Kasi Lemmons loves her strong female characters, but for much of Talk to Me, Henson's Vernell Watson is employed as comedy relief. She's funny as hell, and won't take any shit from her boyfriend Petey Greene (Don Cheadle). When he cheats on her and she finds out, the scene she plays with a naked, cheating Cheadle is a comic masterpiece, and she slays her revenge scene afterward with three words aimed at Greene: "Now we're even." I kept thinking she was going to fall off the edge of dignity, but then Lemmons gives her a scene where she talks about Petey with his friend/boss Chiwetel Ejiofor. Suddenly, you realize there's more to this woman than her extroverted exterior. By itself it's not a showstopper; in context it's a whole 'nother side to this character. This is my favorite performance of hers.

Exhibit d: Benjamin Button. I snarkily called Henson "Brad Pitt's Mammy" on another site, and I should be slapped around a bit for it. Henson refuses to be a Mammy character, and for the most part, Benjamin Button doesn't imply that. She's a caregiver, and Benjamin Button's arrival on her doorstep fills an emotional need for her, much like Djay's demo or stealing back her car from Baby Boy. Henson looks at that decrepit, ugly robotic baby with a motherly love one could envy. She's also, unlike Mammy, given a love life and a side story. Her strength shines through, both in her interactions with the literally old folks in her home and with her adopted old man of a baby. When she's onscreen, Benjamin Button lives up to the emotions it thinks it employs throughout. When she's gone, the movie's heart remains as dark and clinical as its cinematography, and the film doesn't even acknowledge that she is missed. That'll doom her come Oscar night.

Viola Davis, like Ruby Dee last year, has one really good mother scene in Doubt. The difference there is that one scene is all Davis needs to take home that Oscar. It's the linchpin scene in the movie. I hope she wins, but on my official ballot, I predicted Penelope Cruz. Let's hope Davis' fans don't blame me for mentioning her if she loses!

Happy Oscar night folks!

Himes on Harlem: Pop Goes The Weasel

2009-02-22T11:44:00.024-05:00

By Odienator (click here for all posts)

(Odienator note: I'm back from Ireland and trying to catch up. There will be double posts the next few days.)

After the success of Cotton Comes to Harlem, Warner Bros. brought Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques back to the screen in a sequel called Come Back, Charleston Blue. Directed by Mark Warren and based on The Heat's On, the Chester Himes book that followed Cotton, Blue is more a curiosity piece than required viewing. Boasting a score by Donny Hathaway and its place as the second detective movie sequel to feature Black characters, the PG rated Blue is far too tame for its source material. It's not a bad movie, and it has some funny moments, but it would have benefited from an R-rating and the return of Ossie Davis as director.

Fast-forward 19 years to A Rage In Harlem, which shares numerous similarities with its 1970 predecessor. Harlem is based on a Chester Himes book and directed by a Black actor turned director, Bill Duke. Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones are back, with the latter again played by a sarcastic comedian. There are schemes involving religion and money, a fine woman or two, and language and nudity that earn it the same rating Cotton Comes To Harlem got. Both were billed and advertised as comedies, but both have an action-oriented side.

Cotton Comes To Harlem doesn't shy away from Himes' violent world of hustlers, marks and damsels, but A Rage in Harlem veers closer to its graphic nature. It's less an adaptation of the first Coffin Ed and Gravedigger novel, For Love of Imabelle, than an evocation of the moods and ideas found in Himes' books. Rage uses the novel's plot as a jumping off point, spinning a neo-noir fairy tale. There's a big trunk of gold, a character named Goldy, a crime lord who loves an animal more than a man should, and recited nursery rhymes. There's also a love story, complete with the rescue of the damsel in distress by a man of virtue.

All of this is presented with a nod toward the absurd, of which Himes would have approved. The full text of the quote I cited in my Cotton post is:

"And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference."

An example of this absurdity: The man of virtue is a city boy named Jackson (Forrest Whitaker). He bucks the stereotype of the urbanite being smarter and more dangerous than the country folks he encounters. He's clueless about life, but as an undertaker's assistant, he knows a lot about death. Jackson is so overJesused, he has a picture of de Lawd over his bed, right next to a picture whose identity is a hilarious running joke in the film.

People will see this picture. The dialogue goes like this:
Person 1: Who's That up there?
Person 2: That's Jesus!

Person 1: I know who Jesus is! I mean who's the other dude.

Person 2: That's his Mama.
Person 1: (incredulously) That's Jesus' Mama?!
Person 2: No! That's Jackson's Mama.
Person 1: (looking again) DAMMMMMMN!!!

Jackson doesn't realize the damsel in distress he intends on rescuing is actually part of the gang from which he wishes to extricate her. For a virtuous man who is always quoting Scripture and looking at sinners with scorn, his reason for rescuing his gal is purely sexual. Perhaps he wants his virtue back from the woman who took it. Jackson may be the most pussy-whipped character in movie history, and he's the hero of A Rage in Harlem.

Our damsel in distress is actually a femme fatale, not that the virginal Jackson would know the difference when he meets her. Her name is Imabelle (Robin Givens), and she's sexy, vampy and curvy in ways Jackson's Jesus picture would disapprove of, even if Jesus looks like All That Jazz's Joe Gideon.

It's Showtime Folks!

Imabelle is a hooker with a trunk full of gold who, during the film's opening gun fight-slash-mole mutilation sequence, runs away from a dangerous Bama named Slim (Badja Djola). The trunk belongs to Slim, whose shootout results from a trade deal gone wrong. Trapped in Harlem with no liquid funds and no place to hide, she seeks a mark with whom she can crash while she contemplates her next move. She winds up at the Undertaker's Ball, the kind of social event Jackson finds distasteful because of its potential for hook-ups. Of course, Jackson is there this time, but he needs a little coaxing to get trapped in Imabelle's spider web-slash-coochie.

Jackson takes Imabelle home, but not for her intended purpose. When Imabelle wakes up, clothed, after falling asleep in his bed, she finds that her sexy red dress has been covered with a blanket. "You covered me up," she says incredulously. "Most men would have uncovered me." Never once does Imabelle think that Jackson might be gay, or if she does, she's convinced she can at least get him to try the other side of the menu.

Imabelle realizes that she has to uncover herself for this guy to get the picture. When he does, the floor gets the picture too; Jackson removes Jesus and Mama, placing them next to his bed. "I don't know anything," he shyly tells her. "It don't matter, Jackson," says Imabelle. Their coupling is set to the most perfect 2 minutes and 43 seconds ever pressed into vinyl, James Brown and the Fabulous Flames' Please, Please, Please. As James begs on the soundtrack so convincingly that only the most heartless woman would leave, director Duke intercuts Jackson's ecstasy with pictures of Jesus and Mom; it's hardly a subtle representation of a soul's carnal corruption. Afterward, Imabelle looks at Jackson, her face revealing she knows she has her mark hooked. "Will you marry me?" he asks. He's not kidding.

Meanwhile, Slim and his posse find their way to Harlem to make a deal with a crime lord named Easy Money (Danny Glover). Easy Money carries a lap dog wherever he goes, decades before Paris Hilton and Mickey Rourke made it fashionable. Glover juggles the juxtaposition of this tough guy with his fluffy dog, convincing us that his love for the dog could be (and is) his undoing at the hands of Slim. The poor thing suffers the most ruthless piece of slapstick comedy A Rage in Harlem has to offer, but it will be avenged before the credits roll.

When the jealous Slim finds out Imabelle is shacking up with a man as gullible as Jackson, he's at first angry, but then he can't resist running an easy con to get all Jackson's life savings. Imabelle protests--the poor guy's innocence and doggish devotion has softened her heart—but it's either his money or his life. Slim's henchman (Rage's screenwriter, John Toles-Bey) recites the nursery rhyme that precedes much of Rage's carnage, Pop Goes The Weasel. It's Mother Goose's answer to Pulp Fiction's Ezekiel 25:17.

The scam Jackson gets roped into is even more ridiculous than cashing a check from Nigeria. It involves cooking your money in an oven. Slim breaks in, pretending to be a cop cracking down on this particular type of voodoo. Jackson is scammed, his apartment damaged, and his heart broken when he discovers Imabelle is gone when he returns home after giving Slim all his money as a bribe. "Please don't let her be gone," Jackson asks de Lawd, and you almost feel badly for laughing at Whitaker's delivery. The neighborhood Muslim, Claude X (Willard Pugh, looking very Nation of Islam in his tie and glasses), tells Jackson to seek out his step-brother to help him get his woman back.

Jackson's step-brother is named Sherman, though he prefers Goldy. Goldy (Gregory Hines) is a gold-toothed horndog who scams the kids in Harlem by selling them $5 tickets he says will get their dying loved ones into Heaven. He hasn't spoken to Jackson in years, which suits the latter fine until he needs help getting his groove back. Goldy isn't interested in helping Jackson who, despite ignoring several religious tenets in the last few paragraphs, still acts pious when he encounters Goldy dressed like a priest. Goldy shoos his bro away, until he hears about the trunk of gold Imabelle has in her possession. "You get the girl, I get the gold," he tells Jackson, who agrees to take love over money.

Goldy seems less dangerous than most of Harlem, but Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones (Stack Pierce and George Wallace) are obsessed with shooting him. When Ed and Digger discover that Goldy is wrapped up in the Slim caper, they can't resist this two-for-one sale. Jackson's landlord (Helen Martin) describes the woman he has been "fornicating with," and the men who took her. Martin would remember Imabelle, too. When Jackson brings her home, Martin looks at her and complains "if Jesus was on Earth today, He'd climb back up on the cross and start over!" To the detectives, she mentions the heavy trunk the men were hurrying out of the building. "That may be that trunk of gold," says Digger. "Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn't," says Martin, "but somebody's gonna pay $179 for my busted stove!"

The love of a good woman, or should I say the too-damn-good punany of a no-damn-good woman, empowers Jackson. He's still way too naïve for Goldy's taste, for he thinks Imabelle has been kidnapped. His attempts to save her lead Jackson to leap across rooftops, dodge bullets, and get involved with some of Harlem's lowest criminals. He is so delusional that, at one point, he challenges Slim to a fistfight for Imabelle's hand.

The film treads an uneasy line between Jackson's obliviousness and the dangerous nature of those with whom he interacts. To assist in the gold's retrieval, Goldy enlists his only friend, Big Kathy. Big Kathy is the tall, blonde madam of a Harlem brothel, but that ain't no lady, that's Zakes Mokae in drag. Jackson is horrified, and even more terrified after Big Kathy cleans his clock with one punch. Big Kathy is an interesting character, embodied by Mokae without once winking at the audience, and I wish he'd had more screen time. In his one non-drag scene, Mokae provides the film's consequences of the single-minded actions of both Jackson and Goldy, as well as Himes' penchant for broad comedy giving way to brutality. "I recognize that voice!" says an astonished Toles-Bey before slitting Big Kathy's throat while Goldy wastes time chasing his brother. "When I last saw you, you was dressed as a woman! You dat bitch that runs the whorehouse!" It's the film's most brutal sequence, infused with the notion that there is no way on earth anyone could have mistaken Zakes Mokae for a woman.

Redemption isn't high on Himes' priority list, but A Rage In Harlem seeks it in numerous characters. Givens, in her film debut, is convincing both as a heartless seductress and a woman confused about the mark she discovers she has feelings for; he may be the first man in her life to have treated her well. Late in the film, she tells him she doesn't deserve him, and she's right, but the film puts a gun in her hand and the audience on her side. Goldy's loss of his only true friend doesn't cure him of his greed, but it does allow the return of brotherly feelings toward Jackson. Jackson is still naïve, but his passion for Imabelle, regardless of its naivety, makes him man up.

Rage and Cotton are time capsules of their respective eras. Davis' film is looser, less moody and more comedic. It exists not as a period piece because its release was only 4 years after the novel was written. To look at it is to look at 1970. Rage is a period piece, heightened by the director's noirish cin-tog, the cars and the costumes. To look at it is to look at the 1940's filtered through the stylishly violent pictures of the late 80's and early 90's. The music in both films support this theory; Cotton has Galt MacDermott writing music for 1970, and Rage has the ever-reliable Elmer Bernstein offering a jazzy throwback that sounds like 1948 in something that feels like 1991. Both films succeed in their intent, and would make a fine double feature.

That oven scam involves putting money in a cylinder and then baking it until more money "appears." This is how President Obama is going to fix the economy, by the way.

Himes on Harlem: We Kick Cotton's Ass

2009-02-18T20:26:00.030-05:00

By Odienator (Click here for all posts)

The only bad thing I can say about Dublin, Ireland, a place I have visited twice now, is that their Internet access sucks. I have to pay 15 Euros a day for service in this hotel, and there's no promise it'll work. So I apologize for the delay in posts. Nothing I can do about that, and I expect that it will continue to be troublesome until I come home on Saturday. I'm having a great time here, even if work is killing me. At least the Dubliners have been kinder to me than their cousins in Boston and New York have ever been.

But I digress, and I'd better hurry up and post this before I get zapped again. A bruva won't shortchange you. I committed to 29 pieces, and you'll get them all. My apologies for the delays.

Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference. –Chester Himes

Chester B. Himes wrote novels that spanned genres, but he’s best known for his crime novels, four of which have been made into movies. Himes was an Ohio native who, after being expelled from Ohio State, turned to a life of crime that would net him a 20-25 year stint in the penitentiary. While incarcerated, Himes turned to writing as a way to earn respect and avoid violence. His novels ranged from autobiographical stories about racism to a candid take on homosexuality. Himes’ greatest fame came with the eight novels he wrote about Harlem, featuring recurring police detectives Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. I’ve read six of Himes’ novels, and four of his works have been transformed from novel to screen with varying degrees of success. Today and tomorrow at Black History Mumf, we’ll take a look at two of these features, Cotton Comes to Harlem and A Rage in Harlem.

In 1970, the late Ossie Davis became one of the first Blacks to direct a major studio feature. His compatriots all chose material that came from literary sources. The pioneer, Gordon Parks, chose his autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree, for Warners in 1969. Melvin van Peebles chose Summer of ‘42 scribe Herman Raucher’s book, Watermelon Man, as the film he made before he changed the independent movie game. Davis, an actor and playwright (Purlie Victorious), chose Chester Himes’ novel, Cotton Comes to Harlem, as his directorial debut. Parks went on to direct Shaft, and van Peebles tackled Sweet Sweetback. Davis, the most cinematically experienced of them all, never directed another hit after Cotton.

Davis proved surprisingly adept at directing, balancing Himes’ penchant for hilarity and slapstick with his reliance on shady characters and graphic violence. Cotton is less brutal than both the novel it’s based on and the cinematic version of A Rage in Harlem, but it still has plenty of violence. Causing a fair bit of it is a duo played by Calvin Lockhart and Judy Pace. Lockhart, no stranger to playing men who are as trifling as they are charismatic, plays a preacher whose Back to Africa movement has stirred up a lot of interest for Harlem residents. The Right Reverend Deke O’Malley has promised them a boat ride back to the mother country for a thousand bucks apiece. This being 1970, that’s a helluva lot of money to go to a place none of these Negroes had ever been to before. Marcus Garvey and James Monroe may have been serious about sending folks Back to Africa, but Reverend Deke is full of more shit than a Christmas turkey—a jive Christmas turkey.

Seeing through O’Malley’s ruse is Coffin Ed Jones (Raymond St. Jacques), a police detective working the Harlem beat with his partner Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge). Ed complains to Digger every chance he gets, stating that O’Malley’s flim-flamming of his own people is worse than mistreatment by Whites. Digger responds with amusement, but doesn’t disagree. Ed wants to kick the Reverend where the Good Lord split him, and as Cotton Comes to Harlem opens, it looks like he may get his chance. O’Malley has shown up in Harlem to peddle his Africa scam, and the neighborhood outpouring is huge. O’Malley, true to the form of so many Black preachers, shows up dressed like a pimp, using de Lawd to get him chosen by the naïve and the overheated.

After taking in his haul of cash, O’Malley’s rally is interrupted by several machine-gun wielding men. They shoot up the place and are given chase by Digger and Ed. In the fracas, $87,000 manages to disappear from the scene of the crime, and O’Malley’s right hand man is murdered. Davis handles the action well, presenting a car chase with several entertaining angles, plenty of gunplay, an explosion and a punch line that plays hilariously on a certain stereotypical fruit.

It’s the film’s first juggle of comedy and violence, and it’s well balanced.

Digger and Ed find the getaway car and the stolen armored truck hoisted at the rally, but there’s no money in it. Even more puzzling is a large piece of unprocessed cotton found at the scene. Digger, Ed, and their chief, played by Eugene Roche from Webster, are confused. What would cotton be doing in Harlem?

A pickpocket named Early Riser is run over by the robbery suspects’ car. He goes flying comically into the air, a visual reminder of an earlier scene where Digger absurdly tosses a Black militant guy about 50 feet in the air. The pickpocket’s fate is a lot more tragic—he’s killed—but his death may provide a clue to the robbery suspects. Seems Early Riser’s junkie sidekick, Lo Boy, may have seen more than enough to help Coffin Ed and Digger’s investigation. Lo Boy is played, rather convincingly, by Cleavon Little 4 years before he brought color to the Wild West.

Digger and Ed question Lo Boy, but he’s too high to be coherent. At least until Ed starts slapping him around. St. Jacques must slap six different people in this picture; Lockhart looks like a pimp and St. Jacques uses his hand like one. Ed slaps information out of Lo Boy that indicates the thieves in question were White. “They had masks on,” yells Ed. “How the hell did you know they was White?” SLAP SLAP! Lo Boy cries out “because they ran White, dammit!” The duo think it’s the Mob, but the Don tells them otherwise.

Meanwhile, Deke O’Malley, whose name conjures up images of Bing “Dial O for O’Malley” Crosby’s priest in Going My Way, works his way to the home of his right hand man’s woman, Sister Mabel. She’s very cute, and very stupid. O’Malley turns on the charm and gets with her (“Dial O for Orgasm?”). She’s willing to be his spy in exchange for what Biggie Smalls once called “that good luv, gurl, you didn’t know?” (Aside: Calvin Lockhart’s character in Let’s Do It Again is where Christopher Wallace got his nom de rap.) This doesn’t sit well with O’Malley’s woman, Iris (Judy Pace). Iris is as hot as she is hot-headed, and when Ed and Digger assign a goofy, White cop to guard her until O’Malley shows up, she not only manages to get him (and us) so hot and bothered with her nudity that he’s willing to wear a bag over his head in order to have sex with her, she also manages to outwit him before he can get any nookie. He runs after her wearing nothing but that bag, and winds up locked outside butt naked as she runs out of her apartment. The neighbors, all Black, have a good laugh at the guy’s equipment.

While the cop treats the ladies in the audience to an equal amount of nakedness, Iris runs to her friend’s rehearsal at the Apollo. The friend is a stripper (Ossie likes these hot Black women!) who lets Iris borrow something less revealing to wear. “You must have left in a hurry,” says the stripper, who until this moment has been frustrated trying to find a new hook for her big routine. Iris grabs an outfit and heads to the house where her man has been shacking up with that other woman.

As aforementioned, Iris is one angry sistah. When she becomes aware that her man has been screwing the competition, she erupts in violence. “I just needed somewhere to stay,” yells Deke, trying to prevent Iris from whipping the other woman’s ass. “Yeah, between this bitch’s legs!” she screams. As played by Pace, Iris is one hell of a character. One minute she’s peaches and cream, the next minute she’s punches and screams. Davis gives us some tasty catfight shots between the two women before Iris uses a model boat—the same one O’Malley has promised the faithful Back to Africa folks—to fracture Mabel’s skull. O’Malley takes a page from his nemesis, Coffin Ed, and bitchslaps Iris unconscious, leaving her to pay for her sins when the cops show up.

That bale of cotton, the one in the title, winds up in the hands of a junk man played by Redd Foxx. This was before Sanford and Son, though a scene with Foxx and Helen Martin plays like a dress rehearsal for Aunt Esther and Fred. Martin winds up with a huge hole in her dress as the result of an earlier, botched robbery where a man cut the hole to get at her money. Why was she keeping her money under her ass? Had she not heard that Black women kept their dough in their bras? Speaking of money, guess where that $87,000 is hidden in this paragraph? Here’s a hint: It’s not in Helen Martin’s ass.

Turns out the shootout at the film’s beginning was planned by O’Malley, who was going to take the money and run anyplace BUT Africa. It winds up planted in a bale of cotton, which was lost when Early Riser got creamed by those cars. The bad guys know where the money is, so whenever someone mentions they’ve seen the bale, gunfire ensues at its location. Foxx’s Uncle Bud sells the cotton for $30 to a rival junk dealer played by the guy who played Sam Breakstone on those cottage cheese commercials, but buys it back at the behest of his friend. Said friend is the boyfriend of the stripper Iris borrowed clothes from earlier. Neither O’Malley nor the mob knows the bale’s not there, which leads to a gunfight where O’Malley is captured by Ed and Digger. After the gunfight at Breakstone’s yard, he asks “Who would kill for junk?!” Coffin Ed and Digger have an answer, but that person has apparently killed Uncle Bud.

O’Malley’s questioned at the jail, but he refuses to cooperate, calling our heroes all manner of Uncle Toms and demanding to be sent back to his cell. They allow him to leave, where he’s met by the jailed Iris. She does NOT look good at all, and after being in jail she’s gone from pissed off sister to full blown nuclear bitch on wheels. She tells O’Malley she’s spilled the beans on his corrupt operation, and then attempts to whip his ass. Digger and Ed have their man and their proof, but the next day O’Malley makes bail and attempts to find his $87,000. Iris also makes bail, and she still wants to kill Deke’s criminal ass. So do the people he swindled. And the mob too. Of all of those, I’d be most afraid of Iris.

Earlier, I didn’t mention that stripper for nothing. When Iris comes by to get that dress, the stripper is complaining that her routine is “too Uncle Tom.” She needs something different. So when she winds up with the cotton thanks to her man, she decides to use it in her act. Galt MacDermot, one of the writers of Hair, wrote Cotton Comes to Harlem’s score, and the song he comes up with for this routine is one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever heard. It’s as if someone said “take the title of this movie and bring me back a song.” Stripper girl doesn’t want Tomism, yet she comes onstage at the Apollo theater dressed like Mammy and proceeds to dance all over this cotton while George Tipton sings some warped ass lyrics:

Down South, we sweat and strain
We were the prisoners of cotton
But when cotton comes to Harlem,
We kick cotton’s ass!

Down South, cotton was king
A Black man’s life meant not a damn thing.
So when cotton comes to Harlem
I kick cotton’s ass!

I suppose Tipton wears silk underwear.

Sondheim’s strippers sang “You Gotta Have A Gimmick,” but this is fucking insane. The woman strips down to this skimpy bra and panties, both of which are covered in cotton balls. She looks like Peter Cottontail doing ass claps. The audience goes wild. You deserve to see this routine before you die. Hell, it might even kill you. I refuse to believe the filmmakers expected me to take this scene seriously.

Is your cotton stretching right about now?

Everything comes to a head onstage. There’s a White man in blackface, a preacher having a nervous breakdown, a surprise in the cotton, an even bigger surprise by Digger and Ed that reverses the cottony surprise, and a completely out of place change of attitude by Iris. Digger and Ed solve the case, and Uncle Bud turns out to be in Heaven, but not actually dead. I wish I could show you the last shot in this film, which is of Redd Foxx and totally appropriate for that filthy, filthy man, but you’ll never be able to watch Sanford and Son again if I do.

Cotton Comes To Harlem is very well acted. Godfrey Cambridge is funny and credible as Digger, and Raymond St. Jacques, who starred in three of the four Himes adaptations, makes a fine bad cop to Cambridge’s good cop. The screenplay by Davis and (Spike Lee's film) Malcolm X cowriter Arnold Perl is full of funny lines, some taken directly from the book, and tightly written sequences. Lockhart is excellent here; at the film’s climax, he shows how pride does indeed goeth before the fall, revealing his character’s braggadocio as yet another con game. Surpassing him is his foil, Judy Pace who, a year later, would play Billy Dee Williams’ wife in the unforgettable Brian’s Song. The spirit of Chester Himes’ writing lives in her performance. I knew I was in love with her when, late in the film, she breaks a bottle and goes after the man who done her wrong. I didn’t buy her last minute change of heart for one moment, but I was too hooked to care.

Tomorrow, another fine soul sistah with a mean streak graces Black History Mumf in service to Chester Himes’ vision.

Ladies, don't fight! There's plenty of me to go around!

Holding Out For A Hero: Eve's Bayou

2009-02-15T23:50:00.000-05:00

By Odienator

Kasi Lemmons must think Samuel L. Jackson is sexy. Of the three films she’s directed, two feature Sam and both tease from his performance and persona a sensuality unseen in most of his work. Sam can always be counted on to scare the hell out of you, cuss you out, or kill you, but he wasn’t the go-to-guy for seduction. Other directors have reminded us that, despite not being movie-star handsome, Jackson was still entitled to nookie, but it was either in his past (Black Snake Moan) or used for comedic purposes (Soul Men). Even John Singleton neutered Sam—and he cast him as the man whose theme song tells you in its first line that he gets copious amounts of ass.

Lemmons will have none of that. In her directorial debut, Eve’s Bayou, she and Jackson make his character, Louis Batiste’s dangerous sexuality the centerpiece of the picture. She doesn’t make Jackson look any different (though for a change he has a normal hairstyle); instead she makes us see him through the eyes of all the female characters in the movie. Jackson, who was instrumental in getting this film to the screen, seizes the opportunity, channeling his usual onscreen confidence into the pursuit not of vengeance but of conquest. It works; Jackson looks at the beautiful women onscreen with a convincing combination of playa’s hustle and insatiable need. “To a certain type of woman, I am a hero,” he says late in the picture. “I need to be a hero.”

One of the many visual motifs running through Eve’s Bayou is the way Batiste touches the faces of females in the film. With his finger, he gently caresses their cheek, or just under their chin. He looks at them, giving the perception that, for this brief moment in time, they are the only other person in the universe. He does it to his wife, Roz (Lynn Whitfield) and his mistress Mattiie (Lisa Nicole Carson). He also employs this move to console his daughters, 14-year old Cisely (Meagan Good) and 10-year old Eve (Jurnee Smollett), though without the perception of seductive intent. In a film about how actions are perceived, and how they can be misconstrued by the receiver, allowing his daughters to, in his words, “adore him” will have unintended consequences for Louis.

Eve’s Bayou is narrated by the adult Eve, and she is an unreliable narrator not in the sense that she isn’t telling us the truth per se; she is unreliable the way one’s memories can only record one’s own take on the situation. The narration is used sparingly, only at the beginning and end of the film, but reliable or not, its first line is a hook baited with intrigue and promise:

“Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain. The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old.”

The narrator informs us that the Eve in the title was a slave woman who cured her master’s severe illness with “powerful medicine.” As a result, he freed her and she bore him 16 children. “We are the descendants of Jean-Paul Batiste and Eve. I was named after her.” Since this is Louisiana, that “powerful medicine” implies voodoo, and the film’s notions of what Black folks call “the sight” and voodoo curses are woven into the story’s tapestry in the same nonchalant manner as Latin American fiction like Isabelle Allende’s The House of the Spirits or Laura Esquivel’s Como Agua Para Chocolate: it’s just a regular item in the day to day workings of the plot.

Eve’s Bayou was passed down from generation to generation of Batistes, and when the film opens, we are introduced to them all. There’s Louis, his mother (Ethel Ayler), his wife Roz, his three children, Cisely, Eve and 9-year old, Poe (Jake Smollett), and his sister Mozelle (All My Children’s Debbi Morgan). We’re also introduced to the Mereaux’s, Mattie and Lenny (Roger Guenveur Smith). Rounding out the characters is Uncle Harry (Branford Marsalis), Mozelle’s husband. Harry provides one of the film’s symbols, a silver dollar he pulls from behind Eve’s ear when she offers him chocolate.

The main plot points in the film are encapsulated in this brief party sequence. After dancing way too seductively with her husband, Mattie dances almost as dirty with Louis while both Roz and Lenny watch. Lenny is oblivious to his wife’s involvement with Louis, but Roz has known of and tolerated Louis’ indiscretions for most of their marriage. Uncle Harry gets drunk and has an argument with Mozelle over whether he should drive, and while she gets the keys from him, he still manages to be killed. This makes him the third dead husband in a row for Mozelle.

Lemmons is drawn to strong and unconventional women in her films: Taraji P. Henson’s wonderful girlfriend in Talk to Me, Ann Magnuson’s sexually daring artist seducing Sam Jackson’s schizophrenic in The Caveman’s Valentine, and this film’s Mozelle, one of the most fascinating characters I’ve ever seen. Mozelle is beautiful yet cursed. Her curse isn’t that every man she marries winds up dead, but that she has the power of clairvoyance (“the sight”) yet she can’t see her own future. Debbi Morgan inhabits this character as both a sensual woman and the tough Black aunt we all remembered from our youth, the one who spoke her mind yet could offer a comfort rivaled only by (and sometimes surpassing) one’s mother.

Mozelle works as a reader, but more on her in a second. One would probably call her a psychic, but not if you came from my neighborhood. Where I grew up, there was a reader in the neighborhood whom people went to for advice or for prayer. She was always telling people things, and so help me, a lot of the time she was right. Not generic John Edward type things either—she provided detailed information. She told my mother that I had an old soul, which explains why I’ve acted like a grumpy old man my entire life. (“Ain’t this a bitch?” I thought, “I got somebody else’s USED soul!”) She also told me I would marry a woman who played the organ at church (I did) and that when I was a teenager, I would get hurt severely and lose an appendage. I panicked, thinking I’d lose an arm or a leg. She was close. I lost an eye.

Black folks are a superstitious lot, probably due to our ties to the South. I’ve written off much of the things we believe in, but I cling to a few of them simply because I don’t want to tempt the powers that be. We, like Latin American readers, may have an easier time accepting these paranormal phenomena simply because we’ve heard stories like these passed down from generation to generation; they become one of those accepted things. Lemmons uses Mozelle’s skill as less of an ironic plot point than it may seem, and I was grateful that a film about the past didn’t skirt some of the more colorful aspects of the oral tradition of Black history being passed down. We were always told the reader could never read her own future.

Louis thinks Mozelle is somewhat crazy. “She is not unfamiliar with the inside of a mental hospital,” he says, but both his mother and Roz are true believers. Roz visits a reader at the market, accusing Mozelle of having “professional jealousy.” The competition is played by Diahann Carroll in a creepy, sarcastic performance. Carroll tells Roz to “look to your children” just before Mozelle has a vision of someone’s child being run over by a bus. Roz panics, and attempts to keep her three children from going outside in an attempt to keep the vision from coming true. How it plays out results in one of the more morbidly funny sequences in Eve’s Bayou.

How much of what’s happened in my life was predicated on what I knew was predicted? I didn’t marry the church musician because I was told I would, nor did I do anything to cause my half-blindness, nor did I do any of the other things the reader told my mother, true things that I have not told you. Eve’s Bayou plays with this concept. Eve kills her father by obtaining a voodoo death curse from crazy-ass Diahann Carroll. Or does she? (My lack of quotation marks around the word kills gives you my answer.) Did keeping her kids inside prevent Cisely, Eve and Poe from being run over? I was under the impression that you couldn’t hide from Death. He would have sent The Car from the 1977 eponymous horror movie to jump through their bedroom window if he wanted to run over one of the Batiste brood. So how much do we accept as that old Black magic? Eve’s Bayou leaves that up to you.

Perception is everything. When Eve catches her father and Mattie in a compromising position, Louis comforts her and sends her back to the party. When Eve tells Cisely what she saw, Cisely, who idolizes her father, changes the story around to make both parties innocent. Lemmons uses a mirror to present this change in the story (which Eve pretends to believe to please her sister), and unlike Douglas Sirk’s usage as a means of identity in Imitation of Life, Lemmons uses her mirrors as a conduit for reflection, not only of one’s image but of one’s own version of memories. In the film’s best sequence, Mozelle tells Eve the story of how her second husband died, and it is not only reflected in a mirror, but at one point, Mozelle appears in the reflection, her present self transported to the past as she tells the tale.

Uncle Harry’s coin has two sides. Several characters in Eve’s Bayou are two sides of the same coin. Early in the film, Eve has a vision (featuring Uncle Harry’s spinning coin) of his death that alerts us to her also having the sight. This makes her one side of the same coin as her favorite aunt, Mozelle. Roz and Lenny are two sides as well, both becoming angry when their spouses’ infidelity comes to light. The most interesting and surprising pairing is Mozelle and Louis.

Mozelle tells Roz “we're two of a kind, my brother and I.” Not knowing if Mozelle is intended to be older or younger than Louis, I still concluded that Louis is actually a male Mozelle, not the other way around as most have read this relationship. Mozelle’s inability to see her own future is some kind of magical affliction; Louis’ inability is a pure lack of common sense. And while it’s clear that our view of Louis, in all his seductive glory, is a byproduct of our narrator’s memories and the director’s love for the character, Lemmons is making an interesting point about the differences between the sexes. Louis’ inability to see his future is rooted in his disregard for reality, bucking the idea that a woman’s emotions cloud her judgment. Louis is messing with the wife of a married man in the neighborhood, flaunting his affair in front of everyone while Lenny is out of town. Didn’t he know that eventually Lenny would find out?

Mozelle foreshadows this in her mirror memory, as she too was having an affair with a man who, like Lenny, shows up with a gun to take his woman away. However, her affair is far more clandestine than Louis’—she doesn’t flaunt it at all—and when her husband stands up to her lover, telling him that he will not be running off with his wife, Mozelle realizes not only the error of her ways but also that she loved her husband more than ever. In Mozelle’s tragedy, the innocent is sacrified; in Louis’ it’s the guilty.

Lemmons visually represents Mozelle and Louis’ connection by two visual images of men with hats appearing from the shadows out of nowhere. The man who appears at Mozelle’s door is her possible salvation, a painter played by Lemmons’ husband, Vondie Curtis-Hall, who becomes her fourth husband; the man who appears for Louis is also husband material, except its Mattie’s husband and Louis’ undoing.

Eve witnesses Louis’ murder and is sure that it’s because of her voodoo curse. Bayou depicts the temporary rift between Eve and her father as the byproduct of a rift between Cisely and Louis. Both sisters vie for their father’s affection (Poe seems not to register, and I don’t know if that was a mistake or a point in Lemmons screenplay), and Cisely gets most of her father’s attention, which she relishes. Though they have sisterly rivalry, Eve and Cisely remain close and though she’s younger, Eve develops a fierce protection of her sister after Cisely reveals to Eve that Louis made a sexual pass at her. The pass results in Cisely fighting Louis off, and him slapping her. This sets Eve’s plan of voodoo murder in action, but again it’s all about perception. When we see these events from Louis perspective (the correct one), we realize that Cisely was the aggressor, kissing her father inappropriately due to her own teenage confusion. Louis regrets slapping her, but it was an honest reaction. “That’s when I lost her,” he tells Mozelle in a note. The charming father no longer existed for Cisely—he had rejected her in her mind, but for Eve, her guilt over his death elevated Louis into the charming man onscreen. We see him having affair after affair, but his charm never subsides.

Eve’s Bayou is unlike any other Black themed picture I’ve seen. In addition to its gothic feel (the cin-tog by Amy Vincent is excellent at evoking not only the bayou but the radiance of the actors’ faces), it presents an affluent Black family. They throw parties in a big house, they own the land and the bayou, they dress to the nines at social events, and Louis is a doctor, which gives him plenty of time to make house calls.

I guess you could call Eve’s Bayou a chick flick, but it doesn’t play into those clichés. Usually the cheating husband is treated as a rascal and a scoundrel, but it’s clear that Louis loves his children and, to some extent, his wife. He isn’t demonized in the film, which is why I’d pull this out of that genre. Louis wanted to be a hero, but sometimes, as voodoo Diahann Carroll says, heroes “fall on their own sword.” Eve’s Bayou, and Eve herself, sees Louis as that kind of tragic hero.

Quick and Dirty: Happy Valentine's Day

2009-02-14T19:14:00.011-05:00

By Odienator

"My name is Cupid Valentino, the modern day Cupid.
Happy Valentine's Day, every day the fourteenth."
-Andre 3000

Happy Valentine’s Day! While you are getting bizzy with your loved one, I am on a plane to Dublin, Ireland to find out the true meaning of Black Irish. So Black History Mumf has gone International! The next seven posts will arrive courtesy of the Leprechaun in Da Hood.

While I sweat and pray on the plane, occupy yourselves with these two post-oochie coochie movies I’ve selected for viewing after the smoke has cleared your bedsheets. This is your homework assignment.

For the romantic: Love Jones.

See Larenz Tate and Nia Long burn up the sheets and slam up the poetry in this lively, hot and engaging love story of two people who think they're just fuck buddies but wind up getting sprung for each other. Features Lisa Nicole Carson and Isaiah "I said faggot, I got fired" Washington as two of those people who just love to point out that your game is not as smooth as you think it is.

Writer/director Theodore Witcher has an ear for his characters' vernacular and stages several excellent scenes where they just sit around and talk about love, life, and literature. This is smart dialogue that rings true and sounds real. It's also filthy, which earns the Odienator seal of approval.

To satiate the horny, Long and Tate generate some serious heat in a scene where Nina forces Darius to sleep on the couch rather than in her bed, and the two of them squirm about in their respective sleeping places, ready to explode from the sexual tension and longing. It's a comic scene that has a nice, sexy spin to it.

Tate and Long have great chemistry, and their poetry is believably rendered (Tate's first poem is a showstopper), but Witcher makes a big misstep by ruining a perfectly good bittersweet ending at a train station with a lousy coda that's a real cheat. He also introduces a subplot featuring Bill Bellamy which, while amusing, seems to exist only to pad out the running time and offer up stale cliches. But don't let those complaints put you off; neither ruins the movie.

For the unromantic and the perverted: Booty Call.

"If you don't wear a condom, you see a redrum!"
-Wyclef Jean, Gone Til November

Booty Call is just plain nasty. It follows its two heroes Rushon (Tommy Davidson) and Bunz (Jamie Foxx with a hairstyle Our Gang's Farina would've been ashamed to rock) on an After Hours-esque late night journey to find condoms for the titular event. It's a safe sex comedy that supports many men's claims that condoms are more trouble than they're worth. Along the way, our horny heroes encounter pistol crazed Indians, a runaway dog, terminal coitus interruptus, bullet wounds and accidental near castration, all while partaking in some of the crudest jokes and scatalogical language this side of Porky's.

Davidson, as the logical one, makes a good straight man to Foxx's testosterone crazed homeboy. Foxx gets the bigger laughs (his impression filled sex scene is disturbing yet hilarious), but the two complement each other, much like they did on In Living Color. As the objects of affection, Tamla Jones and Vivica Fox hold their own. Fox, as a closet sex freak named Lysterine (for reasons the film is too afraid to fathom), practically walks off with the picture. Insert your own "she wasn't acting" joke here.

Booty Call is at its most deranged when it caters to your inner Eddie Murphy transvestite foot fetish. Director Jeff Pollack, with an assist from that old Rick James-Teena Marie chestnut Fire and Desire, takes us under a table for some kinky accidental footsie dealings between the two male leads and a dog with some nasty mouth habits. It takes a lot to shock me--and this would've done the trick had I not been laughing so hard.

Hope you had a great, sexy Valentine's Day! If you're not with someone, don't let that stop you! Break out the toys, the lotion and the porn! Meanwhile, I'm going to see if anybody wants to join the Mile High Club with me. Pray for me, y'all.

The Content of Their Character Actors: Kimberly Elise

2009-02-13T17:31:00.008-05:00

By Odienator (Click here for all posts)

Jonathan Demme's adaptation of Beloved showcases a different actor during each of its three hours. Hour one belongs to Miss Sofia herself, Oprah Winfrey, whose Sethe is seemingly unflappable. Hour two belongs to Danny Glover, whose Paul D serves as the audience stand-in and the most sympathetic male in the film. Hour three belongs to Kimberly Elise who, in her second appearance on the big screen, lays the foundation for the type of performance for which she's become known. In Beloved, her character, Denver, begins the film as a woman battered into her shell by the angry spirit that haunts the residence she shares with her mother. She's bitter, not only about the ghost who haunts the house, but also about not having anyone to relate to, like a sister or a friend. As the film progresses, two people help coax her out of her shell, changing her for better and for worse.

Elise carefully shows us how these new, outside forces change her personality. When Paul D becomes involved with Sethe, Denver's reacts to him (and the quiet he brings to the house) slowly and cautiously. After he breaks through her shell, they encounter a strange woman named Beloved, whom the duo bring home despite the fact she's covered in bugs and drool and sounds like Cookie Monster. Denver takes her on as her pet project, and Elise imbues her character with the feeling that she now has that playmate she never had before. Elise does a fine job conveying this, despite playing opposite one of the most gorgeous and least talented actresses of the past 20 years, Thandie Newton. Beloved helps Denver become more confident, and by hour three, when Elise is given her moment in the story's spotlight, the confident changes she has undergone have become woven in her character's movements and even her facial expressions.

In her career, Elise has been asked to find the obscured inner power of her characters, and she has always done so credibly and consistently. Her appearance onscreen has become shorthand for a woman who is either finding her strength and/or exerting it. Even with minimal screen time, she can convey so much information, whether with a knowing glance or a well-measured turn of phrase. It is a pleasure to watch her work, and the one thing Tyler Perry got right in his film version of Diary of a Mad Black Woman was casting Elise, not only as his heroine, but also as the daughter of Cicely Tyson. It is an apt stroke of casting, as Elise is heir to the types of roles Tyson has played over the years; she appropriates Tyson's way of evoking the sense that all the unshakeable powers of Black women are rooted soul-deep in their being. She rattles with anger, sadness and joy the same way Tyson once did. With her gaze, Elise can burn a hole through you, or coddle you with sweetness. She even looks like a hotter Cicely Tyson.

Elise first hit the big screen in F. Gary Gray's female actioner, Set it Off. Though her performance is a little shaky, she's still convinces us that a woman this weepy and weak could still join forces with her best girls to rob a bank. Both she and Queen Latifah are the film's complementary extremes. Latifah is all butch firepower, heartless and tough, resisting any attempts to relent or to feel, even as she's being gunned down in one of the greatest onscreen deaths ever filmed. (Her work here is far more Oscar nomination worthy than in Chicago—watch her "OH NO YOU DIDN'T" facial expression as she milks her death scene for all it's worth.) Elise's Tisean has a kid and a heart that's on both sleeves; she feels too much and, through her attempt to toughen up, suffers greatly for it.

In both Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Women, Thou Art Loosed, Elise is asked to veer wildly through a series of emotional moments designed to support both film's spiritual agendas. Both films are underwritten and at times downright preachy, but in neither film does she step wrong. Diary asks us to believe that this woman who had been so brutally dumped by her no good husband might decide to take care of him after he (deservingly) becomes incapacitated. She makes it work by not diffusing her anger so much as accepting some of the Christian values the film preaches to the then underestimated number of Tyler Perry fans. In Loosed, the flashback structure and sequences of T.D. Jakes' ministry (which, despite James' abundant charisma, play like commercial breaks for Jesus) rob the strength from the narrative—do movies understand that sometimes building UP to an event is more dramatic than this flashback shit—but not from Elise's performance. As a sexually abused, drug addicted prostitute, Elise goes for broke, yet every emotion feels earned and thought out by the actress. Neither movie deserves her, but they both are better because of her.

Last week, on cable TV, Elise played opposite my doppelganger, Cuba G., in Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story. Sadly, I missed that, but I'm looking forward to seeing it just for her performance. After all, she's gone from Denzel, whom she starred with in three movies (my favorite of which is the cruelly underrated The Great Debaters), to me. The least I can do is watch.

I just love the "OH SHIT!!" expression on the face of the woman next to Kimberly Elise

Them Some Scary Negroes!

2009-02-12T15:25:00.006-05:00

By Odienator (Click here for all posts)

Remember that story about the White woman who, when told to “hit the floor” by an intimidating Black man in a Las Vegas elevator, she threw herself on the floor? It turns out that the man only meant for her to hit the button for her floor. The next day, she receives roses with $100 bills wrapped around them, and a card that says “Thanks for the biggest laugh I’ve had in years.” The card is signed by Eddie Murphy.

I knew this story was bullshit the first time I heard it. First of all, this woman would have had to have been from the Upper East Side of Mars not to recognize Mr. Fuck You Man. Second, no disrespect to Eddie Murphy, but he’s too pretty to be terrifying. Wes Craven couldn’t make Eddie scary, unless Nick Ashford gives you nightmares. If it had been Yaphet Kotto in the story, I might have been fooled.

Third, how did the celebrity know who this woman was? How did he get the roses and money to her?

Front Desk: Mr. Murphy, good evening! How can I help you?

Ed-DEE: Hi, yes. There was a White woman in the elevator with me last night…

Front Desk: You must mean Lady Jessica Winthrop.

Ed-DEE: Lady…Jessica Winthrop? (Gives classic Eddie look) Ohhh-kay. Well, I scared the shit out of her, so now I’d like to send the bitch some roses.

Front Desk: You got it, sir.

Ed-DEE: Yeah, thanks. And (handing clerk $1200) wrap each of these $100 bills around them. Give her a note that says “You a funny bitch, Lady Jessica Winthrop.”

Front Desk: Right away, Mr. Murphy!

This story, apocryphal as it may be, isn’t completely far-fetched. I can count 5 different occurrences when a White woman clutched her purse as I walked by, and on three of those occasions, I was wearing hundreds of dollars worth of suits, ties and accessories. (I’m a big ol’ metrosexual, folks.) At first, I found this offensive, but then I thought: You know, Black people ARE scary! Just look at the movies I’ve compiled below.

Blacula (1972): Count Chocula precedes Blacula by one year, but despite that rumor about him being a tragic mulatto, Chocula was eventually unmasked as a wigger with a spray on tan. Blacula was the genuine article, an African prince named Mamuwalde who’s bitten by Dracula when the former sought his help stopping the slave trade. Drac seals Mamuwalde in a coffin and leaves Mrs. Mamuwalde mortal so she can die. (Apparently, Dracula is not only a racist, but on the down low too. He likes his coffee black, like his men!)

Speaking of the down low, two gay dudes buy Blacula’s coffin in the 70’s because, honey, it looks fierce! They meet a different kind of fierce when they open it. Blacula’s pissed, hungry, and looking for his wife. She’s long gone, but he finds a woman who looks exactly like her, presumably because she’s played by the same actress, Vonetta McGee. While in pursuit of her, Mamuwalde kills more people, arousing the suspicion of a police lieutenant involved with the sister of Mamuwalde’s object d’amour. Eventually, Mamuwalde persuades his beloved to fall in love with him, but she winds up undead at the teeth of Blacula, then actually dead at the stake of the lieutenant. Instead of having a Lookee Here moment, Blacula does something unprecedented for movie monsters. (SPOILER ALERT!) He gives up. You feel sorry for this Black man who can’t take it anymore, even if he was one creepy soul brother for most of the picture. As Blacula, William Marshall gives a good performance for this genre, and according to Wikipedia, Blacula won the first ever given Saturn Award, which honors sci-fi and horror.

Abby (1974): William Marshall’s here too, except he’s the good guy in this one. Seems a churchgoing woman has started doing and saying things that Jesus wouldn’t; she’s possessed by a sex demon! It’s up to Marshall’s man of God to save her from her horny new groove. Marshall kicks ass here, spouting serious voodoo shit during his exorcism. What neither he, nor American International Pictures, could exorcise was Warner Bros. lawsuit claiming this was a rip-off of a certain movie with Linda Blair. You decide: Linda’s possessed by Pazuzu (remember Richard Burton saying “Pazuzu” 18 million times in Exorcist II?) Abby is possessed by her punany. Linda curses out religious people at her house, Abby curses them out at church. Linda puts a crucifix where the sun don’t shine, Abby uses fried chicken. Abby bangs a guy so hard he dies when his ass catches on fire, Linda, uh, um…well you get the picture. Warners won their suit, and Abby exists only on bootleg videotapes like the one I have. It’s the perfect place for this scary church lady!

Tales From the Hood (1995): Rusty Cundieff’s anthology is hosted by Clarence Williams III, who reminds us that he was loud, Black and scary decades before Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson. Williams plays a mortician who tells four stories to gang bangers led by Poetic Justice’s Joe Torry. They think they’re at the funeral parlor to get drugs. “Give us the shit!” Torry repeatedly warns Williams as the tales spin. None of them are scary supernaturally; the normal things in Cundieff’s tales are far more intimidating. David Alan Grier shows up in the tale Cundieff stars in, and Grier reminds us that he was a fine dramatic actor well before In Living Color (he even worked with Robert Altman). Grier plays “the monster” in the story, who turns out to be an abusive stepdad who beats a young boy without mercy. He gets his, as do some racist cops who kill the wrong brother.

But the biggest get occurs at the film’s end. Williams, whose wild eyed performance is a must-see, tells the boys one more story about a thug who undergoes a Clockwork Orange-like aversion therapy treatment in order to stave off jail. The images presented to him, and us, are documentary-like horrors of the ‘hood. When the thug refuses to mend his ways, he winds up at Williams’ funeral home, the victim of the same thugs who have been patiently listening for the past 80 minutes. When Torry realizes this is a set up, he pulls a gun on Linc from the Mod Squad, but pointing pistols at the Devil will do you no good. Williams’ delivery of the film’s last line is a keeper. “Welcome to Hell (pause) mu-tha-fuckas!!!”

Candyman (1992): Who can take a meathook/Stick it into you/Chop up half the ghetto and seduce White women too? The Candyman! The Candyman can!

I’m sure Sammy Davis Jr. wasn’t singing about this Candyman, a spirit originally created by Clive Barker in a short story called “The Forbidden.” I read it, and it was nothing like this movie short of its general, creepy premise that one’s beliefs can keep evil alive. Virginia Madsen is fantastic as a grad student roaming Chicago’s Cabrini-Green looking for a tall Black man who’s freaking out the neighborhood. No, not J.J. Evans! This dude who, if you say his name 5 times in a mirror, shows up to butcher you with a meathook attached to the stump on his arm. Assisting Madsen is Kasi Lemmons, who starred with the aforementioned Rusty Cundieff in his Fear of a Black Hat, and who seemed to be the sidekick Negro to a lot of White chicks in danger (see The Silence of the Lambs). Lemmons gets, in my opinion, the most terrifying scene in Candyman.

Director Bernard Rose lays on the gore, but not as thick as he lays on the atmosphere and symbolism. It almost seems like the scariest thing this picture may offer is that the Candyman will run off with the blonde woman he keeps framing for his murders. Or is he? Does he even exist, or is he just the product of the overactive imagination of a woman looking for an Other who’s a boogeyman, so she can pretend he’s killing HER victims? Is she 1992’s version of Susan Smith?! I liked how the film kept us wondering, and Tony Todd is one scary Negro, real or imagined. This is the last film I recall scaring the shit out of me.

Def by Temptation (1990): I have to throw this one in here, simply because I love seeing people get jacked up while they’re screwing. Nothing makes me happier than when some guy thinks he’s about to get some in a movie, and then his booty call turns out to be an alien or the Devil. “Gurrl, he was so bad in bed that Miss Thing turned into Satan and killed his ass!” Def is famous for Ernest Dickerson’s fine cin-tog and a scene where John Canada Terrell runs stark naked toward the camera after realizing that his honey dip is really Hell Dip. He was ready to go running into the night butt ball naked in order to escape.

He doesn’t make it.

Anaconda (1997): This one gets mentioned because it bucks the trend on minorities in horror movies. The huge, CGI generated snake eats all the White people, leaving every single minority alive. And he had some fine choices: Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez. I mean, who wouldn’t want to eat J. Lo? Her name sounds like Jell-O. The snake actually does eat one minority, the guy who brought that boatful of Caucasians (including Owen Wilson and Jon Voight in one of the greatest bad performances ever!) to his dinner table in the river. Talk about being ungrateful!

Oh yeah, the snake’s black, so not only are Negroes scary, Black snakes are too. Interpret that as you will.

Special thanks to this Black Horror Movies website for the links to reviews!

Easy Does It: Devil in a Blue Dress

2009-02-11T20:38:00.016-05:00

By Odienator (Click here for all posts)

Had all things been equal in Hollywood in the days of noir, we would have seen something like Devil in a Blue Dress, the Carl Franklin adaptation of the first book in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series. Perhaps it would have been directed by John Huston, who set the bar with The Maltese Falcon, or by Billy Wilder, who leapt over it with Double Indemnity. Imagine a great boxing noir like Robert Wise’s The Set-Up done with a Black lead. What would be different today if one of the other directors of noir like Jules Dassin or Jacques Tourner could have put the noir in Film Noir? Consider Nina Mae McKinney as a femme fatale (see Hallelujah for an example of her seductive power) or Dorothy Dandridge directing her gorgeous layers of sin at something other than a lip-synched musical. Such wasted opportunity by Hollywood.

Even with the emergence of neo-noir brought on by Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (“you aren’t that smart are you? I like that in a man”) and Bob Rafelson’s horrible remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, there still weren’t any major roles for us Noir folks. The 70’s had the Shaft series, but that was more like a police procedural, and if it hadn’t been for Sweet Sweetback, Shaft would have remained a White man. I had to wait until 1994 for a bruva to tangle with a femme fatale. Bill Nunn had his moment with Linda Fiorentino’s brilliant heffa, Wendy Kroy, in The Last Seduction, and he wound up letting his dick get him thrown through a car windshield.

A year later, Devil in a Blue Dress attempted to rectify decades of neglect, presenting us with the first in a planned series of movies based on (at the time) four Easy Rawlins books. Franklin directed a cast featuring Denzel Washington perfectly cast as Easy. Mosley served as one of the producers, along with Jonathan Demme who loaned his fellow Roger Corman alum his cin-togger, Tak Fujimoto. Providing the score are a series of blues singers and Elmer Bernstein, a guy who knew something about scoring the seedier side of life (see Sweet Smell of Success). Toss in Jennifer Beals and Lisa Nicole Carson as sexy femmes, and a scary, violent Bama as the hero’s partner in crime, and you’ve got a sweet throwback to the days of Chandler and Hammett. How can it fail?

I started reading the Easy Rawlins series after the third book, White Butterfly, came out. That was the first Mosley book I read, and I’m partial to it. I read Devil next, followed by the second book, A Red Death. Nine of the eleven books have colors or descriptions of colors in their titles, which is appropriate for a private dick whose career started in 1948, back when he was cullud himself. I devoured each book because I’d often fantasize about being a private detective, shot in black and white, with hard-boiled narration and a series of women coming into my office needing my help. I even wrote a detective story featuring me, but I couldn’t keep a straight face. Perhaps the only hard-boiled narration I’m proud of writing was “Baby, put your dress down. Private dick means detective, not private dick.”

Far better dialogue awaits you in Devil in a Blue Dress, courtesy of the pens of Mssrs. Moseley and Franklin. The film opens with Easy Rawlins (Washington), a World War II veteran, being let go from his job in Los Angeles. In need of work, he takes on a missing persons case brought to him by DeWitt Albright, a sleazy and twisted man played by uber-creep Tom Sizemore. Easy must find Daphne Monet, a White woman who likes her men the same way that lady in Airplane liked her coffee, Black. Easy needs to pay the mortgage on the house he so proudly bought after the war, and the $100 will give him a few months of security. Albright promises no harm will come to Monet, and all Easy has to do is find her and tell him where she is. Easy’s street smarts warn him of the danger—Monet is the ex-girlfriend of a mayoral candidate—but he heads off to the Black club Albright says Monet frequents.

Every good noir has a seasoning of sex, and Devil’s seasoning comes from Lisa Nicole Carson. Carson, who once described herself as “a super bad bitch,” has the onscreen distinction of having more Black men between her sheets than Ebony Magazine: Treach from Naughty By Nature, Samuel L. Jackson, even Soul Glo himself, Eriq La Salle! As Coretta, a shorty with info, she notches Denzel Washington on her bedpost. Easy runs into Coretta and her clueless boyfriend, Dupree, at the club. Dupree can’t hold his booze, which leads to Easy holding Coretta while Dupree sleeps it off in the next room. “You’re hittin’ my spot!” moans Coretta. “And I went on hitting her spot until just before sun up,” brags Easy’s narration.

Albright is at first all smiles and charm, but his sadistic side reveals itself when Easy is accosted by several young White guys itching for a fight. Albright tells Easy to wait for him on a pier, and while waiting, Easy is met by one of those White women who know damn well that talking to Black men is an easy way to get the man lynched. Uncomfortably, Easy makes small talk before those guys show up. Just as the woman’s boyfriend lunges at Easy, Albright shows up. “What do you want?” asks the hothead. “I want to see your brains,” Albright says casually, pointing a gun at the boyfriend’s head.

All his friends run away.

“I’m sorry!” says the boyfriend. “Show him how sorry you are,” demands Albright. “You made your point,” begs Easy, but Albright is just getting warmed up. “Suck his penis,” Albright orders the boyfriend, who is now kneeling in front of Easy. “Do it!” When the guy reaches for Easy’s zipper, Albright is quite amused. “You were actually going to do it!” he says before brutally kicking the boyfriend. Easy realizes that Albright is worse than he ever imagined.

After Albright gets the location of Daphne, given to Easy by Coretta in mid-spot hitting, Albright makes another down payment for Easy’s services. Meanwhile, Coretta winds up dead and Easy winds up at the violent hands of two White officers who want to charge him for the murder.

After a few other altercations with dangerous people, including Albright, Easy decides he needs the help of his fellow Texas native and friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander. Mouse is a great character, created by Mosley and embodied by Don Cheadle in one of his first notable roles. Mouse is more violent and unstable than most of the bad guys, and Cheadle steals the picture whenever he’s on. With his gold teeth and his countrified speaking voice, Mouse seems like a goofball until he pulls one of his numerous guns on you. Watch how Cheadle interrogates one of Easy’s attackers. “Frank,” he says nicely, before turning to Easy and asking “his name, Frank, right?” Easy nods. “Frannnk,” Mouse says again, as if greeting a friend, before stealing the scene from Denzel, and pulling the rug out from under us. It’s a funny and horrifying introduction to this character. We have no idea what he’ll do after this.

I’ll let the film sketch in all the details for you. It’s safer to describe everything else, starting with the acting. The performers inhabit their characters well, from Oz’s Terry Kinney as Monet’s ex to Maury Chaykin as Kinney’s sinister rival in the mayoral race. As Monet, Flashdance’s Jennifer Beals is surprisingly good, sexy one minute and falling apart the next. Her character’s big secret must have been one to which Beals could relate. Albert Hall has a nice, small role as my namesake, Odell, and Carson is sexy and sweaty in her one scene. If Cheadle had had more screen time, I’m sure he would have gotten Oscar consideration. He’s some kind of brilliantly absurd nihilist.

Behind the camera, Franklin directs with a sure hand, dropping in little touches for the eagle-eyed (I like how, after a beating, Easy’s pillow has blood on it when he’s awakened in the middle of the night). Fujimoto shoots in color but plays with shadow and light as if the film were in black and white. Shadows obscure faces and appear on the walls behind characters. His camera always observes the action from the right spot, lingering in closeup or taking an omnipotent view of the scene. In one sequence, the camera has, in focus, a character in a car’s rear windshield while the person in the backseat is blurred. As the car pulls away, the camera switches focus, visually expressing how the car’s occupant feels about leaving. It’s showy, but not overbearing.

Devil in a Blue Dress, like most of the other books in the series, tells a conventional noir story peppered with details of Black life during the period each story is set. We meet stock characters who have been given traits we didn’t see in films of the 40’s. Easy lives in a Black neighborhood populated with fellow homeowners, yet when the cops drag him downtown, he’s no better than any other nigger in their jail. While Easy drives her to an upper class White neighborhood to retrieve a letter, they pass a police car on the side of the road. Monet asks “are you nervous?” Easy’s narration says “No, I wasn’t nervous. I was crazy!” Just the sight of the two of them together would get him killed. Mosley also tackles Afrocentric topics like passing for White and the Civil Rights movement in his books, all of which would have made fine additions to this series had it continued.

But continue it didn’t. Lack of box office gross prevented Franklin and company from making any other Easy Rawlins movies, a shame because Franklin’s script omits items from the book that I’m sure he would have tied into subsequent movies. Denzel Washington went on to another Oscar and Don Cheadle began a career that continues to prove there is no character he cannot play. Perhaps one day we’ll see a return to the screen for Easy, perhaps on TV. HBO, are you listening?

Yes, Odie. That hit the spot.

The Return of Odiebama

2009-02-10T14:53:00.006-05:00

By Odienator (Click here for all posts)

Last year, I made one political statement during Black History Mumf here at Big Media Vandalism. I think the current climate calls for another, which means only one thing: The Return of Odiebama to this blog! He was first loosed on this blog to act as a fantasy representation of how I’d respond if Barack Obama had been magically transformed into me. Normally, before Odiebama’s appearances, I would run a disclaimer stating “this is satire, folks!” But if you actually believe the following happened, no disclaimer will help your stupid ass.

Odiebama, or should I say, PRESIDENT Odiebama, has been good until now. But like most Negroes, he has a threshold that, once crossed, results in what I call a “LOOKEE HERE moment.” The elders used to call it “showing your ass.” Herewith, a report on President Odiebama’s first LOOKEE HERE moment in office.

Brenda BlackMan: Good evening. Tonight on My Ghetto Nine News, President Odiebama uses some strong words for Congress in his latest press conference. The Beltway is abuzz about the events of earlier today. This news story is not for the kids, so put those little bastards to bed.

It started out like any other speech by a President. Odiebama held a press conference that quickly turned into a conduit for the President’s anger.

Odie: Good afternoon, America. I interrupted The Young and the Restless to speak to you today about the economic stimulus package I have been trying to get passed by Congress. Now, like Congress, I work for you. You elected me just as you elected your other government officials. So it is not too much for you to expect that we will do what is in your best interest. I know you share my frustration in this matter, for I have spoken with you. People like Mary Jacobs, a mother of four whose job was cut despite her loyalty for the past 30 years, and Phil, an idealistic young man who cannot find work despite having three Masters degrees and a doctorate. “It almost makes me want to crawl into a bottle of YN,” he told me.

I know that health care concerns you as well. I remember how worried Steven Boone was when he explained to me that, after having his medical job outsourced to the CEO’s pet seal, he would have no health care to help him buy the Tussin he so desperately needed. Meanwhile, that same CEO was using bailout money to buy solid gold DVD’s of The Blue Collar Comedy Tour for his top executives.

America, this cannot stand.

I have tried to be bi-partisan about this package, but it seems that people on both sides of the aisle think bipartisanship is indulging your bi-curiosity at a party. Now is not the time to bicker. I am willing to hear ideas from Democrats and Republicans, but both have been guilty of crimes against the American people. My fellow Democrats keep slipping pet projects into the package—I’ve caught them all and removed them—and the Republicans have said no in the hopes that this will fail and they’ll regain power, which is equally self-indulgent and not in your best interest. (Raises voice) I HAVE HAD ENOUGH! I promised change, and it’s time I implemented some change.

(In frustration, Odiebama pulls out a cigarette and lights it. As he exhales a puff of smoke, audible gasps rise from the audience.)

Odie: Relax! It’s a Newport.

(more gasps)

Odie: LOOKEE HERE! (exhales smoke) This is what I’m talking about! The country is suffering, and the press is more worried about me smoking a damn cigarette than the Congressional bullshit that’s keeping the American people from getting help! That’s right, I said bullshit, because that’s exactly what this is! (Waving hand at an offscreen guy pointing to the TelePrompTer) Fuck that TelePrompTer! I’m mad now!

Press Member: (standing up) Mr. President, you can’t use that kind of profanity on TV.

Odie: When the President says it, it’s NOT profanity! Sit your ass down. I can’t believe this! People are starving, and you guys are reporting that I said muthafucka in my audiobook. CNN, Fox, Bloomberg, all y’all, get the fuck out of my house! (Points at camera, cigarette in hand.) I’m calling an emergency session of Congress RIGHT NOW. So get your drunk asses out of Beltway bars and your mistresses’ beds and get them in here. Do your job for the American people for a change, you dumb mutha-

(picture cuts back to Brenda)

BB: What happened next is even more shocking. Here in our studios are two Congressional pages who witnessed the events that transpired. On my immediate left is Ry, and to his left is Hal. Thank you for being here.

Pages: Thanks for having us.

BB: What happened?

Ry: I was trying to block text messages from Mark Foley--

Hal: How does he get our numbers? He’s not in Congress anymore!

Ry: Unfortunately, our numbers are listed. Anyway, I was fiddling with my iPhone while the Senate was being seated. Suddenly, the entire room filled with this rap beat. I recognized the song immediately.

Hal: It was “Got Your Money,” by Old Dirty Bastard! It was LOUD!

BB: You mean the song that goes (singing) “Hey, Dirty, Baby I Gotcha Money?”

Pages (in unison): Yup.

Hal: Then President Odiebama entered the room. He was dressed very conservatively—except for the hat.

Ry: It was a straight up pimp hat! From like 1975!

Hal: Yeah! Everything else happened so fast it was like a blur!

Ry: The President was running through Congress slapping the taste out Senator’s moufs!

Hal: Hittin’ people on BOTH sides of the aisle! Democrats, PA-POW!

Ry: Republicans, Ka-KRACK!!! People standing there looking stunned, as if they didn’t know what hit ‘em. It took ‘em a second before they realized “Hey, I just got bitchslapped by the leader of the free world!”

Hal: People holding their faces looking like this (Hal holds his face and opens his eyes and mouth as wide as possible)

Ry: It was like a rap video. Then Odiebama held up his hand and said “There will be more of this stimulus package if I have to come back here! Have my money!”

Hal: It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in government. I want to be President!

Ry: Fo’real!

BB: I’m just getting word that President Odiebama has called another press conference. Let’s go live, and hope it’s cleaner than the last one.

Odie: First, let me apologize for my language earlier. I was wrong. I screwed up and take full responsibility. (Holds up right hand, which looks swollen) On the positive side, after a very convincing talk, the Senate has decided to pass my stimulus bill. America, change and relief are coming. Thank you, and God bless the United States of America.

BB: We’ll be right back after this message from KFC, Colt 45 and Trojan Magnum condoms. You’re watching My Ghetto Nine News.

Musical Mondays: Gotta Rock It, Don't Stop It

2009-02-09T21:56:00.010-05:00

By Odienator (Click here for all posts)

High School Musical fans and detractors take note: There is nothing new under the Sun. Hollywood has been churning out musicals for teenagers as long as movies had sound. In the 30’s and 40’s, there were the Andy Hardy musicals. The 50’s and 60’s had Elvis movies and the Beach Party flicks. The 70’s had disco disasters like Thank God It’s Friday and mopey musicals like You Light Up My Life. And the early 80’s gave us an ever escalating series of musicals about the hip-hop culture, specifically break dancing and rap. There was Wild Style, Krush Groove, Breakin’, its sequel Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (still one of the greatest titles to ever grace a movie), and Rappin’, a Mario van Peebles movie that’s worse than Jaws: The Revenge. Perhaps the best of the lot was Beat Street, a Harry Belafonte-produced slice of hip-hop that covered all the bases, from rapping and DJ’ing to breaking, popping and tagging. It doesn’t hold up very well today, but if you were immersed in its topics back in the day, it’s a vivid nostalgia piece.

Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy never picked up a can of spray paint, but he still shares a similarity with Kenny Kirkland, aka Double K (Guy Davis, son of Ossie and Ruby): They both want to put on a great show for people. Double K is a DJ who works the turntables at local parties in the hopes of someday getting discovered and moving the crowd at a NYC club. His brother Lee (Robert Taylor) is an excellent breakdancer, participating in dance battles with breakdancing crews of the day like the Rock Steady Crew. Double K’s right hand man is Ramon (Jon Chardiet), a graffiti artist whose tag is RAMO and who paints entire cars of the New York City Subway. Beat Street’s love interest is Tracy (Rae Dawn Chong, fresh off that perverted, piece of crap caveman humpfest, Quest For Fire), a dancer/composer whom Double K at first thinks is too bougie…until it looks like he might get some booty.

The struggles and triumphs of these characters are as old as film itself, but Beat Street pounds them into a scenario familiar to anyone who came of age in the 1980’s. I was a junior in high school when Beat Street came out, and its numerous scenes of breakdancing and tagging got the audience at my theater loudly cheering the screen. Like my doppelganger, Cuba Gooding, Jr., I too was a breakdancer whose body was much more limber than it is today. I did windmills and head spins and that move where you propel your body across the floor by kicking up your legs and pushing yourself along with your hands. We called it The Worm, but others called the the Catepillar. It’s the only move I can still do, and after I watched Beat Street the other day, I attempted it in the long hallway that runs between my living room and my master bedroom. When I made it to my room, my lower back hurt so badly that I saw Jesus, the Saints, and every marshmallow in the Lucky Charms universe.

But damn it, I did it.

The French Connection is a snapshot NYC in the 70’s, and Beat Street captures the mid 80’s, where subway trains were still loud and rickety and completely covered in graffiti. I could almost smell the subway station pee coming out of my television as my DVD player spun the movie. Making matters even more cringe-worthy yet nostalgic were the fashions worn by the characters and revelers in party scenes. Despite how mismatched my colors were in the 70’s, I’m not ashamed to show anyone pictures of me from that time because I didn’t pick those clothes to wear. The 80’s, however, are a different story, and Beat Street, with its Cazales, Kangos, crazy hairstyles and Adidas track pants reminded me why NO ONE CAN EVER SEE THOSE PICTURES of me from the 80’s.

The story is simple: Double K wants to put on a show and get discovered. Lee just wants to dance and win battles. Tracy wants to show Double K that she can be down despite her composing for classical dance, and Ramon wants to impress his Dad with his artwork, and find the tagger named Spits who keeps tagging over his works of art. Spits’ desecration of Ramon’s murals is the worst thing one tagger can do to another’s art, short of ripping off the other person’s moniker.

The resolutions are also simple: Double K gets to scratch and mix at Kool Herc’s party and in downtown NYC, Tracy conducts her dance piece and shows Double K that their musical styles are not that much different, Lee gets arrested for dancing in the subway and almost gets a foot in his ass by his mother (Mary Alice, who seemed to be everybody’s Mama at one point). Ramon and Spits learn an unfortunate lesson about how spray paint cans conduct electricity. This leads to the big “let’s put on a show” moment; though it is full of life and danceable music, it has its somber origins as a tribute to Double K’s favorite graffiti man.

What made Beat Street work for me, then and now, is not only its depiction of things and places with which I was intimately familiar, but also its energy. The film is wall to wall with dancing and music, featuring appearances by hip hop legends like Grandmaster Mellie Mel (who showed me I still knew all the words to Beat Street’s title track), Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force (who performed the Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk-based Planet Rock, still the greatest breakdance song ever recorded), the Treacherous Three (whose Santa Claus rap is still funny as shit) and Kool Herc. It also features some of the worst 80’s music I’ve ever heard, including a song by some kid named Andy B. Bad who lives up to his title.

Director Stan Lathan, who would go on to produce The Original Kings of Comedy as well as direct TV shows like Charles S. Dutton’s Roc and Sanford and Son, intercuts documentary footage of New York City’s northernmost borough with his characters’ day to day routines. It’s a visual reminder of a line uttered early in the film by Double K: “This isn’t New York City! This is the Bronx!” Interesting to note that both Double K and Saturday Night Fever’s Tony Manero both feel like “downtown” NYC represents something alien outside of their borough existence. Like I said, nothing new under the sun. Except Beat Street’s jHeri curls. I don’t know where the hell they existed prior to the 80’s.

Shine Your Light On The World

2009-02-08T23:50:00.017-05:00

By Odienator (Click here for all posts)

Tomorrow may never come
For you or me.
Life is not promised.
Tomorrow may never show up
For you or me.
Life is not promised.
I ain’t no perfect man
I’m trying to do the best that I can
With what it is I have.
-Mos Def, Umi Says

Mos Def recorded these words in 1999, on an album called Black on Both Sides. Watching Something the Lord Made, the 2004 movie he made for HBO, I felt as if he’d written them about the character he portrayed. I had never heard of Vivien Thomas, the man who helped pioneer cardiac surgery at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, but I couldn’t forget him after the credits rolled. He had angered me, made me laugh, and earned my tears. Mos Def is a fine actor, one who deserves more praise than he has been granted, and his performance in this picture is a master class in subtlety. He carries this film on his shoulders in a tricky role of a victim who became a hero simply by accepting, then transforming his victimization into victory.

Something the Lord Made is a character study of the working relationship between Vivien Thomas, a Black carpenter turned lab assistant, and Dr. Alfred Blalock, a Southern doctor whose great granduncle was the head of the Confederate South, Jefferson Davis. Davis’ take on the place of Black people is well documented; his great grandnephew probably shared some of those views as well, but both his ego and his desire to change the world through medicine were too big to deny the special gifts he found in Thomas.

We first meet Thomas in Nashville, Tennessee, just as he is being let go from his job as a carpenter. The teenaged Thomas is given his last check and told “you do good work.” As a result of his layoff, Thomas is introduced to Dr. Blalock, a doctor at Vanderbilt looking for an assistant/janitor. Blalock sizes up Thomas and dismissively says he hopes he can handle the menial tasks “that your predecessors could not.” As played by Alan Rickman, one of my favorite actors, Blalock is arrogant and egotistical, facets Rickman commendably plays throughout the film without remorse. Blalock is also observant—when he sees Thomas reading through some of his medical books, he knows he has no ordinary janitor. After grilling Thomas, and testing out his useful carpenter hands, Blalock has something else for Thomas to do besides scrubbing floors and cleaning up the dog shit left by the lab’s test subjects.

Jesus was a carpenter, but He was a lot more willing to deal with the abuse hurled at Him. After a breakthrough of sorts with his new lab assistant, Blalock verbally assaults Thomas for not recording their lab discussion. When Thomas mentions that he was unaware of that duty, Blalock hurls more abuse. Rather than take this abuse, Thomas quits. Blalock senses the error of his ways when he sees the comprehensive notes Thomas has kept. Quickly, he follows Thomas out.

“I was not raised to take that type of talk,” says Mos Def in a line reading that is simultaneously polite yet forceful. We know that Blacks weren’t allowed to express anger during this period, lest it cost them, and Def grants the line the unspoken weight of his societal placement without robbing it of its power. Blalock’s desire to “do something great” far outweighs any desire to be tyrannical toward his assistant; he promises to hold his temper and asks Thomas to return. As he notes later in the film, no other assistant handled his requests and his research better than Thomas did; they were on the same wavelength.

Fast forward a decade. Dr. Blalock has moved on to Johns Hopkins and taken Thomas with him. Vivien’s wife, Clara (Gabrielle Union, underplaying nicely) and daughter have come with him. Over the past 12 years, Blalock has come to rely on Thomas’ expertise in building tools (a holdover from his carpentry days) and sharing ideas. At Johns Hopkins, the duo take on a request from Dr. Helen Taussig (Mary Stuart Masterson), a prim looking pediatric doctor with a hearing aid. She hopes to help the “blue babies” she cares for in her ward, babies whose heart problems are the cause of their blue pallor. No one has operated on the heart successfully, notes Dr. Blalock, who must have never heard of Dr. Daniel Hale Williams. This type of challenge strokes both Blalock’s ego and his desire to do something to change the world, the latter he acquired after a near death experience with tuberculosis. Dr. Taussig assigns a test case, the baby daughter of a sailor and a young woman.

At home, both men have wives and daughters with whom to deal. Clara Thomas hates Baltimore, a place where, unlike Nashville, there are few Blacks in prominent positions like doctors. She is also none too pleased by Thomas’ place in the hospital; he’s Dr. Blalock’s lab assistant but is still listed (and paid) as a janitor. Blalock’s wife Mary has, in his constant absences due to hospital work, become some kind of handywoman, fixing items around the house and driving an ambulance for people wounded in World War II. Mary tells Blalock that his daughter “wants to grow up to be a patient, so she can see her father.”

Both men have tough, loving women waiting for them at home, but the similarities end there. Dr. Blalock can host lavish parties at his residence, and Vivien has to work them as a waiter to help pay his rent. This despite his growing contributions to Blalock’s work. Thomas has been tasked with a lot of the research and testing while Blalock tends to patients and to teaching.

Director Joseph Sargeant doesn’t dwell too much on the evils of the period. Watch how the characters react, by rote, to situations. Early in the film, Thomas and the friend who told him about Blalock’s custodial position, encounter several White people walking in their path. Mechanically, both stop talking, move out of the way and acknowledge the presence of the passing Whites. Later, as Thomas walks down the hallway of Johns Hopkins, the background is filled with shocked Whites. One nurse puts down the phone to gawk at this Black man with a White man’s lab jacket on his back. When one doctor demands that Thomas, who has been tasked with cleaning out his boss’ new lab, bring him some coffee and a donut, Thomas politely explains there has been a misunderstanding and hands the doctor back his money. The doctor storms off pissed off, but there are no further repercussions. Blalock casually mentions how angry the doctor was, but he’s amused by the same level of pride he bore witness to at Vanderbilt.

Some of the White doctors get used to Thomas working on experiments, but none are aware of how good he is with sutures and ingenuity. While working on a test subject canine, a resident arrives looking for Blalock. When he sees Thomas’ work, which Thomas performs without even looking at the parts he is manipulating (Thomas compares it to walking through one’s own home in the dark), he is so impressed that the young doctor in training blurts out “I would like to work with you someday.” Thomas thanks him, and after the resident leaves, Thomas makes a noise Def uses several times as a sort of shorthand to convey bemusement, something like “huhmph.” He can’t walk through the front door at Johns Hopkins, but he can inspire the workers within its walls.

Blalock is so self-centered that he occasionally doesn’t see an issue until he’s been jarred by a break in routine. When Thomas walks off the job due to a dispute over pay (he’s still making that janitor’s salary despite his lab tech work), Blalock is forced to act to get him more pay, especially after he notices that Thomas’ last experiment has created in a dog the blue baby symptoms. Now that there’s a test case, he can start working on how to cure the ailment.

The other doctors at Johns Hopkins think Blalock is crazy for attempting to operate on a heart. The film shows how religion, among other things, contributes to the ignorance regarding heart surgery. “You can’t mess with God’s work,” warns the sailor’s priest. “Perhaps God is trying to kill this girl,” says Blalock. “I am not.” Attitude like that has his fellow docs licking their lips in anticipation of failure. But, with Thomas’ skilled hands and ideas, and Blalock’s direction, failure isn’t on the menu. After investigating Thomas’ arterial shunt, Blalock responds “it’s like something the Lord made.” Rickman’s sincere delivery robs the line of all its potential cheesiness; it’s a beautiful moment in the film.

After a setback, the duo find a way to improve on their original experiment. Now they are ready to focus on the little girl. Thomas gives Blalock everything he needs to perform the procedure, except the confidence to pull it off. Rickman plays Blalock’s uncertainty as a foreign emotion. Standing in the operating room, hands up and awaiting his surgical gloves, Rickman lets panic freeze his body, his eyes asking “what the fuck is this?” Then his ego returns, and rules be damned, he’s going to have Vivien Thomas in that operating room as the experienced voice in his ear. With Thomas’ gentle guidance, Blalock performs the surgery. It’s a success.

Blalock and the doctors who assisted him are honored, and he winds up on the cover of Life magazine touting, by himself, the techniques and equipment he and Thomas created. As the photographer takes pictures of Blalock, Sergeant populates the background with Mos Def. The expression on his face is one of mixed feelings. He knows he can’t be in the shot but it looks as if he wishes Blalock would call out and invite him over in the same manner he sought him before that fateful surgery.

At a party thrown in Blalock’s honor, Thomas slips in as one of the hired staff and listens as Blalock thanks everyone but him. It’s too much for Vivien to take, and he quits. After a failed attempt to enter college based on his 15 years of experience at Johns Hopkins, Thomas starts selling antacids to doctors door to door to make ends meet. But he is miserable, and Clara forces him to acknowledge it. He wants to be in the lab, regardless of whether he is credited with the work.

Watching the sequence where Thomas returns to work for Blalock, I felt tears stinging my eyes. These were not tears of joy; I was livid. Anger welled up in me—how dare he return? He’s being denied the credit he deserves, and he can’t even walk through the front door of a hospital where he helped save the lives of babies whose parents would spit in his eye, or worse, if they saw him on the street. I had internalized Thomas’ struggle, and putting myself in his shoes in that office became too much for me. I would not have been able to do it—my pride would not let me—and Thomas’ explanation of how much he loves the work just confused my emotions. Def is wholly convincing, and he and Rickman give the scene a quiet power, but I choked on Thomas’ reasoning. This emotion snuck me like a prizefighter, hitting me in the gut and putting me down. I was mad at myself because I just couldn’t do what Thomas does. My brain understood why, and it admired this man’s strength. But my heart could not acquiesce.

Time passes, and Vivien Thomas becomes a teacher to numerous doctors, people who have degrees he does not possess yet seek him out for his work with Blalock and others. His mentor has become ill, requiring surgery. As he leaves the hospital as an outpatient, he tries once more to get Thomas to come with him, this time to Columbia University. Thomas says he appreciates the offer, but he likes where he is.

Dr. Blalock, sensing death may be coming back to collect on the debt allowing him to survive TB, attempts to convey to Thomas how he feels about their work together:

“They say you haven't lived unless you have a lot to regret. I regret... I have some regrets. But I think we should remember not what we lost, but what we've done. We saved a lot [of lives], didn’t we?”

“We did,” says Thomas.

Suddenly, I fully realized why Thomas went back to that lab. He was able to put the greater good ahead of his own glory. Thomas’ pride in his work trumped everything. Even if nobody knew, HE knew, and Blalock did too. Rickman plays this scene pitch-perfect, and Def underplays his reaction, raising his eyebrow slightly at Rickman’s confession but otherwise keeping his emotions to himself. After refusing Thomas’ help for the first time in the movie, Blalock hobbles out of the hospital as we hear Helen tell Vivien in voiceover that he has passed away.

The film’s last scene is Def’s best. After being honored with an honorary doctorate at Johns Hopkins, a portrait of his likeness is put on the wall at the front of the medical building, joining Blalock’s and Johns Hopkins’. Earlier in the film, Thomas is thrown out of the building as Blalock walks him through the front door, pointing out the portraits. Now he not only can enter through the front, but his likeness will greet everyone who does. Not bad for a guy with no formal medical training. Def’s reaction to the picture is silence; he lets his face reveal a mixture of emotions. The intercom rings out, calling for Dr. Vivien Thomas to report. Def looks up at the portrait one more time. The noise he utters as he walks away speaks volumes.

“Huhmph.”

In the chorus of Umi Says, Mos Def sings:

“My umi says shine your light on the world.
Shine your light for the world to see.”

Something the Lord Made does its part to shine that light on two pioneers, Drs. Thomas and Blalock, and assisting it are the fine performances by Rickman and Def. They are both fantastic. Backing them up are Masterson, who drops little hints of identification with Def’s character--she being a half deaf woman doctor in a place where women doctors are almost as scarce as Black doctors; Sedgwick, who has some fun with her Rosie the Riveter type role, and Union as the rock in Vivien’s life. Charles S. Dutton has a few good scenes as well, playing Vivien’s dad, a man whose idea of pride permeates every fiber of his son’s being.

As Mos Def looked up at his portrait, my eyes welled up again, this time with the intended use for tears. I was touched beyond measure, and I felt the film earned that emotion honestly. For its trouble, Something the Lord Made received the Best TV film Emmy that year. HBO makes great TV movies, and this is one of their best.

The real Drs. Blalock and Thomas

We Are Not a Monolith: HBO's The Black List

2009-02-07T16:50:00.006-05:00

By Odienator (Click here for all posts)

Last year, at Black History Mumf, I gave out homework assignments every day. Some of them were humorous statements, others were actual requests. Today, I’m dishing out homework because it’s the middle of winter and outside my door it’s 56 degrees. I plan on enjoying it! Yes, your friendly neighborhood Odienator is being trifling today.

I heard something today that excited me. HBO is running the second installment of its documentary, The Black List, on February 26th. The first edition aired last year, and it’s a must-watch. The concept has Elvis Mitchell and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders point their cameras on several Blacks in the arts, sports and politics to allow them to speak on race and how it shaped and affected what they do. I’ve seen the first edition three times already, and I’m never less than fascinated by what these people have to say. I don’t always agree with what they have to say, but the fact that it is so varied contributes to my enjoyment in ways I cannot describe. We are not a monolith, as the 3 Black Chicks who review movies were prone to saying. And we aren’t.

Some of the faces on the first edition include music producers Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and Russell Simmons, Pulitzer prize winners Toni Morrison and Suzan-Lori Parks, comedians/writer/directors Keenen Ivory Wayans and Chris Rock, Clinton advisor Vernon Jordan and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, activist Rev. Al Sharpton, sports figures Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Serena Williams, actor Lou Gossett Jr., and Tony winner Bill T. Jones. Most surprisingly, there’s an appearance by former Guns ‘N Roses’ member Slash, whose heritage I always wondered about (I kept telling my friends—that dude’s got Black in him somewhere).

Each has something intriguing to say. Listening to Colin Powell today as I watched a rebroadcast, I recalled how, in 2008, the Republican party branded him a traitor, and how some of their mouthpieces outright accused him of endorsing Obama solely on the basis of his skin color. (See why I roll my eyes at the concept of “post racial America?”) Powell tells a funny story about being stopped by the cops between Birmingham, Alabama and his base in Georgia, pointing out, as Suzan-Lori Parks does, that wearing your military uniform helped you avoid getting shot while driving in the Deep South. The state trooper’s words to Powell, “you better get out of here as quick as you can,” is the best punchline in a show that also features Chris Rock.

Reverend Al Sharpton, with whom I’ve had more than one issue with over time, won me over with his take on how Black music used to elevate, to sing about a place where we wanted to be, which is a sharp contrast to a lot of what blasts into my ears nowadays. “We used to sing about Go Down, Moses and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” he notes. “We weren’t singing about niggas in the field picking cotton.” It’s a great analogy, which I should have expected from a preacher.

The former chairman of Time Warner, Richard Parsons, is also profiled. He begins his section by saying “I burned my house down when I was a kid.” Immediately I thought of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, though if I recall correctly, Wright burned his grandmother’s house down. I also thought of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, so from now on, I’m going to call Parsons “Richard Left Eye Parsons.”

The second volume will feature Melvin van Peebles and Bishop T.D. Jakes among others, and I can’t wait to see it.

There are very few items nowadays that bring us a collection of experiences and viewpoints from a Black perspective. We always seem to be some kind of Chocolate Borg. So your homework assignment is to hunt down two excellent representations of this type, The Black List and Spike Lee’s Get on The Bus. The latter, as all Spike Lee joints do, omits any important female viewpoint, but it’s still well worth considering.