Big Media Vandalism

Everybody Hates Valentine's Day

2012-02-14T15:31:00.000-05:00

by Odienator
(for all Mumf pieces, go here)

Happy Valentine’s Day!

(Editor's Note: Readers of Big Media Vandalism know I am no romantic. I’m a cynic. A cynic is a romantic whose ass has been shredded by life, and life has treated my ass the way White Dog treats Negroes. So, if you’re here looking for something warm and cozy, allow me to retort: My dear, you are Wookin’ Pa Nub in all the wrong places. If, however, you are interested in showing a good time to a slightly used Odie, call me.)

Everybody Hates Chris takes place between 1982 and 1986, the high school years of both its main character and your friendly neighborhood Odienator. Like Chris, I am the oldest child in a family with a popular younger brother and a tattletale sister. We both have parents with similar characteristics: a hard-working Pop and a take no prisoners mother. Chris’ plans and good intentions always went haywire, culminating with him looking at the camera in stunned surprise. My luck was consistent with Chris’, but at least he was on a sitcom. The laugh track was added in hindsight to my memories. Shit wasn’t funny when it was live.

The Chris in Everybody Hates Chris is Chris Rock, executive producer and narrator of the show. Presented as The Wonder Years in the Hood, Rock narrates stories from his adolescence growing up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. In his stand-up, Rock talks about being one of the only Black kids in his school, a trait that got him in nothing but trouble. This is reflected on the show. The bullies call Chris racially insensitive names and his teachers get all glassy-eyed when they mention his life “in the ghet-TOE.” Life would have been easier for Chris had he done an exchange program trade-off with Howard Stern. Stern’s experiences as the only White kid in a Black school should be a sitcom on BET.

BET eventually got reruns of Everybody Hates Chris, but it originally aired on the dearly-departed You People’s Network. After polluting the airwaves with such questionable cullud fare as Homeboys in Outer Space (still the worst show ever aired), UPN put on a Black sitcom that made fun of racism rather than contributed to it. Is it a surprise that, the year Everybody Hates Chris appeared, UPN blew the fuck up? Intelligent Blackness will do that to a network. Ever wonder why TV shows never have more than one useful Negro on them? Now you know. Smart, relatable Black people = Burnt Up Network Transmitter. I’m surprised The Cosby Show didn’t cause the NBC Peacock to turn into a Kenny Rogers Roaster.

After UPN folded, Everybody Hates Chris wound up on the CW, where it ran three more years before a Sopranos-inspired finale. Of all the sitcoms to appear on TV, network or otherwise, this is the show I’d be on if Poltergeist sucked me into the TV. My teenage years felt like I’d done something to piss de Lawd off; He was burning me in effigy every day up in Heaven. Chris Rock must have felt the same way, as every episode of his show has a title that starts with “Everybody Hates...” from “Everybody Hates The Pilot” to “Everybody Hates the G.E.D.” In each, his onscreen alter-ego walks through life in a state of perpetual haplessness. I identified with him in so many ways.

Everybody Hates Chris follows Chris (Tyler James Williams) through his last two years in junior high and his first two in high school. At Corleone Junior High, he is hated by every kid except Greg (Vincent Martella). Corleone is 99.44% White, and Chris has to take three buses to get there. He gets clobbered on the buses, having to run from the dangers in both his neighborhood and the one surrounding Corleone Junior High. Once at school, Chris has to deal with bully Joey Caruso (Travis Flory). Caruso is huge, the king of the bullies, and enjoys calling Chris anything but his gov’ment name. Depending on mood, Caruso refers to Chris as “Cornbread”, ”Satchmo” and “Kareem.” Any of these monikers is usually followed by a beatdown. Greg tries to help, but is as much an outcast as Chris despite being the right color for popularity at Corleone.

Chris gets no help from his teachers either, a feeling I knew all too well. My sixth grade teacher told my classmates not to play with me because I “couldn’t take a punch.” After three years of getting my ass kicked, I finally snapped, broke a bottle and tried to kill my bully with the shards of glass. But that’s a story for another time. Everybody Hates Chris is a family show, so no one can get cut with anything but narrator Chris Rock’s verbal wit. Chris’ math teacher, and later high school principal, Mrs. Morello, is a racist who is prone to making false statements about Blacks in general and Chris in particular. She’s no help to him with Caruso, and Rock doesn’t miss a chance to counter Morello’s racially insensitive dialogue with commentary from his adult self. Morello thinks Chris’ father is absent and his mother is a crack ho.

Neither assessment is true. Chris’ father, Julius (Terry Crews) is home every night and his mother, Rochelle (played by Pam from Martin herself, Tichina Arnold), is drug-free. Rochelle is not drama-free, however, and spends a good amount of the show chewing out her kids Chris, Drew (Tequan Richmond) and Tonya (Imani Hakim). If Rochelle had the mouth Chris Rock does in his stand-up, my mother could sue for copyright infringement. Both she and Rochelle are the disciplinarians of the family, and their threats of violence were worse than the occasional ass-beatings they dispensed. My mother’s sayings are well known to my readers—stuff like “I’ma beat the Calhoun Shit out of you,” “I’ll beat you ‘til you shit blue ink,” and my personal favorite: “I’ll stomp a mudhole in your ass!” In one episode, Rochelle threatens to slap Chris into another race, then hits Williams so hard he turns Asian. I couldn’t breathe from laughing so hard.

Julius’ quirks are also entertaining. He’s cheap as hell, wants to keep Rochelle happy so she won’t take out her anger on him, and like my Pops, is a workaholic. Also like my Pops, he’s always scolding the kids when they piss off Rochelle. “Now I have to put up with her!” he tells them. Julius gets hooked on his “stories” during his sick days off, and lectures the kids for hours as a deterrent whenever they ask him for money. Regarding the stories: Don’t laugh—a lot of bruvas watch the soaps. I loved me some Erica Kane back in the day. Julius is the original coupon master, and like the father from Rock’s stand-up, buys cheap store brands nobody has ever heard of before. (“I didn’t know Lou Rawls made string beans!”)

I have more siblings than the two that appeared on Everybody Hates Chris. But the similarities are still there for me. Drew is everything Chris is not, tall, popular, a chick magnet, and great at almost everything he does. This is my middle brother to a T, the lothario of my family. Chris’ only sister Tonya is, like my only sister, a tattletale who loves to get her oldest brother in trouble. Being the only girl, she is spoiled by Julius but at odds with Rochelle on numerous occasions. Drew likes to torment her and tries to get her in trouble. Blackmail is not out of the question for either Drew or Tonya. In one episode, they both blackmail each other over something Julius shouldn’t know. I thought of the time my brother tried to blackmail my sister after he accidentally recorded her saying “Michael J. Fox is a dick!” with his tape recorder. I have no idea why she said it, but it was on Memorex. How that turned out is also a story for another time.

The casting director of Everybody Hates Chris wants to bring not only 80’s nostalgia to the show but Black TV nostalgia as well. The sitcom is populated with familiar faces, from Ernest Thomas (Roger from What’s Happening) as a shady funeral director to Jackee Harry (Sondra from 227) as the owner of the beauty shop Rochelle frequents. Arnold’s Martin co-conspirator Tisha Campbell appears as the mother of a girl Chris has a crush on (Whoopi Goldberg plays Campbell’s mother). Todd Bridges (the Willis in “Whatchu Talkin’ ‘Bout Willis?”) is a paranoid Vietnam vet full of conspiracy theories. And the owner of the corner store Chris eventually starts working in is played by Huggy Bear. If you don’t know who Huggy Bear is by now, there’s just no telling you. (Don’t you dare cheat by clicking on that link. It might not go where you’re expecting.)

There’s also a character, Risky, who sells things that fall off a truck, and a robber named Jerome who’s always hitting Chris up for money. “Lemme hold a dollar,” is his catchphrase, and he’s always calling Chris “little dude from across the street.” In my ‘hood, Jerome was a crack head who lived next door to us. Jerome breaks into Chris’ apartment in one episode, attempting to steal items he can sell. My Jerome successfully stole our VCR and then had the nerve to try to sell it back to me for 10 dollars. I offered Jerome something better than $10 for my VCR. What that was, and whether it got me back my VCR, is yet another story for another time.

Though Crews and Arnold are seasoned professionals who create two fleshed out, chemistry-laden characters, Everybody Hates Chris belongs to Tyler James Williams. He brings genuine pathos to the show’s humor. You really feel sorry for him, even when he’s being a butthole as in the Everybody Hates Big Bird episode. Everything about the characters feels accurate and just right, from Rochelle’s rocky relationship with her mother (played by the great Loretta Devine) to the sibling dynamics between the three kid actors to Joey Caruso’s bullying tactics. Rock’s narration is never intrusive, and at times saves a scene or the entire show from becoming too sitcom-saccharine. Rock himself appears as a guidance counselor who gives crappy advice to his alter ego, advice that manifests itself in the last episode, Everybody Hates the G.E.D.

Some of my favorite plotlines include:

Caruso meeting his match in an Asian guy who Bruce Lees his ass to a pulp. The resulting beatdown costs Caruso his bully self-esteem and throws off the entire high school bully-nerd dynamic.
Julius and Chris losing all the family’s travel money in a three card monte game in Port Authority. The episode showcases a heretofore unknown skill of Rochelle’s, one she learned from her late father (Jimmie Walker in a Dyn-O-Mite cameo).
The Kwanzaa episode, where cheap-ass Julian decides it’s better to celebrate Kwanzaa because it costs less than Christmas.
Chris gets in trouble after telling Redd Foxx jokes at school. He learned them after listening to Foxx’s album on the sneak tip. (I have a personal tie to this one, as I can recite every joke from that album.)
Rochelle turns out to be The Wicked Witch of the West of tutors. Her berating of Chris is so bad, no wonder he wound up taking the G.E.D.!
Drew reveals he’s a terrible singer, but decides to go on Showtime at the Apollo armed with the one thing the finicky Apollo crowd can’t boo: God. Drew’s performance, and the way he features God, had me rolling around on the floor.

That last plotline is in the series finale, Everybody Hates the G.E.D. It ends the same way as The Sopranos’ series finale did, with the family singing Don’t Stop Believing at a restaurant and the screen going black just as something is about to be revealed. For Everybody Hates Chris, it’s the results of Chris’ G.E.D. After having to repeat the 10th grade due to 30 absences, Chris decides to take the G.E.D. so he can get out of school and pursue a career in stand-up. As the envelope containing the grade is opened, the screen goes black. I had the same initial reaction I did to The Sopranos, but unlike that show, I knew the answer to Everybody Hates Chris’ question. Instead of cursing, I started to laugh. Every show had ended with poor Chris suffering some sort of comic downer that ruined any success he had during the episode. The show couldn’t break that running joke by giving you a happy ending for Chris, so the screen went black.

In reality, we know from Rock’s standup what the results of that G.E.D. exam were. The rest is history, as they say, and so is Everybody Hates Chris. I still watch it from time to time, and it holds up as an amusing show. The writing, by Rock, Ali LeRoi, Alyson Fouse and sitcom vets like Don Reo is always first-rate and true to the characters. It’s the youngest show on Nick at Nite and probably the most award-nominated show to ever spring from the ashes of UPN.

Like Rock, as an adult I eventually learned that adolescence only felt like Everybody Hates Odie. It was just mostly everybody.

Your homework assignment:

Think about high school and see if you overreacted about how bad it was.

A Few Words On Whitney

2012-02-12T23:19:00.001-05:00

by Odienator
(for all Mumf pieces, go here)

Man, this is turning out to be one messed up February.

Last year’s Mumf got a little heavier than I anticipated, so I wanted to add a little more balance this year. Fate appears to have other ideas. On February 1st, we lost Don Cornelius, and yesterday, we lost Whitney Houston. These things come in threes, that is, if you are superstitious. I recall in 2008, Bernie Mac and Issac Hayes died in August, and Rudy Ray Moore two months later. With Don and Whitney #1 and #2 respectively, will I be back here with another unscheduled entry before the Mumf is out?

Allow me a few words on Whitney.

I fully cop to making Whitney jokes in the past—you’ll find some of them in this series. But I’d never joke about her singing. I always thought she was a fantastic singer whose musical pedigree was untouchable. But it took her third album, I’m Your Baby Tonight, to finally pull me into the fold. I liked a few songs off her first two albums, but I thought most of them sounded the same. I’m Your Baby Tonight was the first solo song of hers that I couldn’t stop listening to, so I dropped the ducats for the cassette. I still have this cassette.

I am in love with her first song, a duet with Teddy Pendergrass called Hold Me. Written by one of my favorite lyricists, Linda Creed, Hold Me felt like the old guard passing the balladeer baton to the new guard. It also beautifully illustrated how effective a restrained Houston could be. Both she and Pendergrass could yelp and shout with the best of the church belters, but they pitch this song so delicately. Houston’s phrasing is impeccable here as well. Of all the songs I listened to after I heard of Houston’s death, this is the one that made me truly sad. (Houston also covered Creed's magnum opus.)

Her version of The Star Spangled Banner is as iconic as Hendrix’s, It’s so inspirational, Francis Scott Key should thank her in the afterlife. Her duet with Mariah Carey, the Oscar winning When You Believe, is a fantastic piece of divatude tempered by a respect for the religious material. And while millions of people adore I Will Always Love You, I can guarantee it’ll be on my radio when I am burning in Hell. As far as The Bodyguard soundtrack was concerned, I was more of a I Have Nothing kinda guy.

Speaking of The Bodyguard, I didn’t have high hopes for Houston’s acting career after seeing it. I gave the film an F, calling it preposterous. Houston shut me up with her work in Waiting to Exhale and The Preacher’s Wife. In the former, she holds her own against more seasoned actresses like Angela Bassett and Loretta Devine. I liked Terry McMillan’s book, and Houston brings her character to credible life from the page. Houston doesn’t sing in Exhale, at least not on the screen. The ridiculous (though catchy) Babyface song she sings on the soundtrack (Exhale (Shoop Shoop)) plays in the background of one scene.

Houston does sing in Penny Marshall’s The Preacher’s Wife, a film that is much better than its reputation. I’ve never understood the bad rep it gets. It’s a good movie, a sweet-natured remake of The Bishop’s Wife. Denzel Washington can’t do light comedy to save his life, but something about Houston softens him. She brings out a bubbly effervescence in him (remember them ice skating?) while giving an excellent performance. Washington is playing a role originated by Cary Grant, and Houston brings out a bit of a similar, goofy likability in Denzel.

The Preacher's Wife features the cinematic moment I will hold close to my heart when I think of Whitney Houston. Denzel takes her to a club she used to sing in before she married Courtney B. Vance. With some goading from her former piano player (played by Lionel Richie), Houston sings a heartfelt cover of The Four Tops’ I Believe In You And Me. (Click that link to see the clip.) Her character proves that, despite her long absence from the stage, she could return anytime and be just as good. Houston's fans hoped that would also be true after she took a break from her stage work in the 2000’s. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t.

The cable news media, especially MSNBC, was disgusting in its coverage of the news of Houston’s demise. Every newscaster harped on Houston’s drug problems and her tumultuous marriage to the King of R & B. They mentioned it far more than her hits, her successes, or even her acting. In fact, if I didn’t know any better, I would have thought she was just some junkie, not someone who sold hundreds of millions of records and won 6 Grammys. Not once did any outlet consider playing a snippet from my favorite song of hers, the Wyclef Jean-written My Love Is Your Love. It was the first thing I thought of when my Mom called me to tell me Whitney Houston was dead:

“If I should die this very day
Don't cry, cause on earth we wasn't meant to stay
And no matter what the people say
I'll be waiting for you after the judgment day.”

R.I.P. Ms Houston.

The Poitier-Cosby Trilogy: Cuz I'm From Off The Corners

2012-02-11T20:45:00.001-05:00

by Odienator
(for all Mumf pieces, go here)

Before 1973, Sidney Poitier was hardly known for comedy. In old Hollywood, when you said “comedy” and “Negro,” you meant COON. Sidney was our distinguished Black actor, carrying the weight of the “Good Negro” on his capable shoulders. He was held to a higher ideal, noble beyond any reasonable request. Sidney could be charismatic, charming, and even easy-going. Outright funny he could not be, at least not before he took control of his own career by directing and producing his films in the early 70’s.

Sharing a production company with Paul Newman and Babs Streisand, Poitier started directing the kinds of movies he wanted to be in, changes of pace from his norm. He started with the wildly entertaining 1972 Western, Buck and the Preacher, then helmed the romantic drama A Warm December. The latter I affectionately refer to as the “Put Your Shirt Back On, Sidney!” movie. A shirtless, early 70’s era Poitier is definitely not objectionable, but you could make a drinking game out of how many times he loses his shirt. You’d die.

In 1973, writer Richard Wesley brought a screenplay to Poitier, who intended to direct but not star in it. Attached to the story of two men trying to retrieve a stolen wallet containing a $50,000 lottery ticket were Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx. Bill Cosby blew away the executives during his tryout for the small part of a shifty private eye. In fact, Cosby’s audition for this part is the stuff of legend. But Warner Bros., Poitier’s studio for this new film, didn’t believe Foxx or Pryor were appropriately sized box office draws. Foxx had just started on Sanford and Son, and Pryor had been in the moderately successful Wattstax and the wildly successful Lady Sings the Blues. By comparison, Poitier was an Oscar winning superstar and had been the number one box office draw in 1967, with his triumvirate of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and To Sir, With Love. Bill Cosby was a famous stand-up comedian with three Emmys for his dramatic work with Robert Culp on the 60’s classic I Spy.

Out went Redd and Rich, in came Sidney and the Cos, and the rest is history. The resulting film spawned two pseudo-sequels and changed the way we looked at Sidney Poitier.

Let me briefly stop here for a moment of mourning. We should bow our heads in silent reverence for the movie that Uptown Saturday Night would have been had Warners not been so gaat-damn greedy. I’m not sure who would have played which part, but in either roles, both Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx would have been Black movie dynamite. I would have loved to see Pryor as the suave Sidney straight man and Foxx as the bullshitting Cos. Imagining scenes with them makes me giddy. Alas, like Diana Sands in Claudine, we must relegate these notions to our imaginations rather than reality.

Don’t get me wrong. Uptown Saturday Night is perfectly fine as cast. The movie we are left with for posterity benefits from the fine work by Sidney and Bill. Cosby picks Poitier’s pocket and walks off with the picture, but Sidney purposely telegraphs where his wallet is. Their offscreen friendship translates to their onscreen characters, which is why it works here and works even better in the first "sequel," Let’s Do It Again. I’ll be covering that next week, and the second "sequel," A Piece of the Action, in two weeks. Maybe I’ll miraculously like that latter picture by then.

Uptown Saturday Night tells the story of Steve Jackson (Poitier) and Wardell Franklin (Cosby), two blue collar guys who decide to live above their stations for one night. Cab driver Wardell and factory worker Steve are working multiple jobs and, as Uptown Saturday Night opens, Steve is on vacation from all his jobs for two weeks. Wardell convinces him to go to Madame Zenobia’s, a legal club with an illegal gambling ring behind a red door. This ritzy club is not for po’ folks like Steve and Wardell, so Wardell types a fake letter on some stationery he stole from his wife’s law office employer. The letter says he and Steve are important African diamond merchants and is “signed” by one of the “lawyers.” “Who is that guy?” asks Steve, referring to the fake name on the signature. “I don’t know,” says Wardell, “and I hope he doesn’t show up here tonight.”

He doesn’t. But a bunch of stocking mask-clad burglars do. Before the robbery, Wardell is making beacoup dollars at a craps table. With her hot dice, Leggy Peggy (Paula Kelly) is burning down the House. Both Wardell’s fists are full of money he’s made courtesy of a loan from Steve. When the robbers arrive, Wardell’s upraised hands are full of cash. (Watch how Cosby silently yet reluctantly hands over the money the gun-toting villains take from him.) The robbers make everyone strip to their underwear before they leave. “But I don’t wear underwear,” says one unlucky lady. Too bad for her (and for us—Poitier keeps the camera at a modest angle). Just before the robbers leave, the leader says “Never have so few owed so much to so many.” Yup, a misquoted Winston Churchill is robbing Madame Zenobia’s.

The next day at church, as Reverend Flip Wilson preaches a sermon about not bringing “joy juice” to the upcoming church picnic, Steve and Wardell try to stay awake and out of suspicion. The duo had been cleaned of their cash the night before, so when the collection plate comes around, Wardell puts a handful of air in it. When Mrs. Wardell passes the collection plate back to him, Wardell puts a bigger handful of air into it. Steve gets into bigger trouble after church. Asleep In his chair and smiling, Mrs. Steve pulls a dirty trick on him. “Are you dreaming about me?” she asks. No response. “Are you dreaming about a woman?” she asks. Steve smiles. His wife hauls off and slaps the everlasting gobstopper shit out of him. Poitier’s reaction remains for me the film’s biggest laugh. Holding his face in shock after leaping 20 feet off the chair, he looks at his wife in shock. “Why you hit me?!!” he asks, his Bahamian accent creeping back into his astonished voice. “You must have been dreaming,” says Mrs. Steve.

Fate gives Steve an even bigger open handed slap in the mouth. The newspaper prints the lottery numbers, and Steve’s ticket has hit. (I always wondered if this were the legitimate lottery, or the neighborhood "number.") “$50,000!” the married couple sing in unison. Then reality intervenes: The ticket was in Steve’s wallet, which is now property of whomever hit Madame Zenobia’s. This is $50,000 in 1973 money, so Steve enlists Wardell to help him find out who robbed them. Being new to the ways of crime, their first few interviews don’t go so well. Wardell’s adventure includes that staple of Black folk interaction with the police: He fits the description.

After Steve bails out Wardell, Wardell has a conniption and demands they leave this investigation stuff to the professionals. This leads them to Sharp Eye Washington, Private Eye. This is the role Cosby auditioned for, and when you see it, just think of what might have happened if he’d gotten it. Sharp Eye is now played by the guy who originally was set to star in this picture, Richard Pryor. Pryor is only onscreen 4 minutes (if that much) but during that time, he owns Uptown Saturday Night. Skittish, nervous and as bootleg as the shitty cardboard sign on his door would indicate, Sharp Eye Washington is obviously a con man. He takes our heroes’ $50 and tries to leave before they can tell him what the job is. Going down the fire escape, Sharp Eye is met by the 5-0. “Your con days are over!” says the stern looking detective cuffing the fake detective. The cop lists Sharp Eye’s other persona, including a fake defense lawyer in my hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey. Like Steve and Wardell, I’ll bet some of my relatives got tooken by Pryor’s con man!

Our duo’s next step is to visit their local politician, who is probably a bigger crook than Sharp Eye Washington. Congressman Lincoln is a pandering, corrupt politician trying to hide just how ghetto he really is. In other words, perfect casting for the great Roscoe Lee Browne. When his secretary informs him that there are some “kind of ordinary” people there to see him, Lincoln says “CONSTITUENTS?!!” Before welcoming them, Lincoln has to make some quick interior decorating changes to his office.

Congressman Lincoln Goes From This...

...To this. Just like a damn politician!

Congressman Lincoln’s all set to help until he discovers the crime took place at “that den of iniquity” Madame Zenobia’s. In the middle of his stern lecture about the evils of illegal gambling, in walks Mrs. Lincoln a.k.a. Leggy Peggy! She was introduced to Zenobia’s by the Congressman himself. Her street vernacular makes Lincoln cringe, but she gives Steve and Wardell some advice on where they can next look for information. “Look up Little Seymour Pettigrew,” she tells them, but warns that Little Seymour is a bad, bad man.

Little Seymour sounds like Little Caesar, and indeed we get a character Edward G. Robinson could have played. Before we do, Wardell and Steve see firsthand how rough the bar they’re about to enter is. A guy gets thrown out, makes an attempt to go back and gets an ass kicking before he gets through the door. Steve is ready to go, but Wardell immediately starts psyching him up. The woof tickets Bill Cosby sells in this sequence are what you paid to see when you rented this movie. “If the dude mess with me, I'ma knock him out. You know why? Cuz I’m from OFF THE CORNERS!!” Wardell yells, promoting his toughness to anyone who will listen.

"...cuz I'm from OFF THE CORNERS!!!" And yes, The Cos is giving The Finger.

The woofing continues. Wardell walks into this bar asking for Little Seymour and his bodyguard, Big Percy. When a guy tries to jump bad, Wardell beats him up easily. Maybe there IS something to that “off the corners” jive after all. Steve gets in on it, playing the dozens and calling Little Seymour a “corny little runt.” You can feel Poitier the actor finally cutting loose and enjoying every minute of it.

Mr. Tibbs Plays The Dozens!

But Steve, as so many other Negroes before him have done, sells one too many woof tickets. Just as Wardell is advising Steve to “say something about his Mama,” Little Seymour shows up in the guise of one half of the uber-talented Nicholas Brothers, Harold Nicholas. “I’m Little Seymour,” Nicholas announces. He is indeed little, but the scowl on his face makes him 12 feet tall. Literally 12 feet tall is Seymour’s bodyguard. “I’m Big Percy,” says he, and his booming voice reverberates through the speakers. The two of them look like the precursor to Master Blaster in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

Mutt and Jeff are about to open a can of Whup Ass!

Wardell sees this shit, and immediately starts back pedaling. Writer Wesley said that, in the script, the scene was to have his heroes turn and run from the bar. This entire scene is improvised by the actors, including Cosby, who is funnier than he has ever been onscreen in this one moment. “You see,” he begins before launching into this incredibly convoluted excuse about hospitals, the war, grandmothers, mental disorders and doctor’s cards. Transcribing it would do it no justice, so you’ll need to see this for yourself.

"If you notice, uh, Mr. Seymour, he never said nothing 'bout your mama..."

After all that woof ticket refunding, Little Seymour responds as expected. He tells Wardell “that story you just told is BULLSHIT.” After saying he had nothing to do with the robbery, Little Seymour proceeds to whip both Steve and Wardell’s asses thoroughly. I don’t know why Little Seymour needed a bodyguard. His karate moves and leaps through the air were enough to induce cardiac arrest in any opponent. Even after crashing through the bar, Little Seymour hops back up for more ass beating.

"Here's a little something for niggas who loud-talk Little Seymour!"

“What did he hit me with?” Steve asks Wardell during their recuperation at Steve’s house. “His hands or his feet?” “Both!” says Wardell. “At the SAAAME time!”

With that lead now dead, the guys try Leggy Peggy’s other suggestion, Geechie Dan Buford. Geechie Dan’s portrayer is Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher cohort, Harry Belafonte. If Little Seymour were Edward G..Robinson, Geechie Dan is Brando’s Don Corleone. Belafonte stuffs his face with cotton, adds a Southern swagger to his voice and looks menacing as hell. Just to screw with the audience. The first thing we see Geechie Dan do is slurp down a raw egg, followed by pills and that Vicks thing you shove up your nose. “Whatchu suckas want?” he asks.

Those suckas want to know if Geechie Dan knocked over Zenobia’s. Dan says he didn’t and threatens to knock Steve’s head into another zip code. “Sucka if you don’t get outta here, they’re going to be pickin’ yo’ head up from across the street!” Before anyone can leave, the bar is ambushed and shot up in spectacular fashion. Geechie, his men and our heroes escape, but now Dan thinks he’s been set up by Steve. “Silky Slim did this,” he asks them later, interrogating them in an abandoned area. To get out, Steve admits Silky Slim set him up. He has no idea who Silky Slim is. “Put these dogs to sleep,” Geechie Dan tells his henchmen.

As Steve and Wardell hilariously fight for their lives (what joy to see Poitier doing slapstick!), Silky Slim shows up. Any vet of Blaxploitation would know exactly who robbed Madame Zenobia’s based on voice alone, and would have waited for Calvin Lockhart to show up in this picture. Show up he does, and when he utters his previous Churchill line, the guys know they have their man. Using that fake lawyer letter, which was taken during the robbery, as a ruse to get Geechie Dan to partner with Silky Slim, Steve and Wardell get one step closer to getting their hands on that ticket. Dan and Slim think the letter is the key to $300,000 worth of diamonds hidden in a law office. Slim brings all the loot to Steve’s church in a suitcase, bringing our heroes even closer to that wallet.

Uptown Saturday Night climaxes at that church picnic, the one with supposedly no joy juice, and it asks just how far would you go to retrieve $50,000 of 1973-era money. I felt the same way I did when I first saw this film on a double bill in 1975—these guys go farther than I would have. There’s a happy ending, and a reprise of “How I Got Over” by an uncredited choir that shouldn’t have gone unknown. It’s a rousing number, and though they’re talking about a different kind of getting over, it’s a fitting way to end a film that shows how to get one over on the Mob.

Next Saturday, I’ll do this again with Let’s Do It Again.

The Content of Their Character Actors: Bill Cobbs

2012-02-09T23:09:00.002-05:00

by Odienator
(for all Mumf pieces, go here)

“Your soul is required in Hell!”

Nino Brown looks down at the Old Man whose voice gets his attention. He’s seen him before. Earlier, he lectured Nino about his trifling, dangerous ways. Angered about Brown selling crack in the neighborhood, the Old Man pulled a gun on him before Scotty (Ice-T) tackled and disarmed him. This is the second time Nino stares down the barrel of this gun, but this time Scotty has no intention of stopping the vengeance of the Old Man. Nino’s henchmen can’t stop him either; they’re all in jail or dead. Mr. Brown is about to join the latter, his capped body falling to the ground below in a fitting end to the Warner Bros. Gangsta movie that is New Jack City.

Like Nino, you’ve seen the Old Man before too. Bill Cobbs has been in movies and on TV since 1974’s superb version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Instantly recognizable but usually unidentified, Cobbs embodies the definition of character actor. He can be charming, paternal or menacing, sometimes all at once. Blessed with a great voice and a wonderful laugh, Cobbs has appeared in over 50 films. He’s worked for Coppola (The Cotton Club), Mike Nichols (Silkwood), Scorsese (The Color of Money), Michael Apted (Always Outnumbered), Clint Eastwood (Bird), the Coens, John Sayles (The Brother From Another Planet) and most recently, Werner Herzog (My Son My Son, What Have Ye Done). Most people will know him from Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum, the most financially successful film in which he has appeared.

In the 70’s, he appeared on Good Times and in Blaxploitation flicks like A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But A Sandwich. He had a memorable cameo in 1983’s Trading Places, playing a bartender whose bar the newly rich Billy Ray Valentine returns to in order to settle debts and show off. In the laughably misguided Ghosts of Mississippi, he played the older brother of Medgar Evers. And he was the coach who put a dog in a basketball game in Disney’s Air Bud. Before passing judgment on that one, remember that Don Cheadle did a dog movie too.

Here are some of Cobbs’ more memorable roles:

Sunshine State: John Sayles gave meaty roles to Cobbs twice. Their second film together is yet another sprawling, multi-character tale on race relations and economic inequality. Despite its gentrification plot, and some fine performances, I found Sunshine State to be one of Sayles’ less compelling pictures. However, one scene has stuck with me all these years. Cobbs, playing an older man named Dr. Lloyd, has a conversation with a younger Black man (James McDaniel) about the past and the future. Their dialogue raises some interesting ideas about Black progress. Lloyd’s part of the conversation is almost Garvey-like, hinting that perhaps things were more unified for Blacks back in the days when things were segregated. There were Black businesses frequented by fellow Blacks, and the area, which is now being eyed by greedy developers, was thriving. Cobbs makes his case compellingly, which gave me mixed feelings about its content.

Get Low: Robert Duvall’s tale of a Southern hermit planning a live dress rehearsal of his own funeral gets a major shot in the arm from two fine supporting turns from gentlemen named Bill. Bill Murray underplays opposite Duvall, bringing both gravity and hilarity to his role as a strapped for cash funeral director who doesn’t mind participating in this farce for the money. Bill Cobbs gives the other fine supporting turn, as Reverend Charlie Jackson, a man from Duvall’s past who knows the truth about the mysterious event the townsfolk have been gossiping over for the past 40 years. The fun starts when Duvall visits Cobbs asking for a forgiveness Cobbs will not grant. Rev. Jackson reluctantly agrees to participate in this “funeral” only if Duvall’s Felix Bush will come clean to Sissy Spacek’s Mattie about his big secret. Cobbs may be the only actor who can out-grouch Duvall, and their scenes are showcases for two ornery old hams at the tops of their game.

The Hudsucker Proxy: The Coens are such sticklers for their obsessions that their 30's screwball comedy throwback, The Hudsucker Proxy, has to include a nod to the Black stereotypes of the era. Cobbs is great as Moses, our narrator, who tells us that it’s actually New Year's Eve, 1958, and we’re in New York City. Moses is thankfully not an era-appropriate coon or a tom. He’s a Magical Negro who runs the giant clock at the top of the building where Tim Robbins’ nebbish idea man Norville Barnes works. Norville’s rise and literal fall from grace at Hudsucker Industries is chronicled for us by Moses because “I spects old Moses knows just about everything, leastways if it concerns Hudsucker.”

After Waring Hudsucker hilariously commits suicide (this is a Coen Brothers movie), Norville is groomed to be a patsy by evil Sidney J. Mussberger (Paul Newman, in his second movie with Cobbs). Norville falls in love with a slap-happy Muncie Girl (Jennifer Jason Leigh, whose Kate Hepburn accent is extremely annoying) and invents the hula hoop ("you know, for kids!") in one of the best montages ever committed to celluloid. Dennis Gassner’s Oscar-worthy production design provides the backdrop for the ultimate battle of good vs. evil, which takes place inside the clock while poor, dejected Norville Barnes stands on the ledge of the 44th floor of the Hudsucker building. To say Norville falls off the ledge is no spoiler. But I won’t tell you how he survives, except to say that Cobbs truly lives up to his Magical Negro status. The Coens pull off this WTF scenario convincingly, and Cobbs’ heroism practically negates any worrisome issues about his role. In this film, everyone’s a stereotype. Moses gets the last line of the film too:

“And that's the story of how Norville Barnes climbed waaay up to the forty-fourth floor of the Hudsucker Buildling, and then fell all the way down but didn't quite squish hisself. You know, they say there was a man who jumped from the forty-FIFTH floor? But that's another story...”

As the film fades to black, Cobbs laughs his wonderful laugh. I wouldn't have minded seeing that story, either, because Mr. Cobbs is always welcome on my movie screen.

Your Homework Assignment:

Go visit the Smithsonian. Also, buy yourself a hula hoop.

Quick and Dirty: Michael Jackson's Thriller

2012-02-07T23:44:00.003-05:00

by Odienator
(for all Mumf posts, go here)

Long before it became a favorite of flash mobs and inmates in prison, Michael Jackson’s Thriller was a game-changing music video. It was 14 minutes long, told a self-contained story and marked the first time a major Hollywood director tackled a music video. It had a Tony-winning choreographer, an Oscar winning makeup man and a multiple Grammy winning lead. Thriller was also the first video to have an hour-long documentary made about it, the first documentary I ever saw. I must have watched it 17 million times in 1983, about 2 million times less than its subject.

In 1983, Michael Jackson was everywhere. It’s hard for the younger generation to grasp how big he was, because by the time they came along, Mike was looking far worse than the zombie he portrayed in the Thriller video. As teenagers, my cousins and I thought he was a little weird, bringing chimps to the Grammys and wearing one glove, but there was also an undying adoration. The man could sing, he could dance, and he knew how to take over the show and own it. When he did the moonwalk on Motown 25, roofs blew off houses in the ‘hood. It wasn’t that we’d never seen it before—as a breakdancer I’d been moonwalking before Jackson claimed it as his own—it was that he was doing something we hoodrats were doing, showing it to the world with a mastery of which we could only dream.

I was a freshman in high school when Thriller came out, which makes the album 30 years old (and me 30 years older) this year. I owned a cassette tape of it and the original vinyl album which, believe it or not, I still have. It may be blasphemous for me to say this, but I always preferred Off the Wall to Thriller, despite the latter having the greatest beat Jackson ever wrote. Until the Thriller video, I was lukewarm toward Rod Temperton’s composition about watching scary movies. I thought the best thing about it was the Vincent Price part. By 12, I’d become quite partial to Price courtesy of Channel 9’s Fright Night. I had yet to discover that the gory movies I kept sneaking into were also avenues to some serious physical closeness with the opposite sex during the gross parts.

Director John Landis knew all about that; in 1981 he made An American Werewolf in London, a film chock full of moments designed to get your girl to scream and bury her head in your, um, chest. My cousins and I snuck into that, much like we’d done the year before for Landis’ The Blues Brothers. Werewolf became something of a classic, a favorite of many people including Michael Jackson. His album was no longer on the top of the charts and he was trying to get some attention. Landis’ film convinced Jackson to seek him out to direct a third video from the Thriller album. To the finished product, Landis delivered the same loosey-goosey gruesomeness found in Werewolf, using that film’s Oscar winning makeup artist, Rick Baker, to bring an eerie prescience to Jackson’s visage.

Landis and Jackson flesh out Thriller’s lyrics about things that go bump in the night, providing a movie within a movie as a starting point. In it, a 50’s era boy and girl profess their love for each other on a moonlit night. The female, in her poodle skirt, and the male, in his varsity jacket, cut the perfect, albeit colorized, portrait of young and innocent lovers. “I have something to tell you,” says the boy, “I’m not like other guys.” He then proceeds to prove it by turning into something that looks like a really pissed off LOLCat. The girl runs, but she can’t escape her fatal fate. “See you next Wednesday,” an announcer informs us as we join our main story. A young woman (Ola Ray) on a date with a guy (Jackson) leaves the theater showing that movie in disgust. She’s had it with all the gore, but part of her enjoyed being scared.

Her boyfriend teases her, turning his “They’re Coming To Get You Barbara” moment into a musical number. As he sings about “something evil lurking in the dark,” he and his lady share an easy, flirtatious chemistry. This is foreplay, to be sure, but not the kind that ends with anyone showing their “See You Next Tuesday.” Instead, as the lovebirds walk home, zombies of all shapes and sizes leave their graves looking for dinner. Once surrounded, the girl realizes that she too has been walking with a zombie. Even though it turns out to be a dream, things don’t end well for her.

Of course, no plot description can do justice to the sheer joy of watching Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I hadn’t seen the video in years, but when I sat down to watch it tonight, I knew it would hold up. Landis strikes the right atmospheric note, from his 50’s horror movie parody (complete with intentionally kinda cheap looking makeup) to the emergence of the realistically gruesome undead. Landis walks a fine line between the morbid and the amusing (one zombie’s arm falls off mid-walk), but he doesn’t sink to mockery. His straight-ahead presentation of the horrible events of the night keep things from getting silly when the dance of the undead begins. I especially love the moment when Ray, surrounded by the zombies, realizes that her paramour has become one of them. The camera spins around to reveal Rick Baker’s makeup on Jackson, and Landis’ shot of Ray feels like falling into a nightmare.

Thriller’s undead dance number has been done and redone as of late, from marching bands to the aforementioned flash mobs and prisoners. However, nothing can recreate the energy with which George Folsey Jr. and Malcolm Campbell edit Landis’ extensive coverage of the proceedings. Michael Peters, fresh off a Tony for choreographing Dreamgirls, collaborates with Jackson to create the funkiest dead people in history. Rick Baker’s makeup effects and Deborah Nadoolman’s costuming make the dancers literally funky, their dusty and decrepit bodies in thrall to the music. That it doesn’t look silly, even by today’s standards, is a testament to the talent at hand.

Jackson is the glue holding this together. He’s charming and innocent in the 50’s section, goofy and seductive in the 80’s section, and suitably menacing in both eras when things go downhill. His dancing is flawless, and his performance turns a mediocre song into a classic. Ola Ray isn’t given much to do besides look pretty and express fear (typical for a horror movie gal), but she does both well. When Jackson and his creatures bear down on her, her fear is palpable. Landis shoots the siege on her house like a real horror movie, an effective scene of destruction and terror. He and Jackson’s final goosing of the audience ends the video nicely.

Without a doubt, this is the best video ever made. You know you wanna watch it, so I’m giving it to you below. But I warn you, if you’re my age, it’s going to make you feel old. Damn old. The Thriller album is 30. Remember that. It’s thirty.

Spike Lee's Modest Proposal

2012-02-06T23:58:00.025-05:00

by Odienator
(for all Mumf pieces, go here)

Spike Lee’s Bamboozled opens not with the director’s usually excellent credit sequences but with Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) quoting the dictionary. The camera spins around the insides of a clock tower as we watch Delacroix get ready to go to work writing for the CNS Network. As with his trademark people mover shots, Wayans remains stationary as the background goes round and round. Delacroix tells us that television is suffering because nobody’s watching, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the word he defines beforehand. Any movie beginning with a definition of satire is asking for a boot in the ass if it doesn’t live up to Websters’ words.

Lee’s opening credits memorably set the tone of his pictures. Harrowing and violent images of death put viewers of Clockers on notice about the film’s gritty realism. Do The Right Thing’s Rosie Perez clued us into how funky, forceful and loose her movie is. Crooklyn’s nostalgia-filled credits affected me so much I wrote an entire piece about them here at the Mumf. And School Daze’s opening credits visually take us through Black history accompanied by the Morehouse College Glee Club, fitting for a film dealing with “color-struck” Blacks relating to each other. I suppose Bamboozled’s opening scene also sets the tone of its movie: Delacroix’s fake accent sounds both contrived and constipated, and his lecture is completely unnecessary. Listening to that voice quickly becomes a chore, and Bamboozled spends 134 minutes with it.

More symbolic of Bamboozled’s ultimate failure is the song playing under Delacroix’s opening narration.
Stevie Wonder’s Misrepresented People recaps the history of Black people with Wonder’s usual brilliance. A companion piece to Songs in the Key of Life’s Village Ghetto Land, Misrepresented People ticks off several years and describes the fate that befell Black people at that time. It’s informative, catchy, musically inventive, and more than a little angry. In 4 minutes and 39 seconds, Wonder slyly sings his director’s thesis statement more eloquently than the film that follows it. It’s too bad we have that shitty narration spoken over the song. Coupled with the ghastly racist toys and imagery Bamboozled revels in, Misrepresented People would have made one hell of a credit sequence. It would rival Lee’s hilarious, shocking take on Wonder’s Jungle Fever.

Bamboozled is two parts The Producers and twelve parts Network. Lee makes no attempt to hide his main influence, paraphrasing lines from Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay and lifting plot developments like the militant group and a televised murder. Like the Oscar winning writer of Lumet’s 1976 Best Picture nominee, Lee is pissed about the images he sees on TV. Name-checking You People’s Network shows like Homeboys in Outer Space and The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, Lee wants to take Black TV buffoonery to its symbolic conclusion: a minstrel show. When I heard of Bamboozled’s intentions, I was fully on board; You should be damn sick of me bitching about BET by now. Despite some potent imagery shot by Ellen Kuras and directed by Lee, Bamboozled is robbed of its effectiveness by its sloppy, underdeveloped screenplay. There are some damn good ideas in this picture, and most of them are doomed by the script. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but sometimes director Spike Lee’s worst enemy is a writer named Spike Lee.

Pierre Delacroix and his assistant Sloane (Jada Pinkett Smith) are tired of having the quality Black shows Delacroix writes either rejected or cancelled by the CNS network. Delacroix’s latest show, a Black gumshoe yarn, was just cancelled due to low ratings. “They put it on against Seinfeld!” complains Delacroix. His boss, Mr. Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport) thinks Delacroix isn’t Black enough (read: stereotypically ghetto enough). After Dunwitty drops the N-word, he tells Delacroix not to get upset about it because “I’m married to a Black woman and I have two bi-racial kids! Quentin Tarantino was right. Fuck Spike Lee!” Delacroix is the only Black writer on Dunwitty’s staff, and during this meeting with Dunwitty, all his ideas for Black dramas are rejected. “I know your people better than you do,” says the boss, a line I’m afraid to admit I’ve been told by more than one White person. Delacroix decides to get fired by using the fine art of self-fulfilling prophecy. “Dunwitty wants a coon show,” he tells Sloane, and sets out to give CNS one.

Outside the CNS building are two homeless entertainers, Manray and Womack. Womack, the “brains of the operation” is played by Wayans’ In Living Color colleague Tommy Davidson. Manray, owner of seriously gifted tap dancing feet, has the familiar dreds and attitude of choreographer Savion Glover. In dire straits after the apartment they’ve been squatting in is raided, Manray and Womack enter into an agreement with Delacroix to star in his latest pilot for CNS. When they hear Delacroix pitch it at the network meeting, Womack is shocked. Manray is down “so long as the hoofing is real.” Delacroix christens Manray “Mantan,” after Mantan Moreland, and Womack “Sleep ‘n Eat,” after Bob Hope’s costar in The Ghost Breakers, Willie Best. Dunwitty greenlights the pilot for Mantan: The New Millenium Minstrel Show. Manray and Womack agree to appear in blackface.

In the film’s best scene, Delacroix sets out to interview people to be Mantan’s house band, the Alabama Porch Monkeys. He is surprised by how many Black people show up, including the rap group The Roots and Thomas Jefferson Byrd as a Bard-quoting, singing master of ceremonies. Sloane’s brother, Big Blak Africa (Mos Def) also shows up with his militant group, the Mau-Maus. Featuring muMs from Oz, and rappers Charli Baltimore and MC Serch, the Mau-Maus are rappers who smoke weed and drink what looks like a 2-liter bottle of malt liquor called Da Bomb. (This is a holdover from the Lee-produced Drop Squad, and a damn funny idea.) Their militant rap scares the hell out of Delacroix, who says “I don’t want to have anything to do with anything Black for like a week!” after they leave. He does hire The Roots to be the Porch Monkeys, and Byrd as the MC.

Of course, the network picks up the pilot for “Mantan: The New Millenium Minstrel Show.” It’s a hit. Paging Bialystock and Bloom!

During Bamboozled, Lee uses clips of people in blackface from old movies, including Marjorie Reynolds. In 2008, I wrote a Mumf piece on my discovery of the blackface number featuring Reynolds in 1942’s Holiday Inn. I was stunned when I saw it, as it had been edited out of every screening I’d seen until it ran on PBS. I find blackface disturbing, and outside of a few comic instances (Silver Streak, Trading Places) , I’ve no use for it. Perhaps my tolerance of it in the aforementioned comedies stems from it being either applied by Richard Pryor or endorsed by Eddie Murphy. As bothersome as I find it, I believe that it should not be censored nor hidden from the general public. If an old film has it, or any kind of racial stereotype, it should not be removed. That changes nothing.

Best and Moreland were, along with Stepin Fetchit, stars in old Hollywood. They appeared in numerous films playing shiftless, lazy or “skeered” coon characters. They made a lot of money and, in most Black circles, are either forgotten or considered an embarrassment. Bamboozled sees them as the latter, supplying ample evidence via clips to support this. I’ve seen several of their movies, and I will not be Mr. Self Righteous Negro about this: I watched those movies with an odd mix of revulsion and awe. I cannot deny the comic timing, but the cringe factor always overwhelmed me. Bob Hope said Best was the greatest actor he’d ever seen, and director Melvin Van Peebles put Moreland in Watermelon Man. That latter one always intrigued me.

Lee doesn’t skimp on the coon imagery. Bamboozled offers scenes from the Mantan show, with tap dancing minstrels and scenes with the healing power of watermelon. Later, he parades a series of actual racist toys and other items that I wouldn’t have believed if they had been fiction. When the show is a hit, Bamboozled brings in an audience of people of all races in blackface. “The new fad was blackface!” Delacroix announces as images on shirts, faces, bags and magazines fly by. Thomas Jefferson Byrd’s Honeycutt interviews darkened audience members pre-show, asking them “are you a nigga?” They all respond that they are. Byrd is the best thing about Bamboozled, a truly committed role that evokes Joel Grey in Cabaret. His “niggas is a beautiful thing” slogan, and his delivery are truly inspired, and the actor is fearless, especially when dressed up as Uncle Sam and Abe Lincoln in blackface.

I can completely buy Bamboozled’s premise; an early scene shows a clearly uncomfortable audience obeying the “applause” and “howl” signs that light up during the first taping of Mantan. TV viewers are sheep who will watch anything that is considered “popular.” This explains Jersey Shore, the Kardashians and all the other talentless people you have made millionaires with your eyes.

So why did I dislike this movie so much?

Network may be the superior film, but it and Bamboozled have a problem in common. Chayefsky’s script is speech after speech after speech—it’s Hamlet where everybody seems to be playing Hamlet—and it gets tiring and one-note. He’s so angry that the speeches occasionally stop the movie. What saves Network is its matter-of-fact directing by Lumet, its acting and that a few of those speeches are fantastic. One of them won Beatrice Straight an Oscar. Lee is as angry as Chayefsky, and his actors are as game as Lumet’s, but the script leaves them flailing. Despite all the talking, we learn nothing. Motivations turn on a dime, people do things for no reason, and the film is sometimes forgetful in terms of what it has shown us.

First, Delacroix wants to do the show to get fired, then he wants to do it to prove a point, then he’s happy about the show despite several scenes of him being upset by what his White writers are putting into the mouths of his characters. Then we see him laughing at some of the Mantan show. When he wins awards, he dances around like the coons on his show. Why? Lee then throws in some late-movie love triangle bullshit with him, Sloane and Manray that comes out of nowhere. An intriguing, nearly supernatural occurrence of guilt on Delacroix’s part goes nowhere. A scene with Delacroix’s father, the great race comedian Mr. Paul Mooney, left me not only wanting more of him but wanting to see the film Mooney would have written with this material. How does his fate play into Delacroix’s inconsistent actions?

Manray and Womack are clearly stunned when first pitched the show, yet after Mantan gets picketed by Black leaders, Manray asks “Why is Al Sharpton outside my window?” He’s even more confused after the Mau Maus kidnap him and toss him on live TV to be murdered. His megalomania and his relationship with Sloane are woefully underdeveloped. Despite a good early scene with Mos Def, Sloane’s relationship with her brother is also left unexplored, leaving the ending of the film extremely unsatisfying. Her actions are mirror images of her brother’s, and it seems that Bamboozled’s solution is to shoot all the offensive stereotypes and their enablers.

And yet, some of Lee’s directing hints at what this film could have been. The scenes where the actors make, then apply the blackface makeup are mournfully scored by Terence Blanchard. Lee takes us through the entire process, shooting it almost like a drug making scene; the burnt cork looks like it’s heroin. Lee’s choice of shots, and how some of them are edited, made me wish I were watching a better movie. No matter how bad, Lee’s films are always visually interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever had a complaint about his direction; it’s always the writing that pisses me off. Especially when it ruins a movie I should have loved to pieces simply for its main idea. Instead, Malcolm X was right. I got hoodwinked and bamboozled.

Somebody's going to make this for real one day.

One Drop of Black Cinema: John A. Alonzo

2012-02-03T18:31:00.001-05:00

by Odienator
(for all Mumf pieces, go here)

The One Drop of Black Cinema series has pointed out people who got their start in Blaxploitation, and folks who ended their careers in Blaxploitation. Those folks either ran off to “better things” or left the Earth for the afterlife. Today, I’m putting the spotlight on someone who continued to work in Black film at the height of his career. Not even an Oscar nomination for one of the greatest movies ever made stopped him from working in low-budget Black film. In the five years I’ve been doing this series, he’s been something of an unsung hero at the Mumf; I’ve written about six of the movies he’s worked on, and at other sites, I’ve written about several more. Not only has he lit more Black faces than Chocolate Thai, he shot the one 80’s movie most ghetto denizens (this one excepted) love to pieces. I should be ashamed of myself for not doing this sooner, but today I’m giving props to Mr. John A. Alonzo.

This cat had a fascinating career. He started out as an actor and puppeteer, making him the first actor I can think of who left acting for cin-tog. Most actors want to direct, which Alonzo managed to do 6 times, but I can’t name any who went the cinematography route. According to Wikipedia, Alonzo met Charles Lang on the set of The Magnificent Seven, and this, coupled with a later meeting with Hollywood legend James Wong Howe, led him to figuratively put his name in lights. After shooting National Geographic documentaries and TV shows, he teamed up with Angie Dickinson and Roger Corman, shooting Bloody Mama in his theatrical debut. His career in front of the camera gave him an insight to what it was like to be the subject of lighting and lensing. Though only nominated for one Oscar (for Chinatown), Alonzo’s tutelage helped his most famous student, John Toll, win two Oscars.

Looking at his career on Wikipedia, it appears Alonzo didn’t have a snobby bone in his body. He swung from Oscar fare like Norma Rae and Chinatown to genre work like Star Trek: Generations and Black Sunday. Sometimes it might have paid for him to be a little bit snooty—he shot HouseSitter and the dreadful TV sequel, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby—but he also shot Farewell, My Lovely and Harold and Maude. Some of his other assignments include pointing his camera at the potty-mouthed kids in The Bad News Bears, at the Great One Jackie Gleason, and at robotic roaches in one of my all-time favorite bad movies, Runaway. Who else can say they worked with Jack Nicholson AND Gene Simmons?

Alonzo worked with several actors numerous times: Nicholson, Walter Matthau, and Sally Field worked with him twice. Pulling him into our little realm of Black History, he did three films with Billy Dee Williams. Richard Pryor did five films with him, including entrusting Alonzo with his directorial debut, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling. With Pryor, Williams, and director Sidney J. Furie, not to mention Miss Ross, Alonzo created one of the most glamorous treatments of Black cinema Hollywood ever produced. Ghetto denizens owe him a debt for bringing our favorite movie introduction to the screen.

Of that scene in Lady Sings the Blues, I wrote:

“Director Sidney J. Furie has that arm enter the frame at the bottom left, attached to a $20 bill. After the line, cin-togger John Alonzo brings a close-up of the face of Colt 45 and Cloud City out of the darkness and into the hearts of women everywhere. It's not Williams' first scene—he has an earlier entrance that would make Bette Davis envious—but it's his first line of dialogue and he has you at hello.”

Furie, Pryor, Williams and Alonzo reteamed two years later for Hit!, an action movie with Billy Dee out to get the gang of dope dealers who caused his daughter to O.D. Five years before Blue Collar, Pryor turns in a stunning dramatic performance as a man whose wife is raped and murdered by a junkie. It’s hard to come by but well worth seeing.

By himself, Pryor shows up with Alonzo for Which Way Is Up?, Jo Jo Dancer and the Black Woodstock, Wattstax. Of Wattstax, I wrote:

“Director Mel Stuart and his director of photography John Alonzo provide numerous shots of audience members, especially if they’re hot chicks wearing short skirts and booty-choker shorts.”

Sounds like my kind of cinematography.

Ain't I'm Still Clean?

For my money, Alonzo’s best work is in the movie he got an Oscar nomination for, and the one for which he should have won. Of Chinatown, enough has been written to fill volumes. But Sounder captures Alonzo working on both an intimate and a grander scale. He and Martin Ritt create both vast landscapes and intimate tight shots, each infused with such emotional richness that the film’s visual look alone made me weep. Of Sounder, I wrote:

“How John Alonzo didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for cinematography is beyond me. There are gorgeous widescreen shots of wide open spaces, both in the light and the dark, and effective use of close-up to convey emotion. The spaces where Sounder takes place seem like vast, wide open areas where you can walk for days to get where you need to go. Alonzo’s work helps Ritt achieve, through visuals and placement, these quiet moments of desperation and helplessness, as well as boisterous outpourings of joy.”

Please take a look at the screenshots in my Sounder piece, and tell me this man wasn’t robbed.

Behind the camera, Alonzo worked with some of the best and most famous directors, Ritt, Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski, Hal Ashby, and lest I forget, Brian DePalma and writer Oliver Stone. When Al Pacino screams out “Say Hello to my Little Friend!” John A. Alonzo shows it to you. Scarface is one of the most beloved movies in the ‘hood, and while I could never commit to that picture to save my life, I must admit it is superbly shot.

For making so many movies loved by so many minorities, Alonzo deserves some major dap. The A.S.C. thought so too, making him the first cinematographer of Mexican/Latino descent to be inducted into their ranks. All we can offer the late Alonzo here at Big Media Vandalism is our undying respect.

Your homework assignment:

Rent some of this man’s movies. It’ll be easy to find good ones.

A Mumf Field Trip: The Black Power Mixtape

2012-02-02T23:50:00.003-05:00

by Odienator
(for all Mumf pieces, go here)

Every year, I add a new feature to the Mumf. We’ve had Imagery Saturdays, Musical Mondays, the When I Grow Up Series, and others. This year, I’m adding field trips. During Black History Month in my grammar school, the teachers would take us to a museum or a library to do “research” on Black heroes like Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Medgar Evers or the ubiquitous Dr. King. It got us out of the school yet continued our “studies.” So, this year, I’ll be sending you on three field trips during the Mumf. Don’t worry, I’m not shirking my responsibilities. I’m sending you to pieces I’ve written during the month of February at other sites. If you’re especially good, and don’t shoot the chaperones, perhaps I’ll take you to a movie too.

First up, mosey on over to Roger Ebert’s The Demanders Blog, where you’ll find five great writers including the current and former owners of Big Media Vandalism. Feel free to look around, but before you leave, check out my piece on The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975. That’s today’s entry at the Mumf, and I’d like to say a few words before you get on the school bus and head over there.

During my Budweiser-sponsored Black History Month lessons in grammar school, we rarely discussed any of the subjects in The Black Power Mixtape. I recall us mentioning Malcolm X in passing, and that’s about it. It was all Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks and others in the non-violence movement. If you wanted more militant Negroes, you could occasionally find them on the “Great Kings of Africa” posters Budweiser provided us ever year. As I told you in 2008, we had to cut the Budweiser logos off the posters before we could display them on the wall. This was because we didn’t want to anger the Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull.

When I was 12, I was formally introduced to several books by members of the Black Power Movement and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. On your field trip you can read about how this occurred. I’ve read the book three times, in 1982, 1992, and 2002. I suppose it’s time for a fourth go-round in 2012. In 1992, I re-read the book to coincide with director Spike Lee’s movie version. Denzel Washington made a great Malcolm X, Delroy Lindo a superb West Indian Archie, and Al Freeman Jr. an uncanny Elijah Muhammed. The director turned the 24th letter of the alphabet into a fashion accessory slash marketing promotion, but I digress. In 2002, I re-read it because I’d met a professor who talked with me about what would have happened had the man once known as Detroit Red lived. We talked about how, as soon as the leader’s philosophy started to evolve away from the stance he made most powerfully for years, “he had to go.” I focused on the later passages of the Autobiography, specifically the Mecca pilgrimage.

Something else happened to me in 1982, and this was well before I started my year-long reading odyssey. I had my first personal brush with racism. People can tell you the pool water’s cold, but until you put your toes in it, you won’t know for sure. I knew racism existed, and I’d heard stories, from Black History Month to my family’s first-hand accounts, but I’d been shielded and protected. On this day, a group of White kids in the Jersey City Heights decided to follow my lost 12-year old self for several blocks before giving chase. I had been sent on the bus to sit with my sick brother at the hospital after school. I was a high school freshman, and a responsible kid despite my age. But I was also absent-minded, and I missed my bus stop. This meant I had to walk about 12 blocks to get back to the street I could turn down to get to my brother.

A block after I’d gotten off the bus, I passed a stoop with 7 or 8 White kids. They were about my age. I paid them no mind, even after one of them yelled out “Hey boy, what are you doing up here?” I kept walking and before I knew it, this sneering blond kid was on the left side of me. I still had both eyes at 12, so I could see him out the corner of my now defunct left eye. “You lost, boy?” he asked. I walked faster. So did he, now joined by another kid on my right. “We don’t like no niggers up here,” he told me. “Well, leave me alone and I’ll get from up here,” I thought. I was too afraid to say anything.

Some of the other kids started to follow. “Go home, nigger!” said someone behind me. Whoever it was started pulling my backpack, and since I went to a high school that had no fucking lockers, I was carrying 7 classes worth of books on my back. The kid almost tipped me over, and that was when my fight or flight mechanism kicked in.

Now, I’d been jumped a lot in my old neighborhood, and I expected to be jumped here. What scared me was that something new had been added. I was used to getting the stuffing stomped out of me by Black kids in my neighborhood, but they usually called me Poindexter or Wannabe or Professor or Four-Eyes. These kids were calling me nigger, there were a few more than the usual “jump Odie mob” of 3 kids AND they were White. I’d never been in a fight with a White person before, and I wouldn’t have one until I was 24.

That’s right folks, I ran. Like Hell. With a ton of books on my back. I was a track runner, so I had a little speed despite my extra weight. A few of the kids ran too, screaming slurs, but either they weren’t fast enough or they were just making a statement. One of them yelled back in an odd faux-Southern accent “Y’all come back now, y’hear?!!” I can laugh about it now—did anybody but Dolly Parton in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas say that?—but at the time I was traumatized.

I told my mother what happened, and she gave me a solid piece of advice. “Just because they look like you doesn’t make them your friend, and just because they don’t look like you doesn’t make them your enemy.” It made perfect sense to me, because everybody in my ‘hood who looked like me was whipping my ass every day. I’m surprised I didn’t hate all Black people after all that Black-on-Black abuse. I should have had more hatred than the Klan. Hell, I was light enough back then; I might have been able to pass well enough to join them.

So when I read all those books and speeches by people like Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver and others, I identified with the desire not to sit idly by while violence was perpetrated on your person. Nobility had no place in an ass-kicking. My run-in up in the Heights, my numerous beatdowns for being a smart kid, and the words of these authors and speakers swirled within me, helping to forge my own racial identity. No, it didn’t turn me into any kind of racist, because my mother’s words superseded everyone else’s, even God’s, in my mind. But it did make me realize I was going to have a tough time being a geeky Black kid. I wasn’t going to have any safe haven. I was the wrong color and had the wrong brain. I was fucked.

Watching The Black Power Mixtape, I was reminded that, when I weighed Dr. King and the Black Panthers in my adolescent mind, I knew where I would have been in 1967. I would have had a gun, and Dr. King would have been that guy my Mom followed. Thankfully, the only weapon I’ve ever had to use to deal with issues of racism is my brain. The world would probably be safer if I’d just gotten that gun.

As usual, the teacher has rambled on while you stood patiently outside the bus. But I’m providing you a little context as a companion piece to the post at The Demanders. So please have a look at my piece on The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975.

Peace and Soul

2012-02-01T17:15:00.003-05:00

by Odienator
(for all Mumf posts, go here)

What you are reading right now should not be here.

I don’t know if you’re aware, but the Black History Mumf series is written on the fly. That is, I write it the day it goes up. Today’s piece, which I was currently in the midst of writing, was called Spike Lee’s Modest Proposal, and was about the film, Bamboozled. This was the film I slotted for the opening of Black History Mumf 2012. What you are reading now was originally slated for Super Bowl Sunday. The plus of writing BHM by the seat of my pants is the ability to change on a dime and reschedule a piece at my leisure. What is unfortunate is the reason for this rescheduling.

Long-time readers of the Mumf know of my affection for Don Cornelius. In 2008, I wrote a piece called The Soul Train Conspiracy Theory, wherein I detailed said affection for Mr. Cornelius and the show he created in 1971. Of Cornelius, I wrote:

“He created a show and put dancing minorities on it. He even showcased them on the famous ‘Soul Train Line’ where people would dance down the center of a group of people standing off to opposite sides. Cornelius was like a Black Ed Sullivan, putting talent on and then talking to them afterward. Like Ed, he seemed to have mobility problems. But no matter, Don Cornelius was smooth.”

At the time, I had no idea where Cornelius was. It was as if he’d disappeared off the face of the earth, only appearing as a disembodied voice on The Soul Train Awards. As host, he’d been replaced by a slew of inferior talent on Soul Train as well. Hence the “conspiracy theory” of my title. A reader named Pat Connolly chimed in under the comments section to inform me of Don Cornelius’ whereabouts. I gave a shout out to Pat Connolly at the end of 2008’s edition of Black History Mumf. It pains me to have to answer my own question as to the whereabouts of Don Cornelius now:

Don Cornelius, creator and host of Soul Train, is dead.

According to the Associated Press, the 75-year old pioneer and supporter of soul music acts committed suicide this morning. I’ll leave you to read the article for details, but my heart is so broken I decided to move this piece to today, and save Bamboozled for another day. Minus the first paragraph, which would have been me chiding you as I do every Super Bowl Sunday for making me work when I should be watching the game, this is exactly as I would have written it on Sunday. It was to be called The Soul Train Super Bowl Halftime Special, featuring my favorite Soul Train clips and a little bit about each. That is what I would have done on Sunday, and what I am going to do now.

As such, Black History Mumf will be dark, that is, absent a piece, this Sunday, February 5th, to honor the man who changed Saturday mornings for me and thousands of little Afro headed boys like me. The hole in the schedule isn’t even close to a representation of the hole in my heavy heart and nappy soul.

Rest in Peace…and SOUL, Mr. Cornelius.

The Soul Train Super Bowl Halftime Show

...If you're not a Madonna Fan, allow Big Media Vandalism to provide you an alternate Super Bowl Halftime Special, courtesy of some of my favorite clips of performances from Soul Train. It's Black History Mumf's Soul Train Super Bowl Halftime Show. Commercials for Afro Sheen will follow!

If you are truly an afficionado of the show, you can bet your last money that I'd start here.

Joe Tex, I Gotcha

This may be the greatest Soul Train performance ever. When I found this clip earlier in 2011, I hadn't seen it in about 35 years, yet I remembered every single thing about it. From its funk-drummer style editing to the inspired dancing of Tex and the woman he's "got," this is the essence of Soul Train. I watched it 17 times in a row--seventeen!!!--and I couldn't sit still once. I dare you to try it yourself. You will be "gotten" for sure. Now, give it here...

Al Green, For the Good Times

Al Green may be a Reverend, but he puts more than the Holy Ghost into the woman in this clip. She gets the Horny Ghost, and like the Holy one, it too makes her feel exalted. Watch her reaction after Green touches this woman at 6:25 in this clip. Hell, I felt it! If only you too could have that power, that energy, that falsetto. As the good reverend says multiple times in this clip, "LORD HAVE MERCY!"

Elton John, Benny and the Jets

Yes, folks, White people were on Soul Train too! I'll always remember the first time we saw a White person dancing on Soul Train, which is a story for another time. In the meantime, a leprechaun-looking Sir Elton appeared after Fat Albert on my Saturday Morning TV for good reason: Benny and the Jets went to number one on the Rhythm and Blues Chart. As a kid, I always thought the lyric went "She's got electric BOOBS, a Mohair suit, you know I read it in a maga-zeeeeeene oh oh!" To this day, I see a woman with giant light bulbs on her tits whenever I hear this song. Misheard or no, that line was the only one I understood in this song.

On VH1's Classic Albums TV show, Sir Elton said he wondered why the song was such a big hit in Black circles, and if he's reading, I'd like to tell him why. The original recording has these intentionally off-beat claps during the piano solo ("English people were always clapping off beat," he tells us), and for some reason, that was the part of the song every Black kid I knew liked to dance over. You could do a kind of mechanical step or pop-lock motion. It also had a rather soulful piano melody and a repetitiousness that was fun to dance to, at least for us. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'll fight opinions out in the street to find who's right and who's wrong...(another lyric I obviously misheard as a kid.)

The Jackson Five, Dancing Machine

I wish I still had my Afro. And my old nose! (It was broken during my boxing days, people!) The Jackson Five are here to do the dance you did when this song came on: The Robot. There's another appearance of theirs I like even more, but apparently it's not on YouTube, so I went with this chestnut instead. We saw you doing the Robot while watching this. Dude, you need oil.

Barry White and Love Unlimited Orchestra

WAAAAY too many people lip-synched on Soul Train. Not here! Barry White is obviously live, and sounds great too. I love this clip for the moment the Soul Train Camera spins around to show you the Love Unlimited Orchestra. It makes me go "Wow" every time I see it. And that shirt on the Walrus of Love is just...awesome. The instrumental bridge in this song never sounded better, either.

Aretha Franklin, Rock Steady

Don Cornelius, with the Afro you remember, shows up here to introduce this clip of The Queen of Soul. I'm gonna call this clip exactly what it is: AFROLICIOUS! Check out all the blowouts, and note that Ms. Franklin's Afro is the same color mine was as a kid. Hers looks a LOT better than mine did. I love that the Soul Train sign was so easily dismantled too. In both of the last clips, it's been altered!

Gladys Knight on the Soul Train Line

Not LITERALLY!

I chose this over numerous Soul Train Dance Line clips for three reasons: One, the song is intensely danceable, Two, I've ALWAYS wanted to be on the Soul Train line, and Three, the chick in the flowered pantsuit has haunted my dreams for years. What's that, Reverend Green? "Lord Have Mercy!"

Aretha Franklin Brings It Home For Us

This wasn't originally part of my list for Sunday, but I thought it would be a fitting end to this piece. A little gospel music never hurt anybody, and for such a somber occasion, I thought it fitting to end here rather than the Soul Train Line Clip that would have closed us out originally.

Your homework assignment:

Dig up your own Soul Train Clips and enjoy. Buy some Afro Sheen too.

Better Be Good: Black History Mumf 2012 Is Here

2012-01-31T16:13:00.002-05:00

by Odienator

For the first time in the history of Black History Mumf, I am NOT taking over this blog in the month of February. This is because, due to a technicality, I am now the proprietor of Big Media Vandalism. The forbidden allure of jacking this blog has disappeared. It is now my responsibility to post content on this site. My side hustle has become my daily grind. Let me tell you how this bullshit happened.

Steven C. Boone (the C stands for Cuyahoga) was fired by Bain Capital. No, not the one the Republican Robot runs! I’m talking about Barbara Bain Capital. You remember her? The chick from Space 1999? Well, my benefactor Mr. Boone has decided to devote his life to watching episodes of that cheesy assed 70’s TV show about a runaway Moon. This leaves him no time to run this blog. Please wish him well. As for me, I still have to keep up my end of the bargain. So here we go.

It’s déjà vu all over again. When I started this series, we were in the midst of an acrimonious Presidential primary season. The economy was terrible and there was a war going on in Afghanistan. Politicians were scaring poor White folks into voting for them by saying insane shit about Black people. We had an adulterer, a rich robot from Massachusetts, a Black man and a batshit White woman who sounded like Marge Gunderson as candidates. Attack ads were so rampant that I was afraid to turn on my TV, and the 24 hour news media fanned the flames by running 525,600 versions of the exact same news item.

All this occurred in 2008, but it sounds just like the present day, n’est-ce pas? This means either I’m trapped in Tyler Perry’s version of Groundhog Day, or God is so fed up with us that He’s refusing to script a new episode of this bad sitcom called Human Existence. We’re trapped in an encore presentation on Heaven’s DVR, and we deserve it. If you doubt God’s capability for rerun re-running, check Ecclesiastes 1:9. “There is nothing new under the Sun.” In other words, your ass is in a repeat on Nick at Nite.

You think de Lawd’s the only one fed up? In 2009, I thought I couldn’t get any more cynical, but the events of 2010 showed me I had new depths to plumb. The insanity of 2011 had me going through the Earth’s core with a jaded shovel, hitting daylight in China. With 2012 being an election year, I may as well just hook myself up to an IV of Roofies so I can stay in perpetual coma until 2013. Otherwise, I fear I may spontaneously combust from the sheer friction of my aggravation with politicians, newscasters, and the general public.

The general public deserves most of my fury, and I’m not being partisan here. They pissed me off in 2008 when the Democrats were showing their asses too. The public drives what the 24-hour news media shows and what the politicians say. If attack ads didn’t work, politicians would run different ads. If you didn’t watch cable news for fucking hours on end, they’d show something besides half-assed, barely accurate sound bite news story McNuggets. If you weren’t so gullible, the politicians wouldn’t try to convince you that a lobbyist’s interests are YOUR interests. And yet, CNN conducted a poll that said the #1 criteria for voters was identifying with the politician. They want someone “like us.”

In 2008’s primary, I didn’t vote for Obama because he was “like me.” I mean, all we have in common is our skin color, that both our names begin and end with vowels, that we think Mrs. Obama is hot, and we both look damn good in a hat. I do not have a billion dollar war chest. In fact, don’t tell Prez Barry, but I didn’t vote for him in the 2008 Super Tuesday primary. I voted for the person whose campaign song should have been this.

Please don’t audit me, IRS!

I ask: Do you honestly want to vote for someone who is “like you?” If so, you or your Aunt Tillie should run for office because NONE of these candidates are like you. In either party. Are you rich? Do you have millions of dollars so you can run attack ads? Do you have health insurance you don’t have to pay for? Did you go to an expensive school? If you don’t fit this criteria, then you need a better reason than “they’re like me, they’re really like me!” Because they’re not, and they know they’re not. So, they have to come up with something to get your attention, to distract you from the fact that, no matter how many “job creators” promise to help, you’re probably never going to be rich like them. Because if you were, you might have enough money to run against them and take their fucking job. And that shit ain’t gonna happen on their watch.

So, the politicians fall back on that old standby, the Divine Convincer Himself, God.

Now, as the son of a Baptist minister, I know something about this phenomenon. In fact, God told me to write this article. Go ahead, scream blasphemy! Why would God endorse anything with this much profanity? Well, I have it on good authority that they LOVE cussin’ up in Heaven. After all, God invented those words, and they’re good ones too. I am sure Saint Peter’s going to have some choice words for me when I step up to the Pearly Gates, and they ain’t gonna be “goshdarnit, doohickey and heck.” When addressing me, St. Peter will need a seven-second delay before pressing the big ass button that says HELL on it.

A lot of you were OK when three of the candidates said God told them to run, so why is my statement any different? If a politician wants his stance, argument, or actions to take on added importance, just say it’s a mission from God. That’s one way to shield their true agenda from you. “You believe,” says the pol, “and so do I! I’m just like you! (Just with a shitload more cash…)”

And if that doesn’t work, our pals in the 2012 primary try a tactic we get a kick out of here at Big Media Vandalism: Demonizing Negroes! I’ve mentioned the Black Exorcist ripoff, Abby, plenty of times on this blog, so BMV is definitely pro-Demonic Negro! Folks like me, who grew up in the ‘hood, are a regular bunch of Abbys, possessed by a lack of work ethic and nurtured by food stamps instead of janitorial positions! Apparently even I, armed with a multi-lingual tongue and a grad school education, was never around anyone with a work ethic when I was in the ‘hood. (Sorry, Pops! Those 34 years you did on the line at GM were slacking off!)

If in 2008, Obama had shown up at a debate dressed like Screaming Jay Hawkins and yelling “Burn, crackas, BURRRRN!” he wouldn’t have gotten elected. (I would have had a heart attack too, so thanks for small favors, Mr. President.) So why does the other side think this is going to work? You would think, as far right socially as the Black Church is, the GOP would have a built in set of voters. Same thing with many Hispanic groups. Why such offensive rhetoric, and why does one think it’ll work? Isn’t there anything nice one can say about we people darker than blue?

Politicians may not have anything nice to say, but I do, and that’s why Black History Mumf 2012 starts tomorrow. This is the fifth year, and the last for me. So, I’m pulling out all the stops to deliver pieces on the movies and TV shows that shaped (and continue to shape) yours truly, this poor Black child who is only distantly related to Navin Johnson. The standard warning continues to apply: This is not a scholarly discussion. I cuss. I am not politically correct. I care not if you are offended. And I say nigga every so often, but always in a specific context. This forum is open to anyone, no matter your skin color, hair type, political affiliation or work ethic. If you’re new, to get a feel for the scenario, please start here and look at 2008’s pieces on up to today’s.

Special thanks to all the regulars who have followed me on this journey—you know what to expect. And a welcome to the newcomers I hope to move and surprise. The first piece of 2012’s BHM @ BMV kicks off tomorrow, followed by a piece thereafter every day. We get an extra day, and on that day, I’ll present something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I started this thing. Until then, as I’ve said four times prior:

Creep with me through my neighborhood.

Something Noir Besides Our Owners

2012-01-26T20:05:00.001-05:00

by Odienator

While you're waiting for Black History Mumf, check out my postings from the 10th Annual Noir City Film Festival in San Francisco! It's over at "The Odie Blog," Tales of Odienary Madness.

This is my ticket to all manner of dark joys.

I'm out here being a bad boy in San Francisco. The slogan for the Noir Festival is "No Happy Endings." Whether that's the slogan of my vacation is just too nasty for me to talk about right now.

But seriously, get your ass over there and read it every day. Don't make me show up at your house wearing this:

The Big Media Vandalism Christmas Special

2011-12-24T22:05:00.002-05:00

by Odienator

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through this blog
Odienator was passing out, drunk on eggnog.

Well, not quite. Or rather, not yet.

If you've been nice this year, leave this blog immediately and go read my Christmas Meditation over at Tales of Odienary Madness. If you've been naughty, however, stick around and stay tuned for Big Media Vandalism's Christmas Special! I truly wish I were good with a camera, because I'd do my own Rankin-Bass inspired animation, featuring Steven Boone as Rudolph and me as Hermy the Coming Out of the Closet Elf. (Wait, you actually thought he wanted to be a dentist? Don't you know dentist is code? Have you listened to any blues records about dentists?)

Alas, my artistry lay elsewhere, so I thought we could have a series of Christmas song parodies. That piece started out well, but quickly denigrated into "lump of coal in Odie's stocking" territory. Don't believe me? Bear witness:

(in my best Brenda Lee imitation)
Fuckin' around the Christmas tree
Get a glass bulb in yo' ass.
If you make sure the kids don't see
Everyone will have a blast.

This could only end badly. You don't wanna know what I did to poor Frosty.

And then I thought: Why don't I just share my Christmas Eve traditon with you? No, it doesn't involve screwing under the Christmas tree (that's a Christmas Day tradition). My Christmas Eve tradition involves wrapping my presents while sipping eggnog and listening to Christmas music. Old school ghetto favorites fill the air while I use wrapping paper and Scotch tape with the skill of a 3-year old. It's chock full of holiday spirit and good cheer.

Surrey down to our Stone Soul Christmas Picnic and sample our Christmas playlist. Merry Christmas to the Christians, Happy Hanukkah to our Jewish audience, and Happy Kwanzaa to the folks who are Blacker than I'll ever be.

If we're going to do a Soul Christmas Eve, we gotta start here:

1. This Christmas, by Donny Hathaway

If you're my age and the owner of a troublesome kitchen that terrified an Ace comb, you are familiar with this song. Written and recorded in 1970 by Donny Hathaway, This Christmas is the quintessential 'hood Christmas record. It's the rare Christmas song we 'hood rats can lay claim to, and while I'm sure it's appreciated by others, I have yet to hear it played on any station that doesn't specialize in R&B/Urban Contemporary. I mean, there's a radio station here that's been playing 24 hours of Christmas music and I haven't heard This Christmas on it once. And they've been doing this agonizing Christmas shit since October!

So ingrained in my nappy soul is this record that it does NOT feel like Christmas until I hear it. 'Tis a great irony that I as an adult did not own a copy of this song until 2004. An even bigger irony is that the copy I own is on the Friday After Next soundtrack. Avoid at all costs any remake.

2. That's What Christmas Means To Me, by Stevie Wonder

Stevie Wonder Christmas songs, brilliant as they may be, are DEPRESSING. Have you ever listened to Someday at Christmas? Or this song about a Christmas tree? Jesus, I'm bawling my eyes out right now. Thankfully, we also have this song by the genius known as Steveland Hardaway Morris, with its Funk Brothers bass line that dares you to sit still. I linked to Wonder's live performance at Disneyland (because, come on, it's Stevie Wonder singing live) but I'm partial to his original recording.

3. Silent Night, by The Temptations

There are actually two versions of Silent Night by the Temptations. I believe this is the later version. The original version is on that Friday After Next soundtrack, and while it's a decent rendition, it doesn't hold a candle to this. This version of the standard written in 1859 is the only other song I had to hear before I could truly get into the holiday spirit. I have spent the last thirtysomething years trying to make my voice as deep as Melvin Franklin, the Temptations' resident bass, especially when he says "Merry Christmas from the Temptations" at the end. It will take thirtysomething more.

4. Santa Baby, by Eartha Kitt

This is why I'm going to Hell. I follow a deeply spiritual song about Jesus' birth with this, a ditty raunchy enough to turn Santa's face as red as his suit. When I did my Eartha Kitt remembrance here at Big Media Vandalism, I wrote:

When Kitt re-emerged on my radar in the 80’s, I learned that she was a singer. She had been singing long before I existed, but remember, all I knew of her was Catwoman. I wasn’t aware at the time that she was willing to fuck Santa Claus in exchange for lavish gifts. Santa Baby, her 1953 hit, is the original golddigger song, with Kitt implying with her voice what the censor wouldn’t allow her to say: At her house, trim is a noun during Christmas.

Kitt has another tie to Christmas Day: She died on December 25, 2008. I hope she went to her final resting place without ever hearing Madonna's version of this song.

5. Give Love on Christmas Day, by The Jackson Five

Years ago, my cousin told me that Mike was singing "Give it up on Christmas Day." Like a dolt, I believed her. So gullible a child was I! While my cousin's mondegreen would make a great parody (and I wrote one before I ditched the concept in favor of this), it's clear that Mike is asking you to give love from your heart on Jesus' birthday. Or is it? Maybe we ARE supposed to give "the man on the street and the couple upstairs" some ass. Listen and decide for yourself.

6. Merry Christmas, Baby, by Otis Redding

This is the first Otis Redding song I ever heard. Like that song Kanye and Jay-Z sample, Merry Christmas Baby is a remake that Redding manipulates, making it his own. (Just like Aretha Franklin did to Redding's Respect.) Oddly enough, I hadn't heard this in a while, so revisiting it was a joy. Also a joy, and far, far, FAR better than that hideous cover of Santa Claus is Coming to Town, is Bruce Sprngsteen's cover.

7, Do You Hear What I Hear, by Whitney Houston

Yes, I'm always making fun of Whitney Houston here at Big Media Vandalism, but I never said she couldn't sing. It's a testament to the former spouse of the King of R&B that she takes a song I've always disliked and makes me want to hear it again and again. Her version is also the only one that doesn't make me think of Gremlins.

8. Christmas in Hollis, by Run-DMC

This was a hard choice for me, as I had to decide between this, Kurtis Blow's Christmas Rappin and the Beat Street Santa Claus Rap by the Treacherous Three. I chose Run-DMC because it's become shorthand for feeling pride in celebrating Christmas in your 'hood, whether that 'hood is Hollis, Jersey City, Mount Vernon or some ritzy suburb where only rich White folks live. Their kids love this song too, you know!

9. The 12 Days of Christmas, by John Denver and The Muppets

I admit that The Twelve Days of Christmas is the Chinese Water Torture of Christmas songs. The repetiton of the lyrics alone has been known to drive people insane. But I can't help myself; I love this version of it. The Muppets have fun with it, from Fozzie forgettig his line to Miss Piggy going "Ba-da-bop-bop!" after her lyric (you can guess which day this diva gets). If you think including this was me indulging my bad taste, to quote the singer of The Help's unofficial theme song, "you ain't heard nothin' yet."

10. Santa Claus is a Black Man

I think I was four years old the first time I heard this song. My Mom used to tease me by changing the lyric to "Santa Claus is a Black Lady." (She was right--at least for me.) The song remained tucked in an obscure corner of my brain until many years later when I was doing a radio show. We dug it up on the Internet, burned it, and brought it to the station. It was Christmastime, so we played it.

"You know," I said, "I want to play this again."

After I repeated the song, the radio station phone rang. It was one of our 3 or 4 listeners.

"Duuude, what was that," a young, somewhat stoned voice asked me. "That was Santa Claus is a Black Man," I told him. "John Waters says it's his favorite Christmas song."

"Can you play it again?" asked the voice on the phone. "I got some friends here that didn't believe me when I told them about this!"

His wish was granted. This time, I started singing along, trying to imitate the cute little voice on the record. (I sounded like Elmo on crack.)

For shits and giggles, I said over the air, "I know y'all are out there singing along. Call me, and I'll put you on the air."

I didn't think anybody would have the balls to--holy shit, the phone rang!

"Hey, man!" said the inebriated voice on the phone. "Can I sing Santa Claus is a Black Man?"

'Sure!" I said.

"Um, I'm White. Is it still OK?"

"Of course," I said. "Santa Claus loves all his nice boys, even the White ones."

"Dude, I'm so naughty right about now."

"Aren't we all?" I said to him.

I played the record again. To his credit, the guy sang. To my credit, I put him on the air. He was joined by a few other people in the background. I could only imagine what this looked like on the other end of that phone.

All in all, I played Santa Claus is a Black Man 8 times in a row. Five of those times, I had drunk, stoned suburban college kids singing along, over the air and into the universe. This may be the greatest thing I've ever done on the radio.

Click that Youtube clip. You know you want to. And sing along, because, gosh-darn-it, it's catchy as hell and "really out of sight." Hell, I'm singing it now. You'll thank me later!

Happy Holidays everybody!

The True Meaning of Black Friday

2011-11-25T16:04:00.000-05:00

by Odienator

I should be ashamed of myself.

Steven Boone, creator of Big Media Vandalism, turned over the keys to this blog to me months ago, and while I haven’t exactly been completely idle on the writing front, I’ve been writing less and none of it has been here. (Check both Boone and me out at Roger Ebert's Movies on Demand blog.) As Avenue Q so nicely put it, There is Life Outside Your Apartment. I’ve been trying to deal with mine.

But I’m here now, and it’s only fitting that my first piece as the “owner” of Big Media Vandalism is one of our commercials. You may remember our Vote Or Get Your Ass Whipped commercials from Black History Mumf (here and here). Well, today is Black Friday! It's the one day of the year where shoppers wake up an ungodly hours of the night to fight over deceptively cheap sale items! With all the rumbles, riots, stampedes and pepper spray incidents, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that people of every race use Black Friday as an excuse to act like a buncha Niggas. That's why the Mad Men on Madison Avenue called it Black Friday.

I spend every Black Friday the same way: I gorge on movies rather than shopping. While you're reading this, I'm at The Artist and A Dangerous Method. I used to hit the malls on the day after Thanksgiving like everyone else. But let me tell you about two incidents that scarred me for life.

Remember Cabbage Patch Kids, the ugly ass dolls that smelled like powder and caused a shopping frenzy? They were my generation's Tickle Me Elmo. My sister wanted one for Christmas, so I went to several stores. They proved as elusive as a deadbeat dad running from child support payments. But at a Kmart, I found a doll. Two women were standing in front of the display, arguing over who saw it first. One woman poked the other, and that led to a blue-light special on catfights. As the women tussled and fought, knocking down other displays and screamnig profanities, I casually walked up and took the doll off the shelf and bought it for my sister. I remember both the doll's name on its "birth certificate" (Joya Kitt) and the look on the women's faces when they realized I'd taken off with the object of their affection.

"Hey, stop that kid!!" one screamed. I started running. They chased me, but thankfully, Kmart security stopped both of them due to their prior catfighting. "I hope you die, asshole!" one of the women screamed at me.

The second incident occurred when I was much older. I was in JCPenney when this motherly woman approached me. "Excuse me," she said, "but you're the same size as my son. Would you mind trying on this coat?" I tried on the coat, a three-quarter Shaft-style leather coat. It fit me perfectly. "Where did you get this?" I asked her. "From over on that rack." She pointed out the rack of coats.

I checked the size on the coat I'd tried on, and then went to the rack to find it. After digging for a minute or two, I found one coat in that size. As I was taking it, this crazy-eyed woman appeared in the aisle, as if summoned by magic.

"HEY!" she yelled. "That's MY COAT!!"

I looked at her as if she were nuts. As I continued to walk, she yelled out "HEY! I hid that coat on the rack! It's mine!!" I walked faster. So did she. "Gimme that coat!" she yelled, "OR I'LL KICK YOU IN THE NUTS!!"

Immediately, my body went into prep mode. Adrenaline started pumping. "Is this bitch actually going to fight me in the store?" my brain asked in panic. I outweighed her, and I was bigger than her, but none of that would matter if she had a gun in her pocketbook. There was a very short line at a register about 20 feet away from me. I made for it, almost in a sprint. I could hear heels clicking on the store floor, sounding like the Morse Code for "I'ma Beat Yo' Ass!" As I got to the register, the woman behind it shot a dirty look over my shoulder. Her face said "try it, bitch! Make my day!!"

I left the store with my coat and immediately went to my car. I was terrified that woman would be inside it like a slasher movie monster. I'd look in the rearview and she'd be there. "COOOOAT!!" she'd yell before stabbing me in the neck, causing my car to flip over and explode. The next shot would have been the woman spinning around in the street like Leatherface, holding a burnt up coat instead of a chainsaw.

That didn't happen, but the incident killed my desire for any Black Friday shopping.

So I decided to redefine Black Friday as a cheerful Hallmark Card Holiday. Who doesn't love holidays? You already have the day off, so let's recast today as a more positive event. Here's Big Media Vandalism's latest commercial. It's for a different kind of Black Friday. And remember the BMV Commercial Credo:

"It's Satire, Folks!"

(Roll Commercial!)

JT: Hi, everybody! I'm Justin Timberlake, singer, dancer, entertainer, actor and lifetime Ghetto Pass Holder. I'm Blacker than a lot of people you know, (coughhermancaincough) and I'm here to tell you about the latest way to send one your love. No, it's not another Dick in A Box! That's for Christmas. This is for Black Friday. No, not the one where you kill people over flat screen TV's and toys at Walmart, the one where you show your affection for that special someone in your life.

That's right: Hallmark Cards is introducing greetings designed specifically for your token Black friend! They teach you Soul(TM) and give you valuable advice you can't get from your rich, preppy friends. So, show 'em you care!

Let's see how it works!

Chip: Yo, Tyrone.

Tyrone: Whassup, Chip?

Chip: Yo, you know I appreciate you being my nigga, my ace boon coon and all dat, right?

Tyrone: Yeah. You my nigga too, G.

Chip: Yo, I know I don't show it, cuz that shit is gay, but (pulling out card) it IS Black Friday, and I just wanna give you this, you know, to say thanks and shit for givin' me street cred amongst my suburban homies, helpin' me talk to the sistahs and maknig me look legit on the dance floor when we at the club.

Tyrone: Aw man, you shouldn't have. This is some cool shit right here! (Opens envelope. Reads the front of the card) "To my nigga!" (Opens it, reads inside) Widoutchu I'd be just another wigga! (Closes card) Aw man!

Chip: I mean it man, from inside here. (Pounds his heart with his fist)

Tyrone: Aw, I'm all choked up and shit. (Gives Chip a pound and a hug.)

JT: See! The token in your crew is bound to appreciate these cards, with special sayings from Eminem, Robin Thicke, and Dr. Maya Angelou! And it's not just for da homeboys! We got 'em for the honeys too!

Muffy: Oh my GOD! Shenequa, you are my number one bitch!

Shenequa: Gurrrl, I know! And I so appreciate this "Sorry for tryin' ta fuck yo' man card!" I was all ready to pull those fake ass blonde extensions out yo hair and now this card! We cool now!

JT: So don't forget! Black Friday falls on November 25th this year! Ladies, make the token Negro in your life feel like Rhianna--the only Gurrrrl in Your World! G's, help your homeboy get his Franklin from Charlie Brown on! Hallmark: When You Care Enough To Show Just How Narrow Minded Your Ass Really Is!

Happy Black Friday, everybody!

ANNONCE: INTRODUCING ODIE HENDERSON'S BIG MEDIA VANDALISM

2011-09-08T16:04:00.003-04:00

by Steven Boone

I started Big Media Vandalism spontaneously six years ago, after spending an unhealthy amount of time visiting Iraq Body Count and thenausea.com's Patriots page, where I gorged on images of bloody 21st Century conquest. I was all messed up. Though I hated the word and concept of blogging (it's one of those milquetoasty terms that just plucks a nerve, like "foodie"), I suddenly found it to be the best way of venting my rage and despair. There was also room for my patented crazy talk on pop culture.

When the filmmaker and critic Matt Zoller Seitz came across my blog (probably through our mutual friend, the mad-brilliant Ryland Walker Knight), he invited me to write for his own, called The House Next Door. I had been a freelance film critic, on and off, for almost ten years at that point, but nothing I got paid to write was as inspiring to me as hanging out at THND. Just jumping in on that site's raucous comments threads was more nutritious than most articles I'd written for pay. Matt was a great mentor, instigator (in the best sense of the word) and booster for every writer of any merit he could find. Still is.

A few months into lounging at The House, I met a fellow commenter named Odienator. Odienator? What kind of a name-- at first I thought of a Garfield character as stone cold cyborg assassin. But in the comments section and his film writing, I came to associate that moniker with crystalline insight, vast knowledge of film history and merciless wit.

As Ross Ruediger once put it: "... there’s this guy called 'The Odienator', and his posts mesmerize and hypnotize in the sickest sort of sense (this is a compliment)."

Odie (right) pitches Black History Mumf.

Odie and I became frequent pen pals outside of THND, trading emails that, if printed out at this point, would qualify us for a Pulitzer Prize in talking shit. By the time we got on the phone with our madness, laughing ourselves sick, we were already good friends--good enough for Odie to pester me about my poor frequency of posting. Wildly prolific himself, he became so fed up with the way I squandered genuine reader interest that he instituted a mammoth annual Black History Mumf project as a way of provoking me to post more often. It didn't work, but the Mumf became BMV's only bona fide hit. Every year since 2008, he has performed the daredevil stunt of posting an essay here for each day of February. We are coming up on BHM's fifth anniversary.

Odie makes this silly blog worth reading, year after year. The Mumf is only the most epic of his contributions here. We have tons of other non-February "trouble-making" Odie articles you'll be delighted to discover by roaming the archives*.

And now I hand the keys to this place over to Odie Henderson completely. He is the Editor and Publisher, H.N.I.C. From time to time, I'll contribute some videos or crazy talk, with his permission. I trust that this blog will remain a place where he cuts loose and showcases his writing at its most brilliant, personal and illuminating.

(*Roaming the archives, you'll also find hilarious textual performance art by manic Kinskichrist disciple Dirk Schlaf and at least one acidic outrage from Lady Scorpio.)

BLIND FURY: NOTES ON CHAOS CINEMA

2011-08-27T17:44:00.003-04:00

by Steven Boone

[Editor's note: Don't bother reading all this until you've watched both chapters of the Matthias Stork masterpiece Chaos Cinema: The Decline and Fall of Action Movies.]

"This is what happens when you lose your eyesight. Your other senses try to compensate."

Matthias Stork's thrilling two-part video essay Chaos Cinema tells us that the state of the art in modern action filmmaking is unsound. He blames a chaotic style of covering the action that has proliferated wildly over the past decade.

His presentation has had the effect of a schoolmarm busting in on a cocaine orgy to tell the half-naked, moaning participants that what they're engaging in isn't exactly healthy. No shit? You'd think they'd be grateful, but the reaction from those who happen to enjoy the action movies Stork trashed has been, essentially, "Shut up, nerd! And close the door!"

But I'll bet each of those cokeheads staggers home from the bacchanale only to lie awake in bed, wondering whether there was something to what the kid was whining about. After all, their nostrils are raw and bleeding, their mouths are dry and they have pounding headaches. What's worse, they can barely remember all the fun they had. Just a blur of dildos and Tasers. All they know is that they have to go for some more cocaine and erotic asphyxiation just as soon as they can sit upright again.

Stork's video is an intervention. The addict is any moviegoer who believes that what Stork calls Chaos Cinema (and which I refer to as Snatch bullshit) represents a mere stylistic preference or, even worse, an evolutionary leap in film storytelling. Or, even worse, base-level nutrition, in the manner of a ghetto child raised on Pizza Rolls and Skittles.

The backlash has been predictable but surprisingly passionate. "Styles change and cinema moves forward," writes somebody at The Week. Scott Nye hisses: "What's next, aim for people who turn away because of widescreen? Steadicam? Color? Sound?" Mr. Nye, I hope you can elaborate on how action sequences slapped together to convey nothing but shock and panic are drawing us closer to the Promised Land. After that, let's hear about how the robber barons of neo-3-D are actually living up to the innovative spirit of the French New Wave. (I picture a bunch of portly Disney executives running free like those kids in Jules and Jim.)

Over at PressPlay, Ian Grey scolds anti-chaos zealots by calling us Barry Goldwater:

It’s depressing that the ultra-conservative pro-classicists will not even consider that there might be something valuable occurring through these “chaos” films, planting the seeds of a new movement and establishing a new, valid way of seeing things for a new generation. Can it be possible that those young people born after the advent of 8-bit video games experience everything faster, harder, more intensely and more vaguely than the generations that came before it, on multiple levels, in both ecstatic and numbed-down ways? Whatever the explanation, classical cinema is not and never again will be their answer. It doesn’t match the experience of a generation of Facebookers, Tweeters and Call of Duty players. It just doesn’t. No amount of hectoring will change that.

Grey's rant (like most of the ones I've read that step forward in defense of a storytelling style born in the hectic control rooms of TV news companies and the editing suites of ad agencies) uses the children as a human shield. No, chaos cinema could not be helped. This is what the kids want, because they play video games and they can't sit still. Kids today are said not to have attention spans sufficient to engage with stories that unfold rather than crash down. But even hyperkinetic first-person shooter games are closer in effect to vintage Roman Polanski than to Shoot Em Up. Many of the most popular video games on the market are sprawling role-playing games that reward concentration and spatial awareness. An immersive RPG like Shadow of the Colossus? Pure cinema:

The kids didn't create--or ask for--Chaos Cinema, no more than little Johnny asked for the neighborhood pusher to move onto his block and offer him some new sneakers. Kids just want to escape boredom. They want to feel alive. Chaos Cinema came along at a time when young people and adults alike had learned to expect instant gratification from their DVD players and cable boxes. The kind of spontaneous montage I created as a child couch potato of the '80s, armed only with a cable dial and a slothful VCR, acquired exponentially greater firepower by the late '90s, with thousands of satellite channels and the random-access of DVD chapter stops to draw from.

Concurrently, AVID (and later, Final Cut Pro) non-linear editing systems gave professional film editors the same freedom to make instant selections from their pools of footage.

Meanwhile, the Internet went from a convenient tool for interpersonal and business correspondence to a direct telecommunication and commerce channel. This quickened the pace of everything. Once digital video became widely accessible, it was even easier to feed the beast, 24/7. Finally, cheap portable media devices and Internet screens of varying diminution reduced the amount of information we could be expected to retain in a single image, lending shots the quality of flash cards. Car. Man. Smile. Pile of shit.

In the movie business, this quickening became an opportunity: Storytelling in mainstream movies would get faster and more furious with each year of the last decade, in the style of product upgrades. Let's think of the movies in the aughts as Dell desktops. Each new movie packed more RAM (more footage to draw from, and from a wider variety of camera angles), faster processors (editing that obeys fight-or-flight impulses like a channel surfer) and bigger hard drives (more screen time devoted to densely-packed expository dialogue, like Wikipedia clippings in an undergrad's netbook). Except that, unlike computers, these increasingly tricked-out flicks narrowed our selection of applications (visual styles) to ones with cluttered, user-unfriendly interfaces. This phenomenon was sold as a sign of the times by Ho'wood's de facto publicity outlets and happily/resignedly indulged by consumers who came to think of movies as perishable items. Slurp, burp, next.

And so, corporate filmmakers have found a way to seize young people's attention with relentlessly jarring montage where beguiling storytelling has always done the job more effectively. Kids now get what corporations want them to want. In this scheme, a focus group or test screening functions as a kind of standardized test to confirm that audiences know how to panic. It's also quality control against movies that don't panic sufficiently.

Stork's essay arrives after the movie business has already established cocaine cutting as the new classical and is pushing neo-3-D as the next must-have product line. Oh, just wonderful. We are approaching a decade anniversary of imperial wars in the middle east. Violent flash mobs are storming American groceries, and tea party rednecks are keelhauling minorities from the backs of SUV's. Children are uploading their barbaric street crimes to YouTube. Shattered ex-soldiers are slaughtering their entire families before running onto the highway with samurai swords. Everybody is sucking down energy drinks and lattes to keep pace with this century's greedy, gossipy stock ticker, the Twitter feed. Katy Perry, Lil Wayne and Drake are providing the real-life soundtrack, jingles of vanity, sociopathy and Rolex watches. Panic and complacency bump uglies in every public space. To say that Chaos Cinema reflects the times we live in is accurate, but the times reflect the temperament of constant mania and caprice set by Chaos Cinema and her media cousins, a warped hall of mirrors.

This is not progress. It is the language of hard-sell advertising subsuming the movies. Stork is right to call it out and name names, especially those filmmakers whose intelligence and discernment supposedly exempt them from the anti-chaos firing squad. Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) and Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum) are the worst offenders. Their films, whatever they are about textually, move through space and time with the inhuman ferocity of (to quote another rabid screed of mine) a Rwandan radio broadcast circa 1994. The editing of such films induces us to accept agitation as our default state.

The reason for this trend is clear, old as dirt, and anything but revolutionary. Chaos Cinema puts us in our place. In action movies, it makes the world unintelligible and morality actionable only by its implacable onscreen hero, who can plow through concrete walls without ever losing his soft-spoken Matt Damon-ness--his superficial connection to us civilian lambs. Chaos Cinema is not the New New Wave. It is John Wayne back from the dead, proclaiming liberal sympathies while hiding a bloody bowie knife behind his back. In other genres, CC draws our concern away from the principal business of human drama--namely, the humans--to stupid flash card theatrics: Frown. Retch. Shout. Flail. Cry.

This is the visual grammar of the Tea Party, Crips and terrorists.

What serves to keep movie audiences simultaneously docile and hostile also makes for voters who fail to see beyond the personal emergencies and must-buys that big business tailors for their demographic. The New Wavers spoke up for human frailty and the most delicate, evanescent of emotions. Their jump cuts and violations of the 180 rule were humanism standing up to inane certainties and conventions. They opposed the same shape-shifting corporate orthodoxy that now brings us Jay-Z and Kanye rapping about luxury products as if they were Anna Karina's smile.

Never mind what the screenplay says. Cinema lives by its flow of images onscreen, as experienced in the dark in real time. To dismiss the way a film moves as secondary to plot is akin to insisting that a Brother Theodore monologue would be just as mesmerizing if read verbatim by Michael Cera on club drugs. (Well, actually....) In a common dismissal that mocks this grievance as a mere peeve, Ian Grey misses the point by kilometers: "Another critic could include [as an example of Chaos Cinema] Black Hawk Down, which, instead of being despised for its racism, is despised because its missiles aren’t fired in sufficiently elegant fashion." Form can transform content, Mr. Grey. Takeshi Kitano's Fireworks contains eruptions of violence that positively gasp at the fact of brutality, of all tragic departures from this earth. It's a crime saga in which a simple dissolve from Kitano's frail, cancer-stricken wife gazing up at an explosion of fireworks blossoms with compassion.

When you watch a movie primarily with your eyes and heart rather than your fears, your social ambitions or your bank account, you might see that Chaos Cinema is neither a fad nor a spontaneous youth movement. It's a business decision. Those jumpy teenagers at the head of the march are child soldiers. They get their orders from the limos in the back, via the same technology that might free them.

-------------------------------------------------------

To give an example of an anti-chaos classic, Stork's essay highlights a movie that John Wayne would have have enjoyed, the John McTiernan blockbuster Die Hard. One could go on forever dissing Chaos Cinema, but I will let my cheesy music video below express why a hyper-violent siege picture from 1988 expresses a love of light and life that today's lightest romantic comedies could learn from. Never mind the snarky, reactionary plot. Pay attention to the movement within--and of--the frame. Die Hard's camera nurses a schoolboy crush on life itself. In contrast, Chaos Cinema says it serves at your pleasure while, in truth, it would kill you for the insurance money.

For more on this phenom, go over to Jim Emerson's Scanners and Cinema Blend.

Those Southern Folks Sure Got It Maid

2011-08-22T23:57:00.001-04:00

by Odienator

The Help has been kicking ass at the box office for 2 weeks, and in that time, I’ve read numerous articles defending its subject matter and its storytelling device. Some of these pieces have been extremely condescending, with the writer expressing shock—SHOCK!!!!—that some people (uppity Negroes and “liberal” Whites, this means you) would find the film either patronizing or more of the same “Black story told through White characters shenanigans” Hollywood is known to pull. Equally condescending have been some of the conversations I’ve had, both online and in person, with people who love the film. I’ve been told that I don’t know how to watch a movie, that I went in looking for problems, and that I was just too Black to enjoy the movie. My personal favorite piece of wisdom came from a White colleague of mine, who looked me dead in my redbone face and told me that Kathryn Stockett, The Help’s author, knew more about the Black experience than I did. Granted, Black women had a hand in both our upbringings, but unlike Ms. Stockett’s influential mother figure, mine repeatedly made it clear that she was not my goddamn maid.

I don’t know anyone who read The Help, and I haven’t picked up a book on the South since I read The Secret Life Of Bees. Guys, if you want to see what the universal hand signal for vagina is, bring some chick lit on a plane. Even the flight attendants were throwing up the pussy dubs to mock me. Since I haven’t read The Help, I can only assume that, with the luxury of over 500 pages of reading time, Ms. Stockett presented her characters and their situation in a deeper fashion than 137 minutes of screen time could. After all, Miss Sofia just loved it to pieces and put it on her Book Club.

This was the original Abbey Road album cover.

Entertainment Weekly, a magazine that somehow keeps coming to my house despite the fact I cancelled it 5 years ago and moved twice within that time trying to outrun it, did a big write-up/interview section on The Help the week it came out. The piece, which featured the film’s three main actresses, Stockett and the film’s director, Tate Taylor, took pains to constantly remind me the movie had the Good Housekeeping Seal of African-American Approval. Tyler Perry loved it! The NAACP blessed it! A Black audience in Chicago danced the Hucklebuck after a screening! Pictures of Black Jesus were weeping at grandmother’s houses everywhere! (OK, Black Jesus and the Hucklebuck are slight exaggerations on my part.) But Stockett and Taylor discussing their influential maids in EW made my skin crawl, as both of them are my age and I unrealistically didn’t want to think that someone of privilege could have a Black maid raising them in the 70’s and 80’s. I suppose that’s my problem.

As I read the EW article, I thought to myself “they’re trying pretty damn hard to head off any backlash! This must be off-the-chart offensive! Now I have to go see it!” You know I just love a good movie Negro stereotype. Until I read that article, I was content to leave The Help out of my viewfinder, as it seemed like a run-of-the-mill extension of the White character tells Black story feel-good genre that includes Cry Freedom and Mississippi Burning. In truth, having the story told through a White device is actually more insulting to White people than to us. It’s as if Hollywood is saying “you can’t put yourselves in the shoes of an ethnic character, so here’s Kevin Kline! He’s JUST…LIKE…YOU!!!” At least Hollywood thinks minorities are smart enough to relate to the White characters.

I’m tired of these movies, and even more tired of getting into discussions with people who insult my intelligence about these movies’ intentions. But EW’s coverage made me wonder if The Help were going to be Mammy Writer: The Movie. It was now a must-see.

Well, contrary to what some have said, The Help isn’t racist as hell. In fact, the only thing racist as hell in The Help is Bryce Dallas Howard’s character. More on her in a second, as she is my secret weapon, the character I’ll be throwing back at those who pretend this movie avoids the “congratulations, White people!” trappings of its genre. She brings the Paul Haggis Crash element to this film, except instead of having a magic racism-curing staircase as Crash had, The Help has a Noble Negro Water Closet.

The Help also has some intriguing things going for it, and its problems are not insurmountable, which makes it all the more aggravating and disappointing. It features three actresses knocking their stereotypical roles out of the park, and an original subplot I wanted to see more of than the main plot. The main plot (spoilers from here on in) is, in Cliffs Notes fashion: White grad from Ole Miss returns to Jackson, realizes her friends and her Mama are snooty racists, falls in love with a sexist, racist jock pig, writes a Peyton Place of a book using stories from the neighborhood maids, discovers the whereabouts of her own Mammy, gets a publishing job in NYC and gets the hell out of Mississippi, but not before indirectly getting her lead maid storyteller fired. As the fired maid walks up the street toward the closing credits, like Richard Pryor does at the end of Which Way Is Up? (coincidentally, both characters have lost everything by the film’s end), Miss Thing is in New York City turning into Samantha Jones from Sex and the City.

That’s right, folks: The bad guy (I mean, girl) wins. Post-comeuppance, the villain returns to commit one final dastardly deed. Let’s talk about this bad girl, an over-the-top figurehead of bigotry played by the consistently horrible Bryce Dallas Howard. She is so extreme she makes the Grand Duke Wizard of the Klan look like Eldridge Cleaver by comparison. Howard is the Statue of Liberty of racism, a symbolic Incredible Hulk zapped with tons of gamma racism. If Howard's villainous Hilly Holbrook had a mustache, she'd twirl it wildly before ripping it off her face and eating it like Cookie Monster. In other words, she is completely unidentifiable as a real human being. Not even the gang of White men who chased me in Hamilton, Ohio, throwing bottles and slurs at me a few years ago were as racist as Hilly Holbrook. In keeping her a caricature, she belongs in the same cardboard box as the characters from Crash; she makes you feel good for not being that racist.

"I'm a witch! I'm not you!"

The Help is confused as to whether Holbrook is a comic foil or a serious threat. She’s the butt of a seemingly endless joke about her eating a pie made of Pure T. Shit, but she manages to get people arrested and destroy their livelihoods with false allegations of theft. Hilly gets so many maids dismissed from jobs in Jackson that she should have been crowned Miss FireCracker 1963. She also presents a problem for us as she relates to Skeeter (Emma Stone), the main character of The Help. Hilly and her bitchy friends didn’t turn this way overnight, so Skeeter’s idea to write the book seems more an act of self-promotion than a means of getting some justice. As nasty as Hilly gets, Skeeter still hangs out with her, and even falls for the guy with whom Hilly hooks her up. That last item blows away any notion that The Help is not meant to be seen through Skeeter; this courtship is boring, eats up time, and is a useless way to keep the story on Skeeter rather than the more interesting maids.

Unlike some of the film’s detractors, I don’t have a problem with Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer playing maids. Black people were maids in the 60’s, and many of them raised White children just like the Mammys of yore. Plus both actresses are fantastic, with Davis speaking volumes with her eyes and a stone face, and the comedic Spencer knowing where the minstrelsy line is and slyly threatening to go over it. Davis’ Aibileen is a character that deserved to be the lead of this movie. She narrates the film, but it is not her story. Yet Davis at times threatens to steal it from its segregated gaze. Early in the film, Skeeter asks her if she wanted to be something other than a maid. Davis gives her a “bitch, are you fucking crazy?” look (watch her eyes) before answering yes.

Skeeter’s follow-up question “how does it feel to raise White children while your children are at home being raised by someone else?” is left unanswered. To Aibileen’s story, it’s very valid, but to Skeeter’s, it’s just another interview question. I wanted to hear the answer to that question, but The Help doesn’t. Aibileen does note that the White kids who loved their maids as children eventually shat on them when they became adult members of society. This is a plotline worth fleshing out and explaining. Even the maid who is integral to Skeeter’s story, her beloved, missing Constantine, is given no back story besides appearing as Super Mammy in flashback. My depression at the misuse of the great Cicely Tyson was jolted when Tyson looked at the camera with a mix of devastation, anger and hurt after being fired. “Damn, Cicely!” I said to myself. In that moment, she told me so much more than The Help had time to explore.

The other actress who does wonders with her stereotypical role is The Tree of Life’s Jessica Chastain. The movie pairs Chastain’s lower class Miss Celia with Spencer’s Sassy maid Minny after Hilly fires Minny for using the White house toilet instead of her Colored outside one during a tornado. I’m surprised Hilly didn’t appear in a window flying on a broom before handing Minny her pink slip. Due to Hilly’s influence, Minny can’t get another job anywhere but at Miss Celia’s. Miss Celia is hated by Hilly, and by extension, the women in Jackson, because, as Minny notes “they think you White trash, Miss Celia.” Miss C. has the ill nana, which led her to marry Hilly’s ex-boyfriend. Minny becomes something of a Magical Negro by way of the Food Network; she helps Miss Celia cook on the down low so Miss Celia can impress her man. What I liked about this subplot was the way it comically handled the class issue. Both Miss Celia and Minny are the town outcasts, but the film doesn’t try to compare Miss Celia’s ignorance of the rules to Missy’s skin color-related troubles. Instead, Missy is constantly correcting Miss Celia, whose bubble-headed naïveté leads her to all manner of societal faux pas.

I liked Spencer and Chastain’s interplay so much that I was willing to forgive how their storyline is resolved: Minny’s happily ever after involves a lifelong membership as Miss Celia’s maid. Still, I could have watched an entire movie of their interactions. I hadn’t seen a relationship like this before in a movie, with Minny almost having to teach Miss Celia how to treat her like a maid. This is ripe with Skin Game-like comic and satirical potential. When I mentioned my desire to see the Minny and Miss Celia movie instead of The Skeeter Story, I was told that I should go watch 48 Hrs. You can figure that one out for yourselves.

The Help is going to be a huge hit, which means Hollywood will make 6 million more maid movies. Its influence is already being felt in the real world: I have seen three different stories about Southern White women looking for, and being reunited with, the maids who helped raise them. Everybody cried, syrupy music played, and the newscaster narrated the story in hushed tones. I wondered if a) I’d see a story where the maid went looking for her ward and b) if I’d see the found maid slap the Calhoun Shit out of the ward looking for her, saying “you ungrateful heffa, where the hell were you all these years? You’re just looking for me NOW?!” Neither a nor b was going to happen on my TV.

I sat next to an older Black couple at my screening of The Help. The theater was nearly full, with a mixed crowd of old and young, male and female, Black and White. Crammed and uncomfortable, slumping in the second row, the couple stared at the screen with rapt attention. I detected a slight Southern accent from the woman, who occasionally muttered something brief to her husband. I guesstimated they were my parents’ ages, not just from their appearance but from their manner of speech. They sounded like an old married couple, with her comments met simply by her husband’s “um-hmms and yeah’s.” Occasionally, they both would laugh at something comedic, and at one crucial point, the woman gasped along with much of the audience. I heard the faint rustling of a pack of Kleenex during a moment of high drama, with the husband making a sympathetic noise of support. Normally, I don’t pay much attention to who’s sitting next to me at the theater, but whenever I’m that close to the screen, I have to look around on occasion to keep my neck from becoming stiff.

As the credits rolled, the audience broke into enthusiastic applause. The couple next to me did too. Immediately, I wanted to talk to them, to ask them why they felt this film warranted ovation. They were older than me, and their opinions on the period would carry much more knowledgeable weight than mine. How did they feel, and what light could they shed for me? I was momentarily distracted by the person on my right, a teary-eyed teenage girl who suddenly stood up to continue her applause. She looked at me in surprise, her face asking “why aren’t you clapping?” I found myself contemplating the weird look she gave me, sort of a “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” look. When I shook myself from my distraction, I turned back to my desired task: a discussion with my elders.

Unfortunately, they were gone.

It was a fitting end, for like the film itself, I wanted to see The Help through the eyes of the people who would provide me a different perspective than Hollywood wishes to entertain.

"Hi, Hollywood wants to make The Help II: Electric Boogaloo. I'll need to order more Negroes. Oh, and some Kung Pao Chicken! Thanks!"

A New Aktionist Eruption Taken To The Pathetic Pathological Cubicles and Corporate Boardrooms:

2011-08-17T21:14:00.007-04:00

by Dirk Schlaf

With the pervasive extension through social media and mobile platforms of an almost wholy neutered corporate aesthetic, one of the anihilation of freedom and individual will and revolt, an anti Situationism, a suffocation of the plane of action where freedom and manifestations of non-control erupt and manifest and forced neurosis and sublimation are pervaded through "marketing" and advertising media injecting into the blood and swamping the floor with the watered down broth derived from the unsalted sweat of eunichs. You know all the choked off voices with their flip "in jokes" like the Orwellian duck speak.

Wholly convulsive and relentless aktions of physical self evisceration which will unsulllyingly and unsublimatedly mirror the self annihilation practiced daily in the managerial plantation, chained slaughterhaus, constricted sex, raped consciousnes, branding, branding, branding...

A direkt new extension of Aktionist art and confrontation should fill the finance gulags and cubicle cells. Ritual annihilation manfiested viscerally like the ritual evisceration in the Aktions of Brus. The self castration manifested in the submission to late capitalist, globalized finance hegemony for 9 10 hours a day of the voluntarily cubicle celled drone will be made unsublimated and in direct cruel light and convulsion. Right there in the cubicle, in the conference room, in the faces of the overseers and Management stasi class of finks and slave overseers. The necktie, a voluntary self mutilation and masochistic dog collar ( curious the news stories of collar bombs, people collared to their own potential immolation) will be the means of hanging, a performance of decapitation, ritual lobotomies as Powerpoint presentation. A tablet devise stretched in the lip, stretching the lips of the marketing assistant high end prostitute or suburban ex frat boy dad, his khakis painfull hitched to the navel to contrict his useless loins and intestines, stretching the lips of the colonized daily internees like in the fashions and ritual of the ubangee tribes.

The corporate and capitalist word is one of Nietzchean power and sexy sexy sexy is it? Let's make it Nitschean! Hermann Nitschean!! Well let's have mass orgiastic copulation on the desks and self slaughter at the same time!!! Let's have intestines smeared on the loins of voluptuous interns like in the Vienna Aktions. Let's splatter the corporate logos and reception desks with gallons of ritual semen!!! Sexy Sexy Sexy!!!! Power Power Power???? Let's show the cubical dweller hogtied with his headset with the apple in his mouth fresh to be cannibalized so as to pay his credit card interest his neighbor tearing his face off and ripping his skin like Brus did, slashing his skull and removing his tortured brain and consiousness polluted for years with buzzwords and stupd sports culture and throwing it against the glass of the boardroom where the creatine and steroid addled no necked salesman fight bare knuckled and bare arsed. The music will be that of the constant jackhammer and buzzsaw of needless and pointless overdevelopment, the sick urbanism and prison architecture not even foreseen by Debord in his worst delerium tremens. Personal branding? The Aktionists will brand them like cattle : SLAVE, LARDASS KAPO, COLLABORATOR, SHILL, LICKSPITTLE, CHARACTERLESS DOG, RANDIAN UNTERMENSCH, PUSSYWHIP, PAINTED SHAUFENSTERPUPPE DEVOID OF GRACE AND SEX.

Investment Fands? Investment Fands? Bend over for the VC capitalist dressed as as SS officer. Do the Obama bongo and the Tea Party piss ritual. They yap like mangy little chihuahuas the Tea Party. Little doggies fed with fish, not fed with fish but only the assholes of fish, deep fried in batter. Drinking cheap piss beer. The unventilated torment of the debt ridden mutation in slave holds with no natual light. Bring Bauhausian design and airy open space!!!!

First is Der Neue Aktionismus! Branding? Brand the ass of the next coworker who appeals to you ravish them on the desk. Corporate Fascist training? Show some films of Nuremburg criminals hanged. Show how you treat Mussolini. Macho Macho Wall St. Tough Guys eh? eh? big swinging schlongs sexy sexy sexy huh? Madmen real visionaries. Real St. Augustines huh??? Hahahaha! The Aktionists will infiltrate your cloud computing seminar like von Stauffenburg! The only corporate message will be Artaudian opium ravings. We all drop our pants like centaurs when asked for ID in the lobby. The Fleisch mob will make Pol Pot look like your spinster aunt. This isn't Jonestown Mr Jobs! Put those tablets in Ubangee lips. Throw raw red meat to the insatiable whores and empty vats of wine down the corporate corridors and pipe in the opiatic fumes of madness.

JUNIOR SECRETARY FILMMAKING

2011-08-11T03:35:00.003-04:00

written and photographed by Steven Boone

smurfs poster, east village

Junior secretary filmmaking. Neat and legible, to the point. Nice haircut. How much did it cost? Nice weather we're having. A firm handshake. Let 'em know you mean business. Business. That's what we're here for, not to go climbing in trees, nekkid, howling. Fight the temptation. Stay on the job. It'll all pay off someday.

"tree of life" ripoff poster for "life in a day", Ave D

A few days after I delivered the love packet, Annette asked me how I was able to draw her so well from memory. I shrugged. She seemed impressed, but I had no idea where to go from there. I couldn’t say in words, in person, what I so easily, crazily set down on paper. So nothing came of it.

Two years later, I was in film school when I got a phone call from Annette. I had left my family’s house number in the love letter, but this was the first time she ever used it. She said she’d seen me walking in Mt. Vernon as her bus passed on the street. I looked so different, she said. Bigger, tougher. I still hadn’t yet acquired any clue of how to respond to genuine female interest aside from shock and awe, so I am sure I sounded bored and distracted to her ears. And at one point I was distracted: “You got your TV on?” I asked her. Mine was on MUTE, but the picture showed an aerial shot of Los Angeles on fire and people fighting like mad dogs. The word LIVE in the corner of the screen. “Something’s going on in L.A.” I said. “Oh, yeah?” she said, in a tone that my self-flattering memory interprets as disappointment that I would take more interest in the TV than the girl I once offered my heart.

But she couldn't see there was a riot going on.

1990. I looked in the newspaper for something to watch. I had a little cash from my work-study gig to blow on a movie. I was 18 and positively addicted to flicks. Still, there was nothing too appealing in the paper.

Wait: Goodfellas, a Martin Scorsese Picture. It was playing at the Quad, a small theater in the Village. The tiny ad, featuring an inky image of Robert DeNiro, Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci, made it look like a a low-budget TV movie. Blech. But it was a Martin Scorsese Picture. Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, King of Comedy, After Hours. Plus it had gangsters in it. How bad could it be? I hopped on the subway to Union Square and rushed over to the 9 o’ clock show. The theater was a little shoebox, with about ten other people in the audience. Travis Bickle watched Swedish porn in a more auspicious setting.

But when the movie came on, from the moment Pesci and DeNiro finished off the dying man in the trunk of the car and Liotta slammed the hood, I could not blink. Not until the very end, when Pesci shot me in the face. What a thing to see in your first semester of film school, at the start of a crazy decade.

And from that night on, going to the movies after a long day at School of Visual Arts film department became a habit. It didn’t matter that in school I often saw two or three films a day anyway. I often came out of there so thirsty for more stimulation, more inspiration. But whereas as most of my classmates went off in groups to hang out, I usually went solo, making up some excuse or other. Anything to disguise the fact that, having severe social anxiety disorder, I hated groups. Actually, the only groups I enjoyed were the ones gathered in the dark of a movie theater. It was as close as I came to having a church.

I had a few churches I could rely on back then. One was the Film Forum on Houston street, where classics were always running. That’s where, at the behest of Georgia Brown’s sweeping write-up in the Village Voice, I spent a life-changing day watching Val Lewton classics in dreamy, inky, silvery prints. The Leopard Man, Isle of the Dead, Ghost Ship, Cat People. Such quiet, despairing, sepulchral films, the template for any filmmaker who wishes to create suspense and atmosphere with a human heart.

The Angelika Film Center, a venue that I didn’t particularly like because of its yuppie coffeehouse slickness and similarly upmarket selection of movies, surprised me in 1992 by offering both Bad Lieutenant and Reservoir Dogs. Those crime sagas were actually enhanced by the real-life subway noise that routinely interrupts screenings at Angelika.

But it was Cinema Village that had my heart. Not much bigger or any prettier than the Quad, it screened whatever foreign, classic and indie films it could get its grubby hands on. It often ran features that had already played at other venues, last stop on a Manhattan run. That’s where I saw both Visconti’s The Leopard and Caligula: The Director’s Cut. Cinema Village also hosted Kung Fu Christmas, which showed classic martial arts films. I’ll never forget the madness that ensued at screenings of Once Upon a Time in China, A Chinese Ghost Story, Fist of Legend and Iron Monkey.

I didn’t take nearly as much advantage of The Anthology Film Archives, the venerable institution at Second Avenue and Second Street, as I would have If I weren’t in film school. At SVA, I was already seeing so many of the “Essential Films” Anthology regularly screened. It made me ponder, somewhat bitterly, what if I’d just saved my tuition money and bought an Anthology membership…? Still, catching trippy screenings of Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Tsui Hark’s Green Snake there were enough to make it worth keeping the Anthology calendar close by. The place was also good for palate-cleansing (or shattering) experimental films.

One couldn’t just stay in the Village to feed the habit, though. Sometimes I was tempted uptown by such offerings as a brand new print of Seven Samurai at Symphony Space (packed house, raucous applause when stoic swordsman Kyuzo came back from slaying the bandit scouts), or the African films at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. The “no” heard round the world at the end of the shattering anti-apartheid tragedy Mapantsula. MoMA offered rare treats on pay-what-you-wish Fridays, like Kon Ichikawa’s eye-popping cinemascope sex comedy Odd Obsession. (The colors and compositions in that film defy description.)

On an unassuming floor of the Adam Clayton Powell office building uptown, the annual Harlem Week Black Film Festival showcased edgy stuff you couldn’t find even at Anthology, such as the blistering NYPD expose, The Police Sell Drugs, Too! and the black revolution epic The Spook Who Sat by the Door.

Midtown was still the essence of New York City movie grunge back then. As late as 1995, Times Square still looked and felt like the classically dangerous, charismatic place enshrined in Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver. The hookers and drug dealers still milled about openly. The porno marquees kept equal claim on your field of vision as the legit theaters. After my brother dragged me to see Pulp Fiction at a multiplex in suburban Yonkers, I had a yen to re-watch it in the “proper” setting. Paying it forward, I dragged my girlfriend to a dingy old converted porn palace on Times Square, where Pulp played on a huge, slightly warped, filth-gray screen. We sat so close to the buckling screen that the image of John Travolta’s heroin needle and then of his woozy face top-lit in the darkness took on an ecstatic glow. The surf music strumming along. I wanted to cry: At 21, I didn’t want much more than this, to look over at my girl, who was grinning up at sublime movie images, joining me in movie heaven. It was one of many movie-going experiences we would share and reminisce about and quote, to the dismay of friends. Poor girl. I had turned her into a rabid geek in a matter of months.

The following year, as demolition on 42^nd Street loomed, we grabbed a hot dog at what must have been the very last old school lunch counter in the area before crossing the street to another converted porn theater, where you got to see two movies for $4. First we watched Get Shorty in an auditorium no bigger than your living room, grimy print. Perfect. Then we went downstairs to watch Se7en in a room just as small as the first one. I didn’t realize it until years later, but the projectionist must have had the light bulb turned down low, because as dark as Se7en is, this presentation was dark. Since this was our first time seeing the film, we just took it as director David Fincher’s diabolical genius. No subsequent screening of that film has been as terrifying or mysterious. The reek of ammonia and bleach probably also helped.

We had a similar geekout in the last days of old Midtown, at what I still consider New York’s last great People’s Cinema, the Cineplex Odeon Worldwide at 50^th Street near 8^th Avenue. It was known as the $3 house. There we saw Boogie Nights in 1997, with an SRO crowd from all walks of life. Such was the genius of the Worldwide. The low ticket prices made people take all kinds of crazy chances on movies they would otherwise not give a second glance in the listings. In the case of Boogie Nights, it meant that an eccentric little Indiewood film about the porn industry got a shot at a mainstream audience, which went crazy for it. Watching gorgeous prints of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures and David Lynch’s Lost Highway with similarly universal crowds at the Worldwide taught me that there is no such thing as an “indie” film. A great filmmaker can reach anybody with the sting and lilt of his images.

Down the street from the Worldwide was a little shop called The 43^rd Chamber, where one could mainline pulp thrills via VHS bootlegs of Hong Kong laserdiscs. There I copped beautiful dubs of HK classics like Black Cat, The Blade, The Killer, Hard Boiled, City on Fire, Peking Opera Blues, Chungking Express, Comrades: Almost a Love Story and Drunken Master. The clerks boasted that Quentin Tarantino and Wesley Snipes were regulars there. Cool. It's long gone now, the space currently occupied by a $1 pizza joint.

INT. ROOM-DAY.

BARROW NULL, a black man in his mid-fifties, sits on the edge of his bed, picking through a wallet.

The wallet is fat, the thickness of a King James Bible, overstuffed with receipts, business cards and plastic consumer cards, its fold maintained only by rubber bands that seem eager to snap. He peels off the rubber bands and unfolds the wallet to reveal one wrinkled dollar bill and some change inside.

He pours the change onto the bed.

After a moment of staring blankly at the money, he sorts it, counting to himself in a whisper.

When he finishes counting, he scoops up the money and shovels it into his pants pocket as he gets up, grabbing his coat from the back of a chair.

INT. BODEGA- DAY.

Barrow peruses the snack selection:

Various 50 cent snack cakes, chips and candies.

BARROW

Exorbitant.

He zeroes in on a bunch of chewy granola bars marked 25 cents.

BARROW

Salvation.

CUT TO:

A pile of chocolate chip granola bars land on the countertop, followed, after a beat, by Barrow’s hand slapping that crinkly dollar down next to them. Then an avalanche of loose change.

BARROW (O.S.)

That should be two dollars precisely.

The CASHIER just stares, heavy-lidded.

EXT. STREET-DAY.

Barrow leaves the store, tearing a granola bar wrapper open with his teeth and digging in while stuffing the rest of them in his coat pocket.

A TEENAGER passes him, muttering:

TEENAGER

Trees, trees, trees…

BARROW

Thank you, no.

Barrow continues on his way…

A MIDDLE AGED MAN passes by, muttering:

MIDDLE AGED MAN

Loose, loose, loose…

BARROW

Don’t smoke, thank you.

MIDDLE AGED MAN

Aw, nigga, ain’t it time you started? You ain’t

getting any younger.

BARROW

You have a point.

He continues on his way.

A man wearing a sandwich board advertising a jeweler:

HAWKER

We buy gold,all kinds brother, caaaasssh

moneymoneymoneymoney…

BARROW

Never bought gold in my life.

HAWKER

(leans in, lowers voice)

They don’t got to know that. You go in there—

just going in—and my boss sees, good for me,

na mean? Go in there. They got lots of shit might

interest you. And you’d be helping a needy child.

Me.

Barrow looks inside the store:

It’s a typical jewelry/electronics/bootleg ripoff joint. A church lady and her grandson are haggling with the salesman behind the counter over a laptop.

Barrow pats the hawker on the shoulder.

BARROW

I will help you, young man.

He heads into the store.

INT. STORE.

Barrow goes along the display counter, past the jewelry, past the bootleg CDs and DVDs, up to the case of cell phones beside the computer area where the GRANDMOTHER and GRANDSON bargain poorly with the SALESMAN.

He seems absorbed in perusing the cell phones while craning his head to listen to the transaction:

GRANDMOTHER

And you say for two hundred more we get what?

SALESMAN

You get wireless internet. That means you get internet

right out the air, no cables or special equipment. This other

one is cheaper, yeah, but it doesn’t come with wireless.

And for school and whatnot, he’s gonna need

GRANDMOTHER

If he needs it, he needs it, I guess. (sighs) It’s just—

BARROW (OFFSCREEN)

It’s just that it seems a bit steep, yeah?

They turn to Barrow, who is now wearing shades. He takes them off almost robotically and folds them.

BARROW

(to the salesman)

What is the meaning of this?

SALESMAN

What’s the meaning of what?

Barrow stuffs the shades into a jacket pocket and comes up with another granola bar. Peels the wrapper.

BARROW

I haven’t time for this. You know precisely what I

mean.

The salesman just stares.

BARROW

Or shall I bring in my interpreter? He can put it in

plainer terms for you. Would you prefer that?

SALESMAN

Man, I don’t know what you’re—

BARROW

What are you charging for this machine?

He points at the laptop with his granola bar.

The grandson speaks up ahead of the salesman:

GRANDSON

Four hunned and seventy five, but

with the wireless—

BARROW

Almost seven hundred. For this

three hundred dollar machine?

SALESMAN

(smiling to the grandmother)

This your husband? Brother?

GRANDMOTHER

I don’t know this man.

Other salesmen approach from behind Barrow.

BARROW

(to salesman)

She doesn’t know me. But I know you. And I know what

you’re trying to do here, just so you can continue to live

beyond your means in Astoria or Bayside or wherever.

SALESMAN

Man, they got a psych unit just down the street.

I think you

(to grandmother) I’m sorry, we get some—

GRANDMOTHER

(to Barrow)

This thing is really worth only three hundred?

BARROW

Tops. And every laptop comes with wireless, standard,

these days.

GRANDMOTHER

That’s not what he said.

BARROW

He’ll tell you anything to get your money.

Exactly (a viewing log)

2011-07-08T16:24:00.001-04:00

by Steven Boone

"Til We Get Our Freeeedom..."

2011-05-12T15:26:00.000-04:00

by Steven Boone

Let’s face it: There is always something awkward between the urban down-and-out and their liberal, educated sympathizers. It hovers, it looms, but it won’t even whisper its name. If you are a member of the former, all you have to do to bring the monster out of the box is show a member of the latter a certain music video: "Hell Yeah," by Dead Prez. It is, in my opinion, the greatest rap video in the history of the medium. It's also, on the surface, a sharp slap at shallow liberal sympathy.

This video from 2004 is choreographed like a Muppet Show number directed by Spike Jonze (actually by Gil Green), but right from the start, its buoyancy is undercut by “home movie” footage of a white suburban family driving down the wrong block while on vacation. In a reality-TV-nightmare flipside to National Lampoon’s Vacation, they end up getting violently carjacked. Dead Prez members stic.man and M-1 take off in the car with a couple of homies, recording their crime with the freshly stolen family camcorder.
The rest of the video (and song) is a lyrical primer on every hustle, caper and scheme uneducated, underfed, over-stimulated poor folks pull to get by: armed robbery, petty theft, credit fraud, welfare fraud …

Continue reading at Capital New York.

EbertFest Day 2

2011-04-30T09:55:00.000-04:00

by Odienator

The EbertFest screenings consist of an introduction before, and a Q&A after the movies. The Q&A’s are usually the filmmaker and a moderator who asks questions and then takes questions from the audience. Welcoming us to every screening is Roger’s wife, Chaz, a bundle of energy determined to pump up the crowd and offer up interesting stories about the films being shown. So far, the highlight of Chaz’s introductions has been her Oprah imitation, which you can see streaming over at EbertFest’s website.

On Thursday, Chaz let the dogs out with two features starring man’s best friend. The first was Umberto D, Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 neorealist masterpiece about an old man and his dog. De Sica shows the human decency of the downtrodden as they make their way through their existences in Italy. Umberto D is about to be evicted by his landlady for unpaid rent. His only friends are the pregnant maid who cleans his landlady’s house and his dog, Flike. Flike is played by several completely different looking dogs, and is designed for the maximum “awww” factor.

Umberto D extracts water from your tear ducts by using devastating scenes like Umberto D’s inability to beg for money or his numerous attempts to get rid of Flike. It builds to a powerful climax involving Umberto, Flike and an oncoming train. Whether Umberto and Flike go the way of Anna Karenina is for you to discover. Our Far Flung Correspondent post-film Q&A spent some time discussing what scenes choked them up and sent them running for the Kleenex.

The second dog feature was an adaptation of the novel My Dog Tulip. An animated feature hand drawn by its director and narrated by Christopher Plummer, Tulip is a must-see for dog lovers. It unflinchingly and lovingly details the 16 year relationship between the narrator (J.R. Ackerly, the author of the book) and his dog, a high strung Alsatian named Tulip. Tulip was rescued from a mean owner, and has behavioral problems that make Marley and Me look like Romper Room. Aided by the late Lynn Redgrave as his sister and Isabella Rossellini as some kind of dog whisperer vet, Plummer and the film discuss every aspect of Tulip’s plumbing, digestive and reproductive system. In other words, cartoon piss and dog shit fly everywhere, and there are scenes of doggy style that one audience member suggested should be in a porno. Director and animator Paul Fierlinger pointed out in the Q&A with his wife, Sondra and moderator Matt Zoller Seitz, “dogs are all about eating, dumping and humping.”

Fierlinger’s Q&A was outrageous, featuring tales of drowned puppies, dogs who won’t bark and friends letting friends eat their own dogs. It left the audience speechless. He also caused a spirited debate during the Umberto D Q&A over whether the film was set in pre- or post-war Italy. The audience was on Fierlinger’s pre-war side, while no one came to Ebert Presents At the Movies co-host Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's post-war side until Far Flung Correspondent Ali Arikan provided numerous items to support it.

I skipped Tiny Furniture on Thursday, but I did attend a karaoke session at Bentley’s with the Far Flung Correspondents and several other guests. Highlights included Rachael Harris’ cover of Salt N’ Pepa’s What A Man, Chaz Ebert getting her SuperFreak on, and director Robbie Pickering channeling Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre (which explains my comment from yesterday). Matt Seitz, Pickering and I sang Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer. Paul and Art can sleep at night.

Speaking of sleeping at night: Last night I did not. It’s 8:52 AM and I’m delusional from sleep deprivation. Still, I’m off to see today’s features. I’ll find some way to slip out and re-register into my hotel between features 2 and 3 at the Fest.

Later today: Incriminating Pictures, Revisiting Ohio and Meeting Mr. Ebert.

Greetings From EbertFest

2011-04-29T11:50:00.001-04:00

by Odienator

Greetings from EbertFest 2011!

Today is the third day of the festival, which runs from April 27 - May 1st, and you'll have to forgive me if I'm filing items late. I'm having more fun than should be legal, and Mr. Ebert knows how to keep his attendees busy. I shall try to catch up today and tomorrow with multiple posts.

The festival schedule is packed with 13 films and several panel discussions with filmmakers and Ebert's own Far Flung Correspondents. The schedule is somewhat familiar for me; I've seen 9 of the films listed. The Far Flung Correspondents, or FFC's as they're called here, are, excepting Ali Arikan and Kartina Richardson, familiar to me only from Ebert's fantastic website. Their panel discussion yesterday allowed me to put a human costume on their words. More on that later.

I have a press pass, graciously provided for me by the festival and brought to you by this blog. So I do feel a small sting of shame for being late. I shall try to make up for it at some point. Meanwhile, let's set the stage by starting off with a brief explanation of how things work at EbertFest. An hour before a screening, people line up in front of the Virginia Theatre, a charming, old school movie house complete with balcony. People with festival passes, VIP passes and press passes have first dibs on the seats. In fact, the VIP's have their own section, as VIP's should. After the pass people occupy the seats, anyone with an advance ticket can enter. If there are empty seats after that, anyone can walk up to the box office and buy a ticket. In Ebertfest's 13 year history, I hear that not one person has been turned down for a ticket. So you have no excuse.

Thus far, I've seen four of the five films scheduled, and while that makes me a very naughty reporter, I had always intended on avoiding the movie I skipped. There are two films in the festival that I actively, perhaps vehemently, disliked, and I'm going to one of them solely for the Q&A afterwards. I've never said my opinion was the definitive word, so I hope the seat left unoccupied by my lazy ass (which went back to the hotel to watch The Office) was filled by someone who loved Tiny Furniture. I've yet to enjoy a movie made in this style, and knowing me, I doubt I ever will.

Speaking of the hotel: I'm about to get kicked out of it, so I'd better type fast. See, thanks to the Illinois Marathon, which runs tomorrow, I am roomless tonight. I had to make hotel arrangements from Wednesday-Friday, and then Saturday-Sunday. There were no rooms at any inn for your friendly neighborhood Odienator. Keep in mind that I made these reservations 4 months ago! It's ironic that something I love (movies) is being interrupted by something I used to love (long distance running), but it's also fitting: between my busted knee and the arthur-itis in my foot, running is as big a pain in the ass as being evicted from your hotel mid-stay. Tonight is an all-nighter, with me roaming the streets looking for trouble to get into. I'll duly report to you from somewhere on Saturday morning, even if it's jail. They have Internet access now, you know.

Some brief notes for now:

EbertFest opened with the complete (yeah, right--this is the fourth version of this movie) cut of Fritz Lang's 1927 silent masterpiece, Metropolis. The new cut, which I had seen, contains footage found in Argentina. The new footage is scratchy and worn--restored as well as possible--and adds even more heat and emotion to this classic. This complete version runs 74 minutes longer than its prior incarnations, and marked the seventh time I have seen some form of Metropolis. I first saw Metropolis in its 1984 incarnation as a tricked out, tinted, Giorgio Moroder-scored science fiction movie. That Razzie-nominated version is worth seeking out, if only to compare to this version, and to see just how bad music was in 1984, if you hadn't been privileged to life back then.

A far better musical accompaniment is attached to the EbertFest screening courtesy of the amazing Alloy Orchestra. They created a unique sonic universe highlighted by one of the most batshit go-go music numbers I have ever heard. What it accompanies in the film is perfectly synched, and to hear it performed live was incredible. Not to mention that these guys played, continuously, for 154 minutes as the film unspooled. I forgot they were there, which is high praise indeed for their timing and ability. The standing ovation by the maximum capacity crowd was long, sustained and more than well-deserved.

Unfortunately, the German rights owner of Metropolis would not allow this score to be used on the Metropolis DVD. So you will have to do what the Orchestra advised us to do: Buy both the CD of their score and the Metropolis DVD.

The second film on opening night was Natural Selection, which I will write about under separate cover. The writer/director, Robbie Pickering, and the star, comedian and actress Rachael Harris, were present at the screening and in some of the after festival activities. More on that later as well, especially about my conversations with Pickering, whom Dr. Dre probably wants to shoot right now. I will say that Harris turns in remarkable work here, which makes up for her being wasted in The Hangover.

Next time: Chaz Ebert's Oprah Imitation, Dog Movies, Friends in Low (and High) Places, and Mr. Henderson finally meets his idol.

If you see me roaming around at 3 AM tonight, stop by and say hello. I'm a night person, so I'll be nice. It's in the morning that I'm a real bitch.

Odie and Boone Take on Tyler Perry

2011-04-27T09:57:00.000-04:00

by Odienator

I'm on my way to EbertFest, where I'll be reporting for this blog. In the meantime, please enjoy the latest e-convo between me and my fellow BMV troublemaker, Steven Boone.

It's been too long since we last had a Big Media Vandalism tete-a-tete, and I've got just the troublemaking topic for us: Emmitt Perry, Jr. Our reading audience will know him by his stage first name, Tyler.

Dissed by Black directors for engaging in "coonery," and dismissed by the same critics who'd lick the asses of even worse directors channeling in mumblecore, Tyler Perry has nonetheless managed to succeed. Like Roger Corman, he has his own studio AND all his movies have made money. In the past 10 years, I've read numerous books on Zanuck, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jack Warner and other Hollywood moguls. After reading their exploits, I had to conclude that, in his own ghetto fabulous way, Tyler Perry has brought the old studio system back to Hollywood.

Read more at Tales of Odienary Madness!

Erudite Suckers (or The Grudge)

2011-03-24T21:42:00.009-04:00

by Steven Boone

... in which a reluctant internet troll (me) responds to a years-old post about film editing by The New Yorker's Richard Brody (<---and you better read him first before reading the following):

I stumbled across this post back when it was first published and let it slide but, bumping into it again just now, I find I can't let its distortions stand for film geek posterity. First, you reduce my argument to the typical Old Man Cinema Rant, which it most certainly is not. I was born in 1972 and am of Tarantino's and Anderson's and Soderbergh's generation. I love all those guys and don't equate their rich talents with that of 1960's studio hacks. My argument is that basic editorial craft, which, in the past, ALL filmmakers great and small were at least adept, is now all but dead as a language. It simply isn't taught or appreciated. What's taught now is software and workflow proficiency-- how to cram a certain amount of story "data" into a certain interval of time.

The end-of-cinema arguments of the past have no parity with what I'm saying in the quote you selected. Yes, cinema is evergreen, but to mistake what is happening in mainstream commercial movies today for some kind of innovative next step in continuity with the past is the fatal mistake of most academic film critics. The Ho'wood cinema we are subjected to now is generally more prosaic and word-bound than anything Stanley Kramer might have hacked together in 1962. Don't let the opulent surfaces fool you.

You talk about the "look" of films then versus now but not the most important aspect of the image that makes cinema cinema- how it FEELS. Cinematography and production design continue to push fascinating new boundaries but film editing, the vehicle by which the FEELING of a film takes root in the mind and body of the viewer via the seductive interplay between TIME and SPACE, as arranged on a rectangular screen... is, to quote a Tarantino character, dead as fucking fried chicken. And those film critics who stand by contentedly as this great sell-out to the visual language of Wall Street and Madison Avenue proceeds apace... are suckers. Erudite suckers.

I sure told him, right? But I forgot to address his points about how vast and varied cinema language is now. He basically cited the cream of the mainstream crop and some arthouse icons, past and present, to illustrate his point. This is exactly what I once meant about discerning Whole Foods shoppers reveling in their wonderful culinary options while the Food Stamp recipients dine on potted meat and Ring Dings. It's the best of all possible worlds for the former.

I mean, how many Joes in line at Best Buy hearda some damn Apichatpong Weerasethakul? Or Tsai Ming-liang? Or Carlos Reygadas? But eeerbody's heard of, seen, and endured the brutalities of gargantuan noisemakers like Battle: L.A. There is a consequence of this split in nutritional intake, in which only the educated and relatively affluent now receive images that are put together with some basic understanding of how a thoughtful human being responds to the behavior of light and shadow projected on a screen. That was something you useta could get from just bout anywhere.

The consequence is a firmly stratified society where what should be our common church, the multiplex, is only rarely the site of fellowship and spiritual transportation. That's just how the folks who control the big money want it. They don't want true social cohesion (just consumer obedience), clarity (just order) or patience. They want the Richard Brody's of the world to be content that cinema marches on even as its power as art for illiterates (not just elites) has been bled out like an oil rig in the Gulf.

My Brother from Another Planet: Seti

2011-03-22T10:38:00.002-04:00

by Steven Boone

The New York underground rapper who was my best friend in high school has had many monikers over the years. Last I heard, his latest is Seti Amun Ra Jakada. I run into him every couple of years, usually on a bus or subway car, each of us with a battered notebook at his side. The last time was in 2008, when I was homeless and he had just gotten out of jail. "What were you in jail for?" I asked. "For telling the truth," he said, only half joking. I didn't ask him to explain. Knowing this dude for almost 25 years, I'd seen his mouth get him into all kinds of trouble.

Seti is one of the few bona fide geniuses and uncompromising individuals I personally know. Nah, for real. For one thing, can Jay-Z freestyle like this? And even if he could, would he dare?

rap olympics with seti
Uploaded by lil_crise. - See the latest featured music videos.

Martin Luther King Was a Ho

2011-03-15T02:26:00.002-04:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

Odienator Note: Folks, Black History Mumf is over, but I do owe some pieces to the series. Here's the first of a few BHM Extras that will include a One Drop of Black Cinema and a certain movie by QT. And also catch me on Thursday back at my own blog, Tales of Odienary Madness.

After the success of the My T Fine Barber Shop sequences in Coming to America, somebody MUST have suggested to Paramount that a movie set inside a barber shop would work. A spinoff, perhaps, with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall playing several roles. Someone could come up with a bullshit reason for being in the shop for most of the movie. Maybe once or twice, we’d follow Mr. Clarence to some real ghetto event that surpasses the one featuring Randy Watson and Sexual Chocolate. Alas, either Paramount didn’t listen or no one broached the subject. Not that I am lamenting this; I’m glad Mr. Clarence and Sol remained in their one movie together, unspoiled by corporate greed.

Fourteen years later, MGM made a movie set in a barber shop, called it Barbershop, and got it rated PG-13. Mr. Clarence would have scoffed at the tamer rating (remember his response to “you ain’t never met Martin Luther the King!”), but by this time, his portrayer had gone past PG-13 and into the no-man’s land of Parental Guidance Suggested. Barbershop uses, as a starting point, your recollection of how much you loved those Coming to America scenes or, if you are in possession of a nappy head and a Y chromosome, your own experiences at your local barber shop. It then goes on to craft an amusing character study merged with a rather stupid and unfunny slapstick subplot. Sort of like a Tyler Perry movie.

WAIT! WAIT! Don’t leave! Barbershop eventually weaves this subplot into the main one, using it as a rather clever payoff. However, your mileage may vary on tolerating the film’s shifts from character-based verbal humor to broad, physical buffoonery. Two fools (Anthony Anderson and Lahmard Tate) smash and grab an ATM from an Indian-owned business across the street from the Barbershop of the title. They will spend the entire movie trying to get it open, often interrupting interesting scenes of comedy or conflict to appear onscreen wrestling with this bulky machine.

Barbershop tips its hat early by telling you the machine is empty, so any suspense that would have made these silly Wile E. Coyote-ish scenes work is gone. It’s just Anderson screaming and getting hurt, and Tate acting like he should be under the shortbus, not on it. I know I’m in the minority for being aggravated. I love slapstick, but these guys just tried my last nerve. Full disclosure: When I watched Barbershop again for this piece, I fast-forwarded through most of their scenes. There are two moments of humor I stopped to watch (Anderson outsmarting a cop trying to use the stolen ATM and Anderson’s grandmother’s reaction to seeing him), but other than that and the film’s climax, I saw less of these two characters than Barbershop contained.

Barbershop’s main plot, and the memorable characters it brought to the screen, more than make up for the Anderson subplot. At first, we see the similarities between Calvin’s Barbershop and the My T Fine: There’s a wisecracking old man whose statements get him in trouble with the other members of the shop, plus there’s a Jewish character mixing it up as well. Old folks just sit around playing checkers or shooting the breeze. Both films capture the barbershop atmosphere, but Barbershop uses it and its characters to offer up lessons for its younger audience.

Calvin (Ice Cube) is a man with dreams, a pregnant wife, and a fledgling barbershop deep in the ‘hood of Chicago. Inherited from his father, the barbershop is a neighborhood landmark where fathers and sons have convened for two generations. Calvin has given chairs to an African immigrant, Dinka (Leonard Earl Howze), snooty college boy Jimmy James (Sean Patrick Thomas), cornrowed former criminal Ricky (Michael Ealy), temperamental sistah Terri (rapper Eve) and wannabe Negro White Boy Isaac (Jane Fonda’s kid, Troy Garity). Also in possession of a chair, though it is rarely used for anything but sitting, is Eddie, a 70 year old man with a Frederick Douglass do. Eddie was there when Calvin Sr. opened the shop, and he provides the link to the past. (In the sequel, the filmmakers make this link more explicit). Eddie is played by the much younger comedian Cedric the Entertainer. He provides the commentary that got Barbershop in serious trouble back in 2002.

Everybody has their mini-dramas, but the main drama involves the shop’s owner. To fund his latest pipe dream, Calvin sells the shop to Mr. Wallace (Keith David), who, unbeknownst to Calvin, plans on turning it into a strip club. When Calvin discovers this, he tries to give back the money Mr. Wallace ponied up. But Mr. Wallace is a loan shark, and unwilling to give up a prime piece of property unless Calvin pays double the price. Only the magnificent Keith David can be menacing while dressed like a groomsman at a 1981 wedding. When Calvin reveals his mistake to his very pregnant wife (Jazsmin Lewis), her reaction is not the typical pissed off sistah response one would expect. She’s the voice of reason, and Lewis plays her big scene with a sweet, quiet wisdom.

Speaking of pissed off sistahs, Terri is introduced barging in on her trifflin’ boyfriend Kevin (Jason George) with another woman. “Why don’t you look under the bed?” he asks her incredulously. It’s reverse psychology—his latest conquest IS under the bed. Comic violence ensues, and Terri starts her work day at the barbershop in such a foul mood her customer runs away. “She can’t cut my hair lookin’ like that!” he yells. Terri’s foul moods are common at the shop, as is her penchant for going back to Kevin no matter how badly he disrespects her. She’s ready to kick the ass of anyone who drinks the apple juice she keeps in the shop fridge, but she keeps forgiving a man who screws around on the regular. As I’ve said before, I’ll never understand why women do this, nor am I happy that these men get away scott free while the burned woman makes life a living fucking hell for the good men in the world. Why even try to be faithful and nice to a woman? (Do I sound bitter? Good.)

One of those good men, Dinka, has a severe crush on Terri. He has a cute, Prince Akeem-ish accent and an optimism that being Black in America hasn’t yet destroyed. Typically, Terri doesn’t give him the time of day, but he’s persistent and, as Larenz Tate says in love jones, you’d be surprised how far persistence can get you. But Dinka’s timing is WAY off: he leaves flowers and a love poem for Terri on the day she whips Kevin’s other girlfriend’s ass. Terri throws the flowers into the middle of the shop floor, embarrassing Dinka and causing the entire place to yell out “DAAAAAAMMMN!!” “This ain’t no bullfight,” says Eddie under his breath.

Desperate, Dinka seeks help from Ricky, a pretty boy who has the roughneck edges that attract women. Ricky is trying to prove himself—he’s an ex-convict Calvin took a chance on—and whenever there’s a crime in the neighborhood, Detective Williams (Tom Wright) shows up to harass Ricky. After the ATM robbery, Williams sits in Ricky’s chair, threatening him with arrest if he finds out he’s involved. Ricky responds by intentionally running the clippers over the detective’s ear. BZZZZT! Ricky’s truck was used in the robbery, so Detective Williams and his chewed up ear will be back.

Also at odds with Ricky is Jimmy James, who thinks the barbershop job is beneath him because he is “edumacated.” Jimmy is a college educated know-it-all whose attitude is completely at odds with the other workers, including Isaac. Isaac loves rap music, has a really hot Black girlfriend, and is far more stereotypically Black than Jimmy could be even if he were possessed by J.D. Walker. Jimmy talks down to Ricky and annoys the rest of the shop. He thinks he can never be wrong, citing that scallops are not mollusks and the Indian shop owner whose ATM was stolen is Pakistani. “He better pack and stan’ his ass on the corner before they beat it,” says Eddie.

Political correctness is the farthest thing from Eddie’s mind. Representing the old school barber shop commentators, Eddie holds nothing sacred. He calls Martin Luther King a ho (he must have read Abernathy’s book), calls Dinka “Roots” and, in the film’s most controversial scene, treats Rosa Parks in far worse fashion than Outkast:

There are three things that Black people need to tell the truth about. Number one: Rodney King should've gotten his ass beat for being drunk in a Honda a white part of Los Angeles. Number two: O.J. did it! And number three: Rosa Parks didn't do nuthin' but sit her Black ass down!

When the Barbershop protests this, Eddie persists:

Wait, hold on here. Is this a barbershop? Is this a barbershop? If we can't talk straight in a barbershop, then where can we talk straight? We can't talk straight nowhere else. You know, this ain't nothin' but healthy conversation, that's all.

All these melodramas come to a head at some point in Barbershop. It turns out that the dumbass who robbed the ATM is Ricky’s cousin. Detective Williams barges into the barbershop to arrest Ricky because his cousin used Ricky’s truck AND left Ricky’s bumper at the scene of the crime. Kevin tries to sweet talk Terri back into his bed for the bazillionth time, only to be met with violent resistance by an unexpected source. Both Ricky and Isaac give Jimmy James a dressing down. And Eddie brings the fire that Mrs. Calvin didn’t when he discovers Calvin has sold the shop without so much as a warning to his employees:

This ain't no Goddamn school of the blind, Calvin! This is the barbershop! The place where a black man means something! Cornerstone of the neighborhood! Our own country club! I mean, can't you see that? Hell, that's the problem with your whole generation. You know, y'all... you don't believe in nothin'. But your father, he believed in something, Calvin. He believed and understood that something
as simple as a little haircut could change the way a man felt on the inside.

Twice in the film, Eddie’s theory is proven. One of Calvin’s customers has a penchant for not paying for his haircuts. Using a “job interview” as his latest excuse, he gets Calvin to cut his hair before running out without paying. Calvin uses this as an example of why he’s losing money on the shop and wants to close it, but after his decision, the guy shows up to finally pay for his haircuts. Seems his job interview excuse was no excuse at all. “I got the job,” he tells Calvin, something he might not have had the confidence to achieve with the tore up ‘do he had before Calvin shaped it up. With Eddie’s chastising words still ringing in his ears, Calvin refuses his money.

A haircut is also the reason Jimmy James comes to accept Isaac as something other than what he considers a poser. Jimmy James offers his own hair as a means of Isaac proving that he is worthy of not only the chair in Calvin’s shop but the pleasure of cutting Black hair. Isaac does a great job, and Jimmy James is humbled. To show he is the bigger man, Isaac makes no mention of Jimmy James’ earlier faux pas, where the latter does what we all feared whenever the clippers came toward our Afros back in the day: He accidentally cuts a bald spot in a customer’s head.

Since a sequel AND a spinoff were made from Barbershop, it’s no spoiler to reveal that Calvin keeps the shop open and staffed with the same cast. I was not enamored with Barbershop II, but like its predecessor, it provides a showcase for Cedric the Entertainer. Cedric inhabits Eddie with uncanny precision, from the physicality of an old man to the mumbly patois older Black men tend to have. He is hilarious in his comedic scenes, which makes his dramatic takedown of Calvin at the film’s climax effective and surprising. His nimble theft of every scene he is in is why the supporting actor Oscar category was created. No such fate befell Cedric the Entertainer.

Eddie is the primary reason one remembers Barbershop, but the other cast members hold their own. Sean Patrick Thomas is convincing as a bougie Negro, Troy Garity is the Blackest White boy since Vince Vaughn in Be Cool, and Leonard Earl Howze’s Dinka is far from the Prince Akeem clone his accent suggests. Michael Ealy’s Ricky gets a great speech late in the film, and makes a convincing ex-con. Ice Cube, primarily the straight man here, successfully juggles both a sense of mentorship toward his barbers and a schoolboy’s crazy pipe dreams of success.

Approaching the level of Eddie’s greatness is Eve’s Terri. She is all attitude, but like Eddie, under her bravada beats the heart of a sentimental fool. When things get too tense between Isaac and Jimmy James, she diffuses it with some Marvin Gaye on her radio. When Dinka discovers her in the shop’s locker room, she first apologizes for her treatment of his flowers, then asks him about the poem he left with them. “It’s by Pablo Neruda,” he tells her. (I hope it was Neruda’s Me Gusta Cuando Callas.) “He knows what to say to a woman,” Terri tells Dinka. “You got me feeling all gentle.” Considering what we’ve seen of Terri’s rage, this is fine praise indeed, and Eve makes you feel her vulnerability. In this brief moment, you see what Dinka sees in her, and you understand why he levels her trifling ex-boyfriend with one punch.

Barbershop was the last good movie director Tim Story shot. After this, he helmed such disasters as Queen Latifah’s Taxi (she fares better in the Barbershop spinoff, Beauty Shop) and the Fantastic Four movies. This kicked off Ice Cube’s more family friendly fare like Are We There Yet, which is reason enough to condemn Barbershop, but stupid ATM plot aside, I can’t protest too much. Mr. Clarence would approve.

Happy Oscar Day!

2011-02-27T15:45:00.001-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

For the second time, I have no “sway” over what will happen at the Academy Awards. Last time, I wrote about the wonderful Taraji P. Henson, but the ceremony had been moved to March; her loss wasn’t the result of the Black History Mumf Oscar curse. This year, the ceremony is back in February—tonight in fact—but I can’t hurt anybody because the show is severely Negro-impaired. If you do see a Black face on TV tonight, it’ll probably be wearing a waiter outfit.

Since you’re here, I suppose I should write something. I already feel guilty about my schedule keeping me from being more prolific this year. I have folders of screenshots for three movies I’ve yet to write anything for this month—we’ll have to do BHM extras in March. For now, let’s discuss the past Black winners of acting Oscars. Let’s start with the first winner:

Hattie McDaniel, Gone With the Wind (1939): Olivia de Havilland is the first White actor to lose to a cullud person, but she knew this before the ceremony because, back then, the Oscars were no big secret. Imagine if she hadn’t known! I would pass out if her loss had elicited Shelley Winters’ classic Cleopatra Jones line: “That troublemaking coon!!!” But seriously, folks, McDaniel deserved her Oscar simply because Mammy was no ordinary Mammy. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Mammy was kicking Scarlett O’Hara’s ass when the camera wasn’t on them. Racist White Southerners knew this too: Wikipedia cites that “[h]er role in Gone with the Wind had alarmed some in the Southern audience; there were complaints that in the film she had been too familiar with her white employer.” Too familiar? Yeah, too familiar with airing her employer out. “Go get me a switch, Miss Scarlett!” I can hear Hattie yelling.

Of course, some bougie Negroes and liberal White folks cringe at not only this role but this win. To them I say something I haven’t said since Black History Mumf 2008: SIT YO’ ASS DOWN!!!! As Ms. McDaniel once said: “I’d rather get paid $7,000 for playing a maid than $70 to be somebody’s maid. Lest I forget, it’s a damn good performance too, with several winks to us, the Black folks in the audience. My score: A.

James Baskett, Song of the South (1945): I’ve already said everything I wanted to say about Song of the South; I’m just putting Baskett here because, technically, he was the first Black man to receive an Oscar, honorary or not. Sure, he couldn’t go pick it up at the ceremony (McDaniel got hers at the Oscars, and read a speech written for her by the studio), but he received the Oscar nonetheless. My score: B- for Uncle Remus, A- for Brer Fox.

Sidney Poitier, Lillies of The Field (1963): Y’all know I love Sidney. He’s been a constant here at Black History Mumf, both as actor and director. But honestly, what did he do here that warranted an Oscar? This is Sidney at his most asexual—he’s with NUNS for God’s sake—and though he has several good scenes with the Mother Superior (Lilia Skala), it’s nothing worth worrying Price Waterhouse. He’s been so much better in so many different pictures. This was pure charity. My score: C.

Louis Gossett, Jr, An Officer and A Gentleman (1982): Gossett’s drill sergeant was up against a gay man, a transsexual, Mandingo’s Warren Maxwell (did James Mason attempt to use Gossett’s head to drain his rheumatiz’?) and George W. Bush. W is played here by my personal favorite in this year’s category, Charles Durning, who remains the only person who deserved an Oscar nomination just for singing a song. My Pops said that Gossett was “pretty soft for a drill sergeant,” and he’d know: he was in Vietnam. Gossett feels a bit soft, especially when you compare him to Adolph Caesar, R. Lee Ermey or hell, even Lynn Whitfield in that dreadful Pauly Shore movie. Still, he turns in a good B-plus worthy performance here, calling Richard Gere “Mayo,” and singing one of the more entertaining march songs. Gossett was the third Black Supporting Actor nomination and that category’s first win. Which leads us to:

Den-ZELLLL, Glory (1989): Denzel Washington was here two year before, for Cry Freedom, and in Glory, he manages to steal the spotlight from his fellow nominee in 1987, Morgan Freeman. Private Trip is the PERFECT STORM of Denzel mannerisms. This is the role you go to if you want to perfect your Den-ZELLLL imitation. His vocal “heh-heh’s,” his righteous indignation, his puffed up pride, his brooding and his “so you’re tellin’ me” verbal sarcasm—they are ALL HERE. Unlike some of his later performances, where the Denzel-ness borders on parody, here it’s perfect. Pauline Kael, who disliked Washington’s performance and called it overly telegraphed, was absolutely wrong here. But I can’t help think of her complaint when I watch Denzel slum his way through movies he shouldn’t have taken in the first place. But Glory is a must-see, and this may be Washington’s best performance. My score: A.

Whoopi Goldberg, Ghost (1990): Here’s a performance that divides people. Some saw it as coonery. The Academy saw it as a great performance. I think what Goldberg is doing here is intriguing: She knows this role’s potential for Willie Best-style coonery (She’s seein’ ghosts, y’all!) and she both acknowledges it and subverts it. She knows how far she can go, and unlike Best, there is genuine emotion and craft in her performance. Her role is strong enough that, had the makers of Ghost not pussied out and kept Goldberg onscreen with Moore at the end rather than go all Swayze on us, I would have believed her as Swayze. Most critics don’t respect comedic performances. I do. My score: A-. If you think I’ve gone soft in my militancy, the next paragraph will be my downfall.

Me, Jerry Maguire (1996): My doppelganger, Cuba Gooding, Jr., is remembered more for his Oscar speech than his performance. If you happen to watch Jerry Maguire again—and I did a few nights ago when it was on cable—you’ll see that Gooding’s speech is foreshadowed in that movie. Cuba G’s shouting down of the Oscar orchestra is pure Rod Tidwell, his Jerry Maguire character. As I wrote in my Regina King piece at BHM 2008, Jerry Maguire does an Imitation of Life style switcheroo: We think it’s about the White love story, but it’s really about the Black one. Gooding and Regina King are both excellent here, a fact that is overshadowed by all the terrible choices Gooding has made since he won this thing. (Boat Trip, Cuba? Why hast though forsaken me?!) No matter. Bitch at me if you want, and I’ll send you an autographed picture of me; Gooding deserves an A.

Den-ZELLLL, again, Training Day (2001): Had Pauline Kael gone after Washington for this performance, I would be in her corner. Washington is quite convincing as corrupt cop Alonzo during his early “mentoring” scenes with Ethan Hawke, but as the film progresses, he slowly starts going off the rails until his big “KING KONG AIN’T GOT SHIT ON ME!” freakout, which is NOT convincing AT ALL. This is three-quarters of a great performance, helped along both by the joy you get watching Washington have a good time as the bad guy AND how close to Denzel parody this gets. Just listen to the way Alonzo says “heh-heh (pause) MY nigga!” Like the last Black actor to sink his teeth into blatant villainy (the far superior Morgan Freeman in Street Smart), Alonzo is not given an exit worthy of his character. And sorry, Denzel, this should have been Wesley’s role and his Oscar. My score: B.

Halle Berry, Monster’s Ball (2001): I won’t waste any time. I hated hated hated this performance. Her Southern accent is shaky, her scenes with her son (which foreshadow Precious) are unconvincing, and there wasn’t a single moment her character felt real to me. Berry has been convincingly downtrodden before (she’s fantastic in Jungle Fever, good in Losing Isaiah), but not here. I remember laughing my ass off when she talks about getting “curtains on credit,” (a more knowledgeable screenwriter would have used the correct word: LAYAWAY) and rolling my eyes at hack Marc Forster’s attempts at symbolism (a little white spoon going into a big ass mound of chocolate ice cream? REALLY, Marc? That’s about right.) In my review, I said her sex scene with Billy Bob Thornton (who should have gotten the Oscar nod instead of her) sounded like “Rhett Butler screwing Mammy.” Black pussy can cure a lot of things. Racism is not one of them, and I’m insulted this movie even attempted to make that statement. The same folks who called Precious poverty porn seemed to just love Monster’s Ball. I wasn’t fooled. Angela Bassett should have broken the Black Best Actress curse instead of Berry, at least not for this role. My score: F-.

Morgan Freeman, Million Dollar Baby (2004): More charity from the Oscars. I loved Million Dollar Baby (as I’ve said before, as a former boxer I am a true sucker for boxing movies) but this was payback for former slights by the Academy. Freeman won this for his narration. Yes, he’s convincing as a former boxer and Eastwood’s right hand man, and it’s nice to see him and Eastwood together again after Unforgiven, and yes, there is that Freeman gravitas. If he could exchange this Oscar, he should send it in for the one he deserved for Street Smart or The Shawshank Redemption. As Carol Burnett said about her role in The Four Seasons: It’s fine, no gem. My score: B.

Jamie Foxx, Ray (2004): Who knew Ray Charles was such a dick?!! The general complaint about this win is that Foxx is just doing an imitation of Ray Charles, but what an imitation it is. I forgot I was watching Foxx—he became Ray Charles to me. And damn, I didn’t like Brother Ray very much. That Foxx could add that layer of complexity on Charles—with Charles’ blessing—is why I think he deserved this Oscar. Ray is ultimately too long, and does fall into the biopic trap, but Foxx is stellar throughout. I should also mention that the actress who played Charles’ mother, Sharon Warren, has one of the greatest moments in movie history. I could watch that scene 100 times. My score: A.

Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls (2006): Yeah, she had that damn song on her side, and yeah, I think Eddie Murphy was more worthy of the Oscar than she was, but I saw Dreamgirls on Broadway and if Jennifer Holiday could win the Tony, Hudson could win the Oscar. The role is better written, and better acted, in the movie than the musical, and Hudson’s pitching of the song is perfectly calibrated to the movie. Had she done it Holiday’s way (and Holiday’s version of the song is better), it would have come off as grotesque on the big screen. Like on stage, my love of Effie White was helped by the audience I sat with at the movie theater. They talked back to Effie, and made her one of their own. On stage, I must admit I did not hear one note of Holiday’s performance after the first line—the Broadway theater vibrated so loudly with cheers and stomps that I feared it would collapse. People went batshit at my movie theater too. That has to count for something Hudson did right. My score: B.

Forrest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland (2006): OOGA BOOGA!!! Whitaker is the Black boogeyman as Idi Amin. I’ll give him much credit for the accent, but maybe the mistake here is that the only way Idi Amin can work as a movie character is by showing real footage of him. He’s stranger than fiction, and nothing Whitaker does can make his performance work. I kept comparing him to the Amin I saw in documentaries, and he kept failing. The script also doesn’t help him very much by making the “hero” of the piece so stupid that you want Idi Amin to get him. I’m going to give Whitaker a pass. My score: C+.

Mo’Nique, Precious (2010): Mo’Nique is outrageous in Precious. This is one of the most fearless performances I have ever seen, and what made it even more compelling for me is that I knew people like this in my old neighborhood. I knew Precious, the kids at her school, and mothers who screamed at their kids the way Mary Jones screams at Precious. The movie does pour it on a bit thickly sometimes, but in comparison to the harrowing novel, viewers of Precious are getting a break. I’ve never been a big fan of Mo’Nique’s comedy, but I had newfound respect for her after this (and, from a comedic perspective, after Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins). Her big scene should have inspired envy in other actresses that they weren’t able to deliver it—and nail it—the way she does. When you read my autobiography, you’ll understand just how much I understood the 80’s ‘hood environment Precious forces you to wallow in, and you’ll get to meet my neighborhood’s Mary Jones. Mo’Nique captures not only the character’s villainy, but also the character’s victimization. That she forces you NOT to feel sorry for her earns her the Oscar. My score: A.

Enjoy your Oscars tonight. I am hoping Anne Hathaway has a wardrobe malfunction to spice up the Harvey Weinstein payola!

Ain't I'm Clean?

2011-02-25T23:52:00.003-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

In August, 1965, the neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles erupted in four days of rioting after the DUI arrest of Marquette Frye by the California Highway Patrol. The residents of Watts, Black, poor and tired of feeling oppressed and disrespected by police expressed themselves in a way that caused 34 deaths, injured 1,032 and caused $40 million in property damage. In August, 1972, the citizens of Watts came together in a far more peaceful community expression. At the beginning of Wattstax, Mel Stuart’s concert film, Richard Pryor describes it thusly:

“All of us have something to say, but some are never heard. Over seven years ago, the people of Watts stood together and demanded to be heard. On a Sunday, this past August, in the Los Angeles Coliseum, over 100,000 Black people came together to commemorate that moment in American History. For over 6 hours the audience heard, felt , sang, danced and shouted the living word in a soulful expression of the Black Experience. This is a film of that experience, and what some of the people had to say.”

Wattstax is the 1973 film of this Los Angeles Coliseum concert, sometimes referred to as the Black Woodstock. The concert, and the film, took its name from the combination of Watts and Stax, the Memphis label that brought us a different kind of soul than its rival in Detroit, Motown. Stax, whose record labels were yellow with a snapping Black hand on them, gave Salt n’ Pepa a career of samples to use. It was the home of Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MG’s, The Staple Singers, Rufus Thomas and his daughter Carla, The Bar-Kays, Sam and Dave and the writer of numerous Stax songs for others and himself, Isaac Hayes. Several of these acts appear in Wattstax at a concert that charged a dollar for admission. Hayes, the biggest Stax star of the time, sang two songs from the Shaft soundtrack, but until 2003, this footage was never seen by viewers of Wattstax due to MGM’s refusal to release the rights to this Columbia release.

Richard Pryor, years before Silver Streak, Live in Concert, and Twin Peaks: Fire Run With Me, is your master of ceremonies for Wattstax. It’s a role he previously assayed in the horrible 1971 film, Dynamite Chicken, and like that film, he appears in hilarious stand-up comedy bumpers whenever the main feature takes a break. Wattstax also features commentary from numerous people in the Watts community, including Raymond Allen and a grey mustached Ted Lange. The former took his Watts ties over to Sanford and Son, playing the perpetually drunk husband of Aunt Esther. The latter wound up in much more dire straits as the token Negro on The Love Boat. They and others discuss various topics including the riots, women (Black and White), church, and the word nigger. That word gets a major workout in Wattstax, but none of the singers ever utter it.

Watching Wattstax brought back a lot of memories for me, from hearing both the music and the conversations. Seeing all the Afros and bad 70’s clothing took me back to my Superfly coat and hat and my bushy Afro. We had all the Stax records, from Hayes’ Black Moses to Rufus Thomas’ Do the Funky Chicken, one of my favorite songs as a kid. My aunt loved Staple Singers songs, and I loved Mavis Staples so much that, when I was a teenager, I dreamt that Pops Staples beat my ass with his guitar because I grabbed Mavis’ titty. Still reeling from that guilt all these years later (remember, the Staple Singers were originally a gospel group), I kept my eyes in my head during their musical number in Wattstax. Melvin Van Peebles, no stranger to breasteses, introduces the Staples’ Respect Yourself.

Sigh. She doesn't look like this anymore.

The Los Angeles Coliseum is packed with Black folks, dancing in the stands and singing along with the entertainment. Director Mel Stuart and his director of photography John Alonzo provide numerous shots of audience members, especially if they’re hot chicks wearing short skirts and booty-choker shorts. The DVD of Wattstax I got from Netflix looks like shit, but the audience’s energy was so infectious I wanted to climb into the screen. No, not to get to Mavis! I swear!

Every kind of 70’s hairstyle, from Afros to Afro puffs to cornrows and pigtails was displayed. One talking head from the neighborhood sported a hairstyle that looked like the UltraPerm from Hell, and several other talking heads were depicted getting their Afros trimmed and picked at a barber shop. The nostalgia was overwhelming as I ran my hands across my bald (by choice, folks) head.

In the privacy of my own house, I danced with impunity the Funky Chicken with Rufus Thomas, who comments on his ridiculous pink outfit with the title of this post.

"Can I ask y'all somethin'? Ain't I'm clean?!!!"

I laughed at how easily Thomas gets the crowd, who had rushed the field during his number to do exactly what I was doing, to go back to their seats. I sang along with Luther Ingram’s If Loving You is Wrong, I Don’t Want to Be Right and Johnnie Taylor’s Odie’s, I mean Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone. The Emotions’ Peace Be Still, set in a Watts church, almost made me want to go back to church.

Pryor’s commentary is a series of riffs on ghetto life, from winos to women, and the editing makes it seem that his commentary leads to further comments from the Watts community. Women and men discuss relationships and it’s interesting to hear just how differently people thought back then. Jesse Jackson, back when he was respectable, opens the concert, and it ends the way Wattstax should have in 1973, with Isaac Hayes singing perhaps his best song, Soulsville. Dressed in a knee-length shirt made of gold chains, Hayes cuts quite the figure of gaudy machismo.

It’s impossible for me to try to review a concert movie for you, as it is an experience that words really can’t convey. So allow me to close out with two memories from my youth that came to me while watching Wattstax.

Ted Lange tells a story about when he was first called a nigger. Immediately, my mind went back to when I was 12. I had to travel after school to a predominantly White part of Jersey City to stay with my brother in the hospital until my Mom came at 8PM to stay the night. I took the wrong bus and wound up about a mile from the hospital. As I walked back, I passed this group of White kids on a stoop. I didn’t look at them until one of them shouted at me, “Hey nigger!” I turned around to find the entire group following me. They surrounded me and called me everything but a child of God, but I kept walking. I was terrified out of my mind until one of them said “Y’all come back now, y’hear?!!” I had never heard anybody but hillbilly White folks on TV say that to each other; it had nothing to do with the racial slurs they were spewing. So I started laughing hysterically, which made them mad as hell. They chased me the rest of the journey but, considering I’d spent most of my childhood running from dogs in my neighborhood, I outran all those kids, running straight into the emergency room. My location was appropriate because it felt like I was about to have a heart attack from my ordeal.

On a lighter note: During the Emotions’ gospel number, a woman in church gets hit by the Holy Ghost. Black folks in my church called it “getting happy.” I’ve told this one before: In my church, there was this woman who got happy every week. We thought God was touching her more than necessary, but then we realized she was full of shit. She was doing it for the attention. Those nurses at my church would grab her when she started getting happy and drag her out of the church as if she’d just bombed on Showtime at the Apollo. When kids in my neighborhood would visit our church, I’d bet them a quarter that I knew who would get the Holy Ghost in church that day. They’d always take the bet, because who God was gonna touch in church was a mystery…except at MY church. I made a good amount of post-church junk food money that way, spending it on Drakes Coconut Jumble cookies. I am so burning in Hell.

Your Homework Assignment:
Look out for Pops Staples. He wields a mean guitar.

Now THIS is a movie credit!

Not So Super Negroes

2011-02-24T17:12:00.003-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

Richard Pryor has a great joke in Live In Concert where he awakens from his heart attack in an ambulance full of White EMT’s working on him. In his groggy, resuscitated state, he thinks he’s dead. “Ain’t this a bitch?” he says, “they sent me to the wrong goddamn Heaven!” That’s the same reaction fanboys had when they discovered that Idris Elba was cast as Heimdall, a Norse god in the upcoming Marvel Universe movie, Thor: He’s in the wrong goddamn Heaven. The only Norse gods I remembered were Loki and Odin, so I had to go look up Heimdall. Wikipedia tells me that Heimdall is “the whitest of the gods.” Here’s a picture of Idris Elba, in case you were one of the fools who DIDN’T watch The Wire.

The fanboys are mad because the only thing Norse and Negro have in common is that they’re five letter words beginning with N.

Kenneth Branagh, the director of Thor, has partaken in the race switcheroo before: Robert Conrad’s Jim West was played by The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in the fiasco that was the Wild, Wild West movie. That caused little controversy because fanboys weren’t old enough to know what Wild Wild West even was. This, however, was blasphemy. If he were the whitest of the gods, that meant he had to the purest Aryan muthafucka there is. Heimdall is White with a capital W, White and pure, like Ivory Snow soap powder. For them to cast a bruva in this role was a slap in the pointy hood!

In response to this, Idris Elba appeared on British TV to dispute the uproar. He said that those who protest have no problem believing that there’s some huge White man with a magic hammer running around, yet they can’t accept him being cast as the NordicNig. I wish Elba had read that Wikipedia entry, because he would have had some serious ammo to shut those whiny bastards up. From that site, I learned that:

1. Heimdall is a horn player
2. Heimdall hangs in his crib, Himinbjörg, drinking mead all day
3. Mead is a cheap ass wine made out of honey and water, and has as much alcohol as malt liquor, if not more.
4. Heimdall has GOLD TEETH.
5. Heimdall has a tricked out horse with gold hair, the horse equivalent of rims.

Now if dat don’ soun’ like a stereotypical Negro, I will eat my hat! Plus, didn’t all humanity come from Africa in the first place?

I was about to end this piece by saying that these friggin’ fanboys should stop worrying about some fake ass comic book hero and start doing things like getting a job, moving out of their parents’ basements, getting off the goddamn Facebook, Twitter and video games and finding some pussy (or dick—we’re equal opportunity and non-judgmental here at Big Media Vandalism). BUT THEN I had a horrible, awful thought:

These guys might be onto something!

Have you SEEN Black superhero movies? They’re atrocious! Have a look:

Meteor Man: Robert Townsend follows up on his Hollywood Shuffle promise and makes a Black Superman movie. He plays the lead, a man who gets hit by a meteor, and unlike Stephen King in Creepshow, he gets some good out of it. Seeing Townsend battling his Hollywood Shuffle nemesis Roy Fegan is fun for us fans of his work, and the film is full of Black stars like Bill Cosby, Eddie Griffin, Robert Guillaume, Marla Gibbs, LaWanda Page and Don Cheadle (with yellow hair!!!). It even has a clever power for our hero: He can absorb a book’s knowledge like Number 5 in Short Circuit. The problem is the movie is a mess, full of plot holes and confusion about its tone. There are some funny moments in it, as in all of Townsend’s movies, but there’s so much wasted potential that I walked out feeling depressed. The one truly inspired thing Townsend does is cast Luther Vandross as a mute hitman. Luther conveys much without using that awesome voice of his, but we see so little of him that it becomes just another wasted opportunity.

Blankman: Damon Wayans scored comic points for some by playing Handi-Man on In Living Color. In an attempt to cash in on that, Wayans plays what imDB refers to as “a simpleton inventor with a bulletproof costume and a low budget.” They make it sound so much better than it is. David Alan Grier, the Blaine to Wayans’ Antoine, is more interesting as his brother and sidekick “Other Guy,” but Wayans’ attempt to bring a ghetto (in every possible definition) hero to the screen is unfunny, boring, and unwilling to exploit Blankman’s potentially interesting mental state. On the plus side, this movie has Lynne Thigpen, who’s smart enough to get shot early in the movie. It is also probably the cleanest movie Damon Wayans has ever done.

Hancock: Let me see if I get this straight: Hancock is a homeless, drunk superhero who destroys property and acts like a genuine ass. Yet, people still live in the town Hancock occupies. Never mind that he’s more of a danger-slash-menace than the criminals. I guess that’s because Hancock lives in L.A., and if earthquakes, gangs, and Botoxed Hollywood types couldn’t get people to leave, one superpowered lush isn’t going to either. And wait—Hancock’s weakness…is a White woman. From South Africa. It would be a lot more subversive if it didn’t come out of nowhere. To quote the R-and-B classic Heartbeat: “Now you know this just don’t make no kind of sense!”

To clear my palette, I have to mention a GOOD Black Superhero:

The Brown Hornet!

The Brown Hornet appeared on Fat Albert, and was the reason they got rid of all those catchy songs that used to show up at the end. He looked like Bill Cosby and, as voiced by the Cos, had a very interesting way of speaking. You could...imitate himmmm...all day. He and his sidekick, Stinger, drive a bee-shaped spaceship, fight crime in space and always "naturally escape unharmed" from whatever trap they find themselves in. He battles space witches and graffiti artists while the Cosby Kids cheer.

Hancock should have killed any attempt to give a Black man superpowers, but it made money, so now we have Idris Elba in Thor. Perhaps the fanboys who protested were trying to make the same point I am making, that outside of the Brown Hornet and Richard Pryor’s classic SuperNigger routine (“who, disguised as Clark Washington…”), Black superheroes make bad movies. Perhaps?

Nah.

One Ignorant Negro Don't Spoil the Whole Bunch

2011-02-23T01:55:00.002-05:00

by Odienator
(click here for all posts)

The mystery in A Soldier’s Story never compelled me. I knew whodunit early on, and I don’t think director Norman Jewison and screenwriter Charles Fuller intend to generate much suspense over it. The bigger question is whydunit, which is answered by the flashbacks that make up both A Soldier’s Story and the Pulitzer Prize winning play from which it is adapted. Both the film and the play open with the gunshot murder of Sergeant Waters, the commanding officer and baseball coach of an all Black regiment in 1944 Louisiana.

Though Sergeant Waters has his favorites, he treats most of his men even worse than the Whites In town would treat them. He calls them shiftless and lazy niggers, and is especially harsh to darker skinned Southerners like C. J. Memphis, a talented blues guitarist and ace baseball player. Memphis is a musician and a sports hero, two things that guarantee boatloads of booty, but he is COUNNNN-TREEEEE. Like a chicken coup. Sergeant Waters, a light-skinned, well educated Negro, hates the fact that Memphis, like many other of his men, is willing to shuck and jive to stay alive. He calls it yassir-bossin’. Of course, Sergeant Waters, a man in a rather high position for a cullud person, had to do his own yassir-bossin’ to get there. Educated as he may be, he had to defer at some point to racist, White officers in order to climb the few steps up the ladder the segregated US Military would allow. He can do plenty less yassir-bossin’ nowadays. How quickly they forget.

Right before Sergeant Waters is gunned down, he cries out “they still hate you!” We assume he is talking to his murderer, and in an ironic way, he is: Sergeant Waters is talking about himself.

The army calls in a lawyer named Captain Davenport (Howard E. Rollins, Jr.) to conduct an investigation. The victim would have liked Davenport—he’s no nonsense and obviously well-educated. He’s also something of a blank slate, numb almost, a tactic that would have helped Sergeant Waters had he considered it. After numerous viewings over the years, I’ve concluded that Davenport’s rigid state of coolness is a defense mechanism. Everybody stares at him because nobody has seen a Black officer with this high a rank in the Army before. Some White soldiers won’t even salute him, which forces him to have to call them out. Even Colonel Nivens (Nathan Arizona himself, Trey Wilson) tells Davenport that if he’d known his skin color, he would have called off the investigation. Having your rank and achievement constantly tested, disbelieved and shat on has to make you present a more enigmatic front as protection. After all, as my favorite racist joke in Truly Tasteless Jokes goes: What do you call a Black lawyer? You know the answer. You’ll hear it a lot in A Soldier’s Story.

Davenport interviews Sergeant Waters’ platoon. There’s Corporal Ellis (Robert Townsend), who also serves as Davenport’s personal Jeep driver (“I’ve only flipped this over twice,” he assures Davenport.); Private Wilkie (an excellent Art Evans) who was once both Sergeant Waters’ right hand man AND a higher rank; Corporal Cobb (David Alan Grier), Private Henson (William Allen Young), Private Smalls (David Harris) and his partner from Alabama, Private First Class Peterson (a young but still fiery Denzel Washington). C.J. Memphis (Larry Riley), Peterson’s fellow ‘bama and Sergeant Waters’ constant target, committed suicide in the jail cell Sergeant Waters threw him in after he finally worked up the courage to fight back. Scratch him off the whodunit list and push him near the top of the whydunit one.

The first time I watched A Soldier’s Story, I kept watching the flashbacks looking for clues to the mystery. After reading the play, I realized that I’m looking for the wrong thing. I should be focusing on Sergeant Waters, on what he says and how he reacts. In one scene, he practically begs his White superior officer to give his men work instead of the afternoon off the superior promised. In another, he fights, verbally and physically with Peterson, who, tired of the verbal abuse, asks him “what kind of colored officer are you?” Peterson gets chewed out because he’s country, then gets his ass beaten because the Sergeant fights dirty. The flashbacks also reveal a big clue to Sergeant Waters’ belief system, which turns out to be his undoing. It’s a chilling sequence of dialogue about his WWI days, and a bravura speech by actor Adolph Caesar:

You know the damage one ignorant Negro can do? We were in France in the first war; we'd won decorations. But the white boys had told all them French gals that we had tails. Then they found this ignorant colored soldier, paid him to tie a tail to his ass and run around half-naked, making monkey sounds. Put him on the big round table in the Cafe Napoleon, put a reed in his hand, crown on his head, blanket on his shoulders, and made him eat bananas in front of all them Frenchies. Oh, how the white boys danced that night... passed out leaflets with that boy's picture on it. Called him Moonshine, King of the Monkeys. And when we slit his throat, you know that fool asked us what he had done wrong?

One ignorant Negro. That’s what Sergeant Waters thinks is holding the Black race from rising in the ranks more quickly in the military and in life. When Davenport asks Cobb why Memphis was Sergeant Waters’ favorite target instead of him spreading the wealth to the equally Southern Peterson, Cobb states that Waters respected Peterson because he fought back. Memphis didn’t, and every time he expressed his odd, country beliefs about crows and mojo, Sergeant Waters felt as if he were pushing the race back.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Waters thinks his own upbringing, the way he speaks and how he was educated will make a difference in 1944 (or even today, for that matter). Whites will see him and he will elevate the race by sheer will. After all, he’s respected by many of the Whites on the base. But he forgot one thing: It really doesn’t matter in 1944 Louisiana. His illusion of inclusion blinds him. When two angry, racist White officers become suspects in the murder, Davenport believes they are innocent after his cross-examination, even if the White officer he is with thinks they are guilty. Those two officers did accost the drunk Sergeant Waters the night of his death, but they didn’t kill him. They killed his illusions about all the work he’d done in crafting his persona, but they didn’t literally kill him. The ass-kicking they dispensed on Waters was an eye-opener. All those dominoes he set up and knocked down, actions that led him to his demise, were for naught. At that moment, he realizes that no matter how smart he is or how high he gets in this Army or this life…

They still hate you.

This may seem like a dated message. But look around, people. Listen to what is being said. Look at the vitriol and the hatred that’s grown exponentially the past few years. It’s not so dated at all. When Davenport confronts the murderer, he asks a question he would have had to ask Sergeant Waters: “what right do you have to decide what a good Negro is?” Charles Fuller is asking us that very question, embodying it in the character of the hated Sergeant Waters, who looked at his platoon and saw things about himself he’d rather forget. Fuller’s question gets to the heart of the lack of unity I sometimes feel amongst Black people. Who killed Sergeant Waters isn’t important; the death of what he stood for does.

And now a few words about the man who played Sergeant Waters. I grew up listening to Adolph Caesar’s voice—he was the announcer on practically every Blaxploitation trailer/commercial AND he told me that “A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste” on numerous United Negro College Fund commercials. (Click those first three links to hear him.) Here, in a few scenes, he creates a complicated character, oozing with hatred and using that wonderful voice of his for malicious evil. He originated this role on stage, and he owns it. His final scene, when he drunkenly realized the gravity both of his situation and his actions, is stunning. You can see his world collapsing in his eyes. Shooting him was a mercy killing at this point. For this performance, Caesar was nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar—he’s one of the two nominations people tend to forget when they compile lists of Black nominees (Rupert Crosse in The Reivers tends to be the other). Caesar died in 1986, but I have this performance and his work in The Color Purple to remind me how great he was at being sinister. And that voice! It’s wonderful.

Lest I forget: Miss Patti is in this movie, singing a wonderful blues number about whiskey. She sings two songs in this, and both are worth the price of admission.