With Spike Lee’s temperamental Chi-Raq finally unleashed upon us, let us turn to Lee’s last unambiguously popular film, a work that has now largely been forgotten and lamented with cries of “selling out”. 

It is tempting to claim that an auteur like Spike Lee is at his best when he is at his most personal. A true statement, but not a complete one. Spike Lee is at his best when he is at his most personal, he is at his worst when he is at his most personal, and he is at his most middling when he is at his most personal. In other words, all of his films are his most personal; even a threadbare indie like 2015’s Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, one of Spike’s most nonchalant, slackened films ever, is a quiet sting of an ode to one of Lee’s favorite forgotten filmmakers, Bill Gunn. Even Lee’s vampire film is about race, the divining rod of most of his best films, but like all of his films, it is not only about race. Lee is not only a protest-artist (although he is a great one), but an aesthetic maestro with a adoration for film history, a probing eye for gender relations and power dynamics of all varieties, and a fixation on place and space.

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What with Ash vs. Evil Dead trouncing the television world, a review of the film that started it all is in order…

First things first, The Evil Dead is not Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn, although it is infinitely tempting to compare the two. A comparison isn’t unfair; Evil Dead II practically invites the comparison, being a quasi-remake of Sam Raimi’s debut feature. By 1987, when he made Dead by Dawn with only one other film post-Evil Dead to his name, Sam Raimi was at a more confident place as a director. He had Stephen King’s nominal backing, and, whatever the questionable merits of that false poet, Stephen King was just about the king of the commercial horror world in 1987. With Evil Dead II, Raimi was primed for a daring, pugnacious deconstruction of the very limits of horror and comedy as emotionally tinged experiences. In 1981, when the original Evil Dead was released, he was a more humble independent director without anything to his name but a Michigan backwoods, a buddy with a noble chin and a subtle wink, and all the ingenuity a first timer raised on a steady diet of Italian giallo pics could muster. Continue reading →

With Ridley Scott pulling a fast one and making a movie people unanimously enjoy once again, let us return to the last movie he directed that people seem to unambiguously appraise. Who’d a thought that I wouldn’t like it very much…

How fitting that a film that stole the Saving Private Ryan stylistic thunder wholesale turns out to be Saving Private Ryan, only more-so. With all of its shrill, personality-free glumness and the depressingly literal-minded symbolism and sermonizing, all Gladiator is lacking is the carefully calibrated mechanical craft that occasionally saved Ryan from the abject misery of its narrative histrionics. The screenplay for Gladiator, by David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson, is as dry and cloying as that of any other cinematic Roman epic – take any number of glorified potboilers from the heyday of the early 1960s – but what is missing is the zest. Gladiator is gilded, but it never pops. The screenplay calls for proselytizing, but director Ridley Scott seems parsimoniously bored with the production. He comes alive occasionally – the opening battle, where the desaturation can’t hide Scott’s desire to light it with the fires of hell. But for the most part, Gladiator is a soporific, deadened motion picture convinced of its portentous pregnancy with ideas, but the script is as hollow as the antiseptic digital cinematography that strips it of its personality. Like Ryan, it seems strangely torn between old-fashioned Romanticism and modernist realism, and the two impulses neutralize one another.  Continue reading →

With Steven Spielberg at war again with Bridge of Spies, let us return to arguably his most famous war film. 

To begin as Saving Private Ryan does, and to remove the obvious with brevity: the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan is superior pure cinema. The D-Day invasion, clipped and rampagingly beautiful and barbarically full-throated, has absolutely nothing to say about war that wasn’t already said as early as eight decades before with the forgotten French masterpiece Wooden Crosses, but Ryan repeats the obvious with an ungodly amount of hyperbolic hysteria. So much that your faculties falter and you run with it against your better judgment. As a mini-movie, the prelude of Saving Private Ryan is unimpeachable, iron-clad cinematic entertainment – and it is, mind you, entertainment, fixated on drawing us into the violence and enticing us with it. Francois Truffaut was absolutely correct in his famous anti-anti-war film declaration, noting that cinema could not truly be anti-war because the fundamental act of tying together imagery of violence is fundamentally arousing. Saving Private Ryan could not hope to be anti-war if it spent the rest of its three hour run time declaiming at the top of a hill about it, but morality aside, it is unarguably superb cinema. Continue reading →

As there are reports of the Muppets on television for the first time in a few decades, a review of the first incursion of the Muppets into cinema was in order…

The central enigma of the Muppets, as well as their fascination and their joy, is the sense of childlike post-structuralism they marinated themselves in without ever once dipping into supercilious irony. Every slice of Muppet fiction thrives on the sense of “the show” as it exists in contrast to our world, as the Muppets themselves are performers who are also, tacitly, being performed. Heady stuff, but the key is here, as it always was, to believe both ways. On one hand, we need to know that the Muppets are being performed – the opening joke of the movie, with a talent agent played by Dom DeLuise circumstantially, and whimsically, passing through a Florida swamp where Kermit the Frog resides and invites him to take a trip to Hollywoodland, is pure anarchic happenstance and absurdism. It dares us to question how arbitrary the occurrence is, how artificial, how performed.  Continue reading →

What with all the hullabaloo around the televised Hannibal struggling to survive, let us turn our attention to the grand opus of the character and, with all apologies to Michael Mann’s Manhunter, the primary cause of the character’s continued social relevance today.

It’s not that good, but it’s pretty good, as they say.

Jonathan Demme’s baroque 1991 exercise in rekindling the exploitation fire that stoked his loins twenty years before is something of a coming home party. Remember, this man’s first directed feature was a tried-and-true “women in prison” film, arguably the most exploitative of all exploitation sub-genres, and in the intervening years, the greatest concert film of all time notwithstanding, Demme largely retreated to the more stable, less satisfying regions of “respectable cinema” for middle-aged suburban couples, a state he has since, unfortunately, returned to. It is no surprise that The Silence of the Lambs boasts an undeniable passion of craft, right from the misty, positively soaking wet autumnal forest it begins in all the way to the audience-implicating, voyeuristic conclusion. Demme’s heart is in it, and his heart was in it so much that he managed to have it both ways and tally up a few Oscars (a lot of Oscars) and a tidy paycheck or two. The Hollywood machine is a shame, but sometimes, and only sometimes, it gets it just right. Continue reading →

Update mid-2019 upon John Singleton’s passing: It’s hard to single out one moment in Boyz ‘n’ The Hood without turning to the justly famous death of Ricky, perhaps the most famous moment in any early ’90s black-directed film. But my favorite will always be one of Singleton’s inaugural gestures. Or one of his opening salvos, more like it: a dramatically forthright early close-up of a Ronald Reagan poster, the ex-President decked out in cowboy hat and threads as the film tacitly stitches both the linkages between and the failures of his cinematic and presidential personas, both “sheriffs” promising to “clean up” the neighborhood via fascistically carceral rather than retributive, humanizing, and/or transformative methods. The film thus draws the connections between cinematic performance and presidential roleplaying, all while tracing the contours between Americana mythologies of Manichean justice, mid-century cinematic attempts to monumentalize said mythologies, and late-20th century neoliberal fetishes for unquestioned order. This film, of course, is set in a modern-day Wild West as well, and it suggests, within minutes, with Reagan’s visage assaulting the screen yet unable to attend to the humanity of any of these characters or the bullets which ravage his postered countenance, that this Los Angeles born-and-bred filmmaker was about to vandalize both the American government and the American cinematic tradition whilst acknowledging its potency, using the master’s tools to destroy the master’s house as it were, enacting a new, more humanistic, more inclusive, more egalitarian kind of wild west justice.

This introductory image of the fire next time, both demonstrative and agnostic, willing to declare solutions with moral conviction and then pessimistically pockmark this conviction with shades of doubt, potently evokes the spirit of a filmmaker who has a certain feverish commitment to the belief that Hollywood style is a viable idiom for African-American stories – that the tools and tricks of old-school melodrama and cliche can be nervously renewed – and that these convictions must be interrogated. Like so many classical Hollywood films, Singleton’s vision is brashly direct in its viewpoints, but its confident forward stride belies a real shiver of hesitation. Not only a suspicion of its own decisions, mind you, but a mistrust of anyone’s ability to answer the fatalistic quandary – the choice between retaliatory violence and ostensible, possibly ephemeral peace – that genuinely emanates from the souls of these characters, a decision which we are all hopelessly unqualified to make.

Particularly telling is the way Furious Style’s sermon-esque pronouncements about institutional racism, with their flair for the didactic, suggest a personal anxiety about his son’s future which is nonetheless beholden to certain stuffy markers of respectability politics which the film, ultimately, can’t but query and reconsider as it goes along. It engages the supposedly faultless morality of mainstream society, with its presumably clear-sighted attitude toward rejecting violence, by considering the severity of ground-level conditions which perhaps preclude such ethical guarantees, all without dismissing the consequences of the actions perpetrated by the characters within.

Or without forgetting those characters. Where Ice Cube’s Doughboy becomes the ultimate moral avatar of the Faustian bargains made for success, or even survival, in the hood, there’s no sense that this is a screenwriter’s contrivance, or a hand-wringing moral imposition. Rather, it takes the form of a poetic evocation of the tragic inevitability of life on the streets, a sense of grim permanence that implies not the nihilistic denouncement of any possibility of change but the frightening cyclicality of a recurring nightmare. One that, perhaps, the characters could still hopefully wake up from. In the film’s artistic zenith, much more troubling than Ricky’s famous, melodramatic demise, his brother Doughboy suffers a final, vaporous disintegration, a ghostly reminder that some forms of escape go unvisualized, maybe cannot be visualized, in and by a film that nonetheless strives to materialize the potentially unimaginable dream of a fuller life.

Original Review:

With the release of Straight Outta Compton taking the world by storm, let us turn back the clock to a cinematic statement of urban life featuring the initial breakout star of the musical crew.

Occasionally, there are seismic shifts in the Hollywood landscape. The early ’90s influx of films made by and focused on African Americans doesn’t exactly fit the bill (it was cleansed from production schedules almost before it began, but vestiges retain, and a rebirth over the past few years, befitting the mid-2010s nostalgia for early ’90s culture, is still on the rise). For a while though, Spike Lee, John Singleton, and a few other African American filmmakers were unleashing some of the most vicious cinematic dogs upon society that America had seen in quite a while. The early ’90s were not happy times for Americans, and the recession brought forth increased public awareness of inner city poverty. With it, Hollywood wanted to do as it does and shed a little light on such problems in a way that ’80s cinema had uniformly overlooked. Continue reading →

Directed by David Wain and written by Wain and Michael Showalter, 2001’s Wet Hot American Summer is one of the few legitimate “cult classics” to have emerged post-2000. Sure, we’re always discovering new “old” films from the gutters and cemeteries of cinema history, some via revelatory re-releases or the increasingly miniscule parade of independent theaters pining for midnight screening success to fight the corporate behemoths of Big Theater. But a modern film that has emerged as a cult classic? Now that is a rarity, largely because most of the modern films we identify as cult classics don’t meaningfully fit the term. People can introduce the likes of Anchorman and The Big Lebowski within the halls of “cult classics” all they want, but that doesn’t change the obvious box office success of both films relative to their budgets. Calling them “cult” films only applies if “seemingly all Americans between the ages of 18 and 35” meaningfully qualifies as a “cult”. Continue reading →

Frankly, modern cinema is a little glazed-over, which isn’t the same thing as saying it is bad. Tons of great films are released every year, but even among the greatest, a certain stagnancy grips them, cuts off their heads, and keeps them grounded. Comedy and animation are arguably the two biggest offenders on this front; when was the last time you can recall a comedy with a legitimate eye for visual framing and using editing and composition to enhance or form the girders of the humor? Films still have interesting stories to tell, but they seldom have an interesting means to tell stories. Content can fly, but the technique, the art of film itself, has been grounded for too long. Continue reading →

Vacation was the first zeitgeist-defining hit for a young John Hughes, writer for National Lampoon and eventual savior of its brand name, albeit only temporarily. Hughes, who would go on to direct his fair share of generally more teen-focused films that tend to fall into the quintessential and unmatched “basically solid and fine but primarily unexceptional and more notable for not being the schlock coming out on either side of them” basket from the mid-to-late 1980s. Hughes wasn’t the funniest writer, or the most precise, but he had an unbridled warmth and generosity about him that melded with his legitimately caustic ear for everyday human experiences, a bond that ultimately allowed him to create his fair share of sentimental, humanistic films that sometimes veered into sickly sweet, but generally stayed on the right side of the line. Continue reading →