Dope (2015)

DOPE                         B                
USA  (103 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Rick Famuyiwa                 Official site                

This is a film that seems to have gone out of its way to hit all the touchstones of youth culture, a place where television, pop music, the Internet, drugs, race, and sex all come together in the teenage world, where hip-hop is the anthem that blares in the background while kids try to make their way through the minefield that is high school, complete with an entire set of distinctly black social obstacles placed in the way.  While ostensibly a coming-of-age comedy, the film delves into a myriad of stigmas and stereotypes about blacks growing up in gang-infested neighborhoods, where the stomping grounds are a return to the mean streets of Inglewood, California made famous by John Singleton’s legendary BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991).  But instead of accentuating the contemptuous distrust between the LA police department and the South Central LA neighborhoods, coming on the heels of the Rodney King Incident that took place in March 1991, RODNEY KING BEATING VIDEO Full length footage ... YouTube (8:08), this film seems to have evolved from the Shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, where the life of an unarmed 17-year old black teenager wearing a hoodie was unnecessarily wiped out in an instant, an all-too-familiar headline-grabbing story where guns in the hands of trigger-happy whites are the growing answer to racial fears.  While LA has been nicknamed the gang capital of America, home to more than 1350 gangs and 120,000 gang members nearly a decade ago, Inglewood still has a huge gang problem, with close to 50 different gangs residing within the city, where this film seems motivated to change the stereotype by creating friendlier, less threatening characters.  “Malcolm is a geek.”  These are the first words we hear from the narrator (Forrest Whitaker, one of the film’s producers) about Malcolm (Shameik Moore), a high school senior looking surprisingly like he’s fresh off a 90’s black TV sitcom like In Living Color (1990 – 94), where he might have been one of Theo’s friends from The Cosby Show (1984 – 92), or a featured character in an early Spike Lee film.  Despite growing up with a bus driving single mom (Kimberly Elise) in a low-income neighborhood known as “The Bottoms,” Malcolm, a straight A student with a love for 90’s hip-hop and “white shit,” namely getting good grades and going to college, hangs out with two other equally bright and geeky friends, Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), a likeable, light-skinned lesbian that dresses as a man, whose parents have tried unsuccessfully to “pray the gay away,” and Jib, Tony Revolori, the lobby boy in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), a multiracial oddball who maintains a bit of his impish personality.  Together they play in a garage band known as Awreoh (whose songs are actually Pharrell compositions), while cruising the neighborhoods of the streets of LA on their bikes, often extremely careful about what streets to enter and which ones to avoid, where the prevalence of guns can make these life altering decisions.  On more than one occasion we see the results of random street violence, including an unfortunate burger joint customer that is killed while simply standing in line, literally seconds away from reaching a supposedly unattainable level on his Game Boy. 

At least initially, the idea of presenting material in a new light feels intriguing, where the intelligence of the characters suggests a film at least attempting to cut through the stereotypes, where three definitions of the entitled word “Dope” are provided:  an illegal drug, a stupid person, and something overly cool, each of which at some point or another becomes the focal point of the film.  Perhaps most interesting is the notion of a black geek being into the same things white people are into, like good grades, anime comic books, being in a grunge band, skateboarding, riding bikes, and getting into college, where Malcolm has his sights set on Harvard, and has already written an essay proposal (A Research Thesis to Discover Ice Cube’s Good Day) that examines exactly what day Ice Cube was talking about in his gangsta rap classic Ice Cube - It Was A Good Day (Explicit) - YouTube (5:12), arguing “If Neil deGrasse Tyson was writing about Ice Cube, this is what it would look like.”  His guidance counselor steers him away from that idea, suggesting he needs to distinguish himself from the rest by revealing personal details about his own life, much of which Malcolm feels is a tired, worn out cliché, another story about a poor black kid from a single-parent family in Inglewood.  In the process of discovering himself, however, the film rather circuitously touches on what it means to be black, which has become something of a paradox in the era of Obama, Trayvon Martin, and the Ferguson police Shooting of Michael Brown, where Obama’s 2008 election was accompanied by a multi-ethnic surge of hope, a promise of a better tomorrow, ushering in a supposedly post-racial order, but has instead unleashed a continuing series of violent, racially-tinged incidents that once more remind us as a nation just how far we have yet to go.  In the post 9/11 world, terrorism and Islamic extremists raise the public’s ire while twice as many deaths on U.S. soil have been attributed to white supremacists and right-wing, anti-government fanatics, creating large-scale public misconceptions of what “terrorism” looks like in the United States.  Like derogatory racial epithets, the word “terrorist” has been spewed as a piece of propaganda meant to dehumanize dark-skinned Muslim people while the white killers among us are allowed complex psychological profiles.  Much like that premature elation, this film promises more than it can deliver, where racial identity is so much more complicated than how it’s portrayed here, but the director appears to be drawing from the Trey Ellis 1989 essay The New Black Aesthetic, where “a black individual possesses the ability to thrive and successfully exist in a white society while simultaneously maintaining all facets of his or her complex cultural identity.”  While that goal is evident at the outset, the film is eventually bogged down in familiar Hollywood cliché’s, resembling a black version of RISKY BUSINESS (1983).  When Malcolm accidentally gets pulled into a serious discussion about 90’s hip-hop with a reputable drug dealer on the street, Dom (A$AP Rocky), what starts out as a humorous aside becomes an unexpected side trip into nostalgia, where hip-hop groups like Biggie, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Tupac, and Dr. Dre are being named with the historical importance of former presidents, where these are the cultural icons of contemporary black history, yet these are also the same rap lyrics that started calling women bitches and ho’s while revitalizing the use of the N-word, becoming an expression of endearment among brothers, but a controversial word when used so conventionally in a breezy and nonchalant fashion.  When Dom involves him in a message game with a sultry girl down the street, Nakia (Zoë Kravitz), inviting him to his birthday celebration, she quickly becomes the girl of his dreams, helping her get out of the party safely after a police raid with guns blazing.  While indicating “Those other niggas” stepped right over her to get out of there, Malcolm replies, “Guess I’m not one of ‘those niggas.’” 

Only afterwards does Malcolm realize his backpack has been stuffed with drugs and a gun, where in no time he’s dealing with the criminal element he’d been avoiding all his life, becoming part of his daily routine alongside taking SAT exams and interviewing with the visiting Harvard college representative.  While he’s a total novice in dealing with drug lords, he suddenly finds himself on the speed dials of rival gang leaders, or perhaps an impersonating FDA agent, receiving mixed instructions that he somehow needs to sort out.  While Dom insists that he deliver the merchandise to the upscale home of a business associate, but when he’s not there, he’s instead lured into a bizarre labyrinth of wrong turns, led by two dysfunctional children, a wannabe rap producer Jaleel (Quincy Brown) and his half-naked, stoned-out-of-her-mind little sister Lily, high fashion model Chanel Iman in her film debut, the object of every teenage boy’s sexual fantasies, who makes quite a lurid impression before doing the utterly unthinkable, captured, of course, on YouTube video that streams on all the local news broadcasts.  Perilously close to missing his college interview, Malcolm is even more amazed to discover the Harvard man he’s being interviewed by is the same man he was supposed to deliver the package to, turning the interview into a skewed discussion spoken entirely in code on the merits of Ivy League meritocracy versus the crass, often contemptible conduct of unfettered capitalism, where exploring his options afterwards is not easy.  Drawing upon the knowledge of a former friend he met at band camp named Will (Blake Anderson), a white, all-purpose stoner with an affinity for drug dealing and calling people “niggas,” a social miscue that is eventually discussed at some length, they explore the best way to move the merchandise without being detected, using cyber thriller techniques seen in espionage movies.  While this is all in good fun, it’s also borderline ridiculous, drawing inferences from an early flashback that reveals the only gift he ever received from his long absent father, a VHS copy of SUPER FLY (1972), identified as his Dad’s favorite movie, leads the viewer into a myriad of Blaxploitation references.  Stripped to its barest essential, however, this is actually the story of a boy who likes a girl, where visions of Nakia are everpresent in his all too vivid imagination, where he agrees to help her with her schoolwork, hoping it will lead to more.  Both Shameik Moore (in his first lead appearance) and Zoë Kravitz are excellent, where their flirtatious dynamic has a sweetly underplayed naturalness about it, like it’s only just beginning, where both are seen as evolving figures, vulnerable and compelling, mutually exploring the hazards of the territory needed to cross to get to that next destination in life, whatever it may be.  Part of what works best is the brashness of the young trio of friends, never underestimating themselves or their futures, where the film has a different kind of trajectory in exploring the black experience, vibrantly energetic with a cranked-up musical soundtrack (iTunes - Music - Dope (Music from the Motion Picture) by ...), even if it does have a somewhat preachy and by-the-numbers Hollywood ending. 

The Grand Budapest Hotel

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL         B-                           
USA  Germany  (99 mi)  2014  d:  Wes Anderson       Official site

Despite a coming attractions trailer to die for, where the sheer tone of subversive humor looks like mandatory viewing, and despite all the accolades this film has been receiving, it is not one of the better Wes Anderson films.  While the film espouses to be a rollicking thrill ride through the behind-the-scenes, Kafkaesque inner workings of the Eastern Bloc, rivaling the plot twists and cherished thrills of any Agatha Christie novel, what’s lacking, unfortunately, is a connection to any of the characters, generating a dull thud in the viewer’s heads suggesting none of the sheer daffiness of the story makes any difference in our lives whatsoever, but instead feels like an over-caffeinated, completely invented, cartoonish world of lunacy and adolescent silliness on display.   Yet we’re led to believe this film is so clever, as the rambling narrative offers a continual diversion into another dreamlike world, where we feel immersed into an Arabian Nights fantasy set behind the Iron Curtain during the height of the Cold War, where the film features a gala of stars where all of this offers such amazing potential that the film never comes to realize, as so much of it lies flat on the screen.  While it’s a well decorated screen, given an overly sweet, confectionary sugar look where an attraction to baking goods is essential to appreciating the film’s many side plots, but it just gets too carried away with its own indulgent excess, as if this is a whimsical, lighthearted delight, but so many of the comic bits feel overly contrived and repetitive in tone, where it’s so caught up in a dry parody of sophisticated wit that it forgets the magic of whimsical fun.  Some will have a good time with this film, but it’s an acquired taste and not for everyone.  Unlike 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Moonrise Kingdom, arguably Anderson’s most delightful and thoroughly enjoyable film, one that reaches artistic heights because the essential story being told actually matters, where two highly intelligent pre-teen kids in love make a run for it, escaping the hum drum conformity that waits for them at home, where the kids lead a more charming life, feeling highly autobiographical and supremely tender, using the sophisticated interplay of the music of Benjamin Britten to add a theatrical flourish.  THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is a return to the smart-assed, mocking tone of Anderson where he remains aloof from the audience. 

It’s not for lack of trying, as the effort given by Ralph Fiennes as hotel manager Gustave H. is exemplary, one of his finer performances, as is the previously unheralded Tony Revolori as Zero, his Lobby Boy, where the mischief these two get themselves into comprises the heart of the story.  Many of the secondary characters, however, barely generate a pulse, despite the exaggerated, over-the-top nature of their creation.  Even the opening falls flat, as there’s a slowly developing, somewhat boring modern era prelude that leads to a flashback sequence that generates all the interest, becoming a story (the present) within a story (the near past) within a story (the far past), where Fiennes immediately finds the right tone, becoming the center of attention, but so many of the rest feel like stock characters.  The meticulously designed sets feel like zany fun, but the execution of much of the material leaves something to be desired.  A tribute to troubled Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, a pacifist and anti-nationalist during the rise of Hitler, Anderson draws upon his 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday that he wrote escaping the Nazi’s in exile during the war shortly before his suicide, a practically unknown writer in America today, yet in the 20’s and 30’s he was the most translated European writer. 

The hospital train in which I was returning arrived in Budapest in the early morning hours. I drove at once to a hotel to get some sleep; my only seat in the train had been my bag. Tired as I was, I slept until about eleven and then quickly got up to get my breakfast. I had gone only a few paces when I had to rub my eyes to make sure that I was not dreaming…. Budapest was as beautiful and carefree as ever before. Women in white dresses walked arm in arm with officers who suddenly appeared to me to be officers of quite a different army than that I had seen only yesterday and the day before yesterday…. I saw how they bought bunches of violets and gallantly tendered them to their ladies, saw spotless automobiles with smoothly shaved and spotlessly dressed gentlemen ride through the streets. And all this but eight or nine hours away from the front by express train. But by what right could one judge these people? Was it not the most natural thing that, living, they sought to enjoy their lives?—that because of the very feeling that everything was being threatened, that they had gathered together all that was to be gathered, the few fine clothes, the last good hours!

Here it jumped out at me, naked, towering and unashamed, the lie of the war! No, it was not the promenaders, the careless, the carefree, who were to blame, but those alone who drove the war on with their words. But we too were guilty if we did not do our part against them.

Transporting us to the illustrious era of the Grand Budapest Hotel, the most glorious vacation spot in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, the film attempts to recreate the luxurious aristocratic splendor on display before that polite, civilized world was destroyed by war, even as the building still stands today nestled among the mountainous beauty of the peaks dotting the landscape, quiet and empty now, completely harmless, an old decaying structure that is a wondrous relic of the past that stands as a metaphor for a society on the verge of collapse.  In the era when Gustave H. runs the hotel, he represents the essence of civilized manner and high level service, where everyone’s needs are catered to and taken care of, where his job is to make it as smooth and effortless as possible.  His Lobby Boy is an apprentice still learning the trade from the master, teaching him to understand what a guest wants, and then getting it to them before they can even think of it themselves.  His secret is wearing a scent called Eau de Panache cologne, turning him into a ladykiller, where female guests of all ages are his specialty, offering the most intimately personalized services of the house.  When one of his wealthiest guests dies unexpectedly, Tilda Swinton as Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe und Taxis, her extraordinarily wealthy and extended family is shocked to see she left her most prized painting to none other than Gustave H, causing a scandalous outrage, where her maliciously foul-minded son (Adrien Brody) and his heinously depraved hit man (Willem Dafoe) are determined to get the painting back, using a series of threats and intimidation tactics, which include detestable passport challenges of his precious Lobby Boy, a man in exile who unfortunately travels with flimsy travel documents, where Gustave H. is even thrown into prison.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Gustave H. adapts miraculously to prison life, where he’s at his best while serving the needs of others, but all that matters now is making an escape.  Borrowing liberally from all the prison escape movies, this has to be the most difficult and convoluted escape route ever devised, turning what should be a suspenseful event into a tedious exercise of extending a joke far too long, as whatever original cleverness there was is eventually overwritten to the point of exhaustion.  The rest of the film is basically a chase movie filled with murders and double crosses, remaining out of reach from Dafoe’s deadly assassin who is a miraculous master of disguises, where the sinister threat of fascism on the rise is expressed as a Zubrowkan political movement involving black jackboots and leather trench coats, where they may as well be Blue Meanies out to destroy the candy-colored beauty of Gustave H’s pastel dreamscape.  Much of this does recall Guy Madden’s hypnotic use of surrealism and color, also a kind of slapstick hit-or-miss the way the story develops, but mostly the film deals with a superficial world of illusion, where all the eloquent manner and artificial extravagance simply disappears, where the war saps the life blood out of the hotel and everything it stands for.  After a slow start, it’s eventually told in a frantic pace with a zest for enthusiasm and crazy screwball antics, where what’s perhaps most surprising is on the surface, the movie is all comedy and light, lost in a chaotic confusion of narrative overkill, but under the surface the film just isn’t that funny, instead feeling surprisingly somber and dull, where there’s no emotional connection to any of the characters, where the sheer dependence on such extreme artificiality suggests little of this will even matter afterwards.  Had there been no dedication to Stefan Zweig, the underlying tale of tragedy and doom about the destruction of what was once a genteel and civilized Europe might have loomed even further under the surface, but as is, it’s a confusing mix of nostalgia, comic farce, overdecorated production design, and a strange and peculiar fascination with the past, where memory can be a bewildering embellishment.