Gemini

Director Aaron Katz

 

GEMINI                     B+                                                      

US (92 mi) 2017  d:  Aaron Katz                   Official Facebook

Finally, a film playing at the film festival that is actually fun to watch.  Portland indie director Aaron Katz, the maker of COLD WEATHER (2010), seems to be amusing himself at the expense of the dreaded or perhaps hated Los Angeles (as viewed by everyone on the West coast that lives north of there), home of the nouveau riche with an arrogant, self-satisfied smugness, creating a film noir drama featuring women for a change, where it’s an absolute delight from start to finish, opening with upside down palm trees, mocking the southern California image and lifestyle.  Written, directed, and edited by Katz, which is his style, this is a beautifully conceived, well-written and gorgeous looking film, perhaps the director’s best effort yet. What’s interesting is that Katz as well as his musical composer Keegan DeWitt are both Oregonians transported to Los Angeles, where this film represents their first inkling of how it feels to live there, offering an impressionistic, neo-noir take that is irresistibly intoxicating, with a jazzy score underlying its stylish elegance.  Somewhere on the outskirts of LA as the sun is setting we find two friends in a car, actress Zoë Kravitz, alluring as always, playing Heather Anderson, a high-strung Hollywood actress who wants out of her latest project, while sitting alongside her is Lola Kirke as Jill LeBeau, her personal assistant, who receives an angry phone call from Heather’s ex-boyfriend, “Tell her I know what’s up.  Tell here to fuck off and I’m going to fucking murder her.”  Both tend to ignore this craziness as old news, instead focusing on the important matter at hand, as Heather wants Jill to do her dirty work for her, conveying her thoughts to the director, Greg (Nelson Franklin), who is waiting to meet her in an Italian restaurant to discuss the film.  While their personal banter is amusing, simply by the way they speak, almost in code, with Heather feeling especially vulnerable, but unable to deal with confrontation, and Jill resembling Greta Gerwig in her matter of fact style of delivery, where she plays the straight man to everyone else’s convoluted hysteria.  Greg, naturally, blows his top, but not before ordering two of every app (short for appetizer) on the menu, something this particular restaurant specializes in, but walks out in a huff before he has a chance to try it.  As if by design, Heather steps into his abandoned place at the table, joined by a rabidly interested fan (Jessica Parker Kennedy) who can’t get enough of Heather, gushing over her entire career, wanting to take selfies with her, which Heather, seemingly amused, has no problem with.  On their way out, the paparazzi descend upon them, especially Stan (James Ransone), a particularly obnoxious guy whose unethical practices match his scum personality. 

This little opening scene perfectly describes the world of celebrity, exposing the unique nature of friendships with assistants, where best friend and confidante only begins to describe their role, while also revealing a seedy side of Hollywood rarely portrayed in movies, showing a precarious relationship between stars and adoring, worshipping fans whose motives are entirely unclear.  As if to clear their heads, Jill and Heather are joined by Heather’s latest girlfriend, Tracy (Greta Lee), at some fashionable, late hour nightclub, with a color coded entrance reduced to slo-mo, where clearly visible is a “Gemini” zodiac tattoo on the back of Heather’s neck, all getting blitzed before the original two head back to Heather’s home, an immense, architecturally designed building that exudes a sleek, modern stylishness.  Strangely, the outdoor security motion detector light is triggered, but both are too tired and wasted, heading off to sleep.  Jill rises early, once again covering for Heather at planned reshoots, but before leaving, Heather confides that she feels unsafe and asks to borrow Jill’s handgun that she carries for protection, showing her how to use it before she goes, only to find Heather dead when she returns, shot five times with Jill’s gun, in a particularly gruesome scene.  The lead detective on the case, John Cho as Detective Ahn, is a savvy cop with a special charm, inviting her out for coffee where they can talk, then orders her a coffee even after she refuses and tells her to drink up, exhibiting more personality here than any other film, but he recognizes right away that Jill is the brains behind the operation, but also the lead suspect.  This unfortunate incident leads to a labrynthian journey to find the real killer and prove her innocence, as the cops are all over her home, leaving her no safe place of refuge, turning into an amateur sleuth on-the-run style of film, rounding up all the usual suspects while revisiting many of the familiar places of LA, including a ride through Mulholland Drive and the Hollywood hills, with that beautiful overlook of the city off in a distance glittering in lights.  Using his regular cinematographer, Andrew Reed, the city looks radiant on the surface, including an artfully designed color scheme, while highlighting a series of stunning architectural locations that accentuate a new, upscale Hollywood, interestingly filled with much younger clientele.  This actually has the feel of earlier Michael Mann films, as the artistic design fused with sophisticated jazz tones is striking, featuring the relaxed vibe of Southern California while accentuating the cool surface textures.  

What’s perhaps most remarkable is just how normal Jill seems, her adroit self-assurance, unbothered by all the pressure building up around her, as clearly she is an over achiever, yet prefers the anonymity of allowing someone else to shine, knowing they will be shown in the best possible light due to all the behind-the-scenes work that she puts in, taking care of all the little details, none of which are actually part of her job description.  At one point Detective Ahn asks where she’s from.  “Portland,” she responds, to which he inquires, “Maine or Oregon?”  These little asides are beautifully written and perfectly executed onscreen, with just the right timing and inflections.  Both Kirke and Cho give superb performances, always in balance as both ally and adversary, adding a contemporary demeanor for an updated, more laid back tribute to Raymond Chandler’s sleazy Los Angeles, where crime, betrayal and deception lurk around every corner, but instead of tough talk we get the common sense of a girl clever enough to figure things out.  While the first order of business is purchasing a disguise, Jill finds the most pretentiously cheap outfit imaginable, one that challenges anyone’s view of fashion sense, something of a knock on glamor in show business, bleaching her hair blonde (though it looks like a wig), adding a trench coat and silly hat, along with cheap sunglasses, looking pretty much as she did before in this surprisingly upbeat whodunit.  Humorously playing on character and identity, where Jill seems to be Heather’s other half, which hides her own persona, begging the question are things ever what they seem?  In this film, only Jill seems totally grounded in reality, while the world around her is a shape-shifter, constantly exchanging looks, discovering new identities with each new role, revealing yet another side to the media, exposing only what you want to expose, where charm is cynically scripted, hiding the real truth behind the scenes.  Similarly, there are baffling twists and turns ahead that may leave an audience perplexed and asking questions, yet following the clues, Jill’s persistence pays off, but not before her journey becomes a surprisingly fresh riff on hard-boiled detective capers, slyly subverting the genre, with Jill becoming the alter ego of the writer/director, where they seem to be in a running dialogue with each other in a kind of symbiotic relationship, literally matching wits with all the other characters.  At one point, decked out in black leather gear from head to toe, she seems to be the answer to a Russ Meyer fantasy.  Still, the pulsating rhythm and tone, along with the remarkable look of the film is attributable to the director in this brilliantly paced film, feeling electric at times, and always enjoyable, showing there’s no special tricks required for good filmmaking. 

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.