Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS                  C             
USA  (123 mi)  2014  ‘Scope d:  Spike Lee              Kickstarter page

Spike Lee has reached a troublesome point in his career, initially thwarted from making the Jackie Robinson story that he’d been trying to make for over twenty years due to lack of funding, only to find himself in a mysterious gulf of sudden irrelevance where his career has been redefined by the remakes of other people’s movies, where many scratched their heads over his choice to remake the Korean torture porn classic, Park Chan-wook’s OLD BOY (2003), a disastrous $30 million dollar venture in 2013 that became one of the biggest box office bombs of his entire career, leaving him working in small television projects while struggling for the major financing needed for a feature film.  Left to his own devises, he initiated a Kickstarter campaign (Kickstarter page), raising just under a million and a half dollars to remake Bill Gunn’s relatively obscure Blaxploitation film GANJA & HESS (1973), a black vampire film, supposedly a rival to BLACULA (1972), but shot on a $350,000 budget.  The film was something of a surprise, the only American film to be shown during Critics Week at Cannes in 1973, where the director was determined to create something far more ambitious than a genre film, using vampirism as a metaphor to explore the idea of addiction in all its forms while introducing specifically black themes that had traditionally been left out of American cinema.  Gunn was a television actor who previously wrote the screenplay to Hal Ashby’s offbeat THE LANDLORD (1970), who ironically died just a few months before the Cannes premiere of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), but this overlooked feature is a part of the post 60’s black independent film movement that Lee felt was in need of rediscovery, and if only out of curiosity, this film will lead many prospective viewers back to that original film.  

Much like Gus van Sant’s shot-for-shot 1998 remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Lee’s film, shot in just 16 days, is at times a similar scene-for-scene remake that feels weakly unfocused and out of time, paying homage to a film and an era that remains puzzlingly off the radar for most viewers.  And for those who lived to experience the revitalization of American cinema in the 70’s, largely due to the diminished power of major Hollywood film studios, unleashing untapped energy with a ferocity of spirit and imagination, Lee’s bland, badly acted, and almost wooden remake sadly falls far short.  Perhaps, like Scorsese or Tarantino, Lee might have simply promoted an updated restoration of the original film and distributed Gunn’s film in arthouses across the country.  Viewers probably would have been better served.  Instead we are treated to another Spike Lee bust, as the film was initially released over the Internet before an extremely limited release, where most people will be viewing this film on television.  While this tactic worked with Lee’s splendid Katrina documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), initially shown on HBO, there is little word-of-mouth buzz spreading any interest in this film, which may only titillate the interest of film scholars.  The story of both films is nearly identical, where the unique interest is that it doesn’t follow the normal rules for European originated vampires, where you won’t see the enlarged teeth from a typical first bite or a stake to the heart, no coffins to sleep in the daytime, and no flying bats, but immortality can still be achieved, though it follows a path with a direct link to Africa.         

Dr. Hess Green (Stephen Tyrone Williams) is a renowned art scholar and black archaeologist with an expertise in African civilization, living an excluded life of wealth and extravagance on the island of Martha’s Vineyard where the film was shot.  Traveling by a chauffeur driven Rolls-Royce, his home is a lavish, museum-like display of African artifacts that are spread throughout his luxurious estate, where one item in particular, an Ashanti dagger is used when his trusted assistant, Lafayette Hightower (Elvis Nolasco in a role originally played by director Bill Gunn), grows delirious in a drunken state that resembles a nightmarish, out of control dream, stabbing Dr. Green and killing him with the cursed ancient knife before wandering offscreen and killing himself.  Green mysteriously survives, however, with no sign of a wound, but an insatiable appetite for raw human blood.  Seemingly immortal, his new life is defined by this unquenchable desire, seen driving into the city stealing blood bags from a hospital, but also preying upon lower class women, an unsuspecting prostitute and then another young mother.  However he is soon visited by Hightower’s widow Ganja (Zaraah Abrahams) in an angered state looking for her missing husband, as she hasn’t heard a word about his whereabouts, but Green’s surrounding wealth has an intoxicating effect upon her, leaving her open to his powers of seduction, where she mysteriously joins Green in a world of the undead. Veering between B-movie exaggerated comedy, soft porn and horror, Lee combines a stylistic arthouse aesthetic along with a voluptuous former girlfriend named Tangier (Naté Bova) to introduce Ganja into the ways of blood feeding, using the director’s own fascination with lesbian sex and porn, prominently displayed in SHE HATE ME (2004) and Girl 6 (1996), becoming a confusing, mixed-up mosaic of salacious nudity, gratuitous gore, and often grotesque violence.  While the film wants to articulate a weighty societal message, what’s missing is any sense of urgency, as much of what we see feels laughable, more like an exercise in camp, where many of the themes of the original, discovering one’s true racial identity or exploring the contrast between African spirituality and Southern gospel Christianity, simply get lost in translation.  

The Sitter

THE SITTER               C                    

USA  (81 mi)  2011  d:  David Gordon Green

One way to approach David Gordon Green’s descent away from art films and into the more lucrative Hollywood industry is to think of this movie as little more than an extended short, as basically this is a one idea film, all the things that could go wrong with a completely inept and unqualified babysitter, using a variation on WC Field’s contemptuous view of children theme and then attacking the audience with anarchistic set pieces that will either leave you laughing at the derisive nature of the beast or bolting from the theater in disgust.  If the idea is simply to provoke a reaction, then Green has likely succeeded, though this was probably more fun on the set than the finished product onscreen, likely the case in far too many comedies.  What’s missing here is a cohesive whole, as instead it’s something of a sprawling mess of various likely improvised ideas that never really come together.   

Rather than a just missed comedy, this may be a huge quasi experimental misstep that is amusing by just how far away from comedy this movie occasionally travels, reminiscent of the Macaulay Caulkin HOME ALONE (1990, 1992) series which was one extended misadventure filled with ludicrous set ups and sight gags that in themselves became ridiculous after awhile.  What this mostly resembles, however, are the Doctor Seuss children stories, where kids are left pretty much on their own with no discernable adult presence where they run amok creating havoc and mischief for a brief period before everything returns back to normal by the time their parents get home.  That’s pretty much the film, which includes the random screw ups of the adult sitter in charge, the man-child Jonah Hill as the clueless Noah.  It always helps if the kids can have mature moments when they act much older than their ages, allowing each, by the end, to benefit from the time spent with one other. 

From the outset, using his familiar cinematographer Tim Orr, Green loves to use inventive camera shots, from double to triple screen, superimposed imagery, slow mo and fast action sequences, and even a sideways cam, all a bit offsetting and disruptive from the comfort zone of the viewer, but also offering a taste of the world being viewed from a slightly different vantage point that has tilted askew.  While some may find stereotypes offensive, they are fairly prevalent in comedy sketches, and this film has a field day exuding the pleasures of exploitation flicks which are in the wheelhouse of this director who grew up with 70’s and 80's films.  Taking a riff on the American mainstream family portrayal, Green takes a look at living in the posh neighborhoods of the lily white suburbs with overly pampered and alienated kids, clueless parents who have their own sexual repressive and adulterous issues, where one parent routinely has to look away in order to maintain the high quality of life to which they’ve become accustomed, where morality is a smokescreen, something you purchase in order to impress others with instead of upholding any personal convictions. 

This is the backdrop of the story, where Noah, an aimless, overweight and unemployed twenty something who has amounted to nothing in life is still living at home with his single mother, where they both commiserate over the evils of his absent dad who has left them high and dry, now running a highly successful business yet still lags woefully behind on his alimony payments.  Noah routinely degrades himself for female companionship, where self-absorbed Marisa (Air Gaynor) allows him to pleasure her while keeping all other sexual contact off the table.  When his mom finally has a chance to go out and have an evening of her own, it’s nearly spoiled when the couple she’s going to a social event with loses their babysitter at the last moment, allowing Noah to fill in, where he’s interestingly introduced to three misfits, Slater (Max Records), the overmedicated kid who's pretty much afraid of all human contact, Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), the adopted Central American child with a penchant for explosives and wearing cowboy boots with pajamas, and Blithe (Landry Bender), the reincarnation of Jonbenet Ramsey, an adorable young child with an eye on becoming a celebrity with a flair for gossip and the excessive use of sparkle make up. 

When Marisa calls from a party offering full sexual contact if he’ll score some coke and come pick her up, all bets are off on conventional babysitting as Noah stashes the kids in the back of the family minivan for a rollicking escapade on the town, where he has a few stops to make along the way, all of which explode in his face with things going wrong, including a hilarious trip to a warehouse filled with scantily clad male bodybuilders where a gay escort on roller skates (Sean Patrick Doyle) leads them inside to see Karl (Sam Rockwell), the coked up, out of control drug dealer (with his portrait on the wall) who wants everybody to be his friend, actually ranking them by number, where he’s continually challenged to make on the spot readjustments with each new person he meets.  Karl believes in manly hugs, loyalty and likeability, pointing guns at anyone who falls out of line, which is Noah when Rodrigo makes off with Karl’s personal stash.  Turning into something of a spirited, free wheeling romp, where blacksploitation action, gangsta rap, and a gorgeous black girl friend Roxanne (Kylie Bunbury) literally drop out of the sky offering him a reprieve from the mediocrity of life in the suburbs.  A lighthearted story about being true to yourself, it’s a minor riff on middle class complacency, much of which feels generic and is not so much about anything as expressing a message of creating your own unique style of living, where it’s best not to take anyone or anything for granted. While enjoyable at times, it’s also completely forgettable.