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 Canyons

THE CANYONS        C-                   

USA  (99 mi)  2013  d:  Paul Schrader 

Something of a navel-gazing flick, a film infatuated with Los Angeles and voyeuristic window gazing at the supposed good looking people that comprise the latest edition of overindulgent Hollywood youth culture.  With a title that suggests a B-movie television series melodrama of luridly interconnected sexual affairs by vacuous, coke snorting, paranoid driven twentysomethings who all want to be in the sex business, who 24 hours a day believe they are part of the beautiful people that comprise the decadent, high-society world of Los Angeles, filling stylishly modern but sterile apartments that appear to be sets for magazine pieces, where what the characters that inhabit this world have in common is wretchedly horrible acting performances, where like a bad make-up job, they all seem to be intruding into this picture from far more inferior movies.  While Schrader will forever be known as the screenwriter for Scorsese’s monumental 70’s film Taxi Driver (1976), he’s always been suspect as a director, where his choice of screenwriting material from Bret Easton Ellis, the brilliant writer of American Psycho (2000), reads like sleazy and sensationalist TV, where it’s hard to take any of this seriously.  But if the point is to make something so awful that it actually becomes a parody of the sleazy world that it portrays, well, it’s still D-grade material, where people will only laugh at the damage done to Lindsay Lohan’s once promising career, and how at 26, she is now channeling the aged, over-the-hill Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BLVD. (1950), where you can just hear her say to herself,  “I *am* big.  It's the *pictures* that got small,” telling director Schrader “All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.”  In that same picture, William Holden narrates “Sometimes it's interesting to see just how bad bad writing can be.  This promised to go the limit.”  Who knew that the future would hold new challenges in this regard? 

The best things to say about the film are the exquisite Hollywood locations, luxurious homes in the hills, and interior production design that couldn’t be more exact, like the perfect look of a Kubrick film, and there are some interesting camera shots by John DeFazio.  But overall the film plays out like a campy television series that accentuates good looks and gossip, where people are in over their heads on a conceptual project that simply never comes together.  While there are noirish tendencies, this might have played better as a Black and White film noir, as it opens and closes on still photos of old abandoned moviehouses that sit alone in a state of decay, something of an eyesore on a desolate landscape, which may as well be the future of each one of these beautiful people who hope to use their good looks and sexual prowess to guide them to fame and stardom.  While Lohan as the supposedly sexually uninhibited Tara is not the real surprise, as her train wreck celebrity history as a nonstop party girl in and out of rehab centers leaves one with low expectations going in, the real surprise is that the awkward script is so cringeworthy and that these actors take themselves so seriously, as there’s not an ounce of intended humor anywhere to be seen, yet one can’t help but laugh *at* what we are seeing, as it’s basically just a story about people talking endlessly about themselves, where that’s all that matters in the world, nothing else, where they’re constantly worried what others think of them, always on a high state of alert in their paranoia about their relationships, yet they spend they’re lives “acting,” playing nonchalant, pretending that none of this matters, where they try to convince one another that everything’s cool even as they’re unraveling emotionally and freaking out. 

It’s not even appropriate to identify this as the world of sleaze, as it doesn’t do justice to the picturesque meaning of the word, as one thinks of sleaze with a certain old Hollywood charm or Russ Meyer lowgrade style, cheap films often shot in shadowy, Black and White film noir, where it’s a mix of lurid sex, booze, crime, tongue-in-cheek dialogue, and rampant immorality, often peppered with unintended humor, where characters are perceived as over the edge, or certainly willing to cross any moral line.  What’s so startling about this film is just how uninteresting everybody is, as there are only a few characters that appear onscreen, and they are completely forgettable, even as we are watching them, as there’s no hint of personality or screen chemistry anywhere.  Perhaps most memorable is James Deen as Christian, in real life something of a porn superstar making the crossover into legitimate films, playing Tara’s overcontrolling boyfriend, a trust fund movie mogul living on his father’s wealth, whose idea of fun is constantly trolling the Internet with his iPhone in his hand, searching for interested sex partners for himself and Tara, which he then films.  He’s a completely condescending, overstylized, and artificial character that continually mocks anyone that so much as hints of having any emotion, where at times he appears to be a younger apprentice version of Christian Bale in American Psycho.  While he’s obviously just an obnoxious, self-centered creep, Tara has left her real love interest, Ryan (Nolan Gerard Funk) and his floundering career as a Hollywood bartender, to live a lavish lifestyle in one of the most beautiful homes in the Hollywood hills.  An while feigning love, the two are about as openly suspicious of one another as deathly enemies, resorting to nefarious surveillance tactics to keep each under their watchful eye.  If any of this mattered, or if there was a spark of life anywhere on the set, there might be a movie, but it’s all lost in a superficial glaze of Hollywood sleepwalking.  By the way, where was Nicholas Cage during the shoot?  He might have provided some well-needed, unhinged energy that is sorely missing.

I'm So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros)

I’M SO EXCITED (Los amantes pasajeros)        B     
Spain  (90 mi)  2013  d:  Pedro Almodóvar                 Official site 

Something of a throwback to the 70’s, a simpler era that delighted in VHR’s, video games, and expanding the limits of broadbased comedy with the launch of unedited cable telelvision, where social themes were often targeted with ever-expanding comic satire, not the least of which was the prevalence of more gay oriented characters.  But the nation as a whole has been slower to accept gay liberation than Civil Rights or feminist issues, largely due to the strict moral intolerance of certain religious groups, which extends to political leaders.  Pedro Almodóvar, however, has been on the forefront of queer cinema since the early 80’s, where his first commercially distributed film, PEPI, LUCI, BOM AND OTHER GIRLS LIKE MOM (1980), became a cult sensation and was actually released while the original bad boy of queer cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was still alive and making movies.  A film with zany characters that captured the spirit and sexual freedom of the times, with its campy style, outrageous humor, and explicit sexuality, it is the only film with an appearance by the director in one of his own films, where he’s seen as the judge of a penis size competition.  While both directors were among the first on the arthouse circuit to be seen internationally promoting openly gay films, Fassbinder had a tendency to attack a complacent contemporary bourgeois society, while Almodóvar’s subversive, counterculture nature was reflected in his earlier years writing comics and stories for underground magazines, featuring the marginalized lives of women, homosexuals, transsexuals, and drug addicts, where his satiric themes are often bathed in exaggerated Sirkian melodrama and extreme artificiality, using color as a way to express volatile emotions.  While Fassbinder was part of the New German Cinema movement challenging the political failings of postwar reconstruction developments, Almodóvar was part of a Madrid cultural renaissance that followed the death of Franco, unleashing a radically different agenda, which included carrying the mantle of advancing queer cinema after the death of Fassbinder at the premature age of 37 in 1982.    

Following several films with darker and grimmer themes, Almodóvar’s latest is one of his campier efforts, taking place almost entirely on an airplane from Madrid to Mexico City, where you’re almost surprised John Waters is not a passenger on this plane, as he would have found this his ultimate dream flight.  Set in the claustrophobic confines of exclusively business and first class passengers and the busy dealings inside the cockpit, as both the other air stewardesses and all the economy passengers have been sedated for the flight, called the “economy class syndrome,” depicting a middle class deep in slumber, seen as mindless and sheepish followers (where only the rich stay awake to plot the future), as they are in several Buñuel movies, VIRIDIANA (1961) or THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962).  The film is a demented chamber drama of drugs, alcohol, and sexual excess further exaggerated by an all gay flight crew who have their own way of making passengers (and each other) comfortable.  With an inner-title that announces everything we are about to see is a work of fiction and bears no resemblance to reality, the audience is forewarned that everything that follows is a sunny Almodóvarian fantasy, splashed in color and a mocking artificiality, more of a coming out party celebrating the freedom of being gay, an over-embellished satire that pokes fun at queer culture while at the same time reveling in all manner of gay stereotypes.  What’s always interesting is there’s no requirement that the actors are actually gay themselves, but the beauty is that there be no reservations in playing gay characters.  In effect, that is the uniquely tolerant spirit underlying the liberating aspects of the film, that gays can be just as silly and stupid, but also observant, caring, and very much in love.  This film exaggerates the boundaries through overblown melodrama, but certainly humanizes the trio of gay flight attendants whose lives unravel with the zany passengers like an ongoing soap opera.  Once they discover the landing gear is missing and they’re simply circling aimlessly until receiving instructions on what to do next, the flight crew spends their time tossing down shots of tequila, drinking more champagne, whisky and wine, not to mention marijuana and the somewhat rare mescaline tablets, you’d think they’d all be walking on air with no need of a plane, but this eventually turns into a sex farce, where the Spanish title is “fleeting lovers,” all designed to calm the nerves.

Because of the stated emergency, the film suggests a state of paralysis, like a flying purgatory in the air accompanied by underlying feelings of fear and uncertainty, not really knowing what will happen when they try to land, but disaster is a distinct possibility, which may parallel the economic flux that is currently sapping the energy of Spain of late, as no one really has an answer for the economic woes, where just under 27% of the nation is currently unemployed, while the rate for those between the ages of 16 and 24 is 57%, calling them Spain’s lost generation.  But in this film, everyone’s heads are in the clouds and there is little interest in facing reality, where passengers storm the cockpit to register complaints about the service, which resembles a Marx Brothers routine, but when one of the flight crew, whose Pinocchio-like fate is he cannot tell a lie, spills the beans on everybody’s sexual interests, it quickly clears the room as everyone is suddenly familiar with everybody else all of a sudden.  To fill time and to alleviate nerves, the flight trio mimes an absurdly comic dance routine to the Pointer Sister’s “I’m So Excited,” I'm So Excited (Official Trailer) - In Theatres July 5 2013 - YouTube (60 seconds), though it appears no one on the plane is even paying attention, as they’re all mired in their own emotional distress, where the only available phone can be heard throughout the entire plane, offering no privacy, so one by one passengers call home and unearth their tiny tragedies that play out like serial episodes of Days of Our Lives, while each of the other passengers listen intently, enthralled by the elevated human drama.  These result in a series of smaller films within the film, where contact with people on the ground allows Almodóvar to extend his fantasy world to include overlapping vignettes of hyper real life incidents, adding additional characters, expanding the parameters of the story, and drawing a more vivid picture of the passengers on the plane, all of whom seem to be protecting secrets.  While much is sexually suggested in this film, some of which resembles late night porn on TV, nothing is actually shown, so this is in reality a rather mild and tame version of the subversive film this pretends to be.  While the film doesn’t delve too deeply into the human condition, nonetheless, it goes places few films dare to go by flaunting a free wheeling, guilt free sexuality, showing Almodóvar still has a wildly exaggerated sense of humor, with actors that effortlessly accentuate his rapid fire wit and screwball comedy, while adding plenty of decorous style and panache.