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<\/a>I have so many to write about that I figured I\u2019d do them in reverse chronological order of when they were filmed. Today\u2019s post covers 2023 \u2013 2000.<\/p>\n
They Cloned<\/strong> Tyrone<\/strong><\/em>: This movie is so fun, so joyful in its plunge into a stylized Black cultural world that mixes nostalgia for the bad old Blaxploitation days and hypercontemporary references, that you almost don\u2019t notice how much Afropessimism is in its DNA. Tyrone<\/em> loves its characters, even though (or because!) they\u2019re intentionally stereotypical. There\u2019s only so much distance between a stereotype and a hero! The burnt-orange, dusky yellow, neon-and-streetlamps lighting is gorgeous, the music is sinister and plot-relevant, and there is just enough exposition and explanation but not too much. (There is no US<\/em> type scene where the movie explains its metaphysics.)<\/p>\n There are a couple hard-hitting plot twists; for me, the most powerful one is the one about personal guilt, when they figure out how the cloners are picking who to clone. This movie isn\u2019t as surreal and individual as, say, Sorry to Bother You\u2013<\/em>it\u2019s a commercial product\u2013but it doesn\u2019t feel sanded-down. Like okay, is it fully thought-through? It is not. Is it saying something, not just mouthing Twitter-revolutionary platitudes but trying to say something raw and real? Yes.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s interesting, too\u2026 I watched some screeners for an upcoming series, which I can\u2019t review yet. That show has some striking similarities with Tyrone<\/em> in everything from specific cultural references to broad themes: is success different from liberation, if you join \u2019em does that mean you\u2019ve beaten \u2019em, etc. But Tyrone<\/em>\u2018s world seemed so much bigger\u2013and it\u2019s important that our heroes don\u2019t use elite institutional power at any point. (Spoilers for that thing where Yo-Yo tried to tip off the Washington<\/em> Post, I guess.) Their only allies are sketchy people: sometimes brave people, in one case a very smart person, but people who have never \u201cbeaten the odds\u201d or even risen to the occasion.\u00a0 There\u2019s a kind of disrespectability politics here, or \u201cparticipatory democracy is for jackasses too!\u201d, and I loved that, as a jackass. In a better world, a very different political movement would have adopted the slogan, Deplorable Lives Matter.<\/p>\n Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse<\/strong><\/em>: Thrillingly inventive visuals, an absolute can\u2019t-miss movie in spite of having imho (imho!!!) not much to say and insisting on saying it anyway. Main characters are appealing, I mean it\u2019s Spider-Man, when you buy a Snickers bar you expect it to taste how a Snickers bar does and you like it. \u2026No, thinking back, I\u2019ll say that the writers did work to make Miles and Gwen a bit more individual and lived-in than that analogy suggests; and the plethora of Spiderpeople (and Spider-Cat!) was full of both fun visual gags and delightful characters. Hobie, the Spider-Punk, struck an especially delicate balance as a corporate franchise character whose actions and motivations all made sense coming from an anarchist punk. Also he looked rad, come on. Like a zine that\u2019s a person.<\/p>\n As contemporary kids\u2019 movie messages go (why do they have to tell us messages? why do the messages have to be moral in nature?), \u201cNobody else can write your story for you\u201d is fine, I guess. I was bored by all the lecturing about the nature of the *~*multiverse*~* and I suspect they tried too hard to wring metaphor from something that is ultimately just about the decisions of a corporation in pursuit of pelf. There\u2019s a side order of, \u201cDon\u2019t trust people who tell you to sacrifice another person for the greater good,\u201d which was allowed to emerge through the storytelling rather than in exposition, and I\u2019ll admit that the film is a fairly insightful portrayal of how desperate many spunky teens are to give away their hearts to some plausible non-parent authority figure.<\/p>\n But mostly I was just in awe of how I never knew what I\u2019d see next. A Michelangelo sketch crashing into a modern-day cartoon! A melting teen watercolor world of lilting poignancy!\u00a0 Tilting angles, crazy action, nice punctuation of the overwhelming scenes with calm, character-driven scenes\u2026 a wild ride through a hundred different ways to see the world.<\/p>\n The 25th Hour<\/strong><\/em>: Spike Lee\u2019s post-9\/11 movie, about a low-level NYC crook trying to navigate everybody else\u2019s emotional needs during his going-away party, the night before he goes upstate to prison. Stellar acting from Edward Norton as the shlimazl and Rosario Dawson as his possibly-snitchin\u2019 girlfriend; extremely 2002 acting from Anna Paquin as a high school girl who\u2019s hot for teacher. A terrific opening, not sentimental even though it touches things people get really sentimental about. Two really breathtaking set pieces. One is an intensely Spike Lee montage of ethnic etc stereotypes which is not-particularly-covertly a love letter to all the rotten people of the Big Apple. It pulls some punches, but imho that makes sense given that it\u2019s a rant by someone who is still a Catholic schoolboy underneath it all. And the second one is a dream, an alternate ending, another life.<\/p>\n So far every Spike Lee movie I\u2019ve seen has been aggressively willing to have flaws, to do things that shouldn\u2019t work and don\u2019t quite, and this is no exception. There\u2019s a clunkiness to the rant montage, and yet it is also so heartfelt, so loving. The clunkiness is part of what makes it feel right! There are other moments where 25th Hour<\/em> tries stuff it probably shouldn\u2019t\u2013the high-school sexpot plot is distasteful without offering any compensatory insight (even Philip Seymour Hoffman as the teacher just dissolves into a bunch of nebbishy tics), and the Russian friend\/accomplice is an accent, not a person. But this is a personal movie, a film that wears its heart on its sleeve, and to share Spike Lee\u2019s vision for a couple hours is a precious thing.<\/p>\n The Lady and the Duke<\/strong><\/em>: I continue not to get Eric Rohmer\u2026. This French Revolution picture does startling things with backgrounds, if that\u2019s even the right term for them, moving people in and out of settings that look like paintings. People criticized the film for being reactionary, which like, if you don\u2019t want people to react against your revolution, maybe don\u2019t make it so brutal and repressive? But in fact I don\u2019t get the impression that Rohmer\u2019s central concerns here are political or historical. What comes out in the storytelling is the way our actions emerge from a tangle of sympathies, personal loyalties or debts owed, preexisting relationships we take for granted, and professed ideologies. The balance can shift between these various motivating forces, but people are rarely able to act from only the one motive they\u2019re willing to claim.<\/p>\n Dark Days<\/strong><\/em>: Marc Singer\u2019s first and only movie, and when you see it, you will be as shocked by that fact as I was. This is a documentary about people living in a tunnel under New York City, made in the second half of the 1990s with a lot of participation from the residents themselves. In fact Singer was also a resident<\/a>, though more voluntarily than most, as he became fascinated by the tunnel-dwellers and lived underground for a while.<\/p>\n