Tag: film noir

SUPERFLY – MORALLY TOXIC AND OFFENSIVE

 

SHORT TAKE:

Remake of a bad 1972 movie of the same name which lionizes a drug dealer.

WHO SHOULD SEE IT:

NO ONE!

LONG TAKE:

Coined by the French critic Nino Frank in 1946, the dictionary defines a "FILM NOIR" (literally French for "film dark") as: a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace. This title applies to such movies as: The Third Man, Chinatown, Scarface, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Sin City, Bladerunner, The Big Sleep, White Heat, and Strangers on a Train. In all of these movies, superior by several factors of ten, there is a cautionary tale in which we expect the protagonist of questionable motive and character to get his comeuppance through repentance, death, prison or some combination.

Not so with Superfly. It is a bewilderment to me why someone thought remaking a particularly bad movie from the 1970's was a good idea. But they did. This year's Superfly is an exact replica of the movie from 1972. The original Super Fly's iconic, though dated, funky, Motown music by Curtis Mayfield was the only thing that could even marginally recommend it and is a certainly better soundtrack than the excessively profane, garish, unnecessarily loud, repetitive technopop nonsense that prevades the 2018 version. Although admittedly, the 2018 version has much higher quality production values and slightly better acting, the story, and a goofy choice for the lead character's hair, remains precisely the same.

SPOILERS

The story, written by Alex Tse and directed by Julien Christian Lutz who, understandably, goes by the pseudonym Director X (I would not want my real name on this piece of trash either), revolves about a young man who goes by the name of Youngblood (so dubbed because he was the youngest of his gang when he was a kid) Priest (because he wears a cocaine spoon in the shape of a cross), also inexplicably known as Superfly (Trevor Jackson). Superfly sports a hairdo, of which he is inordinately proud, which bears a comedic and distracting resemblence to the skull piece worn by Alan Rickman's Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest.  Superfly is also the leader of one of several cocaine dealer gangs in Atlanta. He plans on one final score to fund his retirement. All the gangs co-exist in relative peace until one day Juju (Kaalan Walker), a member of the Snow Patrol (laughably outfitted in white EVERYTHING), inexplicably becomes jealous of Youngblood's money and women, despite the fact Juju's own boss assures him that he has all the money and women he could possibly ever desire.

When leaving a strip club one night Juju picks a fight then takes a pot shot at Priest, misses and hits a bystander. This starts a chain of events which will ultimately lead, after a labrynthian trail of carnage and graphic sexuality, to Youngblood getting everything he wants. During the course of the movie his best friend, Eddie (Jason Mitchell) gets Freddie (Jacob Ming-Trent), Youngblood's enforcer killed, and the Snow Patrol wiped out. Youngblood ingratiates himself with the corrupt Mayor of Atlanta by plying him with cocaine and his own girlfriend. Youngblood also betrays Scatter (Michael Kenneth Williams), Youngblood's mentor and supplier, by cutting a deal with Scatter's supplier, a Mexican cartel drug lord, (Esai Morales), eventually getting Scatter killed.

Youngblood gets all the parties with whom he has done deals to turn on each other, LOTS of people get killed, after which Youngblood buys a yacht and sets sail in luxury with his surviving girlfriend. Not that any of the "victims" in this travesty have clean hands, but instead of a protagonist, Youngblood is more of a very clever King Rat standing on a pile of corpses, including, but never ever mentioned, his cocaine snorting customers.

In short, we have a drug dealer and thug who has made millions by destroying the lives of untold thousands of other people, who gets away with a lifetime supply of sex and money.

In a previous blog I exposed  Ocean's 8, in which we are supposed to side with a group of career criminals who steal, destroy and sell priceless historic jewelry from a donation-funded museum, in order to fund their own private vanity projects.

Both Superfly and Ocean's 8 ask the audience to applaud the "cleverness" of egotistic, sociopathic criminals, who harm the innocent and whose only "virtue" is that we see the proceedings from their point of view. The appalling parade of immoral, ruthless, selfish activites we are expected to cheer on in both cinematic obscenities is nauseating and offensive. If you are curious about the plot just read the wikipedia.org version of Super Fly from 1972 and you will get a pretty detailed idea of what the 2018 movie is about. Don't bother to watch any of them.

Cast and crew of all three movies should be ashamed of themselves. Keep your children away from these toxic movies.

TERMINAL – BIZARRE FILM NOIR LOOSELY BASED UPON AN ALICE IN WONDERLAND TROPE

SHORT TAKE:

Macabre murder mystery of intrigue and betrayal set in a futuristic 1950's heavily referencing Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

WHO SHOULD SEE IT:

ONLY adults who have a strong stomach and a taste for true film noir

LONG TAKE:

"Terminal" (WITHOUT the article in front of the word, NOT THE Terminal which is a 2004 Tom Hanks dramedy about an immigrant stuck indefinitely in an airport terminal because of political turmoil in his home country) as the title of this 2018 movie, is a play on a number of aspects of the movie. Much of it takes place in and around an airport terminal – the obvious reference. One of the characters can be described adjectively as "terminal". And "terminal" is the final end to which many of the characters seem to be rushing for one reason and another either voluntarily or not.

The premise of the movie, written and directed by Vaughn Stein (who has been crew for such disparate movies as World War Z, the live action Beauty an the Beast and Les Mis) follows the machinations of Annie,  played by Margot Robbie who seems to be making a career of playing crazier and crazier women – Harlequin in Suicide Squad, Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, Mrs. Milne in Goodbye, Christopher Robin, and now this. Annie is a professional assassin whose bloody and coldblooded antics might have given even Harlequin a frowny pause.

A reference to the classic nihilistic play Waiting for Godot by  Samuel Beckett may seem like a non-sequitur at this point but bear with me. Waiting for Godot is a nihilistic play about two hoboes waiting for a third man who never shows up and in the end they hang themselves because nothing really matters. The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter harkens back to Waiting for Godot. The Dumb Waiter is about two gangsters waiting in a basement for orders on their next job and sinister unspoken messages that come through a pipe from an unseen manipulator. Both of those plays have an absurdist nature to them imparted in the characters willingness to wait in slavish patience for someone or something which may or may not be evilly playing with them.

I mention those plays because there is a certain element in the atmosphere common to them and to Terminal. There is even a prolonged and crucial scene in which two hit men (played by Dexter Fletcher and Max Irons) wait in a room for days for orders on their next kill from a client who no one has ever seen. This is more than a passing reference and feeds in to the physical and mental anarchy that pervades this creepy night-lit underground outing. Speaking of which, night and day light play important features too. Hiding in the dark. Things not what they appear to be but hiding in shadows. Frankly, I think the director missed a beat by not filming it entirely in black and white. But then we couldn't get the stark and almost shockingly red lips which precede Annie's entrance in almost every scene she's in.

This is a rough and thoughtful movie. But, alas, also a bit boring as its pace is too slow. Much like a walk which should have been taken at a jog, Terminal drags on with too many flashbacks and too much lingering on a single image, like viewing a stake out through the eyes of someone distracted by illness or grief. If it sounds like a depressing movie – well, it is. Not that that should dissuade anyone in and of itself. But there should be a purpose to enduring a movie like this. And satisfying a somewhat predictable series of surprise endings just is not enough.

Margot Robbie does her dead level best as a restrained psychopath. Simon Pegg (Shawn of the Dead, the last few Mission Impossibles, and the new Star Trek's new Scotty), performs the most serious role I've ever seen him in, as the terminally ill teacher. And Mike Myers (the voice of Shrek himself), who has not been in a feature length movie since  2009's Inglourious Basterds, is almost unrecognizable as a ubitquitous and mysterious janitor who seems to know way more than he should. (It's been so long snce Mr. Myers appeared in other than a voiced part that someone expressed surprise to me not just that he was in such a dark movie but that he was still ALIVE!)

While definitely not for everyone's taste and MOST definitely NOT for other than the older mature audience this is an intriguing movie which is mesmerizing in the same way that some National Geographic specials featuring insects devouring their kill are hard to watch but hard to look away from. There's a lot of profanity, a number of scenes of a sexual nature and some graphic violence as you might imagine in a movie about hit—people.

There are a number of references both subtle and overt to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, including outright quotes from his book. Thematically there is chaos, bizarreness, unpredictability, people being often both "bigger" and "smaller" than you might have thought they were in the beginning, and even the familiar and most obvious Alice in Wonderland trope of an actual hole in the ground. So I don't think it would be inappropriate, as Alice might have said, for my final words on this film to be …. curiouser and curiouser.