Alma's Rainbow has an interesting history. It was the first feature for writer/director Ayoka Chenzira, who had made several shorts. It was self-funded by Chenzira, and featured a cast of unknowns ... heck, 30 years later, and I still didn't recognize anyone but Isaiah Washington, who had a small role. The talent behind the camera was impressive, including editor Lillian Benson, cinematographer Ronald K. Gray, and costume designer Sidney Kai Innis, all of them new to me. The film looks great, helped by a fairly recent 4k restoration.
It's a coming-of-age movie, and I love the title: Rainbow is the daughter of Alma. It's a slice of life, and it offers a lot of insight into the culture of African-American women. There is a confidence in the film making that makes the movie feel "real". The acting is solid ... there's pretty much nothing bad I can say about the movie. It doesn't jump out at you, nor is that Chenzira's intention. It's never boring, and something is always catching your eye. It's an indie film that succeeds. It was ignored at the time, and was barely distributed, but the restoration resulted in the film finally getting the attention it has always deserved. It is one of 75 films selected for Slate's New Black Film Canon.
This is the first film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 1 is called "The American History of X Week":
Hollywood has a fickle relationship with the letter X. These days it's a popular (if increasingly uninspired) choice for the rare franchise that makes it to a tenth installment: The Land Before Time, Friday the 13th, The Fast and Furious, and Saw have all adopted the roman numeral. But before this new millennium fad, X meant something very different.
In 1968, in response to the desire for a more faceted system of ratings—and, in its early days, to promote the kind of artistic freedom the Motion Picture Production Code had quashed—the MPAA replaced its "approved" and "not approved" seals with a quartet of letters: G, M, R, and X. The X-rating indicated, simply, that a film was appropriate for adults only.
Soon after, in 1969, Midnight Cowboy burst onto the scene. Worried about exposing youngsters to the film's frank homosexual content and depictions of drug use, United Artists chose to self-apply the X-rating, hoping the choice would not only protect American youth but drum up publicity, too. Because the MPAA had failed to trademark their new content advisory system, everyone from Walt Disney to Gerard Damiano (director of Deep Throat) could slap any rating they wished on their work. And the porn industry wished. Once the floodgates had opened, however, the X-rating didn't last long. By 1973, Hollywood studios had given up on the rating (the adult film industry's tongue-in-cheek co-opting having soured it), and the purveyors of explicit films had done the same, instead preferring to use "XXX" to denote the strength of the adult content in their movies. The X-rating languished in Hollywood until 1990 (although independent and international filmmakers didn't shy away), when the MPAA replaced it with the newly minted—and trademarked—NC-17.
To kick off The Letterboxd Season Challenge's tenth installment (LSC10, incidentally, not LSCX), we take a look back at the original era of X. This week's challenge is to watch a mainstream (non-porn) MPAA X-rated film from the rating's 22-year lifespan, conveniently compiled in this list from C Collins.
In 1971, Huey Newton wrote an extensive analysis of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, beginning, "It is the first truly revolutionary Black film made and it is presented to us by a Black man." Newton found the film ripe for explication, and his lengthy piece provides insight into the film and the times. Watching Sweet Sweetback in 2024, we recognize it as a movie of its times, but it retains relevance today, for the situation for black men in America is only partly improved from 1971.
Speaking solely in terms of its impact on American cinema, Sweet Sweetback is trendsetting. Yes, it was "rated X by an all-white jury", and it comes by that rating honestly, with several seemingly unsimulated sex scenes. There is also extreme violence, but these scenes affect us differently depending on who is performing the violence. When white men beat black men, we feel anger ... when black men retaliate, we feel redemption.
As a kid, I remember hearing music on FM radio made by Van Peebles. It was like nothing I'd heard, a combination of jazzy underpinnings and poetic readings. Van Peebles told of lives outside of my white suburban situation, and it was memorable ... it opened up some odd new worlds. Van Peebles is present on the soundtrack to Sweet Sweetback, backed by Earth, Wind & Fire, who released their first two albums in 1971. What sounded like music from outer space on the radio makes perfect sense as the accompaniment to Sweetback's adventures.
Van Peebles worked on a very low budget, partly because no big studios would finance him, although that gave him the independence he needed. He uses an experimental touch at times ... the film has roots in the French New Wave. Things get repetitive near the end, but it doesn't ruin the movie. There is a clear auteur behind the film, as befits a movie where the same person is producer, director, writer, editor, star, and soundtrack contributor. No one else could have made Sweet Sweetback. Along with Shaft, also released in 1971, Sweetback also kicked off the blaxploitation genre.
I'm not sure, but I don't think I've seen this movie since it came out more than 30 years ago. It had a huge impact on me, in particular, the performance of Larenz Tate as O-Dog.
It's an amazing supporting cast: Glenn Plummer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Samuel L. Jackson (I have seen him in more movies than any other actor, 41 and counting), Khandi Alexander, Arnold Johnson, Saafir, Pooh Man, MC Eiht, Too $hort, Bill Duke, Charles S. Dutton, and more. Tate's co-lead, Tyrin Turner, is by necessity less flamboyant, but he is effective. But it's Tate who grabs the screen. Credit to the Hughes Brothers and writer Tyger Williams for creating the character Tate portrays. Over the past 30 years, Larenz Tate has shown his versatile side ... his work isn't defined by O-Dog. But I didn't know that in 1993, and his acting is so believable I forgot he was an actor.
O-Dog seems to take joy out of killing people, and the way he shows off a surveillance tape of one of his murder/robberies is cringe-worthy, except Tate makes that seem joyful, too. The film is not exactly celebratory ... most of the main characters come to tragic ends due to their ways of life. But, in an odd way for a movie so full of excessive violence, the Hughes Brothers don't overplay their hands.
In 2002, a Brazilian film, City of God, reminded me a lot of Menace II Society. It's a better film, one of the all-time classics in fact, and the "O-Dog" character in the Brazilian movie makes O-Dog seem almost subdued. But it's no crime to fall short of a great movie like City of God, and Menace II Society is even better than I remembered it. It is astonishing that this was not only the directorial debut for the Hughes Brothers, who previously had only done a few music videos, but they were only 20 years old at the time.
This is the thirty-second film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2023-24", "A 33 week long challenge where the goal each week is to watch a previously unseen feature length film from a specified category." This is the 9th annual challenge, and my fifth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", and "2022-23"). Week 32 is called "Remembering Belafonte Week":
With his glowing, handsome face and silky-husky voice, [Harry] Belafonte was one of the first Black performers to gain a wide following on film and to sell a million records as a singer; many still know him for his signature hit "Banana Boat Song (Day-O)," and its call of "Day-O! Daaaaay-O." But he forged a greater legacy once he scaled back his performing career in the 1960s and lived out his hero Paul Robeson’s decree that artists are "gatekeepers of truth."
He stands as the model and the epitome of the celebrity activist. Few kept up with Belafonte’s time and commitment and none his stature as a meeting point among Hollywood, Washington and the civil rights movement.
This week, your task is to watch a film starring Harry Belafonte as we mark the first anniversary of his passing. Whether as an actor, singer, or activist, Belafonte was a formidable force, and the world is made poorer by his absence, yet undoubtedly richer in the wake of his presence.
It's a bit of a cheat to use this documentary as "a film starring Harry Belafonte," although it appears on the list we are supplied, so it's not an official cheat. Belafonte is fairly prominent, both as an example of black cinema and as a commentator on cinema. But the driving force behind Black Enough is writer/director Elvis Mitchell. whose career as a film critic spans more than 40 years.
The films that Mitchell chooses to demonstrate how blackness was presented in films are the usual. Two things make Black Enough especially valuable. First, he has a good selection of commentators, not just Belafonte, but also people like Laurence Fishburne, Whoopi Goldberg, Samuel L. Jackson, Margaret Avery, and Billy Dee Williams. Since Mitchell's primary focus is on the Black cinema of the 70s, he gives us Antonio Fargas, Glynn Turman, and others. There are behind the scenes people like director Charles Burnett and producer Suzanne De Passe. Even Zendaya turns up, saying "We have so many stories to tell. We just wanna see more of us existing in all different forms, and I think that is a common frustration, I think, amongst my peers. We just wanna see us just being kids or, like, in sci-fi, whatever."
It's Mitchell's take on 70s Black Cinema that is most important for the film. His vast knowledge of film matters, but he also shows a genuine affection for the movies and stars of the day that don't always get positive reactions. Pam Grier was almost a genre all by herself. Mitchell doesn't just show us Superfly, he talks about the sequels. And he discusses the more mainstream films of the day like Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues. There is a lot to learn from Black Enough, but Mitchell never talks down to his audience.
This film is as hard to describe as it is to pronounce its title. Letterboxd and the IMDB classify it as a documentary. Writer/director William Greaves produced more than 200 documentaries, and in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm he is the on-screen director and writer of the film, as himself. The actors all appear as themselves ... the only one you might recognize is Susan Anspach, two years before Five Easy Pieces. In the film, Greaves is making a movie with the actors ... the crew also appear in the film, and we see the process of filmmaking. We see the same scene over and over ... it seems to serve as a screen test for the various actors. The best equivalent I can come up with is Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up.
There is no real narrative thrust to the film, and the cinéma vérité appearance adds to the documentary feel. But I don't know ... sometimes it feels about as "real" as Curb Your Enthusiasm. Wikipedia describes it thusly: "Greaves creates a circular meta-documentary about a documentary, a documentary about a documentary and a documentary documenting a documentary about a documentary."
You can't make this stuff up. The IMDB tells us that "William Greaves believed that he had made a masterpiece, and that the only place to première it was the Cannes Film Festival. So he carried the print to France himself, where it was screened for programmers. However, the projectionist made the mistake of showing the reels out of order. The film was turned down. Greaves came home, figured he had made a mistake, and put the film in his closet." It appears to have mostly stayed in that closet until the early 90s, when it was shown once or twice. Steve Buscemi saw it and loved it ... Steven Soderberg soon joined the list of admirers. The film was finally re-released in 2005. It was named to the Slate Black Film Canon, and is #627 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time.
Biopics. I don't hate 'em, I see a lot of them, but I rarely look forward to them. My expectations are always low. I have never thought too hard about why that is. Biopics about musicians are especially problematic, because if they don't include the artist's music, there's a big hole in the center of the film, but if they do include the music, it's often in an attempt to tie events in the artist's life to specific songs, and I've always found that to be nonsense. Rocketman was an exceptionally awful example of this, since the lyrics which supposedly reflected things in Elton John's life were written by Bernie Taupin.
Another problem with biopics comes with the participation of people close to the figure in question. The Marley family was involved with the making of One Love, and the film has access to elements of Marley's life and music that might be missing from an "unauthorized" film. But as in most such cases, the result borders on hagiography: Marley is presented in a positive light, which might seem appropriate given his status as an almost godlike figure to his many fans, but it prevents the film from giving a more all-encompassing picture of Marley.
Also, while it's understandable to limit the film to a specific period in Marley's life (1976-1978), this means the musical focus is entirely on Bob Marley and the Wailers, with only rare considerations of the years when The Wailers included Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. OK, it's not a movie about those two, and however good their music was (as Wailers and as solo artists), their cultural impact is nothing like Marley's. But I missed Tosh and Bunny.
Biopics rise or fall in large part on the performances, and here, One Love succeeds. Kingsley Ben-Adir is excellent as Marley ... he makes the movie worth seeing. (He was also great as Malcolm X in One Night in Miami, a film that works in part because it's not a biopic but a fictionalized representation of a moment when four icons were together for a night.) Lashana Lynch, still only in her mid-30s, has offered a wide variety of roles as disparate as a 00-agent in a Bond movie, a warrior in The Woman King, and Maria Rambeau from the Marvel world. Now we can add her portrayal of Rita Marley to the list. The music sounds great in One Love, as well it might. It's a movie you'll enjoy while you're watching it. But down the road, you're more likely to listen to the music than you are to return to One Love, which is merely passable.
This is the twenty-first film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2023-24", "A 33 week long challenge where the goal each week is to watch a previously unseen feature length film from a specified category." This is the 9th annual challenge, and my fifth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", and "2022-23"). Week 21 is called "Afrofuturism Week":
Afrofuturism is an exciting subgenre of science-fiction movies that has been gaining traction in the past few years with mainstream offerings such as the Black Panther and Spider-Verse films, as well as the TV show Lovecraft Country. Afrofuturism is all about centering and taking pride in the Black experience in alternate or imagined realities where Black people can define themselves, potentially without the influence of Western ideas or understandings. These stories can inspire people to build toward a better future and question the past and present social structures that create and maintain cultural and economic inequality between races. Common tropes include the use of African iconography, a rich color palette, and a focus on how technology and culture intersect.
This week, let’s escape the real world and venture forth into a world of new realities made possible by Afrofuturism with this list here.
From the examples I have seen, I think I had a mistaken sense of what made Afrofuturism. I'd seen the mainstream offerings, the Black Panther and Spider-Verse films and the TV show Lovecraft Country. If I'd looked at the suggested list more closely, I might have had a better feel for what Neptune Frost might be like. Touki Bouki ("unencumbered by the 'rules' of cinema"), Sankofa ("uses time travel to place a woman from modern times back into the horrors of the old South"), Fast Color ("a superhero movie, although a very low-key one that can be approached as just a mysterious fantasy"). The introduction above of Afrofuturism is a useful description of what happens in Neptune Frost: "centering and taking pride in the Black experience in alternate or imagined realities where Black people can define themselves, potentially without the influence of Western ideas or understandings" including "the use of African iconography, a rich color palette, and a focus on how technology and culture intersect."
That describes Neptune Frost, but in truth it's a film that defies ordinary description. Saul Williams and Anisia Useyman create a unique world, rooted in Burundi but taking place in a future connected intrinsically to technology. A community of young adults, dedicated to a different kind of world, use unexplained hacking skills to subvert the larger society while staying hidden (China and Russia are initially blamed for the hacks). The connection to "The Internet" eventually destroys them, or rather, the discovery of the community by the outside world allows the powers that be to destroy them. One person remains ... I don't know if this was meant as a positive ending, perhaps it's meant to be ambiguous.
Oh, and it's a musical.
Gender fluidity, colonialism, and yes, science-fiction ... it's a unique blend. Willliams and Useyman deserve praise for creating something new. Sometimes inscrutable, but always fascinating to look at ... I, at least, had never seen anything like it.
American Fiction is based on Erasure, a novel by Percival Everett, and it's a model of how to adapt a novel to a film while retaining what makes the book interesting in the first place. It tells the story of Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed Monk (played by Jeffrey Wright), an African-American novelist and professor whose novels, which are heavily academic, don't get much of an audience from the readers who buy books. His agent says Monk needs to write books that are "more black", which Monk rejects out of hand. But when a new novel titled We's Lives in Da Ghetto, steeped in stereotypes (and thus "more black"), becomes an enormous best-seller, Monk decides to write a parody, which he calls My Pafology. A publisher gives him an enormous advance for the rights to the novel, after which a film producer offers even more money for the film rights before the book has even been published.
A crucial scene in the film occurs when Monk begins writing My Pafology (which becomes Fuck). Writer/director Cord Jefferson illuminates the scene from the book by having two of the characters (played brilliantly by Keith David and Okieriete Onaodowan) act out what Monk is writing, pausing occasionally to ask Monk just what he wants them to say. It's crucial, because it adds an honest, serious level to what is a mocking representation of stereotypes. One of the problems I had with the book is that Percival Everett includes the entirety of My Pafology, and he's far too good at it ... the book is as bad as it is supposed to be, and thus it's a burden to get through. Jefferson steps beyond the badness. (It helps that the book is only a few minutes in the movie, rather than ten chapters of a book.)
The characters, in general, are a bit nicer in the film. Issa Rae as the author of We's Lives in Da Ghetto gives the character substance ... she's not just a pulp writer out for a buck. And Myra Lucretia Taylor's family housekeeper Lorraine has a good relationship with Monk, whereas in the book, she doesn't much like him. Also, the relationship between Monk and his sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), which has a barbed feel in the novel, is more congenial as played by Wright and Ross, without losing an edge.
The film has received five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Supporting Actor, and Adapted Screenplay. I think it would be a worthy winner for Best Picture ... of the nominated films, I'd choose Anatomy of a Fall, and I'm on record as thinking the un-nominated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the best picture of the year, but American Fiction is very good. (Since I last listed my Top Ten of 2023, American Fiction has made the list, replacing Maestro, Barbie has moved up, and I changed the order of a few others.) Of the other categories, I've seen 4 of 5 Best Actors and think Jeffrey Wright is the best of those, I've seen all 5 Supporting Actors and would place Sterling K. Brown at or near the top, and I've seen all 5 Adapted Screenplays, and would vote for Barbie, although it's nonsense that it got placed in the "adapted" category.
It's worth noting that while fans of Erasure will want to see American Fiction, knowledge of the novel isn't necessary to appreciate the movie.
Cooley High is a landmark in 1970s Black cinema, and an early showcase from some top figures. Director Michael Schultz followed Cooley High with another landmark, Car Wash, and is still active today, mostly in television. Glynn Turman is one of our finest actors, and Cooley High was one of his first films ... he was later a part of the great cast of The Wire. Soon after his performance in Cooley High, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs was a frequent visitor into America's living rooms as a main character on Welcome Back, Kotter. And Garrett Morris followed up this film as one of the original members of the cast of Saturday Night Live. Cooley High is often compared to American Graffiti, and like that film, Cooley High started many careers.
I wish I liked it more. It's amiable enough, and its import with the black community is obvious. It has funny scenes, and an honesty that is as important now as it was in 1975. There's a melodramatic turn near the end of the movie that feels too abrupt ... it's not that it is out of place, but the ground hasn't been laid for it, so it sticks out in the wrong ways. Having said that, the ending is powerful.
And the soundtrack is wonderful.
In a timely but sad coincidence, I watched this just days after the death of Norman Lear, who received an enormous number of memories from people talking about his great career. Cooley High was written by Eric Monte, who had worked on several sitcoms with Lear.
For me, John Amos as husband/father James Evans on Good Times is one of the best depictions of fatherhood I've ever seen, and Eric Monte is the person who created that character.
The Marvels is the 25th movie I've seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Most of those came because my wife chose them to watch, and I find them largely interchangeable ... the two Black Panther movies are the best, Shang-Chi comes close, I'm not a fan of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was the bottom of the barrel. The other 18, they are OK but I can mostly take them or leave them. I like Brie Larson, so the Captain Marvel movies are a tad more appealing to me, but I wouldn't overstate that difference. If I really hated them, my wife would have to watch them on her own, but if it's possible to accept a superhero franchise without either loving it or hating it, that's me and the MCU.
The Marvels has a few things going for it, besides Brie Larson. The other two Marvels, Teyonah Parris as Monica and Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan, are just as good. Zawe Ashton is a good villain. The movie is a bit sillier than the usual, which is a nice surprise, and at 105 minutes, it is the shortest film in the Universe, for which I say, thank you.
I'd like to say more good things ... it's a woman-based movie, on the screen and behind the scenes (besides writer/director Nia DaCosta, there are co-writers Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik). But saying I liked it a bit more than the usual MCU movie doesn't mean I think it's great. Black Panther was great. The Marvels is better than Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.