Ron Stallworth, Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, and Spike Lee, 2018
#21, 2018 Skandies
I did a bit of reading after watching this movie and apparently this much is true: Ron Stallworth was the first African-American officer in the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department. After paying his dues working in the records room and whatnot, he got his first undercover assignment reporting back to HQ on a speech by Black Power activist Kwame Ture (the former Stokely Carmichael). Later, he happened across a classified ad recruiting members for the Ku Klux Klan, and more or less on a whim, decided to respond. Someone from the Klan called Stallworth at the number he left, and Stallworth adopted the guise of an angry white supremacist convincingly enough to get asked for a face-to-face meeting. A narcotics officer whose complexion better fit KKK guidelines posed as “Ron Stallworth” during that meeting and whenever an in-person appearance was required, but for the most part the investigation consisted of the actual Ron Stallworth keeping tabs on the Klan by phone. He was awarded a KKK membership card, got asked to lead the local chapter, and even talked to David Duke, the KKK Grand Wizard who in 1991 would come alarmingly close to getting elected governor of Louisiana.
To this story, these filmmakers add: a romance between Ron and the president of the Black Students Union at Colorado College; a Jewish background for the stand-in “Ron Stallworth”, so he is always in danger at the Klan meetings; a takedown of a racist, abusive cop; a profane kiss-off to David Duke; and a bombing scheme that culminates in a big explosion. Liberties were taken, shall we say. Being movie guys, they also highlight the role of movies in reflecting and shaping the history of race relations in America: Gone With the Wind, which made the antebellum South look benign; The Birth of a Nation, which made the Ku Klux Klan look heroic (and thereby revived it); the “blaxploitation” films of the 1970s, which provided a set of icons to a generation of African-Americans. Even more blatantly—and answering the question, “Why make this movie now?”—they connect the dots between Ron Stallworth’s story and the Trump era. We hear a small group of dimwitted goons reciting slogans like “Make America great again!” and “America first!” that would, decades later, be echoed by… well, by a large group of dimwitted goons. And we see the through line from the KKK cross burnings to the torchlit white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that culminated in the murder of social justice activist Heather Heyer.
Anyway, the movie’s pretty good. It’s very reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino picture, with scene after scene driven by the tension of whether the spy will be found out. The difference is that Spike Lee has didactic political points to make while Tarantino generally just seems to want to give his amygdala a workout.
Fabien Nury, Thierry Robin, David Schneider, Ian Martin, Peter Fellows, and Armando Iannucci, 2017
#17, 2018 Skandies
The movie has a major problem that almost ruins it: it’s way too British. And that’s not just bias for once: the movie is called The Death of Stalin. The characters are meant to be Soviets, not Brits. Now, could I really expect, or would I even want, every actor in the movie to hail from the former USSR, speaking Russian and thereby obliging me to turn on the subtitles? Of course not. But there are conventions at play here, and breaking them is distracting. How would a film conventionally signal that, even though the actors are speaking English, we are to take it as Russian? They could use Russian accents, but that might be distracting in a different way. And it’s actually not that complicated. Any accent can stand in for any language—so long as everyone in the production uses it. It’s when accents differ that questions pop up. This movie casts Americans in two key roles—Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev, and Jeffrey Tambor as Georgy Malenkov—while almost everyone else is British, and they all use their own accents. Even so, the movie could almost get away with this, because Received Pronunciation—sometimes called “BBC English”—stands in for virtually every foreign tongue, at least in American productions. Egyptian pharaoh? Roman emperor? Elf queen? By convention, they’re all gonna sound like Eton grads. So I can imagine a version of The Death of Stalin in which the speech of the American characters isn’t distracting because it sounds natural to an American ear and the speech of the British characters isn’t distracting because, hey, this is a movie about foreigners and we’ve been trained to accept that all foreigners sound British. Except a lot of these British actors don’t use Received Pronunciation. The logic I have seen many trot out is that, sure, Julius Caesar should sound like he’s giving reports on the BBC World Service, but a common soldier from the Tenth Legion shouldn’t. Josef Stalin grew up poor and spoke Russian with a thick Georgian accent, so to capture that, let’s have him sound like a Cockney! But that’s just not how it works. Received Pronunciation may signal “upper class”, but Cockney English doesn’t signal “lower class”—it signals Cockney. The same goes for all the various regional forms of British English, both in their accents and phrasings—they pin their speakers to those regions. Maybe the filmmakers thought they could have Georgy Zhukov say things like “Right, well, that’s me told” and signal nothing but “brusque military man”, but no. It signals, very specifically, brusque British man. “What part of Yorkshire do you hail from, comrade?”
Fortunately, “almost ruins” is not the same as “ruins”, and all in all I’d still call this movie a success. The Death of Stalin is darkly comic staging of the aftermath of the demise of the very archetype of the totalitarian dictator. The actual comedy is whatever—there were some amusing moments, but the filmmakers’ sense of humor isn’t really in tune with mine. But here we have a crucial moment in history that was fascinating to see dramatized, with all the various ministers jockeying to fill a leadership vacuum—I mean, if this sort of palace intrigue weren’t up my alley, I wouldn’t have written Varicella. And you’ve got a fun variety of personalities: Beria canny and smug, Malenkov hapless and vain, Molotov grasping for the right combination of groveling and scheming… and then there’s Khrushchev. I found myself imagining what my reaction might be the summer I watched Reservoir Dogs a bunch of times if you had pointed at Steve Buscemi and told me, “Yeah, in a quarter century this guy’s going to be playing Nikita Khrushchev of all people.” Yet Khrushchev at the meeting of the Council of Ministers, complaining about being put in charge of Stalin’s funeral arrangements, is actually not worlds removed from Mr. Pink at the meeting of Joe Cabot’s crew complaining about the color he’s been assigned. All these guys have spent their adult lives trying to find ways to hang on in an environment in which one false move, or just the pure caprice of a paranoid monster, can get you killed; Khrushchev’s strategy has been to stay in Stalin’s good graces by playing the non-threatening clown, and now the moment has arrived when he has to take his shot, and he just has to hope that he’s positioned himself right.
Jenle Hallund and Lars Von Trier, 2018
#13, 2018 Skandies
One advantage of my terrible memory is that I tend to forget why I put movies on my list—by the time I get to them, they’re just titles, and all I know is that my past self thought I might want to have a look. So it was getting late, and I thought, well, let’s see if I can’t squeeze in a movie before bedtime. This was the next one up. Yipes, over two and a half hours. Well, maybe I can watch the first half and pick it up tomorrow, I thought.
So I hit the start button, and up popped a title screen. And right under the logo up and to the left there was the name “LARS VON TRIER”. Uh-oh. Well, that explained how this wound up on the list—Melancholia stuck with me like few other movies have, and Von Trier films in general tend to be memorable. But they can be very rough sledding. And this one turned out to be about a serial killer. Sledding: TOO ROUGH. I turned it off after twenty-five minutes. I only get one life. I’m not spending an additional two hours of it watching a Lars Von Trier movie about a serial killer!
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tumblr |
this site |
Calendar page |
|||