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Barack Obama’s White Christmas
The next four months are to be the most intensely self-conscious, galvanizing, awkward, crazed, humiliating, uplifting, maudlin and surreal period in American racial history. A black man will or will not be chosen as the next President of the United States. My fingers tremble as I type this. As a black-and-white racial spectacle, this is […]

The next four months are to be the most intensely self-conscious, galvanizing, awkward, crazed, humiliating, uplifting, maudlin and surreal period in American racial history. A black man will or will not be chosen as the next President of the United States. My fingers tremble as I type this. As a black-and-white racial spectacle, this is bigger than black Jack Johnson casually beating the living shit out of white Jim Jeffries before all of Anglo-America in 1910. This is bigger than Bigger Thomas. This is bigger than Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Paul Robeson, the Edmund Pettis Bridge, Emmet Till, the March on Washington, OJ, Rodney King, Willie Horton, Jeremiah Wright, the riots, the assassinations, the aggregate of four centuries of two races trading hostilities while building up this nation. This is it. A partial descendant of slaves takes the helm of the American Empire. Or not: Maybe McCain plays into enough fears and received notions to convince his base and those volition-less swing voters that we can have morning in America once more.

Those geniuses at Criterion Collection have anticipated the moment andplan to give it something special. Their new high-definition restoration of Sam Fuller’s White Dog is due on DVD in December, just when all hell should be breaking loose. Fuller’s 1982 adaptation of the Romain Gary novel about a dog trained to attack and kill black people is a nightmare of the Reagan Era. Told with the broad earnestness of a sweeps week Diff’rent Strokes episode, White Dog is easy to dismiss as Public Service Announcement on hate crimes. Ennio Morricone’s somber score captures the heartbreak of racism but also emphasizes the movie’s cuddly, Benji-esque sentimentality. The presence of aging teen starlet Kristy McNichol as the dog’s unsuspecting Hollywood-liberal owner is also good for a snicker to anyone over 30.

But Fuller’s mise-en-scene has never been more precise, operatic or unsettling. White Dog’s visual scheme is less about racism than about the panic and dismay that grips witnesses of racist violence and the loved ones of violent racists. Just as the real horror of Brian DePalma’s Carrie adaptation was not her satanic power but th casual cruelty she lived with daily, White Dog’s main subject is not the dog’s bite but its ugly, irrational bark. And a la DePalma’s slo-mo bucket of pig blood showering a prom dress, Fuller attenuates moments of shame and distress far longer than the initial or subsequent act of violence. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees covers the mayhem with the dynamism he brought to actioners like Dirty Harry.

With its comic book compositions, this flick is virtually a graphic novel about national character and destiny, like 300, A History of Violence and The Dark Knight. But Fuller’s vision is a lot less polished, much more dreamlike–closer to Lynch’s Blue Velvet in its surreal flourishes than today’s all-business Big Idea pop spectacles. Never released theatrically and shown on cable TV sporadically over the years, White Dog is finally rearing it’s snarling, snapping head at the perfect time in American history.

If the Blue Velvet comparison sounds a bit extreme for those who have seen the movie and found its metaphors (not to mention the acting) pretty crude, I’ll let Sun Ra carry the argument further, from beyond the grave (see video below). But don’t watch the video if you haven’t yet seen the movie–wait ’til December.

UPDATE: A commenter named Dwight pointed out that this sentence in the post is confusing: “A partial descendant of slaves takes the helm of the American Empire.” Dwight is right.

As I responded further down in the comments section:

By “partial descendant” I meant to imply that Obama’s “black” face and very American (if worldly, educated) persona are linked in the minds of many with African-Americans– true descendants of slaves like me. His ascendancy is bound up symbolically with those blacks whose ancestors came over here in chains as much as it is with those who came over on Delta first class. He’s the whole diaspora– the whole world, as the NY Times tells it. But “descendant” is too concrete a term and “partial” doesn’t clarify it enough.

Thanks to Dwight for pointing this out.

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Let the Right One In Review, Fantastic Fest 2008
After months and months of anticipation, encompassing countless breathless reviews, surprise festival accolades, and angry warnings from supporters of the Swedish vampire film that I’d better stop dismissing it as “The Swedish Vampire Film”, there was probably no way in frozen-over Scandinavian hell that Let the Right One In could have lived up to the […]

After months and months of anticipation, encompassing countless breathless reviews, surprise festival accolades, and angry warnings from supporters of the Swedish vampire film that I’d better stop dismissing it as “The Swedish Vampire Film”, there was probably no way in frozen-over Scandinavian hell that Let the Right One In could have lived up to the hype. So––sorry––but I don’t think it’s a masterpiece. That said, I find its widespread popularity to be extremely encouraging. Aside from its lovely cinematography and sensitive child-actor performances, Right One’s real selling point is the humanist gild it lays on its genre lilly. Maybe this is why I’m less than blown-away by it––it’s hardly the first film I’ve seen this week which uses basic genre tropes to delve deeper into everyday human horrors––but if this a new trend, I’ll have more, please.

Oskar (KÃ¥re Hedebrant) is a scrawny 12 year-old child of divorce who spends most of his time alone, updating a scrapbook devoted to a number of local murders/bloodlettings, and practicing the revenge against the school’s gang of bullies which he can’t get up the balls to actually enact. One night in the courtyard of the depressingly nondescript apartment where he lives with his mom, Oskar meets a bedraggled girl named Eli (Lina Leandersson), who also claims to be “12…more or less.” Eli catches Oskar making his imaginary bully threats and seems intrigued, but the mysterious girl insists that she and her neighbor cannot be friends. “I want to be alone,” says the teenage Garbo. “So do I,” counters Oskar. And yet soon they’re meeting up every night, and trading brief romantic messages via Morse code through their apartment walls. It’s not until after Eli has agreed to go steady that Oskar puts the pieces together, and realizes that the female salve to his soul-sucking loneliness is actually a blood-sucking killer. But is that really any scarier than the barely-pubescent nihilists in his class who try on more than one occasion to drown him?

Right One’s basic point is that human status is not a guarantor of humanity. There are humans who prey on other humans because they’re cruel and unfeeling and genuinely like to be the cause of pain, and there are former humans who have supernatural disease which requires them to prey on current humans so they can drink their blood, but these former humans may be more capable of love and kindness than the non-undead. Set in deep winter (all the better climes for teen romance to thaw frozen fingers and distract from runny-noses), and bathed in a shiny, ice-blue glow (all the better to highlight the pools of blood, which are inserted relatively judiciously), it’s hard to imaging Right One looking better or more successfully conveying the coldness of the everyday human world. This is nice.

And yet, Right one is hardly above critique. Its construction is problematically loose, with a script full of throwaway narrative turns and straight out plot holes. And it’s not that subversive. What seems like the natural place to end the film––on a realistically sad echo of a heart-tugging early image––is counteracted by a last-minute victory of sorts, leading to a getaway happy ending which feels tacked on and improbably sunny. Right One is certainly well-made and miles more thoughtful than you might expect a teenage vampire film to be, but if I’ve learned one thing this week at Fantastic Fest, it’s that we shouldn’t necessarily have to keep our expectations of international genre films all that low. Let the Right One In is good enough, but it’s okay to ask for more.

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I’m Gonna Explode Review, NYFF 2008
Voy a Explotar (I’m Gonna Explode) is the contemporary Mexican teenage Pierrot le Fou. It knows this, and it wants you to know it, and it doesn’t care if this makes you hate it on principle. The third feature by Gerardo Naranjo (director of Drama/Mex, co-writer and star of Azazel Jacobs’ The GoodTimeskid), it’s the […]

Voy a Explotar (I’m Gonna Explode) is the contemporary Mexican teenage Pierrot le Fou. It knows this, and it wants you to know it, and it doesn’t care if this makes you hate it on principle. The third feature by Gerardo Naranjo (director of Drama/Mex, co-writer and star of Azazel Jacobs’ The GoodTimeskid), it’s the rare love letter to influence that’s infused with enough personal style and sentiment to transform the stolen into something thrilling and moving.

15 year-old Maru (Maria Deschamps) is a prep school bad girl with a mangy mane of hair and, apparently, a drinking problem. When Roman (Juan Pablo de Santiago), the spoiled little rich boy son of a right-wing politician gets kicked out of his school and introduces himself at Maru’s suburban Mexico school via faking his own hanging at a talent show, the girl is instantly besotted. “He exists, but I also made him up,” she writes in a letter to a friend which doubles as internal monologue. “The best part is that he’s angry.” Roman is equally smitten, and soon the pair are scheming to run away together.

Or so they want their parents to think; really, they’re camped out in a tent on the roof of Roman’s father’s mansion. Maru’s hysterical mother and sister come over to the house to become part of the rescue effort––which, under the oversight of Roman’s distant dad, consists mainly of drinking tequila and waiting for clues to come to him. With a stolen cell phone, Roman calls daddy’s security detail with false leads to get the grown ups out of the house so that he and Maru can crawl downstairs and collect provisions. It’s only when the pair decide to finally really leave home that their saga starts to hew to the traditional tropes of love-on-the-run.

Explotar is so blatantly indebted to Pierrot le Fou that it’s tempting to play Count the References––here Maru clomps around singing “I don’t know what to do”! Here the screen fills with her notebook-scrawled ephemera about romantic destiny!––but maybe Naranjo’s greatest invention is that, he’s made Maru more than the beautiful mystery that embodies the typical Godard woman. This girl is a loud-mouthed firecracker who vacillates between unguarded passion for Roman and brittle rejection of his advances. In cutting off her hair to become Roman’s “twin”, Maru reveals that her attraction to Roman is actually a kind of jealousy. Deluded as she is about most elements of the real world and grown up life, she knows her power over Roman ends the moment she becomes a “put outer”, even if it’s for love, and there’s a resentment there. She’s the kind of realistically conflicted girl almost never seen on screen.

The sex scenes between the two teenagers are surprisingly sexy, not because of what you see but because there isn’t much to see at all. Though the nudity is borderline frank in that Euro, “teenage breasts=freedom” sort of way, it’s not overtly titillating so much as it’s recognizably real, from the nervous twitching leading up to it to the lack of assuredness that runs throughout. Maru and Roman’s romance is brittle and tentative at first, but then the floodgates open, at which point, with an almost fin de siecle spirit, it gushes.

The peak of Maru and Roman’s relationship coincides with the puncture of their invincibility––once they cement that they are one another’s “perfect accomplice,” as Maru puts it, the time comes to pay the bill for their rebellion. This is the essence of teenage romance––the first love will be the last love––and thus, it’s something we’ve seen on screen before. What feels unique––and genuinely tragic––about Explode’s denouement is not that shit gets violent and people get hurt, but that Maru and Roman, like most kids, clearly never really wanted to get in trouble at all. Mouthy and lazy but ultimately uninterested in any kind of criminal nihilism that would take them too far away from the womb of parental-funded modern comforts, Maru and Roman went looking for a Ferris Bueller-style charmed but temporary time out from mundane responsibility, and end up bumbling into Bonnie and Clyde. In these climes of quirky indie romantic lessons learned, the punishment of starry-eyed delusion feels not only refreshing, but almost like a corrective with political implications.

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