The Ragged Glory of ‘Chi-Raq’
Nobody crafts an opening credits sequence like Shelton “Spike” Lee. In “She’s Gotta Have It,” photo stills of old-school Brooklyn are accompanied by his father, the legendary jazz composer Bill Lee. BK local Rosie Perez busts out her hip hop-boxing moves to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” at the start of “Do the Right Thing.” “Clockers” starts with a montage of taped-off Gowanus crime scenes as Marc Dorsey sings “People in Search of a Life.” Kids run through the Crayola-hued streets of 1970s Fort Greene as The Stylistics sing “People Make the World Go Round” in “Crooklyn.” “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus” begins with the gorgeously fluid dancing of Charles “Lil Buck” Riley set against the Red Hook waterfront. It’s one of the auteur’s many signatures: that big, beautiful heart worn proudly on his sleeve from the moment he fires each film’s starting pistol.
Relatively speaking, the opening credits sequence of “Chi-Raq” is pretty straight-up. I suspect this is not just because it is set in Chicago but because Spike is grinding his biggest axe since 2006’s very fine “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” which channeled the righteous anger of New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina. In bold, primary hues, the lyrics of “Pray for My City” – It’s Chi-Raq and my city’s lost/ I can’t fall victim to Satanflash – flash across the screen as they’re rapped by Nick Cannon, who plays the film’s titular character, the head of a fictional gang known as the Spartans. His street moniker stems from Chicago’s insidious nickname, which references that the number of the city’s homicides surpasses the number of American soldiers dead in Iraq. Continue Reading →
A True Siren: Illeana Douglas
Illeana Douglas may be best known for her work in such edgy fare as “The Larry Sanders Show” and Allison Anders’s “Grace of My Heart” but she also is a true scion of Old Hollywood. Her grandfather was the multiple Oscar-winning actor Melvyn Douglas and she has counted among her friends such film luminaries as Marlon Brando and Martin Scorsese, with whom she had a relationship for ten years. Now she’s penned a memoir, I Blame Dennis Hopper: And Other Stories From a Life Lived In and Out of the Movies, that doubles as a series of profiles of some key Tinseltown figures.
LISA ROSMAN: Tell us about the title. “I Blame Dennis Hopper.” It’s so promising!
ILLEANA DOUGLAS: Well, it’s the running gag in my life. My parents saw “Easy Rider” and were so affected that they started a commune and began living off the land. As I grew up, I realized that not only did that movie directly change my life but it changed so many lives across America. Not just young people’s. Middle class, middle-aged people’s, too. To me, that’s the power of film. Later on, I got to meet Dennis Hopper and I said, “Thanks for ruining my life. You ruined a lot of people’s lives.” He was like, “Sorry.” It’s very sad he passed away because this was something I really wanted to explore in a documentary. He was talking about freedom, man, and a lot of people resonated with that. Continue Reading →
The Crap Factory of ‘Sisters’
Call me the Grinch Who Stole “Sisters,” but the new comedy starring the dream team of Amy Poehler and Tina Fey is just plain crap. I know some of you will see it anyway, and I kind of hope you do. A mainstream American comedy starring two fortysomething women deserves box-office support, and Poehler and Fey are my absolute favorite forces in American comedy. But the truth is that it’d be more fun to watch them clip their toenails for two hours than mug their way through this formulaic, retrogressive soap dish.
Poehler plays Maura Ellis, a divorced nurse held hostage by her own do-gooder impulses. (Read: She’s a poor woman’s Leslie Knope.) Rather than climb back on ye olde dating train, she prefers to Skype with her retired parents (James Brolin and Dianne Wiest, cursing like a scurvy-addled sailor) and craft motivational cards. (Without the dark night, we’d never see the bright stars.) Fey is big sister Kate, an oft-fired aesthetician who is living on the couch of her former “bug man.” Decked out in hot pants, ratty hair extensions, and an un-ironic fedora, Fey is in serious anti-Liz Lemon mode, though those audible italics are still in full effect: “I’m not a hot-head. I’m brassy,” she says, and you gotta love it – at least a little bit. Continue Reading →