Switch Off: THE MARVELS

The Marvels arrives on a wave of bad buzz for the Marvel Cinematic Universe that has fans and critics and showbiz reporters wringing their hands about the troubled state of the series. What once prided itself on a kind of comic-book style improvised cross-over continuity has floundered as the movies and TV shows have felt less connected. And even when parts of a particular project hit big financially or creatively, which seems to happen less and less, there’s a prevailing sense of diminishment. (It’s easy enough to forget the pretty darn satisfying Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was released a mere 6 months ago.) The newest feature will do nothing to calm fans fears that this whole thing is on its way out. This effort to draw together threads from a variety of projects—it’s a direct sequel to both Captain Marvel and Avengers Endgame, pulls in television characters like the charming teen lead of Ms. Marvel and a key supporting player from WandaVision, and finds cameos from two other movies and one other show—plays like a heavily recut compromise that’ll please no one. Writer-director Nia DaCosta's underlying concept is clever enough: flying, energy-beaming Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) realizes her heroism from her first film inadvertently destabilized a planet’s ecosystem and created a new villain’s need to plunder resources from other planets. Said plundering leads to an accident in which Marvel gets her powers entangled with the two TV superheroes (Iman Vellani and Teyonah Parris), so now they switch places every time they try to use their super-talents. There’s a hint of clever body-switching stuff and some potentially provocative ideas about intractable intergalactic conflicts. There’s a role for Samuel L. Jackson to stand around, and some funny sitcom ideas floating around Ms. Marvel’s charming family. But everything is flattened by the hurrying nonsense plotting, deadeningly empty spectacle, and endless pattering exposition papering over leaps of logic and incomplete ideas. Even then there’s barely coherence to the jumble, leading to what’s less a story, more a number of sequences scotch-taped together as a string of random moments. Everything lands with a thud. It takes several planets near, to, or beyond the point of apocalypse with a shrug, and slams three charming leads off of each other with flat jokes and paint-by-numbers character beats instead of developing actual chemistry. It skips over the surface of every idea, and shreds every good concept under the weight of hurrying into the next scene. I watched in growing dismay as it sat dead and lifeless on screen. Even its attempts to shoehorn in fan-flattering cameos and long-awaited teases for future plot lines play limply, doomed to go nowhere and please no one. Its end credits scene feels like less of a promise and more like a threat to pile on complications past the point we care. I don’t think the MCU is doomed quite yet, but a few more flailing projects like this will do the trick.

Urban Legend: CANDYMAN

Nia DaCosta’s Candyman movie takes the 1992 original’s subtext and flattens into the surface text. Gone are the creeping insinuations and curling undertow of a ghost story about a lynched Black man lurking as an urban legend in a Chicago housing project. (Say his name five times and he’ll haunt you, drive you mad, or maybe slaughter you with his hook-hand.) The new film just states flat out that it’s all about the lingering aftereffects of racism’s traumas, and the ongoing wound-prodding the constant reminders and recapitulations of them with which we live are. What the earlier film allowed to bubble up from the depths of its horrors, this new one uses as dialogue to be repeated over and over as the didactic thematic design of an otherwise simple slasher trajectory in which all of the character start alive and most end up dead. It opens with a painter (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his gallerist girlfriend (Teyonah Parris) moving into a fancy new apartment in the recently gentrified neighborhood that was the housing projects where the first film took place. There’s a discussion about the ethics of such a move, and some gentle ribbing from the woman’s realtor brother (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) who retells the story of a grad student (Virginia Madsen) who lost her mind investigating the Candyman there three decades earlier. (Astute viewers might quickly piece together the movie’s other Big Connection to its inspiration well before the surprise is sprung.) Intrigued, the boyfriend ends up using the story as material for his upcoming art show, sending him spiraling into artistic obsession that lets the Candyman back into the world. I liked his first idea: a mirror that opens onto paintings of lynchings. He calls it "Say My Name," a doubled reference to the activist urgency of remembering victims of police brutality and the lore of the Candyman. That’s the sort of mirroring where the picture’s at its best.

But then the movie is going about making its points flatly and obviously. Even as DaCosta films each scene with artful intent and striking images—I most appreciated Lotte Reiniger-style silhouette animation used to dramatize supernatural events in flashbacks, and establishing shots of upside-down Chicago streets, especially eerie when the tops of the distinctive Marina City towers plunge downwards into an overcast sky—the script undercuts them with declarative and repetitive plot explanations and thematic expostulation. The cast’s charisma—I didn’t even mention the great Colman Domingo as one of the few selling a flimsy supporting role—nearly carries it anyway, but it’s an uphill battle. The film’s politics are admirable—as is its craft—but the story stumbles. Its supporting cast is there to state the themes, provide exposition, and (usually) die. (Worst has to be a smarmy art guy or a sniffy critic, both drawn in such obvious villainy you’re just itching for comeuppance until their deaths are doled out with strange restraint.) Most disappointingly, some of the late reveals muddle its message, and on a scene-by-scene level the scares never quite hit. Elsewhere some curious gaps of logic open up. Cuts to black obscure some holes, while off-screen dialogue papers over others. The movie is full of the sort of things that might not bother me if it was otherwise working, but when my investment is slowly leaking away, it’s all I can focus on. Interesting how the truly great horror movies are simply unreproducible regardless of how many sequels try. Somehow the original is scarier, and more effectively topical, than the new one, no matter how insistent it is about contemporary concerns. It’s a good effort, but a dissatisfying result.

Home of the Free; Land of the Dead: CHI-RAQ

Chi-Raq is a movie only Spike Lee could make. It’s one of his trademark State of the Union pictures overstuffed with thematic intentions because he’s squeezing in provocative reactions to every current event since the last time he made a movie this long, loose, sprawling, sharp, and engaged. (The last was 2004’s She Hate Me, a bursting-at-the-seams Bush-era message about soulless capitalists and bad business ideas.) This new movie is hugely ambitious, telling its story in big hit-and-miss swings, rich with allegorical force, ablaze with righteous fury. It opens, after a rap overture, with a map of America, the states filled in with red, white, and blue guns. A siren goes off. A black screen fills with blood red letters repeating the urgent warning booming through the speakers. “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY.” Timely and essential, this complicated and uneven film is a frustrated dispatch from deep within a damaged nation. Chi-Raq is a pained lament and a riotous satire, a hip-hop musical and soapbox sermon, alive with activist fervor over gun violence, mass incarceration, poverty, police brutality, Confederate nostalgia, institutional discrimination, and gangs.

The messages are forceful; the filmmaking is vibrant, as alive as Lee has ever been with excitement and passion, synthesizing all sorts of ideas into one mesmerizing jumble. One need only glance at the film’s DNA to realize how wide-ranging and eclectic it is. Taking his title from a slang term for Chicago – its origins the statistic that the last 15 years have seen more murders in Chicago than American casualties in Iraq – Lee, viewing the city though an outsider’s eyes, finds inspiration for his story in the nearly 2,500-year-old Greek comedy Lysistrata, Aristophanes’ account of the title woman’s effort to end the Peloponnesian War with a sex strike. The concept transplanted to 2015 on the South side of the Windy City, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson wearing colorful suits and oozing fourth-wall busting charm, finds a gang leader, Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon), left without the physical act of love. His girlfriend (Teyonah Parris), fed up with drive-by shootings and stray bullets terrorizing their neighborhoods, decides there’ll be no more sex until the shooting stops. She organizes every woman in town, including the rival gang’s girls and the local sex workers, to deny their men intimacy until peace reigns.

This broad satire grows wacky – the women invade a local armory and refuse to leave, much to the dismay of the local police who don’t what to do with an army of chastity belt-wearing protestors – while the serious underpinnings remain potent. The epidemic of gun violence in America fuels devastating scenes with a mother (Jennifer Hudson) weeping over her slain child, a wise older woman (Angela Bassett) organizing more conventional protests, and a kind priest (John Cusack) who delivers a fiery Chayefsky-esque sermon against gun culture (calling out the NRA for aiding and abetting murder, legislators their co-conspirators). Lee puts the serious and the silly right next to each other. One sequence finds a goofy, cringe-worthy scene of a black woman seducing a racist old official in order to tear the Confederate flag off the wall of his office: an uncomfortable moment turned triumphant, and a perfect example of the flailing that happens when the tone flops around.

But Lee isn’t doing anything small here. Matthew Libatique shoots in popping primary colors and the editors cut it together with a jazzy meandering pace. Lee, with Kevin Willmott (a filmmaker and professor at the University of Kansas), has written it in rhymed verse, a half rap/half Shakespeare vernacular that’s as artificial as it is dense and beautiful. One part Do the Right Thing neighborhood portraiture, two parts scathing Bamboozled social commentary, and three parts theatrical flourishes of cinematic style, Chi-Raq may have bitten off more than it can chew, but there’s always something interesting and entertaining going on. We linger in moments of pain – Bassett confronting a shady insurance salesman, a somber funeral, and earnest monologues about society’s ills – then bounce to moments of light comedy – like Wesley Snipes as a one-eyed gang leader named Cyclops, a group of pathetic men impotently counter-protesting, and Dave Chappelle as a strip club proprietor lamenting his slow business on account of striking strippers. It is confrontational enough to seem like too much, so many real traumas and eccentric laughs bumping into each other, but is sufficiently committed to its wild mishmash to mostly work nonetheless.

Lee is making a picture of the national mood, painting in bold strokes invigorated by a frayed political climate’s roiling disagreements, mentioning recent murdered young black people, killer cops, and mass shooters by name. (Just imagine the annotations a fresh viewer will need a few decades hence.) It’s overflowing with timely discussions and ideas, even when some of the flailing comedy lands flat (mostly because the sexual politics aren’t as sharp) and the plot takes unfruitful detours and tonal loops. The movie’s unafraid to be goofy, like when Chicago’s slimy (fictional) mayor excuses his racism by saying, “my wife’s biracial,” or a dance number breaks out when police try to break the strike with smooth ballads. Later, though, there’s a moving breakdown in a fantastical scene when a gangbanger is confronted with families of those destroyed by crossfire. The comedy and the tragedy are equally heavy-handed, not always landing, but packing a tremendous wallop when they do. It’s the rare angry political film that’s hardly cathartic. It knows America is too stuck in intractable problems to do anything but laugh and cry while we agitate for a better future. The film’s messy, but too vital and urgent to ignore.

School Daze: DEAR WHITE PEOPLE

Dear White People is an invigorating film, a sharp campus comedy that’s a powerful work of cultural observation and critique. With his debut feature, writer-director Justin Simien proves himself a fresh and vital new voice. The film understands the huge rush of intellectual sparring, the stimulation of smart talk and intellectual experimentation. A clever dissection of identity politics, it is pointed and complicated, as cool, empathetic, and impassioned as it is dryly funny. Set on a fictional Ivy League campus, it’s an unsparing look at campus politics and race relations, but creates such a wonderful cast of original characters that it’s also a sweet character study about people simply trying to assert their race, gender, sexuality, and class and finding themselves tied up in ideological knots, feeling outside pressure to conform to their stereotypes.

We meet several students whose plotlines crisscross throughout the course of the film, each representing a fascinating, vibrant, and thrillingly contradictory collection of viewpoints. It’s smartly constructed so that they’re characters first, their ideas second, but one is inextricable from the other. There’s the impassioned black student activist (Tessa Thompson) who writes tracts, makes student films (her “Rebirth of a Nation,” for example), holds demonstrations, and hosts a campus radio show called “Dear White People.” It’s filled with barbs like, “Dear White People, the minimum requirement of black friends needed to not seem racist has just been raised.” Her secret white boyfriend (Justin Dobies) tells her she should “hold up a mirror, not drop an ideological piano” on her audience. Her supporters at the black student union (led by Marque Richardson) agitate for her to push their agenda forward. Other black students, like an econ major and striving reality show aspirant (Teyonah Parris), call her “blacker-than-thou” and a “bougie Lisa Bonet wannabe.”

A more neutral party is the aimless gay sophomore (Tyler James Williams) whose afro and skin color get him a job at the school newspaper, since they all feel too white to write about this controversy. Still others, like the handsome president (Brandon P. Bell) of the historically all-black dorm about to be gutted by a “housing randomization act,” who happens to be son of the Dean of Students (Dennis Haysbert), doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. He starts to feel the activist heat when she decides to take his place. The film’s perceptive in its creation of a variety of roles for black actors, speaking from a multiplicity of experiences and backgrounds.

But this is also a movie about white people. The black student activists, but especially the radio show, annoy the white frat bros (led by Kyle Gallner) who think the hardest thing to be in American society is an educated white man. The head bro is the son of the college’s president (Peter Syvertsen) who is somehow sure racism is over, not knowing that his son’s frat party is poised to be flagrantly racist, complete with white students in blackface. They think meaning it as a joke makes it somehow okay. We sit with them and understand their perspective, even though the conclusions they draw are deeply flawed. A prologue showed us news coverage of said party before flashing back to the beginning of the fall semester, so we know it’s happening. The film is clever in slowly teasing out the campus culture that allows it to bubble up in the first place.

While that’s a lot of characters and subplots to juggle and a great thorny tangle of modern identity, Simien keeps the ensemble storylines moving along. He cares about his characters, making sure none become mere punchline, or are artificially weakened to make a political point. It’s a comedy, more of situation and recognition than snap, crackle, pop. But the dialogue is written and performed with a heightened crackling intelligence. And it never feels like Simien has them reading passages from a doctoral thesis. It’s a film about real people dealing with how they define themselves and how others define them, struggling to perform their identities as they live, love, and argue in the forge of identity that college can be.

And that’s what makes conversations about societal expectations, stereotypes, cultural appropriation, “ironic” racism, and code switching all the more powerful. Where else but college do you have the freedom to talk about these ideas and live them at the same time? It’s an authentically collegiate experience, with kids grappling with the big issues while living out a microcosm of the world at large. Some of them want to hold court and get in philosophical debates in the cafeteria. Others just want to study, or hook up, or smoke weed.

This is a fun ensemble comedy with characters I cared about, every major role expertly inhabited by a well-cast performer. It also happens to be one of the most politically vital works of pop filmmaking in quite some time. It takes a long, hard look at the variety of ways we interact with a variety of identities, spotting prejudiced aggressions big and small, in the context of a funny, romantic, sometimes moving entertainment. It’s not often a movie comes along that’s so hugely satisfying and so intoxicatingly intelligent.

Simien is a welcome new voice, using his talents to create one of the smartest, liveliest films of the year. He's a promising first-time director, excited to be playing with technique, with slow zooms, chapter headings, and voice over for emphasis and structure. Perhaps most effective is the way he takes certain confrontations – a conversation between the president and the dean, say – that could be filmed in a simple two shot and instead cuts back and forth between characters speaking in profile towards each other. This emphasizes the disjunction, how quickly honest discussion of race becomes pointless. They’re trapped in their own boxes, talking past each other.

Dear White People is about the hard work of breaking down those boxes, finding barriers where they usually can’t be seen, and especially as people run into differences between the way they want to be seen and how others see them. Identity is more than a collection of signifiers and affectations, no matter how convenient it is for media, corporations, institutions, friends and neighbors to reduce you to them. Here's a movie that says it's okay to love Spike Lee and Taylor Swift. (Whew.) Simien writes wonderfully complicated characters in a film that gives them space to be themselves, to argue and grow. It doesn’t solve problems or wallow in them, but serves them up in the context of a story well told. It’s a powerful, nuanced work of cultural critique that’s also a fun time at the movies.