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Movie Review: The Wolf of Wall Street (content warning: descriptions of sex and drug use)

November 20, 2021

I admit, I was on the fence a lot before seeing this film. I tend to be squeamish about violence and sex, so I looked at the Kids in Mind review for any explicit content that the movie showed (in terms of sex, violence, and language, Kids in Mind rated it a 10.4.10, meaning that this film contained a lot of graphic sex and enough language to warrant any parent to cover their child’s ears.) But I think it helped learning about the explicit content beforehand, because then I felt a little more prepared for what to expect. I was still pretty dizzy after the film because it was definitely a wild ride, but reading the Kids in Mind review helped me get through the movie.

And that’s not to say this is a film for everybody. I thought it wasn’t going to be a film for me, so I thought, “I’m not going to have the stomach to see this.” But then I remembered how much I love dark comedies, and The Wolf of Wall Street is a dark comedy. After watching dark comedies like I, Tonya; Parasite; and Zola, I have more appreciation for the genre. Even though dark comedies are called comedies, I think like any movie they give some pretty serious insight into the human condition and show us in a bare-bones way just as we are, in all our imperfections and fallibility. Also, I’ve been on a biopics kick lately, so I’ve been watching a lot of biographical films. The last one I saw was The Runaways, which is based on musician Cherie Currie’s memoir about her time in Joan Jett’s band The Runaways.

As much as I want to re-watch the film (in college, I treated films as texts so I ended up watching movies for my classes at least 4-5 times no matter how intense the film was. Probably not the wisest strategy since I’m sensitive about content and thus ended up being consumed emotionally by these films, but that’s beside the point.) I need a bit of a break from it because it packed a lot of content into three hours. I didn’t realize this until halfway through the film, but the first 3 hour Leonardo DiCaprio film I saw was Titanic (not the first Leonardo film, though; before that, I saw Inception), and that was 3 hr 17 min long. I made the mistake of watching that at night and at 1 am I was a mess of snot and tissues and tears. The Wolf of Wall Street is almost 3 hours long, too. I thought I would be better off watching this movie in small parts throughout the week because of its length, and because I had other things to do on my schedule, but once I watched it I was so enthralled with the acting, in particular the way Leonardo DiCaprio embodies the character of Jordan Belfort, and the storyline, that I just couldn’t stop watching. Watching this movie made me realize how much I missed watching Leonardo’s acting. He was of course, as anyone who saw Titanic knows, ah-mazing, and in this one he seriously brings his acting chops, too. So I ended up staying up late watching the film until about 11 pm. I had work the next day and was pretty tired, but then I still had thirty minutes left of the movie to watch the next morning, so I finished it before work, and dang I couldn’t stop thinking about that movie for the rest of the day.

So honestly, when I first saw the film I was pretty much duped. At the beginning they play a commercial for a brokerage house in New York City called Stratton-Oakmont, and because I didn’t really read much about the movie before watching it, I was confused because I bought the film on Google Play, and they usually don’t play commercials or trailers before the movie. They only played commercials and trailers for other movies on the DVD version of films I watched, or if I watch the movie in the theater. So I thought it was a brokerage firm advertising for the movie, but then the next scene immediately cut to Leonardo’s character Jordan Belfort and the other people at the firm throwing a short person for target practice at a dart board and yelling and cheering, and then I realized, Oh wow, I thought that was an actual commercial (I’m sure it was though, because this is based on the memoir by Jordan Belfort and Stratton-Oakmont was an actual brokerage house in Long Island, New York). The film starts off with him telling how he ended up becoming so rich and powerful, and shows him snorting cocaine from a woman’s backside. He started off with a pretty humble childhood, and then in his early 20s he worked for a brokerage firm. In his meeting with Matthew McConaughey’s character Mark Hanna, meets with him for lunch and Mark talks him through the business of working on Wall Street. He essentially tells him that it’s a dog-eat-dog kind of environment, and in order to survive he needs to push aside any kind of empathy or compassion, and not care about clients and just focus on making money from other people. Unfortunately, the stocks fail on Jordan’s first day at the firm, LF Rothschild, on a day called Black Monday, and he loses his job. He and his wife Teresa look through the ads in the newspaper, and at first he thinks of taking a job in an entry-level position at a department store and just work his way up, but Teresa tells him it won’t make ends meet and has him apply for something else. She points to an ad for working on Wall Street, and he ends up going to apply for another firm. At first, he is surprised by the more laid-back attitude of the employees, not to mention the smaller size of the firm, which was a total contrast to the LF Rothschild environment, which was more fast-paced and less relaxed. Also, the shares and stocks they sell are way less than what they sold at LF Rothschild. On the first day of him working there, Jordan shows them that he can outsell any of them on the phone calls, and everyone is impressed, so they raise his paycheck. While eating at a diner, a guy named Donnie Azoff (the last movie I saw Jonah Hill in was Megamind. He was the voice of Hal, who becomes Megamind’s archnemesis. So up til then I hadn’t seen him in any other movies, but in his role as Donnie, oh my gosh he was such a good actor. It really gave me more respect for his acting.) approaches Jordan and asks him how much he makes working at the brokerage firm. When Jordan tells him he makes $70,000 in one day, Donnie’s eyes light up and he asks if Jordan can find him a job because he’s working at a furniture store and barely making ends meet. So he and Donnie team up and gather a few more guys and they establish a brokerage house called Stratton-Oakmont. Pretty soon the firm grows in success, and with it Jordan’s ego. He ends up spending lots of money and upgrades his humble lifestyle to a lavish lifestyle of booze, yachts, drugs, and sex with various women outside his marriage to his new wife, Naomi, who he meets at one of Stratton-Oakmont’s lavish parties (Theresa stands outside after she finds out Jordan cheated on her with Naomi, and calls off their marriage.) Jordan thinks he will find bliss in marrying Naomi and buys her an expensive wedding ring and has a nice wedding ceremony. However, eighteen months later, we see her splashing him with water and cussing him out because he brought home a prostitute and slept with her, even though he is married and has kids. However, she stays in their marriage even when he does all these horrible things. Jordan’s activities get more and more corrupt, and we see the Federal Bureau Investigation agency tracking his activities. Eventually, he gets caught, and has to announce to his firm that he is ending the company. Again, I was duped, but not totally because I still was only halfway through this 3 hour film, and I thought to myself, is it over? and then realized, no there’s still another storyline to this. And sure enough, Jordan basically tells everyone, “Nah, I was just messing with you, I’m staying, I’m not leaving.” His dad, who warned him that he was not only spending extravagantly, but also that the FBI was going to be on his case for a long time until he turned himself in and stopped his criminal activities for good, warns him that he can’t simply change his mind like that and that there will be consequences for what he did. However, no one can hear his warning because Jordan is beating his chest and humming just like Mark Hanna taught him to do when they had that lunch together early in the film, and everyone, because they think Jordan is God, follows his lead and starts beating their chest and humming, too.

We then see them on a yacht partying to “Hip Hip Hooray” by Naughty by Nature. However, Jordan is also seen with a Swiss broker trying to get them to smuggle all the money he illegally obtained there so he and the people at his firm don’t get caught. It’s sad because on the yacht in Italy, where they aren’t going to get caught, Naomi comes up to the yacht with her friend crying because her Aunt Emma died. Even though they have to go to the funeral in London, Jordan refuses and insists on taking the money to Geneva and sticking with his plan to go there, totally forgetting that he has a family member that just died. To him, it doesn’t matter that Aunt Emma died, but rather than her money is in the bank and he needs to get it out so that the FBI doesn’t catch him. The FBI finally tracks him down, and he is under house arrest for all the crimes he committed while Stratton-Oakmont was in business. He can’t drink, he can’t do drugs, he is undergoing withdrawal for his addiction to drugs and it’s painful for him. However, Donny visits him and tells him he’s got Jordan’s back no matter what. Then, while Jordan is telling Naomi his plan for the money he’s smuggled illegally, Naomi says she wants to file for divorce. He then gets angry and she slaps him and he slaps her back, and he rips up the sofa and gets out his stash of cocaine and breaks his sobriety from drugs by snorting the cocaine furiously. He gets angry when Naomi tells him she is keeping custody of their kids, and he refuses to let her take custody, and he grabs his daughter and takes her in his car and drives off. Naomi and her housekeeper retrieve his daughter from the car and Jordan, high behind the wheel, is bleeding on his forehead from the force of the crash after he backs into a brick.

Jordan and the people at Stratton-Oakmont end up getting arrested and Jordan ends up teaching a class on sales. He tests people on their knowledge of sales by having them pretend to sell him a pen, and when they’re not quick enough, he cuts them off and goes to the next person to see if they can do what he asked. When the movie ended, I had no words.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to write the review for this movie because there was a lot to digest while watching the movie. However, I think studying more about Buddhist philosophy and reading The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin has given me insight into the human condition just as movies give insight into the human condition. One reason I love philosophy is because it gets to the root of why people do the things they do, and after chanting daimoku about how to best approach this review, I found some things to write about with regards to this movie. I think the early part of the movie, where Jordan is just starting out at the firm, gives context for why he did what he did. I was watching the movie 42 and there’s a young white boy who watches his dad call Jackie Robinson the n-word and at first he doesn’t know how to react but then because he sees his dad do it, he thinks it’s ok and ends up calling Jackie the n-word, too. I told my professor allowed that I was horrified when that scene happened, and he woke me up to the fact that kids are not born racist, they are taught to be racist. Similarly, Jordan wasn’t born a corrupt person who engaged in debauchery of all kinds. He encountered Mark Hanna, who taught him the philosophy of competitiveness. No one gave Jordan an alternative to that philosophy. During the meeting, even little things in Mark’s behavior indicate how Jordan was influenced for the rest of the film. Mark asks for alcohol and offers Jordan some, but instead Jordan asks the waiter for water. Instead of respecting Jordan’s wish, Mark jokingly tells the waiter that Jordan is just starting out in the business and that he’ll “catch up” and learn how to act like everyone on Wall Street. When Jordan asks him about how to care for the clients, Mark tells him that he doesn’t care about the clients, and that the only thing that matters is making money off of them. He also tells him that if he gets stressed he needs to find time to “jerk off”, even though Jordan is married and happy with his marriage. This broker tells him that to work his way up the ladder, he needs to tear people down and make them feel small, and he sees this in his first day working on Wall Street. He sees people shouting over the phone and swearing, and he internalizes this. The work environment is based on the life condition of animality, which is one of the ten life states, or Ten Worlds, that we can manifest any time in our daily lives. Animality is a life condition wherethe strong prey on the weak and take advantage of them. Jordan was young and didn’t know much about working on Wall Street; he just wanted to be reasonably happy. But Mark Hanna instilled in him this idea that he wouldn’t make it in Wall Street unless he succumbed to that life state of animality.

At first it was easy for me to conclude from The Wolf of Wall Street that money is the root of all evil. But I thought about it from a Buddhist perspective, and we have a concept called value creation, which means that even in the most stressful situations, everything has meaning. The philosophy of value creation reminded me time and again that humans create institutions, and just as we use them for evil, we can also use them to create good. In real life, Leonardo is a philanthropist. He has all this money but even though he is rich he donates a lot of his money to environmental causes and has a foundation dedicated to environmental issues. Just as human beings established slavery, they established investing, Wall Street, money in general. As the film progressed, I reflected on the purpose of money: what does it serve? what determines our use of money? what is its fundamental purpose? And it’s interesting because there’s a scene early in the film where Jordan is talking with his friends about starting the brokerage house, and they’re talking about how everyone wants money and one person in the group says that Buddhists are an exception because they don’t care about money. I was kind of happy they mentioned Buddhists, like “yo shoutout to my religion!” haha. But it’s actually interesting they mentioned that, because this week I was reading this article in the April 2021 issue of the publication I read called Living Buddhism, and there’s an article called “Becoming People of True Wealth.” According to the article, “Buddhism teaches that money is neither inherently good nor bad, but it can take on good or bad qualities depending on how we use it…Conventional wisdom holds that praying for something like having a better job or a bigger house runs counter to religious values, but Buddhism views life from a deeper dimension. The Buddhist principle “earthly desires are enlightenment” explains that the Buddha’s enlightened wisdom can be found in the lives of ordinary people who are driven by their earthly desires, or deluded impulses. We can chant to the Gohonzon and express our desires just as they are. And as we do so, we tap into our inherent Buddha nature, which manifests as compassion, wisdom and courage that gradually transform all our desires into the fuel for developing a richer, happier and more fulfilling life.” (p. 16-19, “Becoming People of True Wealth,” April 2021 Living Buddhism)

It’s interesting that I chose to watch this movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, because a couple of weeks ago I applied to a job on Wall Street because I wasn’t really sure what else to do with my life and didn’t think I could find a job in my creative field. I got rejected and felt sad about it, but moved on. The Wolf of Wall Street made me reflect on my 20s and my attitudes towards money: is money a tool to help people or a way to validate my worth? I have been studying The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, and there’s a letter called “On Attaining Buddhahood in this Lifetime,” and in the letter Nichiren Daishonin tells his follower Nanjo Tokimitsu that while everything and everyone has Buddhahood, he needs to summon up faith that “Nam myoho renge kyo” is his life itself, and that he must not seek enlightenment outside himself. I chanted about this and thought about it more the more I studied this letter, and then I watched The Wolf of Wall Street, and it reminded me that no matter how successful I get, I need to win over my own self in order to feel like I’ve truly won in life. In his book Discussions on Youth, the philosopher Daisaku Ikeda has this incredibly beautiful quote where he says that winning isn’t necessarily about becoming rich or becoming important, and that a lot of people who became rich or important ended up leading corrupt lives and didn’t actually win over themselves. He also said we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others because each of us is unique in our own way based on the Buddhist principle of “cherry, plum, peach, damson.” While of course I may be reading too deeply into the movie (after all, it is a comedy, albeit a dark comedy), from a Buddhist perspective, I just feel that Jordan in the film ended up doing the things he did because no one taught him that success lies within himself, and that he could lead a successful life just as he was. Someone else told him that to be successful, all he had to care about was money. Jordan felt that he had to look outside himself for respect, for validation, and couldn’t tap into that respect in his own life.

One scene that really stuck with me was when Jordan and Donny get high on lemon quaaludes, which the most potent quaalude they have. At first nothing is working and they’re not getting high, so they pop more of those quaaludes. Later on, when Jordan is on the phone, he suddenly experiences paralysis of his body and loses all consciousness when the effects of taking so many quaaludes at once hits him. He struggles down the stairs, and honestly, this was the hardest scene to watch because he is literally fighting for his life against the effects of this drug. He slurs his words on the phone and no one can understand him. He gets in his car and his wife calls him and he can’t communicate coherently, and gets in the car and just starts breaking down. When he gets to the house, Donny is also slurring his words high on the quaaludes and also cannot function, and ends up choking on his food. Naomi, who is very pregnant, has to call for help and even though she tells Jordan to help him he can’t understand her because he’s high on the quaaludes. He manages to resuscitate Donny, but ends up feeling miserable on the couch after taking these drugs. It reminded me of a scene from Uncut Gems, when Howard is struggling to pay off his debts from gambling. His girlfriend tries to cheer him up, but he breaks down and cries and tells her that he can’t do anything right and that everyone is after him. Howard was in a life state of hell, which is a life state where everything feels hopeless and you’re swayed by everything in your environment and feel like you can’t do anything about what’s happening to you. Similarly, Jordan feels like he can’t do anything about his situation, and even though he keeps running away from the FBI he still owes a lot of money to the people he and Stratton-Oakmont scammed.

After watching this movie, I reflected on this chapter I read in Discussions on Youth called “What is Freedom?” and even though at times I thought to myself if the point of life and success was to live a lavish lifestyle (not that there’s anything wrong with wanting nice things, of course), reading this chapter made me understand that true freedom doesn’t necessarily depend on our circumstances or how well things go in our lives, but rather on our inner state of life, or what we call in Buddhism our “life condition.” Even though Jordan did as he pleased, he was always at the mercy of his environment. He struggled with what we call in Buddhism fundamental ignorance, or fundamental darkness, which is this inability to see our inner potential, the courage, wisdom, and compassion we each inherently possess in our lives. He did these corrupt things because he couldn’t see his own innate Buddhahood. We have a principle in Buddhism called respect for the inherent dignity of life, and while watching Jordan and his friends tear down people at the firm and degrade their humanity, I thought that because they didn’t respect the inherent dignity of their lives they couldn’t respect the inherent dignity of other people’s lives. It reminded me that my success, no matter how much money I make, I need to respect my life, and while I love money like everyone else, and appreciate nice things, if I don’t keep growing as a person I get complacent with my success and stop appreciating the people around me, and eventually I get stagnant and stop truly winning in my life because of this reluctance to keep growing and maintain a sense of appreciation for my life and others’ lives.

Here is the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street:

The Wolf of Wall Street. 2013. Rated R for sequences of strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language throughout, and for some violence.

Movie Review: The Runaways

I had been meaning to see this movie for a while, and I had read some movie reviews about it, and the trailer looked so good. I watched it last night, and I was stuck making a decision whether to watch this or Good Boys. Good Boys is funny and this movie, The Runaways, was pretty serious. I will watch Good Boys another time though because I’ve really been craving biopics.

This film is based on Cheri Currie’s memoir about being a member of Joan Jett’s music group The Runaways. Honestly, I haven’t listened to much of Joan Jett’s music but this film made me appreciate her music even more. I’ve heard one of her more famous songs, “Bad Reputation,” in just about every movie known to man, every grocery store, on the radio, everywhere. It’s been in Shrek, Baby Mama, and so many other movies. And I’ve heard “I Hate Myself for Loving You” and “I Love Rock n’ Roll” so many times. And maybe “Cherry Bomb” in Guardians of the Galaxy. But I actually first heard of the song “Cherry Bomb” from watching the trailer for The Runaways, and then I recognized it when I watched Guardians of the Galaxy later on. But it wasn’t until this film that hearing Kristen Stewart sing her songs while playing Joan Jett that I actually became familiar with more of her music. Like, in the end credits, the song “Love Is Pain” but Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, I hadn’t heard that one before. In the near to final scene of the film, Kristen Stewart, as Joan Jett, is lying in the bathtub and singing lyrics to what would become her song “Love Is Pain.” It’s a beautiful song and I love it, too, because it’s in D major and I love that key.

Honestly, I saw Kristen Stewart in mainly the Twilight franchise and while I liked her in those movies, she really played Joan Jett well. I don’t know much about Joan Jett’s story, but Kristen embodied the musical energy that Joan Jett put in her performances. The chemistry and complex relationship between her and Cherie Currie (played brilliantly by Dakota Fanning) was played so well, and by the end of the film I wanted to listen to the song “Cherry Bomb” on repeat. Honestly I can’t really put Kristen Stewart’s performance of Joan Jett into coherent words. You know when you watch biopics you know that that one actor was meant to play that person? Like Chadwick Boseman, he was made to play James Brown. Or Jennifer Hudson was meant to play Aretha Franklin (I still have yet to see Respect, but one of my friends said Jennifer was really good in it.) I just felt like I was watching Joan Jett when watching Kristen Stewart perform. I also didn’t realize that Alia Shakwat played one of the members in the band; I vaguely recognized her face, but the last thing I saw her in was Broad City.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind watching this film again. Maybe it’s because I saw Lovelace and really liked that film. Lovelace and The Runaways both take place during the 1970s and Linda Lovelace is briefly mentioned in The Runaways in passing. Of course, the storylines of these films are different, despite them both being biopics. The former is about Linda Lovelace and the abuse she dealt with when she was coerced into filming a pornographic film called Deep Throat. The latter is about a group of female rock musicians who defy gender stereotypes. However, both films deal with young women who don’t know much about sexuality, but then come into their sexuality. In Lovelace, Linda is in her early 20s and lives with her very religious family, who don’t want her seeing boys and value marriage over dating. However, she meets Chuck and he introduces her to pornography, and at first their relationship is strictly friendship but then he coerces her into the business without her knowing what really goes down in the pornography industry. It completes changes her, and while she did awaken to her sexuality, she also dealt with a lot of trauma and abuse at the hands of Chuck and the men involved in the filming of Deep Throat. The film also put tension on her relationship with her parents because no matter how many parties she was telling them she went to, at the end of the day, she was still working in an industry that went against their family-friendly religious morals and they were worried about her (until later on in the film, when they find out that she didn’t choose to go into the industry and that instead, Chuck forced her into doing pornography.) The film made lots of money and Linda became a star but Chuck still maintained full control of her success and her whereabouts, dictating where she could go and not valuing her independence. In The Runaways, Cherie Currie is 15 years old and lives with her parents and twin sister, Marie. She doesn’t get to spend much time with her family and her parents divorced. When she meets Kim Fowley and Joan Jett, her life changes and she becomes more confident in her sexuality. When they first meet Cherie, she doesn’t feel comfortable saying the lyrics to the song that Kim comes up with called “Cherry Bomb” because they are sexually suggestive. When she expresses her discomfort, Kim laughs at her and kicks her out, but then Joan tells her that it’s just a song and to just sing it just as she is.

However, this sours when Kim sets up a photo shoot where some photographers shoot sexualized photos of Cherie posing in sexually suggestive positions for The Runaways’ upcoming tour in Japan. Joan and the other band members get upset with Cherie for selling out and selling her body, and this is partly what drives the band apart. While Kim is definitely different from Chuck in Lovelace, he also is quite manipulative. Even though it seems like at the beginning he is empowering Joan, Cherie and the other band members he is actually driving them apart, calling them names and condescending to them. Towards the end, he calls them a bunch of dog c**ts (not gonna print the actual word but I’m sure you’ll find out eventually.) and Joan throws stuff at him. But he just cheers it on like it’s normal rock and roll behavior. It takes Joan herself realizing that Kim is driving them apart and preventing them from just being true to themselves and making music as friends.

Overall, this was an excellent movie.

The Runaways. 2010. Rated R for language, drug use and sexual content- all involving teens.

Movie Review: The Last Black Man of San Francisco

Man. This movie. A24. Once again, you have blown me away. The music, the storyline, the acting, the scenes. Just. Wow.

This film is so powerful for so many reasons, the main one being that it is about a very serious issue: gentrification. I first heard about gentrification when I was in college, because some of my friends who lived in New York City were talking about it gentrifying. For one of my Africana Studies courses, I interviewed a classmate about the gentrification of Flatbush. I also had heard about it from a skit by Saturday Night Live called “Bushwick, Brooklyn,” which pokes fun at the gentrification of Bushwick. In the skit three Black men (played by Kenan Thompson, Kevin Hart, and Jay Pharaoh) are standing on the street corner talking about what they did over the week. Kevin’s character says he went to the new artisanal mayonnaise shop down the block called Martha’s Mayonnaise, where they charge $8 for mayonnaise; Jay Pharaoh’s character takes a spin class; and the three guys are seen at an art gallery party where a hipster white lady is playing folk song on guitar.

I also saw another skit called “Do the White Thing” that Jimmy Kimmel did to mark the anniversary of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The sketch features a bunch of white actors playing white people living in the now gentrified Brooklyn (Zooey Deschanel, Jay Duplass, Amy Goodman, Rami Malek, Billy Crudup and Jimmy Kimmel play white people in the sketch) and doing things that mark the gentrification of the area, such as Billy Crudup telling Sal (Jimmy Kimmel) he could have at least gotten a gluten free crust in the pizza he ordered, and when Billy Crudup and Rosie Perez are alone together, he reenacts the scene where she is having ice rubbed on her shoulders, and tells her sensually that the ice was handcrafted at this super fancy pump that used bicycle power to pump the water needed for the ice (to top it off, he breaks out a bottle of Sriracha, and that turns her on.)

While at first I thought both of these sketches was hilarious, as I thought more and educated myself more about gentrification and its impact on the longtime, mostly BIPOC residents there, I found a lot less to laugh about. The Last Black Man in San Francisco served as a very timely reminder to me that the widespread gentrification of cities is a very real issue that has hurt a lot of longtime residents, and in particular BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities. While I have never visited San Francisco, the movie allowed me to feel some kinship, some empathy for what the characters were going through. Two young Black men, Jimmie and Montgomery, are navigating the rapidly shifting landscape of their hometown, San Francisco, as its rising rents force many of the longtime residents, Jimmie and Montgomery, out of the city. They travel through the city on skateboard, trying to hang onto old memories, old relics of the past, as their city changes right before their eyes.

While watching this movie, I kept thinking about another A24 film, Moonlight. The Last Black Man in San Francisco wrestles with another theme, the theme of Black masculinity and its varied expressions, and how society’s norms have limited the freedom to show varied expressions of Black masculinity. Moonlight, if you haven’t yet seen it, is about a young gay Black man growing up in Miami, and it features many tender moments as Chiron’s life progresses and he comes into his sexuality and his manhood with the passage of time. There is an intimate moment where him and his crush, Kevin, are sitting on the beach and just talking, and then they fall in love with one another and kiss. Unfortunately, the school bully gets Kevin to beat up Chiron. Even though Kevin shared such an intimate beautiful moment with Chiron in privacy, because society dictates that he must behave a certain way in order for him to be validated as a Black man, he suppresses that vulnerability with himself and with Chiron. As adults, they reunite and share a beautiful tender moment with one another in the privacy of Kevin’s house. Both Kevin and Chiron get to be their authentic selves in this final scene of the film. Even though Jimmie and Montgomery are not explicitly a gay couple, the other Black men who hang around outside their house tease them for being such close friends with one another. They think these men aren’t really men just because they express their friendship with one another in a way that might not fit what their mainstream ideas of male friendship are. But Jimmie and Montgomery share an incredibly beautiful eternal bond that lasts well after the credits. I just felt those tender moments of dialogue, of shared pain and vulnerability with one another about their desire to just own the space they occupy rather than having to constantly leave, their desire to resist the push of change that robs them of their ability to take up space and just live and breathe and reclaim space.

There is one scene in the film that really stuck with me and further illustrates this human vulnerability. When Kofi, one of the guys who hangs out with his crew and goes along with their teasing of Jimmie and Montgomery for acting less masculine than they do, is murdered, the crew is standing outside of Jimmie and Montgomery’s place and they tell them Kofi got shot and killed in a scuffle with another guy. When Jimmie asks why he got killed, one of the guys in the crew approaches him asking why he’s asking so many questions, and Jimmie tells him he doesn’t understand, doesn’t get it because he just saw Kofi and his friends not too long ago. The guy looks at him angrily, and the music builds and I thought he was going to punch Jimmie for what he said, but he ends up breaking down into tears, landing his head on Jimmie’s shoulder and just letting himself feel grief, letting Jimmy share quietly in his grief as well. This scene had me in tears, especially because I haven’t seen many films where Black men are allowed to just be completely vulnerable with one another and just cry, other than this movie and Moonlight. Black men had historically been conditioned by American social conventions to not show pain, to “wear the mask” and mask their pain and hurt with toughness. During the racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, however, I witnessed a collective moment where Black men were allowed to feel pain, to just acknowledge their grief and embrace it. For instance, John Boyega, during a demonstration in the UK, spoke to the crowd about the racism he dealt with as a Black actor and in the middle, after expressing his anger he broke down in tears. It showed me that I need to listen to more narratives, embrace more narratives in which there are many different ways that Black men express their emotions and themselves. Crying is a human emotion, and part of the process of healing in times of grief and trauma is letting myself cry, letting myself feel what I feel, being honest that I am angry, hurt, confused, not knowing what to say and just expressing my complicated inexplicable pain through my tears. This moment where Kofi’s friend cries on Jimmie’s shoulder was just so deep, raw, powerful tender and human all at once, and honestly I might have exhausted my tear ducts from crying so much during that scene.

I also thought it was sad when Jimmie finds out that his granddad didn’t build the house that he and Montgomery bought. In the middle of the film, a group of Segway tourists are on a guided tour, and the white tour guide tells them that the house was built in the early 20th century, but Jimmie calls down to him that he is wrong, that the house was built in 1947 by his grandfather. He tells people this each time he talks to them, but then Montgomery produces a play called The Last Black Man in San Francisco and reveals to Jimmie and the people who attend the play that Jimmie’s grandfather didn’t build the house he bought. Early on Montgomery and Jimmie speak with Clayton, a white real estate agent who just happens to be a lifelong resident of San Francisco like them. But then the real estate agent throws their stuff out and puts the house up for sale, betraying their trust of him. Montgomery meets with him and tells him that Jimmie’s grandfather built the house and that he has no right to throw out their stuff, but Clayton basically tells him he is just doing his job and that the house was actually built by someone else in the 1850s.

Wanda, Jimmie’s auntie, later meets with him, and Jimmie tells her he feels bad because he told everyone his grandfather built it. Wanda tells him that his feelings are normal, and that if he leaves San Francisco, it’s not his loss, it’s San Francisco’s loss. Later on, while on the bus, two young white women, presumably new transplants to the city, talk about how they hate San Francisco, and Jimmie, overhearing their conversation, tells them that they “can’t hate the city unless they love it.” They think he is weird for saying it, but I feel Jimmie on that. If I go to live in a new city, it wouldn’t do anyone or me any favors if I went to a city and expected it to fit my expectations because life doesn’t always fall into place the way I want it to. I have learned that if I want to get the most out of a city, I need to embrace the longtime community and their contributions to the city. Jimmie and Montgomery and the longtime residents share so many memories of San Francisco together, and it’s hard to maintain hope when something you love is fading so fast and so many changes are happening at once. Honestly, it made me think about the US system of slavery, because Black people weren’t allowed to own property because they were property, their bodies belonged to the white slaveowners. They were, under the 3/5 Compromise, not fully human. Gentrification, as shown in the film, robs Jimmie and Montgomery of their right to own space, to take up space and claim it, to mesh their identity with the space they occupy, and so that it constantly feels like no place is home for Jimmie. He asks Montgomery where he’s going to go because he doesn’t know where his mom lives even after a brief encounter with her on the bus, his grandad is in another place so he can’t stay with him, and he can’t stay with his dad. Jimmie is basically homeless, and he has to constantly keep uprooting himself, not being able to settle in one place because the gentrification is raising home prices and making the city much less affordable.

I think what made this film especially incredible was the music and the cinematography. I swear, the aesthetics of the film are phenomenal, the most intimate human imagery. The music is mostly strings and orchestra, with clarinet, oboe and other woodwinds, and its sweeping and soaring nature paired together with Jimmie and Montgomery’s skateboarding through the city, just moved me a lot. Jimmie and Montgomery spend a lot of time in nature. At the beginning they both sit on a grass hilly area overlooking the bay, in peace and quiet while watching a Black man in a suit talk about the environmental injustice of gentrification. Their spending time in nature is significant, particularly in light of last year’s racial profiling of Christian Cooper.

Overall, it was a powerful film that moved me a lot.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco. 2019. Rated R for language, brief nudity and drug use.

A Buddhist’s Perspective on The Florida Project (note: I started this review a month ago, but didn’t finish it until now)

June 19, 2020

Categories: Buddhism, movies

After watching the 2017 film The Florida Project, I am still trying to breathe like normal again, because throughout the film I kept holding my breath. It is a deep film set in a motel near a highway around Disney World (specifically in Kissimmee, a city in Florida) and follows the adventures of six-year-old Mooney and her two friends Scooty and Janey. I had been meaning to see this movie for a while, especially because Willem Dafoe got nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and the clip they showed during the nominees presentation was so powerful. Frankly, I think this award should have gone to Willem Dafoe, but then again I didn’t see Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri yet, so I can’t say anything about Sam Rockwell’s win. Or at least it should have gotten some kind of Academy Award.

For some backstory, The Florida Project got its name because Walt Disney World, an entertainment complex, used to be called “The Florida Project” as a supplement to Disneyland in Anaheim, California during the 1960s. The movie is important to watch because it paints a different side of the magical Disney World (then again, this video shows how Disney hasn’t exactly been magical to its employees.) It takes place in a motel, in a low-income area, and Mooney and her friends find themselves often going to abandoned housing projects and breaking things, tampering with the electricity system of the motel, and asking strangers for money so they can buy themselves ice cream. Meanwhile, Mooney’s mom, Halley, is a struggling sex worker trying to pay Bobby, the hotel manager, her rent on time but falling behind each time. Her friend, Ashley, works full time at a diner and steals food from the kitchen to give to Mooney and her friends because she doesn’t want to ruin her friendship with Halley by saying “no.” However, things take a turn with their friendship when Scooty, Ashley’s son, breaks things in the abandoned housing project with Mooney and Jancey and lights a pillow on fire, burning the entire place up. Even though people are out cheering and calling the old place a dump, Ashley knows that Florida Department for Children and Families (DCF) will come for her and her son for what he did, so she keeps Scooty from playing anymore with Mooney and Jancey while also distancing herself from Halley because she didn’t prevent Mooney from doing what she and her friends did.

While I did at first have some sympathy for Halley’s struggle, I noticed there was a major difference in how Halley handled it and how Ashley handled it. Even though the film focused on Halley and Bobby, there’s a lot to be said about how Ashley deals with Halley’s shenanigans. Ashley is a woman of color and Halley is white. Halley was able to get off scot-free while Ashley, who doesn’t benefit from white privilege, was aware that she would be the one getting in trouble (10.10.21: looking back, I don’t want to assume anything about the race of these characters, but it was just an observation I made while watching the film that may or may not be true.) This difference makes itself more prominent at the diner scene, when Halley and Mooney go to the diner Ashley works at. Halley is angry that Ashley is keeping Scooty from playing with Mooney and Jancey, and is also angry when Ashley tells her she doesn’t allow Mooney and Jancey to steal food from her anymore because she is getting in trouble for it at work, and so Halley cusses her out and gives her a hard time, letting Mooney order all this food and then having a burping content with Mooney in the diner while eating. This shows the racial disparity between the two women in their experiences; even though both Halley and Ashley live in poverty and both are struggling to work and provide for their kids, Halley does not think twice about the consequences of her actions while Ashley doesn’t get to get off as easily. This also impacts how they tell their kids about the realities of what they are dealing with. When Ashley finds out about the abandoned houses setting fire, she reprimands Scooty and tells him that the DFC will come for them because of what he did. Halley, however, refuses to tell Mooney the truth and tries to hide it from her, thinking that as a six-year-old Mooney won’t be able to understand what is going on (even though, at some point, she was going to have to find out anyway.) She still acts as if Mooney shouldn’t take responsibility for participating in the fire, and lashes out at anyone who criticizes her for not taking responsibility. She takes Mooney on all these adventures around town, taking her to stores and restaurants where they get to act up and cuss people out.

The dynamics in Halley and Ashley’s friendship get even starker when Halley comes to Ashley’s room to apologize and asks for financial help, and Ashley laughs in her face because she knows Halley has been bringing clients to her motel room for sex work even though she is not supposed to bring unauthorized guests to her room, and tells her she can pay her rent herself. Halley takes this as an insult though and beats up her friend very badly. Even when the DFC finally comes to Halley’s apartment because of her neglect of Mooney and her illegally bringing clients to her room, Halley denies she did anything wrong. When Mooney asks what is wrong, who the adults are outside her and her mom’s apartment and why they are screaming at each other, and why DFC is taking her to live with another family, none of the adults take the time to explain the situation to her. None of them feel she will understand what is going on, so they keep trying to convince her that everything will be okay and to just stop talking and come with them, even though the situation is clearly not okay and Mooney will be in fact taken away from her mom. Ashley seems to be the only adult in the film who tells it like it is to her kid; the other adults try to implant this idea in their kids’ minds that poverty is an adult issue that kids shouldn’t have to grapple with.

Another important part is the scene in the middle of the film where a couple walks into the motel and tells Bobby that they looked at the pamphlet and thought they were going to be staying at Disney World. When Bobby tells them they are at Disney World, they tell him he is wrong because they expected to be staying at a nice fancy hotel (the website shows that there are a variety of places in Kissimmee for tourists. And yes, your good old Super 8 Motel is one of these places listed.) A lot of people say Disney World is the happiest place on Earth, but it’s just like anywhere else. There’s a cool episode of SGI-USA’s “The Buddha Beat,” in which people walking around Orlando answer the question, “Is Disney World the Happiest Place on Earth?”

In the video some people say yes and others say no. Some people said it wasn’t the happiest place on Earth because it is super crowded, another said that for the Disney workers walking around in the costumes it isn’t the happiest place on Earth. The interviewer then tells them that Buddhism teaches that happiness lies within you no matter where you are, and a lot of people in the interview agree with her.

In his letter “On Attaining Buddhahood in this Lifetime,” Nichiren Daishonin says the Lotus Sutra teaches that there are no two lands, pure or impure, but that “the difference lies solely in the good or evil of our minds.” (The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, volume 1, page 3.) Even though Mooney and her friends don’t have much money, they find happiness where they are, and they also treasure their friendship with one another even when the adults in their lives are dealing with stressful situations. I can’t relate to the situations of the characters in the movie, let alone the real-life residents of Kissimmee. But as one reviewer of the film put it, The Florida Project doesn’t sentimentalize poverty or try to send in someone to save Mooney, Halley or any of the other people living in the motel. It shows people just living life, challenges and all. Which is probably why, as many reviewers have said, the Oscars snubbed the film. As Heather Dockray, the author of a Mashable review on The Florida Project, rightfully calls out: “Oscar voters don’t historically like to look at women who are poor, especially when they are asked to stare their poverty head-on.” (Dockray, Mashable) Dockray explains that award-winning films about poor people, such as Precious and The Blind Side, often show a savior coming in to rescue the poor person from their circumstances. Mariah Carey helps Gabourey Sidibe get an education and escape her abusive mom forever. Sandra Bullock adopts a homeless Black teen and magically unlocks his potential as a student and football player. However, in The Florida Project, no one is coming to adopt Mooney or save Halley, Ashley or really anyone in the motel from their problems. Even Willem Dafoe’s character fails a lot even when he’s trying to help Halley. He can’t rescue her from her problems, especially when he’s dealing with his own. The women try to look out for each other, but due to their circumstances it’s hard because they are all just trying to survive.

Movie Review: Hustle and Flow

The first time I heard about Hustle and Flow was when I was watching the 78th Academy Awards in 2006 and one of the songs in the film, “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp” won an Oscar for Best Original Song. After that, I didn’t think about the film again, especially because I was too young at the time to see it. But fast forward to 2021 and I’m older and have seen enough R rated dramas to not mind seeing another one. Also, the movie received positive reviews from critics, so I wanted to see it.

It was definitely different from watching Zola. For those who haven’t seen Zola, it’s a dark comedy based on a true Twitter thread by a young Black woman named A’Ziah “Zola” King, who meets a fellow stripper while waitressing in Detroit and embarks with her on a wild road trip to Florida. The pimp in Hustle and Flow, played by Terrence Howard, ends up being a good guy who just wants to follow his dream of being a musician. Even though he doesn’t respect the women in his life, they still help him follow his musician dreams. The pimp in Zola, however, is anything but a good guy and doesn’t even become a good guy at any point during the film. In one scene of Hustle and Flow, D’Jay has Nola accompany him to a pawn shop where he is buying equipment for his recording studio, but the old white guy working there is unwilling to give him a discount for the expensive equipment. But then the guy ogles Nola and DJay arranges for her to have sex with him in exchange for the music equipment (this scene creeped me the fuck out, not gonna lie.) Nola then leaves the store and DJay threatens her with abusive language and she tells him she doesn’t want to hustle anymore, and wants something different in life even if she doesn’t know what that is. DJay then has Nola help him out in recording his rap album, and later on in the film when he is arrested for shooting up a bar he gives her his cassette tape and has her say aloud that she is in charge, meaning that she needs to take over his career while he is in prison. She is later scene getting out of a car wearing a business suit (which early on in the movie she told DJay she wanted to wear) and heels and walking to a radio station, and she seduces the DJ at the station to play DJay’s song “Whoop That Trick,” which he recorded at his home with Shug, Nola, Shelly, and Clyde. The song ends up being a hit and everyone rejoices.

Zola, however, paints a much grimmer picture. There are many scenes where Stefani, the white woman who coerces Zola to go on the trip with them, faces brutal treatment from her pimp, X (Colman Domingo acted the hell out of that role, and I’m glad I watched interviews of him talking about his character before watching the film, so I wouldn’t be scared shitless by his character.) When Zola first gets in the car, it seems they are all having a fun time, with X driving and all of them–X, Zola, Derek, and Stefani—rapping loudly to Migos’ “Hannah Montana.” However, within the first fifteen minutes of the film things go dark real quick, and we find out that X is actually more sinister than he appears. In one scene of the film (that has stayed stuck in my memory in the months after watching the movie) Stefani has sex with a client and ends up making less than she is worth, and Zola is furious with that, telling Stefani that “pussy is worth thousands.” Stefani tells her with false confidence that she doesn’t set the price for her services, and Zola has her update her profile and set a rate for her services. Stefani ends up making a ton of money that evening with multiple clients, but the next morning, when Stefani gives the money to X, he gets angry and tells Stefani to not let Zola get it in her head that her services are worth a lot of money, and that he is in charge when it comes to negotiating the rate of Stefani’s services. Stefani taps him quietly on the shoulder, and whispers in his ear if she can have some of the money (that she, not X, made through her own work), X tells her no and to be grateful that she has “food in her belly” and that he is providing her with these places to stay. Stefani lives in fear of X because he is absolutely an unpredictable character, and even though she projects this air of confidence around Zola, that X is just doing his job as her pimp and that she has no problems with him, it’s obvious that he uses fear and pumps himself up to intimidate Stefani and make her feel like she doesn’t have control over her life. In another scene, Stefani is forced into a client’s room and locked in a closet, and X, Zola and Derek run over to the room to get her. X shoots the guy who held her captive and they end up getting Stefani out of there, but in all honesty he’s not doing it because he like Stefani. He’s doing it because she makes him money, and if he loses her he will lose his cash flow, especially because Zola refuses to follow through with anything he does because she is a good bullshit detector and knows X is trying to intimidate her and make her lose her sense of self-worth. X doesn’t care about Stefani’s hopes and dreams, or even really about her career, unless it makes him money.

I am actually glad I watched Zola before watching Hustle and Flow. And I admit, I cannot compare the two movies to one another. While both movies are crime films, Hustle and Flow is a serious drama, and even though it has its tender moments and some funny moments of joy, it is at the end of the day a drama. Zola, however, is a dark comedy that has its funny moments, and it was an enjoyable film to watch (I think had I not read the Twitter thread before seeing the movie, I probably wouldn’t have appreciated the film as much.) The film doesn’t of course poke fun at sex trafficking or dancers themselves. The comedy lies in the absurdity of Stefanie, Derek and X, and knowing that Zola already knows how trippy and wild these people are as she quietly observes their ridiculous behavior. In Hustle and Flow, DJay is the main character and the women he pimps (Shug, Nola, and Lexus) are supporting characters who help bolster his music career so that he can address his midlife crisis (not that that isn’t important or that DJay’s dreams didn’t matter. They certainly did, and as a musician myself the film was quite inspiring in that sense) while in Zola, the pimp is a supporting character and Zola’s narrative is front and center and she gets to tell it just as it happened. Zola actually gives the lived account of a woman who was coerced into this trip. Honestly, it wouldn’t be fair for me to reduce it to just a wild trip to Florida. It was human trafficking and Zola, a Black woman and dancer, was actually in real life coerced by a young white woman into the human trafficking business and she actually shared the trauma she dealt with on that trip on Twitter in 2015. In one scene, Zola is sitting by herself at the poolside of the hotel X has them stay at, and she is just trying to have some alone time to herself but then X interrupts her and forces her to come back inside so that she can accompany Stefanie to meet with clients. Zola then says that she came on the trip to dance (at the beginning, when she and Stefanie first meet they dance together at a strip club, make a ton of money and have a good time just being themselves and doing their work) but then X tells her that “they’re done with that” and that she is here so that she and Stefanie can make him money. In Hustle and Flow, we briefly see Lexus and other women working at the strip club, and DJay sending Nola off to meet with clients, but that’s pretty much it. We don’t actually see what the men do to these women, how they treat them. It’s pretty much focused on DJay, his old high school friend Clyde, and a white guy named Shelly who all work together to create an album and help launch DJay’s career. Nola, Lexus and Shug are there for support, and even though Shug sings the chorus on the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” she is still at the end of the day a supporting character who helped the main character succeed in his career.

And of course, that’s not a bad thing in itself. The movie is really about people making music together and enjoying the process of it. It actually reminded me of Begin Again in that sense, because in Begin Again Keira Knightley’s character, Gretta, and Mark Ruffalo’s character, Dan, create their own band from scratch, recruiting random musicians who aren’t signed to a record label and just want to make music together and have fun. It is an enriching process of music making for all of them. Of course, the way Gretta and Dan see the music making is different from how DJay views it. Dan and Gretta just want to enjoy life and making music together, and even when Gretta sells the music online for a small price, Dan doesn’t mind because they had fun on the album together. DJay, however, puts a lot of pressure on Shug when she is singing the vocals for the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” because he really wants his album to get noticed by big producers and in particular, a famous musician he looks up to called Skinny Black (played by real-life rapper Ludacris). They are not making the album for fun; they are having fun in the process, but they are not just making the album for laughs. DJay wants worldly success and acclaim because he came from nothing and is going through a point in his life where he doesn’t know what to do. Dan, however, is also going through a midlife crisis like DJay, but he was already working for a renowned record company for years so he had access to the resources in the music industry and all the connections. He has won many awards, while DJay is just getting started and has to start from scratch and has to work extremely hard to get noticed by the big record labels and radio stations, and of course, his idol Skinny Black, who ends up putting his career down and not supporting DJay in his dreams. Even though these two movies about music are totally different in their subject matter, they are about people following their dreams from scratch even when the going goes rough for them.

Here is the trailer for Hustle and Flow:

Hustle and Flow. 2005. Rated R for sex and drug content, pervasive language and some violence.

Movie Review: Dolemite is My Name

I didn’t know much about this movie before watching it on Netflix, but I’m glad I finally got a chance to see it. I also didn’t know too much about Rudy Ray Moore before watching the movie, but I’m really glad I saw it because the acting was incredible, and the screenplay was amazing.

The film starts off with the song “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye playing at a radio station in the 1970s. Rudy goes to Roj, the DJ of the radio station (played by Snoop Dogg) and asks him if his records are going to get some air time. The DJ tells him that his records aren’t going to sell well, and Rudy finds himself at a deadlock. His comedy shows bomb and the owner of the comedy club doesn’t like his shows. In short, Rudy is struggling to make it in his career, and every time he tries to do something, he falls short. This prompts Rudy to meet with a guy who he kicked out of his record store, and he has the guy and other friends tell some jokes. Rudy then imitates the jokes they made later on at home and records himself improvising on those jokes. He ends up creating an alter ego for himself called Dolemite, and his catchphrase becomes “Dolemite is my name, and f*cking up motherf*ckers is my game!” He releases a series of albums and sells out a lot of his shows, and he recruits Lady Reed, a woman whose man just cheated on her. She doesn’t believe in herself, but Dolemite sees potential in her, and he asks her what she did for a living. She tells him she used to be a backup singer in New Orleans, and he recruits her for his comedy show. When she is reluctant, he tells her that she just needs to create a character for people, like he did. In real life, he is Rudy Ray Moore, but onstage he is the character, the alter ego, Dolemite, who tells raunchy jokes and curses a lot. She ends up joining him and they make a really hilarious duo, singing goofy raunchy songs and making audiences laugh (it kind of reminded me of the time my then-partner and I were sitting together one time, and he had me listen to “Hand Job, Blandjob, I Don’t Understand Job” by the folk duo Garfunkel and Oates. I think I almost peed my pants laughing so hard when I heard the song.)

Then, Dolemite meets Jerry Jones, a playwright (played brilliantly by Keegan-Michael Key of another hilarious duo, Key and Peele) and approaches him for a movie he wants to make. At first, the guy he works with at the record store, Theodore (played by Titus Burgess of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) says that he can’t just up and make a movie, but Rudy won’t take no for an answer, and he approaches Jerry and asks if he can work with him. After giving into Rudy’s persuasion, Jerry meets back at Rudy’s place to write the screenplay with him. Rudy comes up with all kinds of wild outlandish ideas, and Jerry tells him to be practical and “write what you know.” Rudy gets sad for a moment and then thinks up all these different characters in the film because he thinks that his average everyday life won’t be interesting enough to put on the big screen. Jerry hears these ideas that Rudy says and then thinks it’s brilliant, and him and Rudy churn out the screenplay. Then Rudy finds an old beat up hotel to film the movie in, and recruits Nick and some other white film students to direct the film.

Before doing that, he meets with D’Urville Martin (played brilliantly by Wesley Snipes), a distinguished director who has done countless well-renowned movies. When Rudy pitches his idea to him, D’Urville is offended that Rudy would approach him to work on such an outlandish movie, but he does it anyway because Rudy keeps persuading him to work on the movie with him. D’Urville directs it and is absolutely frustrated, trying to impose his own ideas about how the movie should be onto Rudy and the crew members. But they still end up making the movie, even with all the twists and turns. Rudy tells them on the way to the midnight premiere of Dolemite that even if the movie gets booed, they still won because they had fun during the filmmaking process.

It kind of reminded me of this movie I saw called Be Kind Rewind. If you haven’t seen Be Kind Rewind, it’s starring Jack Black and Yasiin Bey (he is listed in the credits by his stage name, Mos Def) who work at a movie store that is about to be closed down. Jerry, played by Jack Black, gets the idea of remaking movies that people don’t like and making these movies with him and Mike (Yasiin Bey) playing the characters in the movies. They charge the movies for high rental fees, and when someone angrily comes in saying the movie they gave them was a ripoff Jerry tells him that the film is “sweded,” and that it is expensive because the tapes came from Sweden. Then they recruit a young woman, played by Melonie Diaz, to star in their movies, and in the process they end up having a brilliantly fun goofy time. Danny Glover’s character reminded me of D’Urville because at one point while making the remake of Rush Hour, Danny’s character quits because he thinks that the two of them are just silly amateurs for making these movies. However, many people end up coming back to the movie store to watch the films. As someone who wants to make a movie myself, I needed to watch both Be Kind Rewind and Dolemite is My Name to remind myself to be serious about my creative work, but to not take myself so seriously and to appreciate the moments when I do have fun.

Here is the trailer for Dolemite is My Name:

Dolemite is My Name. 2019. Rated R for pervasive language, crude sexual content, and graphic nudity.

Movie Review: Get On Up

9/24/21

Wow. All I can say is wow. Honestly I can say that this film really deepened my appreciation for Chadwick Boseman’s work as an actor. For those who don’t know Chadwick Boseman was an incredible actor who starred as King T’Challa in the movie Black Panther, as well as the character Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Jackie Robinson in the biopic 42. He passed away from colon cancer last year, and I remember feeling disbelief, not knowing how to react to his death, and then crying for about a week, just long sobs. I honestly didn’t think I was going to get through most of my days at work that week without crying. On television shortly after his death Black Panther was on, and afterwards there was a tribute to Chadwick, and seriously I was convulsing with tears and didn’t think I would sleep that night. I didn’t understand how life was going to be the same without Chadwick alive because in every movie I saw with him, he just put his heart and soul and feeling into the roles he played. And in the biopic Get On Up, it was like he was the only actor who could actually play James Brown, was meant to play James Brown.

This is also the first film I’ve watched starring Nelsan Ellis. Nelsan Ellis is an actor who was famous for his role in True Blood. I haven’t seen True Blood, but when I saw him in Get On Up, I was like, Damn, this guy could act. He plays Bobby Byrd, a member of James Brown’s band The Famous Flames. The movie shows how their rapport changes over time, and even when the other band members quit because James won’t pay them on time, Bobby stays behind and is the only member of the band to stick with James. That is, until he tells James that he wants to release his own record someday. In one powerful scene of the film, he and James are performing together, and James lets Bobby have some of his spotlight, giving him some credit when before he treated Bobby like any other member of the band. But when they’re sitting and talking together, Bobby tells James that he wants to release his own solo record, and James goes off on him and accuses him of stealing his spotlight and going around telling everyone he’s going to become the next big thing rather than stay in James’s shadow as he’s been doing the past something odd years they were performing together. Bobby quits because he can no longer take this anymore, and when he leaves Brown asks him why he’s leaving him alone, and Bobby tells him that from the very beginning James has always been on his own and wanted to do his own thing. This shows that he can see right through James, that even if James wants him to stay, Bobby knows that he worked behind the scenes with James for years, bolstering his career, hoping to one day launch his own career, but James isn’t going to return the favor or help him because he’s focused on his own career and his own success. Earlier, Maceo Parker, asks Bobby why he is sticking with James even though he treats the band poorly, and Bobby says it’s because he wasn’t meant to have the spotlight on him, and that James is the one meant to be in the spotlight. Maceo questions this logic, and we can see Bobby reflecting on whether he should stick with James or not. Even many years later in 1993, James thinks Bobby should perform with him again, even though Bobby has moved on and started a new life with his wife and family. The film shows how complex their relationship was, and Ellis and Boseman both did incredibly embodying the roles of both these people.

The biopic is also important to watch because of the theme of Black masculinity. We see several flashbacks to James’s childhood, when his father threatens to shoot and kill his mother and beats her severely. Another scene is when his mother is seen drunk and playing around with another man, and the young James calls out to her but she pretends to not remember who he is. Another scene is when James is talking with Little Richard during Richard’s shift at a burger joint, and Richard opens up to him about his past trauma and then asks James about his past trauma. James recalls a moment when he and several other Black boys were blindfolded and had numbers painted on their chests, and they had to fight in a boxing ring against each other in front of a crowd of white people. All the members in the band playing during the fight are Black men, and the camera flashes to their pained expressions as they look at the fighting. It shows the injustice of it all, because these Black men not only have to play music for white people but also have to witness young Black men learn aggression against each other for the sake of entertainment. They understand that these Black boys are being treated like chattel for the white audience. When James is knocked down, he looks at the band from where he is lying and they break out into a funk song and start getting into playing the music, and seeing this in his mind’s eye, even though it may not be actually happening in real life, inspires James to get back up and fight even harder against the other boy in the ring.

These flashbacks not only give a glimpse into what James’s life was like growing up, but it shows how he had to hide being vulnerable under all his success so that he wouldn’t seem weak. In one powerful scene of the film, his mother Susie comes by and tries to engage James in casual conversation, but James says he doesn’t want to talk to her because he doesn’t need her help anymore. His mother cries and explains that she did her best to raise him, and he gives her a $100 bill and shows her out the door, telling her to stop crying and getting sentimental because he is James Brown and he can make it on his own without anyone else’s help. When she leaves she says he is beautiful but he still gives her a hard cold expression. When Bobby appears, James appears to be crying, but he quickly wipes the tears away, suggesting that he doesn’t want to appear less than a man by crying. The scene made me think of the film Moonlight, and its depiction of Black male pain was told from a different lens because Chiron, unlike James, had homophobia to deal with on top of the struggles of being a poor Black youth. Towards the end of the film Chiron is sitting with his mother, who abused him when he was younger, and she is reflecting on her past behavior towards him and starts breaking down in tears because she feels she could have been more supportive of him when he was going through such tough times. When he sees his mother crying, Chiron breaks down and cries. This is a total contrast from the beginning of the scene where we first meet Chiron as a grown adult because at the beginning he is muscular, he works out, he’s no longer the skinny kid who got beat up by his crush in high school for being gay. He seems to be the prototype of the straight Black man, but the scene where he meets his mom shows that even as a grown man, he is a human being with feelings and that he doesn’t have to be ashamed of crying. We cry so we can heal from past trauma, and Chiron cries because he remembers his past and realizes he can’t keep it buried away no matter how much he tries to distance himself from his past. Him crying and sharing this moment with his mother of reconciling grief and trauma when he was younger allows him to truly heal and to express his humanity, his manhood, in a way that is true to himself, that doesn’t depend on societal expectations that say that men, particularly Black men, should keep their emotions to themselves and not share them with anyone.

James Brown actually had a song called “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door I’ll Get It Myself)” where he talks about not needing people’s charity or anyone’s help (“open up the door/ huh/ I’ll get it myself” is one of the lyrics). As groovy as that song was, it reminded me that asking for help, especially as a Black person living in a racist society, is perfectly okay, but also how historically Black people have been conditioned to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they want to be successful. However, this mentality has only caused further pain and trauma because talking about mental health has historically carried a stigma in Black communities because of the idea that Black people, and Black men in particular, should just buck up and keep their feelings to themselves. It’s getting better and more people in the Black community are realizing that we need to talk about our mental health in order to go through the process of healing from trauma.

Also, side note: it was so interesting that Viola played the character she did, because in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, it’s totally different and this time, instead of being a supporting character like she was in Get On Up, Viola Davis actually plays a musician famous during the 1920s called Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. Boseman, in the film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, plays Levee, who is a member of Ma’s band. Unlike Ma, who just wants to make her records and do her own thing, Levee caters to the white record executives and seeks validation from them for his work. He is constantly asking them to take his songs, and when they refuse he pretends to be okay with it, and then takes his anger out on his bandmates because as a young Black man living in a white supremacist society he doesn’t have many other outlets through which to express his frustration. He also challenges Ma a lot, underestimating her authority as a musician. Ma constantly puts him in his place though and reminds him that he needs to keep his ego at the door and just play the music how she wants it. It was interesting to watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and then Get On Up because I think Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom gave me some key context for watching Get On Up, particularly in regards to how Levee and James both handle their past trauma. In one scene Levee recalls how a white man assaulted his mother, and how witnessing her assault led to him feeling angry and disillusioned about life, especially life as a young Black man. Remembering that trauma with his mother also challenges Levee’s faith in God, and he points up to the ceiling cursing God and telling him to turn his back on him. I think that’s why, when I think about the last scene of the film, where a white band is seen recording Levee’s song, which the record executives at first rejected but then stole and sold to a white audience, because in that song there is a lot of pain and trauma underneath the joviality and upbeat nature of the song. Levee put his life into that song, and while writing it wrestled with his past trauma, his tense arguments with Ma and the other band members, so to the record executives, it’s just a song to be sold and distributed to the public, but within music there is the narrative of someone’s life, and Levee’s life, his suffering and brief moments of joy, went into that song.

In one scene of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the white record executives are about to do a recording session with Ma, but she tells them that she won’t record the song until they bring her a Coca-Cola. This is just one of many demands that Ma makes, and it frustrates the record executives. But Ma tells one of the members of her backing band, Cutler (played brilliantly by Colman Domingo), that she knows that the white record executives only want her voice. They only want her voice, not her humanity, and they will do what they can to control her image to appeal to white audiences, giving her little to no artistic freedom or room to express her authentic self. This was common though at the time, and another example of someone who had to assert herself in the industry was Aretha Franklin. In a tribute to Aretha Franklin, Daily Show host Trevor Noah said that Aretha demanded to get paid before she performed instead of after she performed. She did this because she knew how white executives treated Black musicians, and in general because she was living in a racist society where Black people were treated as second-class citizens even in a prominent industry like the music industry, so she had to demand her pay and be assertive so that she wouldn’t be walked all over. In the film Ma didn’t care what other people thought of her, and she wasn’t trying to curry favor with the record label. She had a certain way she wanted to sing and express herself, and she came in with that self-knowledge, so she wasn’t duped into thinking that she had to do what the record labels said for her to do. Similarly, in Get On Up, James Brown makes several demands to his manger, Ben Bart, because he knows that if he signs with the record labels, these white executives are going to just make all the money they can off of him and not pay him well or treat him with respect, or even genuinely respect his artistry. Earlier in the film he has a conversation with Little Richard, who warns him of the “white devil” and to not let himself get easily duped by white people in the music industry. He remembers this advice and when he meets with Ben Bart, he tells him that he knows the “white devil” (aka the white record executives) just want to make money off of him, and he commands respect and makes demands of what he needs from them so he can launch his career and have complete ownership of his image. James suffered from mistreatment as a young Black man all his life, so he isn’t going to let white people profit from and take away the one thing he holds dear, his musical talent.

Overall, I really loved this movie. And Boseman’s dance moves were out of this world.

Get On Up. 2014. 2hr 19 min. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug use, some strong language and violent situations.

Movie Review: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Woah. Ok. This film. I saw this last night and gosh, it kept me up. It got nominated for quite a few Academy Awards when it came out, and I saw Frances McDormand’s speech when she won for Best Actress for the movie, and I thought, I should probably see this movie. I’m not super familiar with a lot of Frances’ work, to be honest, but the last movie I saw with her was Nomadland, and her acting was absolutely incredible. There’s just something about her facial expressions when she acts that make you reflect deeply about the film. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, she does the same thing, entrancing you with her incredible acting chops.

The film opens up with “Andante” from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 1 in C (Maria Joao Pires sings the andante) and we see beautiful rolling green hills (even though the film takes place in Ebbing, Missouri, the movie was filmed in North Carolina) and fields of flowers. We also see three torn-up billboards advertising various things. Mildred, played by Frances McDormand, goes into the office of this man named Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones, who played Jeremy Armitage in the horror film Get Out) and has him rent out those three billboards she passes by. Mildred’s daughter, Angela, was raped and murdered, and Mildred is on a mission to find which guy was responsible for raping and murdering her. At first, Red is skeptical about renting the billboards out to Mildred, but she refuses to back down and so he finally rents them out to her. Later, a police officer named Jason Dixon is riding through town when he passes by the billboards, the third one which reads “How come, Chief Willoughby?”, the second one which reads, “And still no arrests” and the first one which gives the main reason why the billboards are being painted in the first place: “raped while dying.”

In the process of seeking vengeance for her daughter’s murderer and rapist, Mildred faces a lot of backlash from the town’s people, and in particular, from the Ebbing Police Department. They think she is too obsessed with this matter, and she tells them they’re more focused on racial profiling than they are on this matter. This movie reminded me a lot of Promising Young Woman. In Promising Young Woman, Cassie puts together a plan for getting revenge on Al, her classmate in med school who raped her best friend and classmate, Nina. However, as Cassie continues her plan she feels self-doubt creep up on her, and feels like no matter what she does to avenge her friend, she is going nowhere and her plan is going nowhere. She meets with Nina’s mom, who tells Cassie that everyone felt like they wanted to do more to help Nina, to not feel like a bystander who just let her get raped and didn’t do anything, there’s nothing much they can do, so they just need to let it go. I felt this was similar to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, because Mildred has the billboards put up and does what she can to speak out against the injustice of Angela’s murder, and meets with the police department to persuade them to give even just a tiny ounce of care about Angela’s murder and finding the guy who raped and killed her. However, there’s a particularly chilling scene where she feels like no matter what she has done, no matter how long those billboards stay up, there’s no way she can get over the grief at having lost her daughter. The scene flashes back to the kitchen and Mildred is arguing with Angela, and before Angela goes out she says that she hopes that someone rapes her and kills her, and Mildred shouts back that she wishes the same. The scene flashes back to the present, and Mildred is standing in the darkened hall of her home, reflecting on that day with guilt, like “Why did I even agree with her that she should get raped and killed? I should have told her to not say that.” There’s another particularly poignant scene (and it was in the trailer at the very beginning. It’s actually the scene that convinced me to see this film because it’s a deeply powerful scene.), and in this scene Mildred is sitting in a field, and a deer comes up and eats peacefully across from her. The deer looks Mildred in the eyes, and Mildred asks the deer, “You’re not trying to make me believe in reincarnation, are you? Because you’re pretty, but you ain’t her.” Mildred wants nothing more than to get Angela back, and not even this rare moment of seeing a beautiful creature can surpass the moments she spent with her daughter.

Overall, this movie gave me a lot to think about, and the acting was really good, and the music was excellent too.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. 2017. Rated R for violence, language throughout, and some sexual references.

Films I Watched a Few Weekends Ago

What About Adolf?: Honestly I didn’t know what to expect before seeing this film. But honestly it kept me on my toes. It’s about a couple named Elisabeth and Stephen, and Elisabeth invites her brother Thomas, her friend Rene and Thomas’s pregnant girlfriend to dinner one evening. When Elisabeth, Thomas, and Rene get to talking about what names Thomas and his girlfriend Anna have picked for their baby, Thomas leads them in a nearly 5 minute guessing game to see if they can correctly guess what the baby’s name will be. Finally, after they give up, Thomas tells them they will name the baby Adolf. Unsurprisingly, Elisabeth, Rene and Stephen are not happy because of Germany’s history with Adolf Hitler and how you can’t really separate the brutal legacy of that man from his name. All of them get into a heated argument about Thomas and Anna naming their baby after a dictator, and when Anna arrives it gets even more heated. Stephen is actually the one who is the most heated out of him, Elisabeth and Rene and gives Thomas all kinds of reasons why he shouldn’t name the baby after a dictator. The movie had all kinds of plot twists in it and sparked a serious and also darkly comic philosophical discussion on namesakes and whether some namesakes are more appropriate than others.

The Class: I saw one other French language film before this one called The Intouchables, and it was an incredible movie. I also really loved this one. I saw the movie Freedom Writers and it kind of reminded me of it. However, the way the education system is depicted in France is different from the way the education system is depicted in Freedom Writers, which took place in the United States. It’s based on a semiautobiographical novel and it’s about a white teacher in an inner-city school (apparently the guy who wrote the novel plays the main character in the film) who navigates how to inspire his students in their learning.
The Lunchbox: This is a really touching film. Seeing as how most of the movies I watch contain a lot of intense violence (ok, maybe not Quentin Tarantino violence, but I’m guessing you know what I mean) I needed this film to balance out my film repertoire. This movie is a beautiful story about how a woman who makes lunch as part of a lunchbox system in Mumbai where people deliver lunchboxes to employees at an office. The lunch the woman makes ends up going to to a guy who is almost retiring from work and has lost his wife and is feeling rather lonely and depressed. The food he makes for her is delicious and he writes little notes to her to express his appreciation for her food. Their exchange via notes develops into a powerful friendship over the course of the film. Honestly, watching the movie made me hungry for Indian food and it made me want to go back to India because I really loved the food there.
The Women’s Balcony: I haven’t seen too many movies set in Israel, and the movies and shows that I do watch about Judaism are usually set in America (Uncut Gems, A Serious Man, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). This movie is about a synagogue in Israel that has a balcony for the women who attend the synagogue, but when the balcony collapses, the women try to raise money to get a new balcony, only to get pushback from their husbands and the young rabbi who keeps trying to put down their plans. Nevertheless, these women persevere even if the men keep telling them that their plan won’t work, and eventually they win some of the men over to their side to support their plan to build a new balcony. It truly was a beautiful film. I read a book a while ago called Being Jewish by Ari Goldman, and reading it gave me some pretty good insight that was helpful when watching this movie, especially because there are differences between the denominations of Judaism that I didn’t really know about before reading the book and watching The Women’s Balcony.

Movie Review: Good Time

Ok, to be perfectly honest, after watching Uncut Gems I had to watch Good Time. Seriously. The filmmaking of Uncut Gems made me want to watch Good Time. Like a lot of people, I saw Robert Pattison in the Twilight movie franchise and thought he was good in it, but I hadn’t seen his other films like Cosmopolis, The Lighthouse or Good Time. I finally watched it and honestly it was amazing.

The movie is about a guy named Connie (played by Robert Pattinson) whose brother, Nick (Benny Safdie), ends up at Rikers Island after the two guys attempt to rob a bank, only to have their plans to rob the bank backfire and Nick ends up going to jail (my one thought though was why the choice of bank robbery masks? It kind of looked like they were wearing blackface, but maybe I’m being paranoid, I don’t know.) Connie needs bail money to get Nick out Connie does what he can to get his brother out of jail, and when he finds the guy he thinks is Nick at the hospital and wheels him out, he stays with a Black woman named Annie and her granddaughter, Crystal (Taliah Webster). Connie involves the daughter in his plan to get Nick away from the hospital, but what ends up happening is that Connie finds out that the guy he thought was Nick isn’t really Nick but some other guy named Ray (Buddy Duress) who, like Nick, looked beaten up badly. Connie thinks of leaving the guy but can’t because the guy opens up to him this story about this bottle of LSD he bought from his friends that’s worth more than a pretty penny, and how it got left in an amusement park and the guy never retrieved it because he took a cab and then told the cab driver what happened and then the cab driver wanted to take him to jail and so the guy jumped out of the cab and injured his face badly while doing so. In the end, the guy jumps out the window in a suicide attempt and Connie ends up going to jail. The movie ends with Nick in a facility where they have a mental health group therapy session for everyone, and in the session they play a game where they have to step across to the other side of the room if some event happened to them. The end credits roll as Nick ponders as to why this game is even relevant and why he even has to play it.

Honestly, while watching this film, I had the same bodily reaction that I did while watching Uncut Gems. It was so packed with action, and the movie pretty much just jumps into the plot without stopping or building up suspense. The music by Daniel Lopatin is the same kind of music that Uncut Gems had, and it gave the scenes their intensity.

9/18/21: So it’s September 18, and it’s been a couple weeks since I started writing this review. I was really chanting and pondering about what kind of review I wanted to write about the film, and I was also wrestling with why Connie did the things that he did. And so I chanted and reflected this morning, and I think seeing the film from a Buddhist perspective helped me process it a little better. In Buddhism, there’s this concept called The Ten Worlds, which are ten states of life that any one of us can experience at any given moment. The first four of these ten life states are hell, hunger, animality and anger. I think Connie did the things he did because he was constantly in the life state of animality. I read this really helpful book called An Introduction to Buddhism that the Soka Gakkai International (SGI) published, and it talks about each of the ten worlds. According to the book, “when in the state of animality, one acts based on instinct or impulse, unable to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil…In the world of animality, people lack reason and conscience, seeing life as a struggle for survival in which they are willing to harm others to protect themselves. Unable to look beyond the immediate, they cannot plan for the future. Such a state of ignorance ultimately leads to suffering and self-destruction.” (An Introduction to Buddhism, p. 19) As I write this, it makes sense why the film moved so quickly the more I reflect on this probable reason for why Connie did the things he did. All Connie wanted to do was get his brother out of Rikers and get him home, but he didn’t really have a way out because the police are still tracking him down and the news keeps reporting about the failed bank robbery he and Nick set up. When he’s on the couch with Crystal and they’re watching television, the news suddenly comes on and his mugshot appears. Crystal looks at him and is trying to figure out if he’s that same guy that robbed the bank, but then Connie panics when he realizes she might turn him in to the cops, and so he forcefully kisses her. It’s hard to tell whether or not this kiss was consensual, but it showed me just one example of how Connie is in the world of animality. Because all he can think about is getting away from the cops, he’s willing to take advantage of Crystal to make his plot work. Even when Connie realizes that the guy he thought was Nick is actually somebody else, he still has Crystal drive him and the guy to White Castle to get them food with the little money that he has left. When Connie and the guy go to the amusement park to retrive the bottle of acid, a Black security guard stops them and Connie beats him up and steals his uniform while Ray pours the LSD down the guard’s throat. Connie by this point is not thinking about Crystal and when she gets arrested even though she’s obviously not the one who robbed a bank or beat up a security guard and poured acid down his throat, all he can do is just look silently as she is taken away. I was wondering why, while watching this film, it just seemed Connie was just going and going and couldn’t stop for anything, and I read the Wikipedia plot summary of the film after watching it and reading it gave me more insight into why the film moved so quickly. I know you’re thinking, Well, duh, silly, it’s a crime thriller, of course it’s gonna be fast-paced. But I think on a deeper level, seeing this movie from the perspective of the 10 Worlds concept helped me understand what might have psychologically or emotionally driven Robert Pattinson’s character to commit the actions he did. I mean, I can definitely see why the film got critical acclaim though, because Robert’s performance was really good.

I’m definitely still reflecting on the movie, and I’d probably have to watch it a second time just to maybe dive a little deeper into the film (and also, because the music was excellent.) I wasn’t even really thinking about what grade to give the film, I was just enthralled with the acting and the visual effects because the acting and visual effects of the Safdie brothers’ last film, Uncut Gems was excellent. My feeling about the movie at this point is pretty neutral; I just was more enthralled by the acting than anything else. Uncut Gems was really good, and I think after watching a lot of A24 films (Good Time is an A24 film) I think I just love the acting in them.

Good Time. 2017. Rated R for language throughout, drug use, sexual content and violence.

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