OVER the long Labor Day weekend (n.b. for my US audience, the Philippines, like the rest of the world except you, celebrates Labor Day on May 1. It’s a metric holiday.), I went to see the recently released Ryan Coogler film “Sinners,” starring Michael B. Jordan, who Jack-and-Jills it as the gangster twins Smoke and Stack Moore, and the relatively unknown Miles Caton as Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore, a musical prodigy of the Delta Blues genre. Fun fact: For a brief minute or two at the end of the movie, Moore’s character is depicted by the Blues God Buddy Guy, which is not inappropriate, as Caton himself is an insanely talented musician.
The story is set in 1932 in the Mississippi low country, and centers around the return of the twins, who are World War I veterans and apparently were employed for a time by Al Capone’s organization in Chicago, to their homeland, where they intend to open up a “juke joint” in an old sawmill that they purchase from a local leader of the Ku Klux Klan with the proceeds of whatever it was they were doing in Chicago. Their cousin Sammie, who is the son of a pastor (hence his nickname) is enlisted to provide some music.
I’m not going to get into a whole review of this thing, mainly because this movie pissed me off beyond all possibility of keeping my mouth shut about it. Michael B. Jordan, Mile Caton, and the entire cast did a fantastic job of acting. The music was beyond excellent. The setting – deep in the Jim Crow south at the tail end of the Prohibition Era – offered so many opportunities for a deep, socially profound message, if that’s what the writers and director (Ryan Coogler) wanted. The movie even teased – not just teased, slapped the audience in the face with a profound-sounding idea: “There are legends of people with the gift of making music so true it conjures spirits from the past and the future.” And how did the movie follow that up?
Vampires.
Fucking vampires. Irish folk-singer vampires, as if that matters.
I get that the vampires were probably supposed to be some kind of metaphor, but here’s the thing with vampires: They were frightening, or funny, or intellectually compelling the first 17,823 times the trope was applied to a movie. Here, it just came across as a lazy shortcut past whatever complex and important social message this movie could have delivered.
Honestly, I feel bad that Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, and the entire rest of the cast wasted their vast and eminently respectable talents on this piece of garbage. But a paycheck is a paycheck; being in the media, albeit in a far different form, I get that, too.
Again, I’m not interested in doing a full-blown review of the movie, because that’s not actually the point here. “Sinners” was just the latest in a string of bad recommendations that I’ve received, movies that impressed the critics, and more to the point, impressed people that I’ve interacted with, either online or in person, for reasons that, after I’d actually seen the movie in question, were a complete goddamn mystery to me. Here’s a rundown of a few that everyone seemed to completely lose their shit over, and compelled me to go see out of FOMO, that I could not judge as being anything other than stupid as hell after I saw them myself (and regretted spending the money on):
Inglorious Basterds: Fanfic about actual history is the wheelhouse of guys who only need to use two fingers when they whip their weasel. Props to Christoph Walz, who is an appallingly good actor in any role, even in a movie that’s otherwise a complete piece of crap, but the entire rest of this film just had me facepalming.
Pacific Rim: Oh my god, you guys. Please put down the bong, and slowly back away.
Napoleon: Maybe, just maybe, a better treatment of the complicated and vastly intriguing story of Napoleon Bonaparte would have been better-handled if the title role was written in such a way that the actor filling it was actually trying to play Napoleon and not Joaquin Phoenix. Did Ridley Scott not bother to watch the 1970 classic “Waterloo”? Whether he did or didn’t, I hope the ghost of the renowned Rod Steiger came back to slap the piss out of him.
Interstellar: OH MY GOD, this movie. Look, the whole thing ends with the people of Earth building a giant space station to solve the problem of Earth itself becoming untenable. SO WHAT IN THE HELL WAS ALL OF THAT OTHER NONSENSE FOR????
Look, if you like something, you like something, enjoy it. If I think it’s stupid, I will judge you, silently, unless you get in my face about it, and that's the problem. If you express dissent with the popular opinion, expect to be attacked for it. If you're attacking me, expect to be eaten alive; I live and work in a world where nastiness is a way of life, I will shred you in a word-skirmish. You shouldn't let anyone's opinion stop you from having a good time, and if you feel self-conscious about that opinion differing from yours, that's a you problem. I think the real lesson here is people need to make up their own minds, and let others be if they see things differently. I’m trying; sometimes it feels like I’m the only one, but I’m still trying.
