Thoughts on John Q (2002) directed by Nick Cassavetes starring Denzel Washington

 

Ever since I first heard the news of ol' Luigi Mangione, this film has stayed in my mind and so I decided to watch it again. It is amazing how even in a world after Obamacare that the United States lags so behind in the basics of healthcare. That Cuba, under one of the most destructive economic embargos this side of Gaza, still has a better healthcare apparatus than the United States is incredibly sad and depressing. I suppose that John Q and Luigi may have different political leanings, but they are celebrated folk heroes all the same. Their respective martyrdoms as much products of civil and political negligence and corruption as anything else. 

This movie may be one of the few I have seen where James Woods isn't the final boss villain. As corrupt as his character is as the fancy doctor, The hospital represented by the character Rebecca Payne and the health insurance company are the true villains of this film. The continuing inequality of healthcare in the USA is the true villain of this film. 

Ray Liotta as a cop will never not be jarring as he will always be Henry Hill to me😄

Miss Juneteenth (2020) directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples

 "Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on 'til victory is won."

Well today is as appropriate as ever to finally watch this movie. I had been aware of it since it made its way to home release, but did not have the interest to watch it then as a lot was going on. This is ironic as a lot of folks did watch it for the very same reason. Channing Godfrey Peoples film was made on location in Fort Worth in August-September 2019 and had it's theatrical-run in January of 2020 with a planned home-release for Juneteenth of that year. And then events in the world took a turn that is stranger than fiction and suddenly for a brief moment folks were clamoring for a film about Juneteenth. This is an indie film about a relatively-young single-mom that wants to get her daughter out of the poverty of Forth Worth, Texas that she finds herself in and figures the annual Miss Juneteenth pageant and its promise of a full-ride scholarship to an HBCU is the best chance. The film's title is a clever misdirection as it is referring to a particular Miss Juneteenth—just not the one we are thinking of coming into the film. 

I really don't watch enough of these sort-of "quiet drama" films. It was refreshing to watch a film that, while dramatic (and almost melodramatic in the first third) ends with hope and victory. A victory that was shown to be very necessary over the course of the film. I loved all the supporting characters in this film who could've been my very neighbors in certain instances, but Nicole Beharie was the tour de force actress of this movie. While she never truly spirals into a broken-blob, you are fully convinced as her character's daughter is at how much Turquoise Jones wants Kai Jones to win the Miss Juneteenth pageant and we're all holding are breath until the very end as the protagonist as to come-up against so many challenges and sacrifices for this one little dream. When the ending play out, the hope one feels that things might start to turn around is palpable.

I guess this year saw me really needing to make sure I celebrate and commemorate this holiday in my own way, and not rely on others to do it for me. I am certainly happy I finally got a chance to watch this movie and I wish everyone reading this a Happy Juneteenth!

My Review of El Norte (1983) directed by Gregory Nava

 In the current times of genocide and migrant hysteria, I thought it was time to re-visit a film that deals with the United States government's role in both. El Norte is an epic film that is told about the trials and tribulations of two Kʼicheʼ Mayan siblings named Rosa and Enrique Xuncax caught up in the U. S.- backed genocide of the Mayan population in Guatemala that occurred during the Guatemalan Civil War and make their way through Mexico to the United States. This is a tough film to watch, but a necessary one to show truth and perseverance of humanity in dark and hopeless times. This is one of the first films to make extensive use of magical realism and one of the first films to use Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings in its soundtrack.

I think this is the first narrative feature film to document a genocide while it was ongoing (and being funded by the United States). The first act of this three-act film looks at this Kʼicheʼ Mayan village called San Pedro as it is being destroyed during the Guatemalan Genocide. The daily life of the people living there and the their exploitation by wealthy planters is sown before we quickly see horrors of the genocide with magical realism playing a big role in telling the story of what is going on. It is ironic that some of the most beautiful imagery of the film is shown in this part. Because the actual place where the first act of the film takes place was undergoing the actual genocide, much of this film was shot in Southern California with some shots in Mexico until hostile locals and government agents of Mexico's then-PRI dictatorship forced the production out of Mexico. One benefit of moving production to Southern California was being able to use actual Mayan refugees as supporting cast and extras. The characters of Don Ramon and the mysterious twins represent Mayan deities to Enrique and Rosa, respectively in very interesting ways.

The second act details Rosa and Enrique's journey through Mexico to the United States and it is based on the story from Mayan folklore of the "hero twins" Hunahpú & Xbalanqué from the Mayan text Popol Vuh. They stay in an immigrant shanty town in the boarder city of Tijuana, Mexico which is directly south of San Diego, California. Though the siblings encounter various forms of anti-Indigenous prejudice in Mexico, it is not on the level of literal genocidal hate that they encountered in their own country (but this particular form of mestizo anti-Indigenous racism will remain a constant in this film and his something rarely highlighted in films about Latin America that are made for gringos). Luckily, there are also mestizos who help them—no matter how cynical they are about it. We see the first of that here when we meet a Mexican truck driver who takes them halfway through the country and we will see that again when we meet Don Ramon's friend who helps them get across the boarder. With all the horrors we witnessed in act one, it is here in act 2 that the most intense and dramatic scene in the movie takes place and we have the tunnel crawl from hell (I won't spoil it anymore than that, but it would have grave consequences for the remainder of the movie). One other thing two note is that many of the "coyotes" (the name for fixers and smugglers that help people across the boarder) and refugees we see in this part of the film are real and it adds a neorealism to this magical-realist film. If the film had ended here it would be the beautiful ending of many a Hollywood film of human perseverance, but Nava wants to make a film that shocks his audience into action not comfort them. 

In act 3 we are in Los Angeles, California. We now see Rosa and Enrique set-up in a motel for undocumented immigrants ran by a Mexican called Monte Bravo played by the late-Trinidad Silva (the second time he has played a critical supporting role in a movie about migrants). As the Xuncax siblings settle into life in Los Angeles, they take English classes and hustle from the ground-up. Rosa starts in a sweat shop and makes a friend who gets her a job in as a domestic after Immigration agents raid the sweat shop. Enrique works as a busboy until an envious Chicano co-worker calls immigration and he nearly gets caught. Meanwhile, Monte gets Enrique a job offer for good money in Chicago and Rosa's journey to across the boarder catches-up with her...

"To the rich, the peasant is just a pair of strong arms." That is said by Rosa & Enrique's father at the beginning of the film, and it is book ended at the end of the movie. The tragic tale of Rosa and Enrique is the modern Grapes of Wrath. It is a much more pessimistic film than that earlier film of migrant workers. In El Norte, the chances for good things to happen are available if people try to make the choice. It is tragic that while people do make good choices in regard to the Xuncax siblings, it's not enough. But I suppose the best the audience can do is think back to the end of act 2 when our protagonists emerge from the abandon tunnel and look out at the San Diego skyline with Mahler's 4th symphony playing in the background and take that one clear win in a movie about losses. Folks need that moment of victory to give them a reason to keep going. We certainly all need that now.

My short Review of ¡Alambrista! (1977) directed by Robert M. Young

[I wrote this on December 8, 2020]

 ¡Alambrista! was one of the first feature films to look at the issue of Mexicans crossing the border for work. This was the era before NAFTA, border walls and cages, but after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Even so, migrant workers trying to make money to send home or find a better life made this dangerous journey any way and Robert M. Young made this movie to document the life of one such person. Interestingly enough, and what some folks don't take into consideration, is that the main character is a migrant in the truest since of the word: he is on the run and on the hunt for any work he can get, but ultimately he ends up going back to Mexico voluntarily. The story of his time between crossing and re-crossing the border is the story here.

My Review of The Lion King (1994) directed by Rob Minkoff & Roger Allers

When I was 4 years old, the earliest film I remember seeing in the movie a movie theater was The Lion King, It was the Marlow Heights Community Theater and I went to the upstairs theater with my mom and we sat in the theater. I will always remember the stampede scene and how it felt to 4 year old me when the sound made the whole theater shake and I felt it and the impact of that never left me. It was the moment when the movies became real to me.

This movie came during the legendary Disney Renaissance and was pitched as Bambi in Africa. It merged Kimba the White Lion with Hamlet along with Pan-African and Biblical themes. It is three acts where we see the hero's journey of Simba as he goes from crown prince to prince-in-exile, to finally defeating his evil uncle and earning his father's inheritance. The music here is some of Disney's most memorable and Timon & Pumbaa would become the breakout characters getting their own tv show and a spin-off movie re-telling the events of this film from their points-of-view a la Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. The KiSwahili phrase "hakuna matata" entered the English-language lexicon based on the song from this film. 

The voice acting in this film has to be the best assemblage of actors from this era. This is the defining James Earl Jones character for my generation (imagine how confused I was when I saw Coming To America (1988) and Star Wars for the first time). Jeremy Irons as Scar was as diabolical a sounding villain as you can imagine. The hyenas were one of the more controversial features to the movies when they were initially introduced as they reminded certain folks of the crows from Dumbo, but you can't deny that Whoopi Goldberg, Cheech Marin, and Jim Cummings brought their A-game as henchmen. Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella as Timon & Pumbaa are again the breakout stars of the movie. 

I can't think of anymore to say than that this has been the only Disney Renaissance movie that I still come back to 31 years later. It is a defining part of my experience as a cinephile as it is for me the defining origin point of my relationship with cinema. 

My Goodreads Review of Black Skin, White Masks by Franz Fanon

I have been so focused on working on my film criticism/review game (I'm on Letterboxd, if you wish to follow me) that I have been neglecting my book reading and anime watching (not even reading manga lately). On the flipside I do have some Goodreads reviews that I have not published here yet—this review being one of them. I had posted this back in February of last year and I feel it may be one of my most controversial reviews I have done on Goodreads at the time as I did not partake in the Fanon worship as other's in my old Goodreads circle have (something that made me hype to read the book). One unexpectedly positive thing about the review is that it got the attention of the rapper Noname and that was an unexpectedly cool surprise. 

 Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"There are three intertwined themes in Fanon’s writing: a critique of ethnopsychiatry (which aimed to provide an account of the mental life, in sickness and in health, of colonized peoples) and of the Eurocentrism of psychoanalysis; a dialogue with Negritude, then the dominant system of thought among black francophone intellectuals, in which he challenges its account of the mental life of black people; and the development of a political philosophy for decolonization that starts with an account of the psychological harm that colonialism had produced." - from the introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah


So this was an interesting read. I don't read as much psychology as I do philosophy so the book is a bit of a change-up for me. This book is the landmark text to explain the effects that colonization has on the colonizer and the colonized. He is basing this from his experience as a Black Martinican in France and the people he treats and reads about as psychologist. The books reputation had long preceded it and I decided to give it a read this year to kick-off a series of reads that I plan to read. He speaks a lot in the royal "we", but is talking from his point-of-view and that of the people he reads around him. There is a lot to get through with this book and I am going to do my best to give my impressions, both good and bad.

Let me start with the good. I think this book really brought a lot of necessarily uncomfortable looks at the mind of white supremacy using psychoanalyses. I think he really does a good job in the first and most of the fourth chapter of the book in talking about this book. I like how he goes so hard in stating how absurd the approval of white people had in the life of Black Francophones.

All colonized people—in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave—position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture. The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more he will have escaped the bush. The more he rejects his blackness and the bush, the whiter he will become. In the colonial army, and particularly in the regiments of Senegalese soldiers, the “native” officers are mainly interpreters. They serve to convey to their fellow soldiers the master’s orders, and they themselves enjoy a certain status.

It is clear that while he is greatly influenced by people like W.E.B. Du Bois and his high school teacher Aimé Césaire (some of the best quotes of the book are from Césaire). But the three dominate men of this book are Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and, while least referenced the most important and where I'll be tearing into him from, Richard Wright.

While I think this book takes-off well, when it gets in-flight the journey is shaky and I do not think it sticks the landing. The criticism of Black consciousness (in the form of the Négritude movement) is a key part of the book. Fanon is one of these "color-blind" leftist at the end of the day. He wants the post-racial society that so many folks foolishly triumphed after the election of Barack Obama. This is what really holds back the book for me (I will mention that yes, he does not do justice to Black women in this book and his zealous adherence to classical Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalyzes greatly influenced his views on homosexuality. Others have done much to cover his misogynoir and homophobia so I am focusing on the whitewashing "universalizing" of Black culture). I have no problem with having a humanist approach to the world, but I don't think that I should have to sacrifice my culture and history for it. Black people tend to always be the one to have to give up their history for the current struggle, but no one else. I say no to this.

I am an African-American, I am not a Martinican or French West Indian (who Fanon calls Antilleans in this book) or an Afro-French/Black Francophone at all. This book looks at a lot of different people, but it is focused on Black Francophones. The idea of the post-racial society is very seductive in the way that most idealistic schools of thought are. Alas, such is wasted on me and I may well be one of the scumbags that Fanon talks about. I agree with Fanon that using reductive-stereotypes against an antagonist is unrealistic, but I think that Fanon does risk over-correcting in order to create a perfect Marxist-humanist utopia. There is a lot to criticize about different forms of cultural and historical movements. I think Fanon makes the same mistakes that James Baldwin criticizes Richard Wright for in Notes of a Native Son & Nobody Knows My Name. One can acknowledge that they are a man without having to justify it with the past, but having a past is still a good thing. Human rights are human rights, but we don't have to go and reject our past however noble or painful to justify are present.

This book was a lot, both interesting and frustrating in turns. I may add more to this review later, but this is what I have so far. Read this book, but read it critically! Fanon is not a saint, but a human being like you and me.

View all my reviews

My Review of Purple Rain (1984) directed by Albert Magnoli, music by Prince

 Few films have been so lifted by their music like this classic. Yes, I said classic. Possibly the greatest movie soundtrack of all time was accompanied by a film that would've bombed without it. Prince's musical magnum opus and his his most watchable narrative film.

Let's just get the narrative plot stuff out the way first. While this is the best of Prince's narrative films and his second best music film after Sign "☮" the Times (1987), that ain't saying much in regards to the acting. This film confirms the timeless truth that actors are better at playing musicians than musicians are at acting in movies (most of the time). Nobody does any real acting here besides the professional actors playing Prince's parents (shoutout to the late great character actor Clarence Williams III) and Morris Day & Jerome Benton who were having a blast at playing the antagonists to Prince's character (very different from real life where Prince was their very strict boss). This is the only one of the major "Prince films" where Prince was not the director and that may contribute to the acting being relatively more passable than in subsequent films like Under the Cherry Moon (1986) and Graffiti Bridge (1990). While the locations in the film are real (besides the interior shots of Prince's parents' house), much of the movie is original/made-up. In real life: Prince's parents are both Black, he is not an only child and has multiple siblings, and most importantly—all the music that appears in the film, including the songs by Morris Day & The Time and the Apollonia 6 were written by Prince alone.

What makes this film so beloved is the music. The In-story had Prince's character be at war with Morris Day over top-billing at the First Avenue club in Minneapolis, yet the music for both The Time and The Revolution were written and mostly performed by Prince himself (with Morris Day singing lead on the final product for The Time). Prince's real-life rival at this time was that other Midwestern prodigy Michael Jackson. Both men were deeply inspired by James Brown. This film and album dropped a year after the hype over Thriller had stared to subside. 1984-85 would then be Prince's time to shine and shine he would. Much of the music for the film was recorded live in concert at First Avenue in 1983 while other songs had been recorded as early as 1981. The Revolution stands as the test of time as the best incarnation of Prince's bands and of the "Minneapolis Sound." As good as Prince's follow-up album Parade was, as a soundtrack it was not strong enough to have a similar effect on Under the Cherry Moon as Purple Rain's soundtrack had on its movie.

As we approach 41 years this July since its premiere and 67 years since his birth June 7th, I think this film will live on. It was, in the middle of the 1980s, a convergence of African-American, alternative/indie, and Minneapolis cultures. "According to legend," Prince had intended the song Purple Rain to be a county music song for Stevie Nicks, but she passed on it and Prince decided to start working on it and add more gospel, R&B, and rock elements to it made the masterpiece we know today. It is right that the movie's ending climax is the title song and two encores (with an ending "happily ever after montage playing over one) on stage and let the music be the send-off of the movie on a high note. 

That's how you stick a landing☔

My Review of The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins directed by Les Blank (and Skip Gleason)

 I hate to be one of those "I liked X before it was popular"  hipster-types, but I really was into the Blues before Sinners (2025). I got into the Blues and Jazz after watching Ken Burns' Jazz documentary as a kid. It (and old-school music in general) has been a personal love of mine ever since. Of course, even in the early-2000s it was unusual for an African-American millennial to be into African-American folk music (which the Blues is), but it didn't bother me none. As it is, one of my favorite Blues musicians if Samuel "Lightnin'" Hopkins and this 30 minute Les Blank documentary is about him and the people of his neighborhood in Centerville, Texas. 

This documentary works on the classic "stream-of-consciousness" style of most of Les Blank's documentaries. We get introduced to the subject(s) of the doc and we just follow them around and let them show us what they want. In this case, Lighnin' Hopkins wanted to show his neighbors and some of his fellow musicians at a rodeo show and cookout where they would socialize and play some of their songs. While this doc is mainly about Hopkins—the breakout star would be Mance Liscomb who would get his own Les Blank documentary a few years later. The people are all quintessential Les Blank docu-subjects that you are use to seeing in his works. 

I glad that docs like this exist that just let the people show themselves as they wanted to be seen and I can't wait to watch more docs from him.