My Five Year Plan

It’s December. I figured I’d start posting again.

Let’s talk about some media I’ve consumed lately:

American Gangster

In lieu of an original essay devoted to the curious wonder that is Ridley Scott’s latest… uh… movie?, here’s an e-mail I sent to a friend about it:

American Gangster. Hm. I mean, It’s a Ridley Scott movie - he’s not an incompetent storyteller, the cinematography is nicely murky/cloudy (Harris Savides channeling Conrad Hall), most of the performances are fine (always good seeing Chiwetel, Ruby Dee, John Hawkes - though Josh Brolin is like something out of a Michael Dudikoff movie and Cuba Gooding Jr is an embarrassment), etc. etc. The movie is bloated as shit, though - I don’t care about Russell Crowe’s personal life, I don’t care about his wife (Carla Gugino, in a bed-shittingly shrill performance), his friend or his partner. In the 1930s, this movie would’ve been 95 minutes long and you probably wouldn’t have lost anything meaningful, as far as narrative, theme, or character.

There are at least two astonishing brainfarts: a throwaway character anachronistically projects latter-day criticism of the gentrification of Harlem onto the late 1960s and one montage intercuts between Denzel and his family celebrating a Rockwellesque Thanksgiving and anonymous heroin junkies shooting up/wasting away. If I hadn’t been on a date in a crowded theater, I probably would’ve howled with laughter at the latter.

Xala (1975)

Watched this yesterday as part of Film Forum’s postmortem Sembene revival. As I’ve noted in earlier pieces on this blog, I’m a huge fan of Sembene’s, both for thoroughness and rigor of his political vision and the clarity of his narrative control. Xala is, like many of Sembene’s films, a strongly-articulated critique of the relationship between Europe and Africa, here examining a greedy business functionary’s tenuous relationship to both African and European identity. All that and erectile-dysfunction comedy! Xala is the story of Hadji Aboucader Beye, taking up a beautiful third wife but finding himself unable to consummate the act. As he sets out do to this (and meanders about a slew of comic and tragic figures representing westernization, European influence in a ‘postcolonial’ Africa, and other political notions, he finds that the origins of his curse stretch back much farther - and delve into much darker territory - than anyone could imagine. Comparing Xala to latter-day political works like Cache seems glib in light of the former’s comedic tone, but I think the narratives certainly have strong parallels. As political critique, Xala might be the more complex and solvent, exploring colonial injustices not as an expression of individual prejudice but institutional function.

Just for the sake of argument about the mastery of Sembene’s filmmaking, check the above still from the film - Hadji and his politically-minded daughter slowly devolve into a sniping match about Evian, but every bit of production design here is critical toward building meaning: the Francophone African flag to the side of Hadji’s desk, the iconic, lines-of-political-division-free image of Africa directly behind Hadji’s daughter. Sembene is acutely aware of the way ideology plays out in all aspects of Senegalese life.