I Am Not Your Negro
There’s literally no way to even try to guess what kind of world we’ll be in as you read this, a week after my deadline. Every approach I take to try to find some sort of leavening encouragement feels gross. Every concept I try to come up with to address what is happening all around us seems inadequate given what invariably does happen. But we all like to watch movies, yes? Below are some great and relevant ones to stream now. As always, check recent issues of the Scene for more recommended titles: March 26, April 2, April 9, April 16, April 23, April 30, May 7, May 14, May 21, May 28, June 4.
I Am Not Your Negro on Amazon Prime
I Am Not Your Negro, an essential documentary about writer/theorist/cultural and film critic/icon James Baldwin, is well worth anyone’s time, but especially so during the chaos of The Now. The fact that the civil unrest we see around us is all going down during what is traditionally LGBTQ Pride Month (note: do not subject yourself to Roland Emmerich’s 2015 catastrophe Stonewall, because it neither raises consciousness nor informs the viewer, which is something Baldwin’s work does both of) seems somehow appropriate given that Pride is about the necessity of social change and the power of protest. And Baldwin is, simply, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. To hear his words is edifying and necessary. And his book of film criticism, The Devil Finds Work, is one of the most rewarding and alive works of film criticism you’ll ever read.
Harlan County USA on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max
Harlan County USA is one of the most important films ever made about American labor. Director Barbara Kopple gets deep about corporate exploitation, the resilience of put-upon workers, and what it means when a single industry controls nearly the entire economics of a community. If you grew up during (or after) the Reagan era, when worker and union power were systematically disassembled, this is an accessible and informative way to learn how differently things once worked. It also pairs and contrasts nicely with Michael Cimino’s epic film maudit Heaven’s Gate (currently on Amazon Prime) as a portrait of one of those pivot points in history that entire decades turn on.
Blue Collar on Starz and Amazon Prime
My standard line is that the three best movies ever made about the workplace are Alien, 9 to 5 and 1978’s Blue Collar, written and directed by Paul Schrader. Three co-workers at an auto plant: Yaphet Kotto, Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor. The pressure is on, the company is battling the union, families need things, and the money just isn’t there. This isn’t a fun film (I wouldn’t say any of this week’s offerings offer up a lot of fun), but it’s remarkable and volatile, and fueled with three really great performances and Schrader at his best. Few horror films have ever conceived or executed a murderscape with the visceral dread of the industrial “accident” herein.
Cruising
Cruising on Amazon Prime
Cruising is one of those films that has been infamous for so long that it’s finally started swinging back around toward respectable — this doesn’t always happen, but more often than not if a film can hang as a punching bag for 30 or so years, it levels up to a new sparkle and gets retroactive respect. Like its chrome bisexual sister Basic Instinct (currently streaming on DirecTV and Showtime), Cruising was protested by the queer community at the time of its release. And also like its sibling, Cruising’s problematic depictions of LGBTQ individuals have been eclipsed by its unheralded inversion of the trope of the heroic cop: There are few moments as deeply funny and semiotically rich as undercover police officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino) being denied entry into the leather club he’s supposed to be infiltrating because he’s not dressed up in cop gear. At its best, this William Friedkin effort is an American giallo and a document of a community just before HIV/AIDS came along and demolished it.
Baskin
Baskin on Hulu
If you’ve missed the foundation of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, where the human body becomes a laboratory for desires unmoored by traditional emotional responses, Turkish procedural Baskin delivers all the cosmic splatter you could hope for. There aren’t really any sympathetic characters, and the concept is simple and focused on the principles of symbolic retribution and punishing the absence of empathy. Can Evrenol’s film would make for a great double feature with Tales From the Hood, if you were looking to center your sense of overwhelming horror in latex and goo on screen and not in real life flesh and blood.
Brewster McCloud on TCM
Brewster McCloud is an evocative tale of a manboy who wanted to fly, and the ornithology lecturer (recently departed global treasure René Auberjonois) who guides us through it. Sally Kellerman is a fallen angel, Bud Cort is the titular naïf, Shelley Duvall is temptation incarnate, and Michael Murphy is the incarnation of director Robert Altman’s thoughts on superdetectives. This fable is beautiful and heartbreaking and has a recurrent motif where birds kill racists by shitting on them.
Addendum
We lost Larry Kramer recently. He was a force of queer rage, an incredible author and playwright, and one of the most inspirational figures of the AIDS epoch. He also wrote the screenplay for and produced Ken Russell’s film Women in Love, which is shamefully not streaming anywhere right now. (There’s a beautiful Criterion Blu-ray out there, though, and it’s worth your time and dollars.) Similarly lost to the digital world is Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 sci-fi apocalypse Strange Days, stuck in the same “not even a 16:9 enhanced DVD” limbo as Lightstorm/Fox-now-Disney’s The Abyss. (Hulu, this is y’all’s territory, right?) The Bigelow film has been on my mind lately; I want to see Angela Bassett kick ass and Ralph Fiennes give off snivelly weasel boyfriend energy and Juliette Lewis cover P.J. Harvey songs — but I also want to see a future passed where the video is enough. Where no corruption is unshakably permanent.
