Newsletter: Indie Focus: Checking back in with ‘I Am Not Your Negro’ and female filmmakers of the ‘70s and ‘80s
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to your weekly field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
I’m not entirely sure that Team LAT is yet entirely re-acclimated from returning to the sea-level altitudes of Los Angeles from the mountain highs of being at Sundance, but we’re getting there.
One of my favorite things I did at Sundance was also one of the simplest — at the end of a series of video interviews with performers and filmmakers including America Ferrera, Jessica Williams, Dee Rees and St. Vincent, I would ask a relatively straightforward question, “What is the purpose of art in a time of crisis?” I was not expecting the series of thoughtful, considered responses — they had obviously already all asked themselves the same question.
And while we would like to consider this a nonpartisan space free of political sloganeering and awards campaigning alike, I spoke to Isabelle Huppert and Paul Verhoeven following her Oscar nomination — her first! — for “Elle.”
‘I Am Not Your Negro’
Did we talk about about Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” a while back for its limited qualifying run? Yes, we did. Are we now talking about it again for it’s broader commercial release? Yes, we most certainly are. A bold essay film in which Samuel L. Jackson reads the words of author James Baldwin, the film felt urgent when it first premiered last fall, but in the months since it has come to seem essential, a vital document on race, resistance and, well, the purpose of art in a time of crisis. Needless to say, it is a movie well worth revisiting.
The Times’ Kenneth Turan reviewed the film back in December and this week the New York Times’ A.O. Scott published a review in which he called the film “a thrilling introduction to his work, a remedial course in American history, and an advanced seminar in racial politics.”
Scott also wrote “Whatever you think about the past and future of what used to be called ‘race relations’ — white supremacy and the resistance to it, in plainer English — this movie will make you think again, and may even change your mind. … [Y]ou would be hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark lessons from the shadows of history.”
The Times’ Tre’vell Anderson spoke to Peck about the film, Baldwin and what the long-in-the-works project has to say to the volatile culture moment in which it has finally arrived.
“I’m not playing games with people anymore,” Peck said. “If you don’t get it, it’s your problem. I’m not going to wait for you. I’m not going to explain it to you much more than this film.”
At the Ringer, K. Austin Collins considered the film both on its own and in light of its competition as an Oscar nominee for feature documentary, noting, “I suspect Peck’s film will not win. But the 90 minutes’ worth of incisively designed sequences in the documentary convince me that it should.”
Critic Ashley Clark — who recently participated in a rather sparky conversation on identity in film alongside Violet Lucca and Amy Taubin — published an extended transcript of the interview he did with Peck for Film Comment.
Peck also spoke to Doreen St. Félix for the Stakes podcast at MTV News.
‘What A Difference: Women and Film in the 1970s and 1980s’
The UCLA Film and Television Archive is starting a new series called “What A Difference: Women and Film in the 1970s and 1980s,” that might be one of the most inspirational programs to recently play in Los Angeles. The films still feel fresh today, with titles that include Donna Deitch’s “Desert Hearts,” Claudia Weill’s “Girlfriends,” Susan Seidelman’s “Smithereens,” Bette Gordon’s “Variety,” Joan Micklin Silver’s “Hester Street” and Joyce Chopra’s “Smooth Talk.” The now name-brand talent that pops up in front of and behind the camera, from cinematographer Robert Elswit to actress Laura Dern, illustrates how these films are a string of overlooked gems.
As programmer Paul Malcolm said to me, “These are radical films. Whether their form is radical or just that they are focusing on women’s stories that is radical … it’s a radicalized independent cinema that had a voice and had a message and all this incredible talent to get it up on the screen. This is really the kind of filmmaking we could use a lot more of.”
April Wolfe wrote about the series for LA Weekly, keying in on the idea that in their moment they presented a future for female filmmakers that has still not quite yet been written, when she said, “Imagine you’re devouring these visual pleasures for the first time like you’re full of hope for the future, and you think this is the moment that women will really make their mark. And then maybe go home and start writing these films’ Wikipedia pages, so we can start retroactively making that all come true.”
‘War on Everyone’
When the film “War on Everyone” first appeared on the festival circuit early last year the caustic nihilism of its story of crooked cops seemed a bit out of step with the moment. Written and directed by John Michael McDonagh and starring Alexander Skarsgård, Michael Peña and Tessa Thompson, the film is finally getting a commercial release and it’s now tough not to wonder if it actually feels cynical and mean enough.
Reviewing the film for The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “Like so many crime movies conceived in the post-Quentin Tarantino, post-Guy Ritchie era, “War on Everyone” is a breezily impudent postmodern object — a fast and ferocious pileup of highbrow allusions and lowbrow insults, shoehorned in between intense episodes of coke-snorting and head-smashing”
For the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “His two stars are naturally appealing, but neither seems at ease with Mr. McDonagh’s writing, with its on-and-off rhythms, cliffhanger pauses and ugly slurs. … [T]he Hobbesian war of the title feels as if it’s been waged by Mr. McDonagh alone.”
Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter @IndieFocus.
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