At the movies: O.C. and Stiggs.

 Everything you've heard about O.C. and Stiggs is true.

At the movies: Cowboys & Aliens.

There's a deadpan goofiness to this film that resonated with me (and apparently very few others- people have been lining up to dump Hatorade on this film like it was the Elm Street remake). It's as High Concept a title as you can get, and you can practically feel the dozens of executives, focus groups, Mountain Dew-addled nine year-olds, and teams of Harrison Ford's writers working things over into movie Play-Doh.

But there's something here that's distinctly enjoyable, even when it's completely ridiculous. Jon Favreau is a director I will follow anywhere (seriously, Made is one of the outstanding directorial debuts of the ages), and you can tell he's ecstatic to be making a Western. That there's a giant spacecraft/complex and alien fighters thrown in the mix is just gravy.

The plot is there just to get in the way of the story, and awesome character actors will periodically show up to liven the proceedings- seriously, Walton Goggins is on his way to becoming the Harry Dean Stanton of the new millennium (once HDS dies, though, and he's still going strong for a bit).

Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford are exactly what you'd expect, and Sam Rockwell is just awesome, as always (except for The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy).

At the movies: Black Dynamite.

When Vietnam veteran and ex-CIA agent Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White)’s brother is killed by a phalanx of heroin-dealing criminals, it becomes open season on those who would exploit the black community through dealing drugs, attacking orphanages, chemical warfare, and kung fu treachery. But Black Dynamite is not alone in the struggle; he has his own fighting force of street pimps, karate hoes, and conscious militants to help bring down The Man and avenge the death of his brother.

A word-of-mouth smash at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Black Dynamite has since hammered out a rocky road in its theatrical release- getting great audience response, but in a small, slowly-circulating release pattern. Not quite as weird as Pootie Tang, much truer to its inspiration than I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Black Dynamite is nonetheless the first comedy must-see of this year for Nashvillians.

Black Dynamite is a delightful spoof of 70s blaxploitation films that manages to be clever, witty, and five times as politically audacious as much of today’s genre cinema. Perhaps it was its 70s setting or its willingness to slip the horseshoe of righteous anger inside the oversized novelty glove of comedy, but you’d have to go back to Spike Lee’s oft-maligned Bamboozled to find a film with this much horror in its heart about the exploitation of minority communities in this country.

Also, it has Captain Kangaroo Pimp and a musical sexual astrology sequence. Don’t miss it.

Flashback at the movies: Bamboozled.

Beyond its uneven and bludgeoning tone, beyond its odd misogyny and antisemitism, beyond its stupefying central performance from Damon Wayans, and beyond the dreadful second ending (the film has three by my count), Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is the first film of 2000 that I honestly believe every American should see. The warts-and-all screenplay is the story of Peerless Dothan (Damon Wayans), a television writer so desperate to assimilate into the TV mainstream that he obliterates his own ethnic heritage by using the name Pierre Delacroix. Continually frustrated with the resistance shown his sensitive and intelligent scripts about middle class black families, he decides to get himself fired by creating ManTan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, wherein black actors in blackface sing, dance, and perform skits in a watermelon patch in Alabama. It causes a furor, public opinion is diverse and vocal, and ManTan: the New Millennium Minstrel Show becomes a hit.

Is it possible for such a thing to happen? Lee’s point is that given the preponderance of hoodcoms on UPN and the WB (and he is not afraid to name names either, as the maligned Tommy Hilfiger will attest to) and the recent upswing in the trend of ghetto fabulousness, blackface is just a more obvious incarnation of the destructive racism that plagues society and (more specifically) television today. And there are sequences in this film that are absolutely merciless in their attack on complacent attitudes and foolish traditions regarding racism, just as there are scenes so utterly wrongheaded that one can’t help but be struck by their incongruity with the densely packed morality tale at the heart of the film. Fortunately, the cast offers up several great performances (Tommy Davidson, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Mister Paul Mooney, and a cameo from the always welcome Susan Batson, as cutting here as she is in Lee’s vastly underrated Girl 6) and their devotion to the material is palpable.

What Bamboozled does is make the viewer gauge him or herself against the material being seen. There are images in this film (expertly shot in a jagged and perceptive manner by Ellen Kuras (Summer of Sam) in raw digital video) that are constructed of emotionally and socially violent icons, and the viewer is given no orientation other than whatever inherent sense of right and wrong you brought with you to the theatre. Walkouts abound, but so does a sensation truly unique when compared to most major releases: the feeling that every single person in the theatre is being made to think and evaluate what they are seeing. There is nothing even remotely escapist about the film, and by the end of the whole experience, I was weeping and emotionally destroyed.

Will you like it? How could anyone like the iconography of hate that the film dishes out, both barrels?

Should you see it? Absolutely.

At the movies: Gran Torino.

Clint Eastwood is back in what could unironically be called Angry Grandpa: The Movie. His Walt Kowalski, a recent widower with unappreciative offspring, Korean War trauma, and habits of confusing racist invective for terms of endearment and growling at things which displease him, is a bizarre fusion of Dirty Harry, Archie Bunker, and Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge character Sgt. Highway.

Originally rumored to be a new Dirty Harry movie, Gran Torino has surfaced with a great deal of acclaim for Eastwood and a good deal of slackjawed disbelief at the film's script, which serves as an interactive history of American racism (including slurs you haven't heard since the last James Ellroy novel) and which peppers its 'men coming-of-age' narrative with gang violence and glimpses into the Asian immigrant experience.

In what he says may be his final performance as an actor, Eastwood is staggeringly good. The script is pretty terrible, and I worry what the result would have been if someone without Eastwood's charisma and cinematic history had tried to bring Walt to life and then gradually be won over by his Hmong neighbors. Gran Torino, for all its faults, is a distinctive mess, and it's like nothing else out there.