music videos

The Prince of Pictures

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Prince was a lot of things: a genius, a control freak, a madman, a pervert, an enigmatic visionary. Based on those descriptors, you might assume he was also a great filmmaker, but it’s difficult to make a convincing case. Having already mastered the medium of pop music by the mid 1980s (an indisputable fact by the time he produced the album 1999), Prince was determined to get into pictures, threatening to drop his then-manager Robert Cavallo if he couldn’t land a starring role in a big-time Hollywood movie. That’s how 1984’s Purple Rain came to be, and that’s how Prince’s big-screen career is mostly widely and most fondly remembered. Purple Rain was a huge hit, mythologizing the broad bullet points of the Minneapolis musician’s life story in what’s essentially a feature-length music video about the vicious cycle of domestic abuse. It’s the closest Prince ever got to making a normal, functional movie and it’s still an MTV-addled brainscrambler, repurposing the relentless quick-edit montages of Adrian Lynne’s Flashdance to illustrate & promote its eponymous album by Prince & The Revolution. Unwilling to cede any creative control of his music or image, Prince was heavily involved in the writing of the screenplay and the sounds of his onscreen avatar The Kid’s rival bands, most notably Morris Day and the Time. As a result, everyone in the film dresses & sounds exactly like Prince, while he saves the best tunes for himself and the fictional crowds reject him as an underdog anyway, betraying an underlying self-doubt that drove him to be such a controlling perfectionist in the first place. It’s a narratively confused & confusing film as a result, but it’s undeniable as an 80s-era pop artifact, the undisputed pinnacle of Prince cinema. Then, things got really strange, inscrutibly so.

After the commercial success of Purple Rain, Warner Bros issued a blank check for Prince to produce whatever he wanted for a follow-up, which resulted in the 1986 headscratcher Under the Cherry Moon. Recently restored & re-released for its 40th Anniversary, Under the Cherry Moon is a Merchant Ivory-themed music video set in an alternate universe only Prince could dream up: one exclusively populated by chic babes and flamboyantly gay skirtchasers. Prince stars alongside The Time member Jerome Benton as a pair of Miamian expats who are explained to be brothers living on the French Riviera, but whose onscreen personae are only explainable if they are a closeted gay couple. Regardless, their financial well-being is hinged on their dual schemes to woo local heiresses as boytoy gigolos, a status that’s threatened when Prince accidentally falls in love with a playfully bratty Kristin Scott Thomas. An anachronistic period-piece tragicomedy, Under the Cherry Moon is gorgeous, corny, hip, sexy, and disastrously unfunny in equal measure. Like a lot of failed comedians of their time, Prince & Benton’s approach to humor appears to be entirely based on impersonating Eddie Murphy, to consistently clumsy results. Most failed comedians don’t have access to Prince’s library of all-timer pop tunes, though, and it’s near impossible to hate a film that’s scored by tracks like this one’s hit single, “Kiss.” Prince seemed to be aware that the music video was the visual medium he was best suited for, initially hiring frequent Madonna collaborator Mary Lambert to direct. The same refusal to collaborate that led him to writing & recording all of The Time’s songs himself also led to him taking the project over from Lambert, however, and he ended up with his first official directorial credit — a beautiful, confounding mess.

Prince’s total creative control as a self-designated auteur only tightened from there. The rest of his cinematic output was contained entirely within the sound-stage studio space of Paisley Park, where he made both his very best and his very worst pictures. 1987’s Sign o’ the Times finds Prince in peak form, doing what he does best: music. Ostensibly a live concert film, Sign o’ the Times marks the exact moment Prince retreated to the hermetic studio space of Paisley Park, where he could exert total control over every sound & image captured on record. After shooting some genuine live concert footage in Northern Europe that he found lacking in quality, Prince then reshot a majority of his band’s live show in his home studio, with performers miming their instruments to pre-recorded tracks for optimal sound quality. Once again, the result is more closely aligned with music video filmmaking than a traditional concert doc, so much so that when the footage switches to an actual music video interlude for the Sheena Easton collaboration “U Got the Look,” there’s no discernible break from reality. In this one instance, Prince’s megalomaniacal control over every aspect of production proves to work in his favor, resulting in one of the greatest concert films of all time, regardless of its flimsy definition of what a “concert” even is. Still, some of his control-freak tendencies show in concerning ways. The one standout sequence that doesn’t highlight Prince’s all-powerful awesomeness is a minutes-long drum solo by bandmate Sheila E, who goes full beast mode on a 360° Neil Peart kit. Later, Prince attempts to steal her thunder by having Sheila E indulge in a stage-front dance break so he can show off on that drum kit himself, as if to prove to the audience that he could hit the skins just as well as anyone, if it weren’t for the physical limitation of only having enough arms to play one instrument at a time. In that moment, you get the sense that Prince’s ideal version of playing in “a band” would be taking the stage alongside five or six of his exact clones, but I’m sure he’d also find a way to get overly competitive with parallel versions of himself if he could.

Now self-isolated in the cavernous dungeons of Paisley Park, Prince returned to narrative filmmaking in the early 1990s, kicking off the decade with an instantly ignored & forgotten sequel to Purple Rain. Graffiti Bridge once again stars Prince as The Kid, professionally competing against his funky-unc nemesis Morris Day. Instead of riding his superhero motorcycle around the streets of Minneapolis, however, Prince is now trapped on a skyless sound stage, which is designed & lit in a way that suggests that all four Ninja Turtles are hanging around somewhere nearby, always just barely cropped out of the frame. Plot-wise, Graffiti Bridge makes its audience nostalgic for the relative coherence of Purple Rain, which at least includes narrative details like events and consequences among its more Princely abstract poetics. While Prince is still somehow struggling to convince crowds that his band (now The New Power Generation) is better than The Time, the years-long rivalry is interrupted by the intrusion of an ironically named muse, Aura (the auraless Ingrid Chavez). Aura reads bad poetry to no one in particular under an unconvincing bridge prop leftover from a Muppet Show set. Later, she’s hit by a speeding jeep, and an ambulance scrapes her body off the street, leaving behind her two pop-superstar suitors to call a truce because they’re both sad to see her go. Apparently, she was an angel sacrificed by God to inspire said truce, like a second, sexy coming of Jesus Christ. That non-story just about accounts for the majority of the runtime, give or take the expected music video interludes that mercifully interrupt this supernatural love triangle melodrama (and occasionally feature always-welcome industry luminaries George Clinton & Mavis Staples). The biggest creative leap Graffiti Bridge makes in Prince Cinema is allowing its characters to break into song in full movie-musical fantasy sequences, instead of restricting the song & dance numbers to diegetic stage acts. Otherwise, it finds Prince recoiling into an increasingly private sphere where no one can tell him “No” loud enough to inspire him to refine his ideas in a second draft. Like all first-draft poetry, it sucks.

Prince’s reclusive cinematic output at least got more entertainingly bizarre in 1994’s 3 Chains o’ Gold, even if qualifiers like “good” or “coherent” would be laughably generous. In this case, the muse-du-jour for his Pepe Le Pew romantic antics is short-time spouse Mayte Garcia, whom he met and courted at her mother’s suggestion while she was still a teenager. Alarmingly, 3 Chains o’ Gold includes even younger footage of Mayte as a small child appearing on a segment of the 1970s variety show That’s Incredible!, showing off her prodigal skills as a belly dancer. Prince watches a VHS recording of that performance with a Videodrome-style unseemly fixation and as a result finds himself psychically connected to the now-adult Matye, characterized onscreen as an Egyptian princess fleeing a violent regime change. You can tell 3 Chains o’ Gold was a straight-to-video affair as soon as Princess Matya is introduced during a nude game of lesbian grabass with her bathing handmaidens, intercut with images of her royal father’s nearby assassination. Meanwhile, in Paisley Park, Prince is going through a tough-as-nails hardcore rap phase in a string of music videos for songs with titles like “Sexy MF”. The two destined lovers meet in the US, have a brief soul-shattering affair, then quickly find trouble as the nonstop orgies of Prince’s more routine sex life call back to him like a siren song. Like Sign o’ the Times, 3 Chains o’ Gold finds Prince finally excelling at cinematic language because he’s fully given into the idea that all he’s making are long-form music videos. Only, the songs aren’t as good this time around, and the self-contained self-mythology has gotten so inscrutable to outsiders that it plays like Prince’s version of a Dianetics video. He makes the full transition from pop singer to compounded cult leader in the final minutes of the video, when he literally buries the Prince persona in the ground and resurrects himself as The Symbol — an idol to be worshipped for the endless cosmic power of his sexual charisma. It’s neither good nor coherent, but it is admirably insane.

Those five titles account for Prince’s filmography as listed on Wikipedia, a convenient reference point for audiences outside the Paisley Park cult. Prince’s official filmography gets much more unwieldy when you refer to the bottomless archives of The Prince Vault, which has separate pages listing titles of various TV movies, documentaries, and concert broadcasts Prince produced alongside his more widely distributed works. The most instructive page on the site, for me, is the subcategory of “Unreleased Movies and Documentaries“, which lists a dozen or so projects that were abandoned at various stages of production. It’s in Prince’s unreleased work that I believe he reached his final form as a filmmaker. No longer satisfied with the amount of control he could exert as a writer, director, producer, star, and composer, he eventually discovered a way he could also act as his movies’ sole audience member, so that they could be properly watched & appreciated by the only person who would know how to fully understand them. The stubborn assuredness in vision that Prince demonstrated as an artist allowed him to create some stunning cinematic objects — some great (Purple Rain, Sign o’ the Times), some merely bewildering (Under the Cherry Moon, 3 Chains o’ Gold). The way that same stubbornness got in the way of his ability to delegate & collaborate also cornered him in the lifeless, hermetic world of Graffiti Bridge, though, which I struggle to see as anything other than an elaborate embarrassment. The man was a one-of-a-kind genius, which made for some great art and some frustratingly overworked mediocrities. In either case, I’m surprisingly sad there’s not more of it around to puzzle through.

-Brandon Ledet

Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001)

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After several false-starts in the build-up to this moment (most of them penned by backpack-rap dork Lin-Manuel Miranda), we have finally arrived at the official return of the mainstream movie musical.  The monkey’s paw irony to that triumph is, of course, that neither of the awards-nominated musicals marking that return are any good.  If anyone who isn’t already afflicted with a debilitating, life-long case of Oscar Fever is paying attention to this year’s Awards Race, it’s because they’re fans of the pop stars Selena Gomez or Ariana Grande, who are both competing for a Best Supporting Actress statue in their respective movie-musical projects.  Gomez struggles to speak-sing Spanish in the operatic French musical Emilia Pérez, which is a strong Oscar frontrunner despite wide critical disdain for its ludicrous misrepresentations of transgender identity & Mexican criminality.  For her part, Grande excels as the only successful element of the Wizard of Oz fanfic musical Wicked: Part One, which is a strong Oscar frontrunner despite playing like a color-desaturated Target commercial with exactly one redeemable performance.  It’s baffling that either film is in Awards Contention at all, considering their shared artistic anemia, but their dual success is still a healthy sign for the movie industry at large – proving a wide-appeal audience interest in the movie musical format and activating sleeper-cell agents from the pop-girlies Stan Wars to draw wider attention to this year’s Oscars race.

In this world where two of the biggest Awards Season frontrunners are embarrassingly clunky musicals starring pop singers with rabid online fanbases, 2001’s Carmen: A Hip Hopera is a foundational text.  Produced for broadcast on MTV, the hip-hop flavored reinterpretation of the classic opera Carmen was propelled entirely by the star power of a young Beyoncé Knowles.  Before she tested the limitations of her Movie Star presence in her official debut Austin Powers in Goldmember and the limitations of her rapping skills in the albums leading up to Lemonade, Beyoncé was given the titular role in a made-for-TV feature that asked her to be a rapping Movie Star, hoping that her charm & beauty would overpower her unpreparedness.  The gamble mostly worked, if not only because the MTV production team was able to surround her with a talented cast of actors (most significantly Mekhi Phifer) and rappers (most significantly Mos Def) for support.  Like Emilia Pérez & Wicked, it was a film younger viewers watched solely for the star presence of their favorite pop singer and supported on principle, so as not to cede ground in the fight to cement their fav on Pop Music Mt. Rushmore.  As a result, it’s aged into a fun novelty as an early-aughts time capsule, padded out with performances from names that would only mean something to children raised on daily broadcasts of TRL: Da Brat, Lil Bow Wow, Jermain Dupri, Rah Digga, etc.

Beyoncé enters Carmen wearing a sparkly red Jessica Rabbit gown, turning the head of every Philadelphia cop slamming brewskies in their department’s go-to dive bar (tended by blacksploitation legend Fred Williamson).  Even the straightlaced family-man cop played by Mekhi Phifer can’t help but drool over her classic beauty, much to the indignation of his loving fiancé.  Instead of seducing any of the already crooked cops on the force who’d sleep with her in a heartbeat, Carmen of course zeroes in on the above-board gentleman in the room as a kind of personal challenge.  Phifer resists her advances at first, explaining in Seussian rap verses, “You’re too hot for a guy like me.  You and me are unlikely.”  They immediately bone anyway, which gives Phifer’s corrupt superior (Mos Def, giving the only genuinely good performance in the film) an excuse to lock the goody-two-shoes up and eventually chase the mismatched lovers out of town.  A classic tragedy follows as Carmen gets bored with her new plaything and moves onto the next, as slowly spelled out in a prototype for R. Kelly’s “Tapped in the Closet” narrative style.  There’s plenty of humor in the effort to reconfigure Carmen‘s narrative into modern hip-hop rhymes, like in Beyoncé’s warning that “Everything that glitters don’t bling,” or Phifer’s romantic declaration, “Let me tell you how much I care. Man, when I was locked up I couldn’t smell the piss, only the scent of your hair.”  It’s all vintage early-aughts camp, as long as you don’t take the inevitable deaths in the final beat too seriously.

Carmen: A Hip Hopera is at its most enjoyable when it drops the pretense of respectability and fully leans into its MTV-flavored novelty.  After a brief opening-credits music video wherein Da Brat explains the basic elevator pitch, the movie naturally slips into a kind of low-rent melodrama that happens to be set to a rap beat.  Eventually, though, director Robert Townsend (B*A*P*S*, Eddie Murphy: Raw) loosens up and has fun with the premise, introducing green screen illustrations of the rap lyrics in pure music-video kitsch.  The MTV branding is noticeable throughout in the choppy Pimp My Ride editing style and in-film references to shows like MTV Cribs, but it isn’t until the second half of the runtime that the music-video aesthetic fully takes over and Carmen becomes something sublimely silly instead of disastrously silly.  I’m willing to admit that I am personally biased on this front, as it was produced in the exact era when I would have been glued to MTV myself, so that its vintage music-video touches trigger an easy nostalgia for me.  I am also biased since, of all the singers currently vying for positions on Pop Music Mt. Rushmore, Beyoncé is the only one that most appeals to me.  As a musician and a stage performer she’s consistently impeccable, so to see her try her hand at something in which she’s merely mediocre only makes her that much more adorable.  So, maybe my dismissive opinions on Emilia Pérez & Wicked will cool over the next couple decades as they become cultural artifacts instead of poor excuses for Prestige Cinema, but it’s more likely that I will never warm up to them, since I have unknowingly chosen my own combatant in the War of the Pop Girlies and just hate to see the competition win.

-Brandon Ledet

This is Me … Now: A Love Story (2024)

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Jennifer Lopez is an amazing dancer, a magnetic actress, and . . . a singer also.  Outside her soulful tribute to Selena and the freak-chance payoff of the dance hit “Waiting for Tonight”, JLo’s decades-long singing career hasn’t produced many highlights, which is what makes it so awkward that she’s insistent on commemorating her legacy among the two towering pop acts of the current moment: Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.  Instead of sitting it out while those two titans fight for the throne in their own competing, career-defining concert films, Lopez has naively entered the fray with a couple career-recappers of her own – first, through the grand spectacle of a Superbowl halftime show (greatly aided by collaboration with Shakira) and, now, through a self-funded “visual album” retracing the steps of Beyoncé’s culture-shifter Lemonade.  This is Me … Now: A Love Story is an hour-long collection of music video vignettes, titled as a follow-up to JLo’s 2000s era pop album This is Me … Then, which is only notable for puzzling the world the personal-brand PR anthem “Jenny from the Block”.  This is Me … Now is a massive vanity project that cost $20mil of Lopez’s own money, meant to celebrate her romantic reunion of the Benifer partnership and to solidify her status as one of the great artistic minds on the modern pop landscape.  Personally, I would’ve much preferred that she just work with talented, established filmmakers like Tarsem or Soderbergh again, but at least this latest project was an interesting failure, which is more than you can say for most of her recent streaming-era acting jobs (and most of her post-90s music video work as a pop star).

This is Me … Now starts with abstract, poetic ambitions, as JLo self-narrates storybook romance fantasies about her rocky path reuniting Benifer (illustrated as an uncanny CG motorcycle crash), about her years of suffering repeated heartbreak (illustrated as uncanny CG steampunk dystopia featuring a giant mechanical heart powered by rose petals), and about her lifelong idolization of true love (illustrated by an uncanny CG hummingbird searching for its floral soulmate).  In this early stretch, it’s seemingly competing with fellow post-Lemonade projects Dirty Computer & When I Get Home to challenge the boundaries of the music video as a cinematic artform.  Then, it quickly backslides into standard-issue romcom tropes, making for a weirdly talky & plotty “visual” album.  All of the fantasy elements of the narrative are contextualized as dream sequences, each to be analyzed in therapy sessions with a teddy bear psychologist played by Fat Joe.  Teams of celebrities, factory workers, and stock romcom characters join Joe to coach JLo through her crippling love addiction so she can find her way back to her beloved Ben, a destination she can only reach by learning to love & hug her inner child (again, in a dream).  It’s all very tidy and, frankly, unimaginative, which is a shame considering the free-for-all fantasy promised in its opening heart factory sequence.  By the time the closing credits pad out the runtime for a 12-minute eternity—just barely stretching the film over the one-hour feature length finishing line—it’s clear there isn’t enough artistic drive behind this project to justify the classic MGM title card announcing it as A Movie.  Meanwhile, Lemonade, Dirty Computer, and When I Get Home all ranked among the best movies released in their respective years, regardless of form.

I’m not sure that JLo has the ability to stage her own sprawling, Tarsem-style fantasy piece, but I do think she could manage Maid in Manhattan: The Musical if tasked.  The only times This is Me … Now pays off its “so bad it’s good” irony-watching potential is in generic romcom voiceover about how people call her crazy for wanting to commit to traditional monogamous partnerships, about how she still believes in “soulmates and signs and hummingbirds,” and about how when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always answered “In love.”  It’s a thoroughly committed “me, me, me, I, I, I” tribute to her own hungry heart, combined with a genuine cinephilic soft spot for classic romances like Singin’ in the Rain and The Way We Were.  The problem is that her artistic ambitions reach far beyond those Blockbuster Video romcom boundaries, and they ultimately prove to be an Icarian downfall that exposes her limitations as both a pop singer and a visual artist.  Of course, none of these shortcomings really matter, because This is Me … Now has already accomplished everything it set out to do; it refreshed JLo’s name in the pop stardom conversation by promoting her new album and promoting her ongoing tabloid romance with Ben Affleck.  Whether or not it’s any good is beside the point, which is generally how her pop music career at large contributes to her overall celebrity.

-Brandon Ledet

Guava Island (2019)

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The natural impulse when trying to find a proper context for the Donald Glover vanity project Guava Island is to consider it in conversation with recent “visual albums” like Beyoncé’s Lemonade or Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer. While it is billed as “a Childish Gambino film” and features a smattering of songs from Glover’s most recent album under that pseudonym, this isn’t exactly the form-breaking music video experiment we’ve been seeing echoed in the post-Lemonade era. It’s far too loose & laid-back to hold up to that standard. Guava Island is an hour-long, low-key movie musical that only allows its surrealist touches & music video interludes to creep in from the borders of the frame. It’s more narratively focused than its fellow visual albums, but also too casual & relaxed in its narrative to feel too substantial without its occasional breaks for Glover’s music. Guava Island is deliberately minor in some ways as a result, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unpleasant or not worthwhile. The worst you can say about it is that it often feels like a thin excuse to watch beautiful pop stars vacation in Cuba; that’s not such a terrible thing.

An opening narration from Glover’s costar, Rihanna, promises something much more adventurous & detached from reality than what’s ultimately delivered. She establishes the fictional island setting in a magical-realist folktale about the battle between Love & War that has raged since the island’s creation, a storybook monologue illustrated by 2D animation akin to 90s era Disney titles like The Emperor’s New Groove. This tale of The Dueling Truths (love & war) is only faintly echoed in the live-action story that follows – love in the beautiful silks & music that the island creates and war in the evil capitalist shipping company Red Cargo that seeks to commodify those arts. Of course, Donald Glover’s protagonist finds himself at the exact center of this struggle. He seeks to woo Rihanna (along with the rest of the island) with his beautiful music, but the wicked Red Cargo company only wants him to sing jingles promoting their products and encouraging their workers to remain productive. The whole thing culminates in a kind of workers’ uprising in the form of an all-night party that Red Cargo attempts to shut down, so its employees won’t be too tired to be industrious the next day. The stakes can be tragic, but defiance through partying & letting loose is exactly the film’s M.O. throughout.

Formally speaking, Guava Island is a gorgeous wonder. It has the classic shot-on-film look of a 70s arthouse picture (or a well-curated Instagram profile) and is effortlessly charming in its documentation of two charismatic pop stars, barely in character, vacationing in a lush tropical locale. Director Hiro Murai, who has previously collaborated with Glover on career-high achievements like the “This Is America” video & Atlanta, occasionally choreographs its music video sequences as if it were a movie-musical reiteration of arthouse relics like Touki Bouki or Black Orpheus. Glover himself brings a surreal touch to what’s otherwise a romantic hangout film in his writhing dance moves – reinterpreting the Iggy Pop contortions of his “This Is America” choreography in a newly interesting context (and prompting questions of what it would it be like if he were in a Magic Mike sequel now instead of four years ago). The only frustrating thing about the film, then, is that there isn’t more. Rihanna is a joy to watch here but doesn’t sing herself. Glover & Murai hint at a sinister, surrealist tone just under the surface of their dance sequence collaborations, but never fully unleash that impulse. The songs themselves are pleasant, but far more abrupt & spaced out than what you’ll hear in Lemonade or Dirty Computer. In almost every way, Guava Island could be more and could be better with just a little extra effort from each of its collaborators, but that doesn’t mean what’s onscreen isn’t worthwhile as is.

-Brandon Ledet

Belly (1998)

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If the main metric of cinematic excellence is in the art of the moving image, it’s a grotesque injustice that legendary music video director Hype Williams was locked out of feature filmmaking after just one attempt, Belly. Just before venturing into the sleek futurism of his iconic music videos for TLC’s “No Scrubs” & the Janet Jackson/Busta Rhymes collaboration “What’s It Gonna Be?,” Williams sets this over-stylized action thriller just one year ahead of its release date, in the far-off distant future of 1999. Belly‘s intense monochromatic neon lighting vaguely recalls the sci-fi standard set by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner, even though the story it serves is more like a late 90s hip-hop version of GoodFellas. As you might expect from a music video auteur, Williams subscribes to the term “style over substance” as a personal mantra rather than a potential criticism. Belly’s visuals are as gorgeous as its dialogue is disposable. Its performances (mostly from musicians like Nas, DMX, T-Boz, and Method Man) and its overall narrative are so oddly constructed that the film practically qualifies as outsider art. However, 20 years later, there’s no one film that can be directly compared to its merits as a visual achievement. Long after the emptiness of the narrative & dialogue fade in your memory, the film still lingers as a sensory spectacle, a gold standard in the art of the moving image. If Williams had been paired with a stronger screenwriter for a second feature, I have no doubt he’d be hailed as one of the great auteurs of our time. His debut’s lousy 13% approval rating on the Tomatometer is entirely undeserved, though, as its ambition far outweighs its means. Belly’s vision of an MTV-minded, near-future crime dystopia is a powerful narcotic; getting hung up on whether it has something meaningful to say is almost beside the point.

Nas & DMX lead the cast as two tough-as-nails gangsters who’ve become incredibly wealthy though incrementally more dangerous crimes, but dream of leaving the game before it’s too late. There’s a nihilism to their wealth-hoarding that they both recognize as unhealthy (though Nas is by far the first to get there), as indicated by the line, “We’re born to motherfuckin’ die, man. In the meantime, get money.” The dialogue & acting are, to be honest, conspicuously amateur, with near-constant voice-over pulling most of the narrative weight. Thematically, the film can also be downright nasty in its function as a macho power fantasy, with gorgeous women dressed in lacy lingerie patiently waiting in sterile McMansions while their men shoot up nightclubs and coerce teen girls into acts of fellatio. The line between what’s supposed to be glamorous and what’s supposed to be grotesque is a grey area in the film, as everything is framed with a loving, stylized cinematic eye. We do know that theft & murder are A-okay in this world, but selling heroin is a bridge too far (a common theme in these kinds of crime narratives). The casual misogyny & homophobia are on much shakier moral ground, as they’re not directly dealt with in the text. Ultimately, the movie does attempt to pull most of its loose, frayed ends together in a few climactic monologues about the black experience in modern America. Reflections on the prison system, the ravages of addiction & gun violence, kids who’ll never make it past the borders of a housing project, and the spiritual promise of returning to Africa recontextualize the violent excess of the preceding 90min in a near-convincing last-minute turnaround. It’s difficult to know what to do with the information, though, since it’s philosophically at odds with the strange music video glamour of the film’s constant violence & macho posturing, but that moral tension is partly what makes Belly such a fascinating work.

It’s there’s any one clear way that Belly was ahead of its time, it’s in how it fulfills a recent push to pay attention to how we light & film black skin. Titles like Girlhood & Moonlight have earned much-deserved praise for acting as a corrective to a standard way of shooting that favored white complexions on the screen, but even they pale in comparison to the way Belly looks. Cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, who more recently shot the “Formation” video for Beyoncé’s Lemonade project, creates otherworldly, monochromatic spaces lit in impossibly rich blues, reds, pinks, and browns. The way these hues compliment black complexions is never more evident than when the few white characters (i.e. cops conducting drug raids) invade these spaces to interrupt the reverie. Hype Williams pairs this lighting-intense vision with fashion photography-minded production design and a distinct sense of music video cool to establish an insular world that is only ever disrupted by the arrival of the aforementioned white cops. The way gun violence & misogyny also look cool in this in this otherworldly space is troublesome, especially in the opening, strobe-lit sequence where Nas & DMX shoot up a strip club & return to a gaudy McMansion homestead to “lay low.” That sense of danger & moral unease is distinctly build into the film’s charm, though. It’s also somewhat thematically undone in a climactic series of speeches about the plight of modern black America. There’s something oddly off-balanced about the image Belly is presenting and the (unclear) message it ultimately tries to convey, but the way it consistently carves out a thoroughly black, American space ties the whole thing together as a cohesive piece. It’s one of the many ways the film’s visual achievements outweigh its narrative shortcomings.

After the opening strobe-lit club raid, DMX entertains his guests at his gaudy McMansion by projecting Harmony Korine’s Gummo on the living room wall. Puzzled, Nas repeatedly asks variations on the question “What the fuck is that?” It’s an irreverently funny exchange that doesn’t hold much narrative significance, but does establish context of what’s to follow. Like Korine, Hype Williams is a highly skilled outsider artist whose approach to cinema is much more concerned with visual, stylistic provocation than it is with having something cohesive to say. His music video work alone should establish him as one of the great directors of our time, but I still find it shameful that he hasn’t made a second feature film in the 20 years since Belly. Where Korine has been afforded the space to develop his voice as a feature filmmaker in the public eye, Williams came out near fully-formed with a powerful debut, then returned to directing short-form videos. The critical disappointment with Belly may have been a result of the movie being framed as an MTV-era commercial product instead of a werido art piece like Gummo. Don’t be fooled by the inclusion of Kurt Loder & the stacked cast of big name, late 90s rappers. This is the exact kind of shaggy, off-balance visual piece that should be projected on the living room wall after a long night of partying so that your friends can ask in wonder & disgust, “What the fuck is that?”

-Brandon Ledet

 

Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)

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Four films into the Roger Corman-produced “Massacre” collection & I feel like my efforts have finally payed off in a significant way. Sorority House Massacre was a delightfully dreamlike slasher, but it was cheap & derivative in a way that kept it from achieving anything too special. The Slumber Party Massacre was a by-the-numbers genre exercise with brief flashes of feminist-bent satire that were exciting, but mostly lost somewhere in their translation from script to screen. Sorority House Massacre II bridged the two properties, mixing & confusing the plots of the two original features to the point where no sense could be made of their central mythology (which, I assure you, was never intended to be shared). Slumber Party Massacre II, thankfully, brings a sense of purpose & unique charm to the (very loosely connected, if connected at all) Massacre franchise. It’s the first film of the series I’ve seen that felt like something truly special, the exact kind of bonkers midnight monster schlock that’s so mindlessly trashy & gratuitous that it approaches high art.

Courtney, the younger sister of one of the few nubile survivors of the original Slumber Party Massacre, ditches visiting her traumatized sibling in the hospital (“But Mom! It’s my birthday! I don’t wanna go to a mental hospital!”) in order to practice for The Big Dance with her all-girl New Wave garage band an at unsupervised (and unfurnished) condo. Of course, a group of goofball boys crash the party in order to make out & cause mischief. Despite warnings from her sister (who speaks to her through nightmares) to not “go all the way”, Courtney does the deed with the hunkiest of the bonehead beaus anyway, an act that releases a killer sex demon bent on killing everyone in the condo (seriously). Before having sex, Courtney falls into a routine of seeing nightmare images that recall the loopy flashbacks I enjoyed so much in Sorority House Massacre, but pushed to a much goofier extreme (severed hand sandwiches, killer raw chicken, a mutant zit spewing a river of puss, etc.) only to have everything snap back to normal when she calls for help. Her buddy/drummer asks, “Are you on drugs or something?” and Courtney responds with a perfect, gravely serious deadpan, “I wish I was, Sally.” It isn’t until after she has sex that these horrors become “real” & Slumber Party Massacre II devolves into supernatural horror/screwball comedy antics.

Slumber Party Massacre II gets everything right on its approach to slasher-driven mayhem. The origins & specifics of its killer rock n’ roll sex demon are just flat out ignored. All you know, really, is that he kinda looks like Andrew Dice Clay (although I’m sure they were aiming for Elvis) with a Dracula collar on his leather jacket & a gigantic power drill extending from the neck of his electric guitar (or “axe” in 80s speak). He mercilessly disembowels & impales teen victims on his monstrously phallic weapon/musical instrument all while shredding hot licks & doling out generic rock ‘n roll phrases like “This is dedicated to the one I love” & “C’mon baby, light my fire” before each kill. The best part is that this irreverent killer antagonist, although supernatural & unexplained, feels clearly purposeful. He not only plays directly into the slasher genres teen sex = instant death trope in a hilariously exaggerated way, he also stands as a perfect fit for the film’s overall aesthetic of a dirt cheap MTV relic. The film’s nightmare sequences & playful girlishness intentionally mimic/mock cheap music videos (right down to the smoke machine & bare bones sets) so it makes perfect sense that the killer would be a rock video knockoff with a phallic guitar murder weapon. Early in the film the girl band dreams of big success in ambitious statements like “Some day we’re going to be in movies & rock videos & everything,” and “MTV here we come!” What they didn’t expect is that MTV would come to them, wielding a gigantic power drill & an endless abundance of cheesy rock ‘n roll one-liners. All this & the camera taking the POV of a television while the girls watch the sister-Corman production (and flawless masterpiece) Rock ‘N Roll High School & dance around the living room in their undies (or less).

There are isolated moments that made the three Massacre films I had watched prior feel occasionally worthwhile, but Slumber Party Massacre II puts them all to shame. Written & directed by Deborah Brock, Slumber Party Massacre II includes everything recommendable in the earlier films, only pushed to their most exaggerated extremes. Its kills are bloodier. Its self-parody is funnier. Its nudity is more enticing. Its characters & dialogue, although awful, are far from memorable. I even have favorite characters in this film (a power couple of the impossibly attractive/horny Sheila & the perfect cad/Adam DeVine prototype T.J.) when I couldn’t name you a single character in any of the Massacre films I had watched before. So far in this franchise I’ve been championing Sorority House Massacre as a favorite due to its surprisingly strong femininity (for a slasher, anyway) & loopy dream/deja vu imagery. Slumber Party Massacre II outdoes it on both counts. The music video nightmare imagery is far more plentiful/bizarre than anything to be found in Sorority House Massacre & its mock sexiness (although it mimics male masturbation fantasies like pillow fights & car washes for a comical effect; at one point some male lookers-on exclaim “I didn’t know girls really did this stuff!”) is far more playfully feminine in an authentically girly way. It even achieves all this without airlifting its killer from John Carpenter’s Halloween with little to no changes in his backstory the way Sorority House Massacre does, opting instead to bother creating its own monster to terrorize its buxom, half-dressed teens (R.I.P. Sheila). Barring the highly unlikely event that Slumber Party Massacre 3 is an even better turn for the franchise it feels safe to say that this film is the most worth tracking down under the “Massacre” imprint. More importantly, it’s one of the most deliriously fun VHS era slashers I’ve ever seen, within or without the franchise. I highly recommend checking it out no matter how much you care about the “Massacre” films as an enterprise.

– Brandon Ledet