May’s Movie of the Month selection, Girl Walk // All Day, was such a unique experience. After initially viewing the film, I couldn’t help but think of albums that I would love to see done in the style of Girl Walk // All Day. These, of course, would need to be dance albums because anything else just wouldn’t be as energetic and fun.
Here’s a list of five albums that I would love to see come to life on the big screen:
1. Scissor Sisters – Scissor Sisters
How can you not “feel like dancing” when listening to this incredible debut album by the Scissor Sisters? The music is just as unique as their bizarre music videos, so a visual album would turn the world upside down. I’m picturing a few body painted dancers portraying a coming-of-age tale in a mystical forest.
2. The Chemical Brothers – Push the Button
As the iconic beginning to “Galvanize,” the first track on the duo’s fifth studio album, plays, the audience is introduced to post-apocalyptic New York City. Dancers would be decked out in shredded pants and leather studded jackets, you know, the regular post-apocalyptic couture. Oh, and dirty faces for everyone!
3. Fatboy Slim – You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby
Every song on this album would be perfect for interpretive dance, and I think that a short musical film for You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby would be much like Girl Walk // All Day. Energetic tunes in the background with a leading lady breaking all the rules is the image I get for this one.
4. Beastie Boys – Licensed to Ill
This album is just 100% fun, like just about all of the music from the Beastie Boys. The songs on this album are so humorous, and they definitely make for some great old-school hip-hop dancing.
5. LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
Aliens dancing up a storm in outer space is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Sound of Silver. This is one of those albums that you just can’t help but smile while listening to. The futuristic beats are perfect for dancing in the goofiest way possible, and I think it would be a lot of fun to see this album as a film.
With his last two features writer/director Jeremy Saulnier has carved out a nice, little niche for himself in constructing intimate, terrifying thrillers about folks who are in way over their heads (in blood & viscera). His last film, Blue Ruin, was a tightly-wound revenge thriller in which a doomed, ordinary man took on an organized criminal syndicate despite his ineptitude for violence in a private war he instigates (or avenges, depending on your perspective). His attempts at violence are ugly & disastrous, as he fucks up constantly, but the inertia of the plot doesn’t allow him any viable options but to continue on anyway. There isn’t much of a difference in Saulnier’s follow-up, The Green Room, except a change in scenery and a shift in perspective from revenge to survival in its central plot concerns. The Green Room somehow feels less special & more pared down than Blue Ruin, but it’s still an effective thriller that never loosens its chokehold on the audience’s throat throughout its runtime thanks to an increasingly limited set of options for a positive outcome for any one of its characters, protagonist or otherwise.
Fictional hardcore punk band The Ain’t Rights (featuring Burying the Ex‘s Anton Yelchin & The Final Girls‘s Alia Shawkat among its members) are struggling to make it home from a disastrous road tour, resorting to siphoning gas & camping roadside to ease their financial desperation. Keeping their punk band ethics D.I.Y. & internet presence free, the band finds themselves in the fragile situation of playing one last gig for an isolated skinhead (ne0-Nazi) community (run by a no-nonsense, ice-cold Patrick Stewart). As soon as The Ain’t Rights open their set with a cover of the Dead Kennedys’s classic diddy “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” the vulnerability of their situation becomes terrifyingly apparent & only gets worse as the plot thickens & the chokehold tightens. After their set The Ain’t Rights accidentally uncover a couple nasty secrets their racist/militaristic punk show hosts are hiding at their concert venue/compound and the situation snowballs into a total nightmare where they’re locked in a small, windowless dressing room with no hope for escape except an all-out bloodbath where the ill-prepared youngsters aren’t likely to survive. Spoiler alert for those unfamiliar with this kind of genre fare: most of them don’t.
If there’s a prevailing concern that drives every scene of The Green Room it’s authenticity. Scenes of D.I.Y. punk kids drinking beers, listening to records, getting dead serious about their biggest artistic influences during college radio interviews, and having out-of-body religious experiences while thrashing around in a mosh pit all feel true to the punk scene as I know/remember it, albeit without the stench of body odor that would seal the deal. Apparently The Thermals frontman Hutch Harris was brought in as a coach for this aspect of the film, which is about the cutest thing I’ve heard of since Deb Harry handed out “punk rock merit badges” to the Frog Scouts on The Muppet Show. I only have to assume that the skinhead scene is represented with the same level of authenticity, as I’ve thankfully had very few experiences with their presence at New Orleans D.I.Y. shows. I’d like to see a version of this kind of punk scene thriller without these white power monsters’ involvement, but the movie seems well-researched in their representation. At the very least it gives the same fetishistic attention to the various designations of their bootlace colors as Friedkin gave to the gay S&M scene’s handkerchief coding in Cruising.
The Green Room‘s authenticity doesn’t stop at its depictions of D.I.Y. punk culture, either. The violence is some of the most horrifically brutal, gruesome gore I’ve seen in a long while, not least of all because it’s treated with the real life severity that’s often missing in the cheap horror films that misuse it. Each disgusting kill hits with full force, never feeling like a frivolous indulgence, and the resulting tone is an oppressive cloud of unending dread. From the Dead Kennedys cover to the end credits my veins were pulsing so hard they felt as if they might explode. That’s a sign of a highly effective thriller, but it wasn’t necessarily a feeling I’d wish to return to at any point.
The Green Room amplifies the hopeless situation of Blue Ruin by confining its action to an extremely limited space & uping the potential number of lives at stake, but I couldn’t help but find the plight of Saulnier’s in-over-their-heads protagonists a little repetitive here. There are some truly great, small moments in the film (the religious experience in the mosh pit especially stands out), but in a larger context I felt it was mostly delivering a heart-racing sensation of fear & apprehension. It was intense in the moment, but felt like somewhat of a cheap thrill once I reached the relief of the end credits. As a genre picture I think The Green Room checks off all the right boxes & delivers everything you could ask for as an audience looking to cower & sweat. However, I’d love to see Saulnier switch gears in the future & push where else he can take that intensity/authenticity with an entirely different set of genre expectations.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Boomer & Britnee watch Girl Walk // All Day (2011).
Brandon: Mashup DJ Gregg Gillis, better known by the stage name Girl Talk, releases all of his sample-based mixtapes for free through an imprint collective named Illegal Art. This isn’t necessarily a choice based in artistic integrity (although Gillis himself does have a lot to say about the legitimacy of copyright laws), but rather a product of the circumstance that Girl Talk tapes would be illegal to sell commercially. In an industry where hip-hop artists & pop music producers are careful not to get sued over borrowed melodies & uncleared samples, Gillis composes his music entirely out of repurposed, previously copyrighted material. His work as Girl Talk is fantastic party music, but it’s also commercial suicide. I assume Gillis makes most of his money mixing songs at live gigs since the art he’s most well known for is decidedly “illegal”.
Having this uncopyrightable material floating around out there has its advantages, though. For instance, a rogue dance crew could, say, make a full-length music video centered around one of your mixtapes without any fear of legal persecution (at least not from the DJ). Girl Walk // All Day is a movie-length dance video constructed around Girl Talk’s 2010 album All Day (which is still his most recent full-length mashup release). The film (and I do think it qualifies as a legitimate film) seems to take Gillis’s “illegal art” imprint as a mission statement. Stealing its soundtrack & candid reactions from outside sources and operating around what presumably had to be permitless film shoots, Girl Walk // All Day has an inherent sense of danger at its center that makes the film feel like it shouldn’t exist. Yet, its star dancer Anne Marsen (billed simply as “The Girl”) brings a childlike exuberance to every scene that makes the movie feel like it does have a right to exist even if it’s on earthquake-scale shaky ground legally, as if good vibes & positive intentions should outweigh any potential scandal. Girl Walk // All Day is frequently removed from YouTube & broken into annoying chapter segments on Vimeo due to its inability to secure an official release, but when you watch the film you’re left wondering exactly why someone (or some corporation) would want to crush or erase a work so joyful & goodhearted in the first place, uncleared music samples or no.
Legality aside, I feel like the first thing we have to address about Girl Walk // All Day is whether or not it has a legitimate claim as a feature film. It screened at film festivals, it made critic David Elrich’s Top Films of 2012 countdown, it has several narrative arcs that run throughout its 74 minute runtime (one about The Girl’s personal growth as an antonymous woman, one about a love triangle where she’s caught between The Creep & The Gentleman, and one about the sprawling structure of NYC), but it’s easy to see how someone could brush the film off as an overlong music video. Britnee, where do you fall on this divide? Is Girl Walk // All Day a modern spin on the dying art of the cinematic musical or does its thin, near dialogue-free narrative exclude it from consideration as a legitimate motion picture?
Britnee: First and foremost, I was unaware of the legality issues with Girl Talk’s music prior to this conversation. I always thought that he had permission to use all the popular music samples in his mashups. I’m far from being a Girl Talk expert, but the thought just never crossed my mind. It’s amazing how his musical career is so huge while he’s surrounded with so many copyright issues. This makes Girl Walk // All Day seem so dirty, and I like that.
As for your question of Girl Walk // All Day being considered an actual film, I would have to say that it’s most definitely a legitimate film. I can also see how some would consider it to be an “overlong music video,” but I consider many music videos to be the equivalent of short films. Take Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” or, more recently, Adele’s “Hello” music videos for example. How could those not be considered cinema? Music videos are directed, contain acting, and tell a story. Is that not what makes a film, well, a film? Girl Walk // All Day does contain quite an interesting plot, and although the film contains no dialogue whatsoever, emotions are portrayed through expressive dance and facial expressions. That doesn’t make it less of a film; it just makes it a little different.
The dancing in Girl Walk // All Day was so contagious. Just watching The Girl dance her heart out all over New York City gave me such a sense of freedom, to the point that I was getting a bit lightheaded (I was only drinking water during the viewing). Boomer, if you were one of the many bystanders during this film’s production, would you join The Girl in quick jig or would you walk on by? Did you find her to be a likable main character or did you find her to be annoying and intrusive? What exactly did you make of The Girl?
Boomer: That’s a good question. At multiple points throughout the film, I found myself identifying with many of the people that The Girl encounters, the willing and unwilling participants alike. Although several of these passersby seemed disinterested in participating, she actively seemed confrontational with many of them (the one which stands out in my mind is the man whose hand she grabs while wearing the “Dance With Me” sandwich board), which didn’t sour me on the character but did leave a bit of a bad aftertaste in my mouth. Having lived in a few different cities, I can certainly say that my experiences with unsolicited engagement with others is not always pleasant. Over the course of the film, I found myself very much wanting to dance with The Girl in theory, but I don’t know if I would have actually had that desire in practice and in the moment. It’s pretty unlikely that the Girl Talk tracks that appear in the film were diegetic, given the movement from place to place and general public reaction, and as such I feel like my first instinct would be to avoid a potentially dangerous person approaching me, dancing to a song that I cannot hear. Other factors, like what kind of mood I might happen to be in when The Girl chanced upon me and whether I was in a hurry to get to work or another engagement would also affect how willing I would be to join in her movements, sublime though they might be. I want to answer your question with a resounding “Yes,” but I just don’t know if I would actually do so should the opportunity arise.
I’m talking, of course, about those scenes in which she is dancing through crowds and on the streets. Some of the Staten Island ferriers are utterly disinterested in her performance, and many of the people who seem taken aback by her look like NYC tourists to me. It makes sense that residents would be nonplussed by The Girl and her apparent mania, in contrast to visitors who are less accustomed to every performer within a 25 mile radius desperately fighting for attention and notice. Still, as fun and flouncy as the narrative is, there was an undercurrent to it that felt off, as none of the people captured on film seemed to have given their prior consent to being filmed, which is troubling despite how much joy I, as a passive observer, got out of the performance. I don’t know that I would find her annoying, and I really wish I could unequivocally say that I would have given in to the movement, but I know that I would have found her intrusive.
That may be why I got more enjoyment out of the less candid scenes. The opening scene in the ballet class and the overpass breakdancing dance off were a lot more fun to me, as was The Girl’s voguing in an alley with no other people around. There’s an exhilaration to the street scenes that I would find anxiety-inducing were I to be involved as a performer, and I like that the more rehearsed sequences felt a little calmer (but no less exciting) in that regard. Still, I didn’t care for The Creeper dancing with flowers in the park, despite the fact that it was one of the sequences that did not feature non-performers. It lacked some of the verisimilitude (insofar as that word has any meaning in a film like this) of the rest of the film, and I found it lacking as a result. What do you think, Brandon? Did you prefer the sequences that featured random people being pulled into the mix, or the more standard, “closed set” sequences?
Brandon: The individual set-ups in Girl Walk // All Day work for me on kind of a case-by-case basis. There’s so much going on in this film (which, although manicured to an extent, must’ve been a chaotic shoot) that each of the moving parts can be hit or miss depending on the execution. I’d agree that the closed set shoots do feel more purposeful in a general sense than the candid shots of The Girl interacting with the public do, but they sort of have to for the film to make sense narratively. Take, for instance, the graveyard flowers scene Boomer just mentioned. It’s a somewhat jarring tangent when the flowers first appear because they exist outside the Girl-Creep-Gentleman dynamic we’re used to until that point. However, the scene does carry a lot of significance to the film in a narrative sense, since it’s in that moment that The Creep literally grows a heart inside that dancing skeleton of his and makes the transition from antagonist to socially inept beau. The only “scripted” scenes I was lukewarm to, honestly, were the ones centered on The Gentleman, since he was the most static, least interesting character of the central trio. I guess it was fun for a moment to watch the random hardcore parkour dude steal his hat, but that’s about all there is worth mentioning.
As for the candid video interactions with the public, I think Anne Marsen’s performance as The Girl has a lot to do with how they go individually. She has an insanely infectious smile that can make you want to join in as well as a cartoonish grimace that can make you want to back way, way off. Marsen has incredible control over her physical language & expression (as I’m sure most talented dancers must) that can make interactions either inviting or confrontational depending on her desired effect. I’m in total agreeance with Boomer that the discomfort of these scenarios isn’t something I’d necessarily want to live through as a passerby, but The Girl’s mock aggression does make for some especially great moments in the film. I’m thinking not only of the aforementioned “Dance With Me” sandwich board sequence where she’s shown mentally unraveling & a scenario where’s she’s booted from a baseball game by the nonplussed security team, but particularly of the glorious moment when The Girl appears loaded with shopping mall ephemera in a high society fashion bitch outfit to taunt Occupy Wall Street protestors. It’s a beautifully over-the-top exchange that not only solidifies Girl Walk // All Day as a work of highly-functional performance art, but also a document of a very specific moment for NYC/America at large.
In most cases it’d be a massive cliché to say that New York City itself is a character in a piece of film criticism, but I feel that faux pas is inescapable here as it’s quite literally true. Not only are citizens (and tourists) of NYC roped into the production as performers, but The Girl’s personal journey (into adulthood? autonomy?) is more or less told through a guided tour of The Five Boroughs. Historical markers like Occupy Wall Street & the pop songs Girl Talk samples on the soundtrack are also very specific to the cultural zeitgeist of a particular time. Britnee, how much different would Girl Walk // All Day be if this physical & temporal setting were shifted? How different would the film be if it were set in, say, 2016 New Orleans? Are the time & place of its setting and the era of its pop music soundtrack entirely essential to its existence the way they’d be in a documentary?
Britnee: I’m quite unfamiliar with NYC as I have never visited the city nor do I personally know any residents, so I probably missed a good bit of symbolism that NYC offered Girl Walk // All Day. However, I am not that out of the loop and thoroughly enjoyed the hilarious yet profound Occupy Wall Street scene. I do think that the film would be very different if set in a different time and place. Music style and social issues change through time and by location, and these are major components of the film. The film’s essential message of self-acceptance and personal freedom might be the only thing that would not be all that different if this film were not set in 2011 NYC. It’s interesting that you brought up the question of the whether or not the film’s setting and music serve the same importance in the film as in a documentary. I definitely think that the importance of time and place in Girl Walk // All Day is very similar to that of a documentary. Her actions and the film’s music would hold a different meaning if she were to dance through Miami in the late 1980s or Atlantic City in the 1930s.
If set in modern day New Orleans, the film would be slightly different as New Orleans seems to be really different from NYC. Current issues New Orleans faces include gentrification, social segregation, and uncontrollable crime. I’m sure that the same issues occur in NYC, but not on the same level as they do in New Orleans. I can imagine The Girl dancing up a storm out in the Bywater to one of those extra-long bounce remixes Q-93 plays on Saturday nights. As she dances her way through the neighborhoods, life-long residents pack moving trucks while white upper middle-class families unpack moving trucks, carrying boxes to their new homes. Oh, and she would need to definitely leave that windbreaker behind since it’s always hot as hell down here.
Boomer, would you like to see more films in the style of Girl Walk // All Day? What particular album (from any artist) would you like to see turned into a film? And where would the setting be?
Boomer: Oh man, what a great question. The first album that springs to mind is The Decemberists’ Picaresque, if only because that album already has a particularly narrative quality. A film version of Picaresque would have to take a different approach, acting as more of a series of vignettes through which a dancer could travel; I would also see this as having more of an exaggerated, fantastic visual leitmotif, perhaps moving through several different areas inside a vast theater with individual plots being acted out in different small set pieces (or perhaps I’m just being too influenced by the album artwork in my imagining, as the characters I’m picturing all have the same ghoulish, caked-on white makeup as the members of the band). I would also love to see a film set entirely to Visions by Grimes; I imagine it as a Miyazaki style animated feature following Grimes herself as she makes her solitary, heroic way through a colorful jungle, a barren desert, a village full of people who refuse to interact with her (maybe they’re ghosts?), and other familiar Hero’s Journey locations, with each new track bringing her to a new locale.
Moving back to something more grounded (again, as much as that word can apply to anything in Girl Walk), I’m having a hard time trying to think of a particular album that’s actually New Orleansy enough to work in this context. Although they’re Brooklyn-based (or were 5 years ago, the last time they updated their Facebook page), I’ve always thought that Snakes Say Hisss! had a dirty South synth aspect to them, and I’ll Be Loving You feels right for something like Girl Walk filtered through a South Louisiana lens. The film could start in the Bywater (I imagining the film opening just like the video for NOLA-based Jean-Eric’s track “Better than Good”) with “Talk,” then move into the Marigny with “We Are Hot” before getting deep into the Quarter with the next few tracks before hitting the CBD with “Take It Slow” and “Right Behind You” (this track in particular makes me think of the rich carpetbaggers in suits hanging around the offices near Ampersand and Jos. a Bank). “I Control the Wind” is totally MidCity, as is “Avalon,” despite its region-specific references. I could go on, but I encourage people to listen to the album and trace their own journey, really. Of course, this runs the risk of locking non-Louisianans out of the loop, but that’s never really been a concern for large scale productions set on the coasts, has it?
Lagniappe
Britnee: I love how this film made me insanely happy the entire time. There wasn’t a moment when I felt even the slightest bit disinterested. Films that contain the amount of good vibes given off in Girl Walk // All Day are a rarity.
Boomer: I agree with Britnee; this movie was a delight and it made me want to dance. In the intervening time since the viewing, I’ve found myself dancing to myself in spite of the general inappropriateness of the given situation. And although this isn’t a complaint (merely a fact of life), I’m with Britnee in her hesitant appreciation for the NYC-specificity of the film overall. I recently had a conversation with a friend (well, a member of a rival trivia team, but whatever) who was shocked that we were familiar with the Queensborough Bridge. He hails from New Jersey and was shocked that Southerners would know about a relatively unremarkable landmark in New York; I had to explain to him that all of America lives under the iron fist of NYC’s cultural stranglehold, for better or worse. Still, given the rate at which gentrification is rotting the soul of that city (as it is in New Orleans, and here in my new home in Austin), it’s entirely possible that Girl Walk may one day be remembered as one of the last pieces of real art to come out of the boroughs before all the artists actually starved to death.
Brandon: Besides whole-heartedly backing Britnee’s concept for a New Orleans version of Girl Walk set to a Q-93 Social Shakedown mix (not a bad idea for a Kickstarter campaign, honestly), I’d also like to conclude my thoughts here by highlighting my favorite section of the film: the shopping mall sequence. Just before The Girl emerges to taunt the Occupy Wall Street crowd, she gets through a butterfly-like metamorphosis at the shopping malls of Times Square. I’m typically a sucker for shopping mall delirium in film, anyway; it’s usually the imagery that sticks out for me when it’s done right, with Clueless, The Night of the Comet, Invasion USA, and the 2007 Dawn of the Dead remake being a few key examples off the top of my head. However, I think part of the reason it sticks out so much here is that it’s one of the better moments where The Girl is allowed to focus on herself instead of her place in the Girl-Creep-Gentleman love triangle. The self-reflective nature of consumerist pleasures like make-overs & fashion upgrades provides The Girl a lot of personal space to emerge as an oversexed butterfly in a moment that oddly glorifies & satirizes femininity as a performance & an identity.
This sequence always makes me so happy & by the time The Girl appears crunking in her Tell Me About It, Stud leather get-up at the end of it, I always get a little overly giddy. If the idea of watching Girl Walk // All Day in its entirety sounds a little too exhausting for some folks, I at least suggest checking out that particular chapter in isolation, especially since the film is often broken down into those rigid divisions anyway (instead of its ideal state as a fluid, continuous work).
Upcoming Movies of the Month: June: Britnee presents Alligator (1980) July: Boomer presents Citizen Ruth (1996)
When Britnee & I used to work together in New Orleans East, she once gently pressured me into taking a couple DVDs out of the trunk of her car that even she couldn’t stomach, despite typically having a much stronger fortitude than I do when it comes to total shit cinema. One of those putrid slices of schlock was Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, a movie so amateur that I had a hard time convincing myself that it was an actual, legitimate feature film & not some 80s punks’ super 8 home movies. The other was Da Hip Hop Witch, which I am sad to report is most certainly not a legitimate feature. It is, without question, a home movie (this time filmed on a camcorder instead of a super 8 camera). It just happens to be a home movie that features a long list of famous (and not-so-famous) rappers. Even accounting for the “film”‘s straight-to-DVD cheapness, it’s difficult to pull any entertainment value from Da Hip Hop Witch, except maybe from the schadenfreude of watching Eminem embarrass himself.
Because it is the sole moment of genuinely entertaining content in the movie, I’m going to transcribe here the entirety of Da Hip Hop Witch‘s prologue: “In December 1989, in the Newark Projects, there were a series of unsolved attacks and one murder. Residents claimed that it was an angry spirit, who became known as ‘The Black Witch of the Projects’. Ten years later, the attacks began again. This time, occurring in every inner city project on the East Coast and targeting every Rap star in the Hip Hop scene. An aspiring reporter determined to find out the truth and five white kids & a pug from the suburbs were determined to become famous for capturing Da Hip Hop Witch.” I promise that passage is much more fun than a proper plot synopsis would be. The only other chuckle-worthy bit of text in the film is the line, “Yo, check it! This is Salem, Massachusetts. You know, the place the witches are from?” Dear God. That about sums it up for the film’s enjoyable dialogue. For the other 90 minutes of runtime you’re pretty much left to fend for yourself.
If you haven’t yet guessed based on the film’s title, release date, or the phrase “The Black Witch of the Projects” in the prologue, Da Hip Hop Witch is a found footage Blair Witch Project spoof. Just by genre alone, the movie may already sound lazy to the uninitiated, but I swear it gets worse from there. More than half of the film’s runtime consists of staged street interviews in which famous rappers call the titular witch a bunch of names, coming off a lot like foul-mouthed schoolyard bullies. Imagine Eminem, Pras, Mobb Deep, Vanilla Ice, Ja Rule, and (for reasons unknown) graduation dances staple Vitamin C mumbling things like “That fucking bitch,” and “I was like, oh my God, what is up with this fucking bitch?” and you pretty much get the gist of what the film has to offer. To keep up the appearance that it has some sort of narrative structure, there are some non-Hip Hop Witch TV (as the interviews are dubbed in the film) storylines involving some late 90s, dreds-rocking, white hip hop kids & an investigative journalist all attempting to prove that Da Hip Hop Witch is a hoax created to sell records & garner buzz. Unfortunately, Da Hip Hop Witch is very real, and so is this piece of shit movie.
Perhaps the worst aspect of Da Hip Hop Witch is that it wastes a pretty killer title. I like the decades-late idea of a blaxploitation horror comedy like Blackenstein or Blacula (those are real movies, in case you’re wondering) updated for the late 90s/early 00s era. Besides the prologue & a laughably bad, Russ Meyer-esque tour of Salem’s street signs, though, the only value the film brings to the world is in embarrassing Eminem, as mentioned earlier. According to some reports, the blowhard, dickhole rapper’s lawyers attempted, but failed, to have his part removed from the film entirely & also tried to completely block the film’s distribution. A lot of the dialogue in Da Hip Hop Witch ranges from the misogynistic (women are feared & ridiculed because they might be the witch) to the transphobic (there’s a whole lot of “She looks like a man!” bullshit), but Eminem’s street interviews are are particularly cringe-worthy as they go on & on about how the witch tried to finger him. He just endlessly rambles about the witch’s “basketball fingers” and his own precious butthole to a near-obsessive degree and because he was such a hot comoddity at the time of Da Hip Hop Witch‘s release date, they kept every embarrassing second of it. If you dislike Eminem as strongly as I do, Da Hip Hop Witch provides a deeply satisfying feeling of knowing that he hated his contribution as much as he did, but the movie was released anyway.
The only stipulation is that the movie is so horrifically unwatchable that most people will never be able to participate in Eminem’s public shaming. Vanilla Ice also gets his fare share of embarrassments here, as Da Hip Hop Witch was filmed during his nu metal phase, but that detail is honestly more sad than it is satisfying. Every other rapper (and there are dozens involved that I haven’t bothered to list here) get by more or less unscathed. Ultimately, who cares who’s involved, since Da Hip Hop Witch isn’t a real feature film anyway? It’s a DVD version of a home movie that never should have left the confines of Britnee’s trunk. Well, Eminem cares. When the film was set to be re-released in 2003 (what? how? why?) the rapper managed to have its cover art that prominently featured his likeness scrapped before it reached the shelves, reportedly under undisclosed, Shady circumstances. As terrible as Da Hip Hop Wtich is on the whole, Eminem’s reluctant involvement still shines as a beacon of delectable embarrassment from within. I wouldn’t say that the full experience was worth it for that aspect, but it honestly didn’t hurt.
I was at first a little overwhelmed by the idea of a N.W.A biopic stretching out for a 147min runtime, but as I was watching Straight Outta Compton in the theater its length gradually began to make total sense. It’s an incredibly thorough biopic, digging not only into the cultural & political climate surrounding the group’s origins, but also the aftermath of their falling out & disbanding. Even at 2.5 hours, not everything was covered & large swaths of historical accuracy were tossed aside in favor of a tight narrative & an indulgence in a killer 90’s aural & temporal vibe. Straight Outta Compton is not a particularly great example of a historical document, but damn if it didn’t achieve an incredible Cinematic Aesthetic in every scene, somehow managing to squeeze out a great biopic with exactly zero deviations from the format (unlike more experimental films like Love & Mercy). The cinematography, provided by longtime Aronofsky collaborator Matthew Libatique, confidently supported the film’s surface pleasures (including an onslaught of still-great songs & pandering nostalgia) to the point where any & all faults were essentially irrelevant. When a sample wraps up the music video portion of the end credits by proclaiming “Damn, that shit was dope!” (the very same sample that concludes the song the film’s named after) it was difficult to disagree.
Because stories ultimately belong to those still around to tell them, the film’s narrative is undoubtedly bent towards the stories of Ice Cube & Dr. Dre, who are both credited as producers here. In a lot of ways they use the film as a sort of redemption piece, reshaping their personal history to include a reconciliation with departed group member Eazy-E, who lost his life to HIV-related health complications at a young age. The real-life tale as long as I’ve known it has been that the group never truly resolved their very public feuds (a deeply ugly mess of shoddy contracts, legal disputes, and diss tracks) while Eazy was still alive. The movie version cleans that mess up in an unbelievably tidy way perhaps more fit for the likes of a made-for-TV TLC biopic, but that tendency towards a clear A-B narrative feels entirely intentional. There’s a scene late in the film where Cube confronts Eazy for calling out his acting debut Boyz n the Hood for being “an afterschool special” & Eazy responds “I like afterschool specials.” The simple, clean redemption story Straight Outta Compton tells doesn’t feel at all far from that sentiment.
So according to this romanticized, cleaned-up folklore, Dre was the group’s seminal producer, Cube was responsible for its best writing, and Eazy held down the majority of the raw talent, street cred, and business acumen. Folks like MC Ren, DJ Yella, and The D.O.C. are not only sidelined, but sometimes they’re even downplayed as lesser talents to make the film’s holy gangsta rap trinity shine all the brighter. Yella, for instance, shoulders most of the blame for Dre’s involvement in the Prince-influenced, sexually ambiguous funk days of the Worldclass Wreckin’ Cru & other club gigs that required him to wear sequins & play mindless party records. Ren gets the real short end of the stick here, though, verbally thrown under the bus as an inferior lyricist that couldn’t hold down the crew after Ice Cube’s departure. As a fan of the group’s entire output (and Ren’s solo records for that matter), these claims sting a little, but just as the fudging of the Eazy redemption story makes for a clearer narrative, dissing Ren in the script does actually make sense story-wise (even if it’s a shame that he only raps a total of three verses in the entire film to make more room for Cube, Dre, and Eazy).
If the film didn’t capture the entirety of the group members individual nuances, it at least got the imagery down. Actors Corey Hawkins & O’Shea Jackson, Jr. look & sound incredibly similar to the roles they’re playing (Dre & Cube, respectively), with Jackson having the distinct advantage (and possible awkwardness) of portraying his own father. New Orleans native Jason Mitchell pulls the hat trick of not only looking & sounding like Eazy-E, but also outshining his fellow cast members as a damn good actor, bringing to life what turns out to be one of the group’s more interesting & complicated characters. R. Marcos Taylor & speaking of Love & Mercy, Paul Giamatti (playing infamous record industry tyrants Suge Knight & Jerry Heller) aren’t nearly as visually accurate in their roles as the film’s villains, but they do provide an all-too-believable menace to their scenes that allow them to get by more as archetypes than carbon copies. The only actor who looks jarringly out of place here is a brief appearance by an absurdly inaccurate Snoop Dogg, but that’s more than made up by the likeness of the rest of the cast, an appearance from a Tupac lookalike so accurate he could’ve been a hologram, and clips of the “Straight Outta Compton” music video shown at the end credits to remind you just how detailed the film’s attention to visual preciseness was.
Visual & historical accuracy aside, director F. Gary Gray should get a lot of credit here for creating a wildly entertaining biopic with exactly zero deviations from the genre’s format. This is a movie that somehow makes room to capture our current cultural 90s fetishization, ludicrously timely reflections on race-based police brutality that are sadly just as potent now as they were in the days of Rodney King, and an extended gag that calls back to the infamous “Bye, Felicia” line in Gray’s debut film (and original collaboration with Ice Cube) Friday. Instead of calling into question N.W.A’s more unsavory attributes, namely their misogyny & homophobia, Gray just lets them play themselves out. Misogyny is on display in hedonistic, music video style pool & hotel parties where women are treated like party favors (sometimes literally tossed around like objects) & homophobic rants are allowed to be voiced in Ice Cube’s infamous diss tracks & Eazy’s reaction to his HIV diagnosis. Straight Outta Compton makes no moral judgements about its subjects, but rather just more or less portrays them as they were.
There’s some glorification inherent to the biopic format here & a lot of ground was breezily glossed over (including contributions from names like Vanilla Ice, Bone Thugs, Above the Law, and J.J. Fad), but it’s unwise to nitpick too many of Gray’s decisions here, since the final product is so enjoyable & packed-to-the-gills as is. It’s not only successful as an aurally & visually beautiful slice of N.W.A fan service, but it’s also a great primer for younger folks who mostly know Ice Cube as an actor & Dre as Eminem’s buddy who peddles expensive headphones. Even as a longtime fan, I learned a thing or two along the way (most excitingly that Eazy-E once dined with President George H. W. Bush). Gray competently captures the social & political climates that gave birth to his infamous subject as well as the context of their dissolution’s aftermath (even if he intentionally fuzzes up the details in-between), but the story he tells in Straight Outta Compton is mostly remarkable in how fun & rewatchable it is without at all straying from its biopic format. He used an already well-established narrative structure as a bottle to capture the lighting that was what the made the group so special & their songs so endlessly listenable to this day. That’s no small feat & the final product ended up being one of my favorite trips to the theater all year.
As I previously mentioned in the Highway to Hell Swampchat, the film’s soundtrack is bananas, and I’ve never heard anything quite like it. The best way to describe the sound is r&b vocals with 80’s pop/rock music, but the vocals are more like soulful grunts instead of actual words. The group responsible for all of this insanity is Hidden Faces, and this group is just as mysterious as their music. Researching Hidden Faces wasn’t so easy because there’s virtually nothing out there about this group, but I was able to find some interesting information.
Frank Fitzpatrick founded Hidden Faces in 1989, and the group strictly did soundtracks and scores for movies. Highway to Hell, Nuns on the Run, Breaking the Rules, Friday, Under the Hula Moon, The Player’s Club, and Soul Man are all films that feature Hidden Faces tunes. Nuns on the Run seems fantastic, so I have Hidden Faces to thank for bringing it to my attention. In the film, Eric Idle is a criminal disguised as a nun, and that’s all it took for it to make it onto my watchlist. Come to think of it, the only film that I’ve seen from this eclectic film collection is Friday, and if I recall correctly, the music was totally different from the music in Highway to Hell. I guess that’s common for artists in the film score/soundtrack business. Unfortunately, Hidden Faces called it quits in the late 90s, so it’s doubtful that they’ll be doing any movie soundtracks again.
It turns out that Hidden Faces has a connection to New Orleans, though. Not only is Fitzpatrick a songwriter, producer, and certified yoga instructor, he is also a major social entrepreneur that raised funds and awareness for Hurricane Katrina victims. In particular, he produced a song called “Be On Our Way” with Van Hunt, Supervision, Buku Wise, and Hidden Faces for the film Hurricane Season, a film that follows the story of John Ehret High School’s basketball championship journey post-Katrina. All of the proceeds made by the song were donated to the Make It Right Foundation.
I’m actually pretty surprised to find that Hidden Faces is more than just a growling man and a drum machine. They actually have a very interesting history that’s much lengthier than I expected. This is all the more reason to pay close attention to film credits, even the ones in horrible movies.
Earlier this year the Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck struggled to navigate the difficult task of having something new to say about a story that was already familiar to most of its audience. The first half of the film was pretty successful on that end, creating an impressionistic view of Cobain through a highly energetic montage that tried its damnedest to portray him as a regular dude instead of a rock god. The movie fell apart for me in the back half, though, when its preference for raw footage over actual information became much less compelling as Cobain nodded off into a life (and death) of heroin addiction. In my original review I wrote “In a lot of ways this mirrors Cobain’s actual life: a burst of creative energy stopped short & made less special by substance abuse. As an anti-drug PSA, Montage of Heck is pretty damn effective, but as a documentary it’s very thin on the information end, so when it loses its momentum to heroin addiction, there’s not much else to hold onto,” a sentiment I still feel holds true.
The Amy Winehouse documentary had a much less familiar story to work with than Montage of Heck (less familiar to me, at least), so it more or less got away with playing its material straight. All I knew of Winehouse going into the film was the shape of her hair, the single “Rehab”, and her history of substance abuse. It turns out her & Cobain’s lives were remarkably similar in a lot of ways, although her talent was cut short even sooner than his. There’s nothing particularly flashy about the way Amy tells its subject’s life story. With the exception of a couple details that are withheld until late in the film, her story is pretty much laid out here in an exactly linear progression. There’s some context of her upbringing early in the film & then a year by year recap of her too-fast rise to stardom, followed by a deeply sad unraveling & list of what-could’ve-beens. What’s interesting about the film is not exactly how the story is told, but more of what goes unsaid. Much like with Cobain, Winehouse was not built for fame & mass attention emotionally, so it becomes apparent throughout the film that the audience (including those of us at the cinema at that very moment) played just as much of a part in her demise as the three men the movie explicitly points a finger at (her greedy father, her junkie ex-husband, and her shady tour manager).
This lack of stylistic flourish makes Amy an aesthetically ugly film in an (also unspoken) way that draws attention to Winehouse’s relationship to class. Cheap digital photographs & short clips of Winehouse joking with friends & shooting pool are very much uncinematic, especially when they clash with the crisp drone shots that establish setting & act as chapter breaks. Winehouse was a working class girl with a inordinate amount of talent for singing & writing songs. She states plainly through interviews & home video that she does not want mass attention & that if she becomes famous she will likely kill herself. Winehouse’s ideal career was to sing to small crowds in jazz clubs & small-scale festivals, not to drown in a sea of screaming fans that desperately want to hear her every word just as much as they want to pick apart & ridicule her personal life. By the time Winehouse is famous in Amy, it’s disturbing how much the imagery of the film changes. It jumps from humble home photographs, mostly of Winehouse acting camera-shy, to an intense onslaught of high quality paparazzi footage that makes a spectacle out of the simplest of things like a walk down the street & much more personal moments, like the struggle to kick her heroin habit. It’s incredible that Amy didn’t come with an epilepsy warning, considering the strobe effect of the paparazzi cameras, which were disorienting to me even in brief glimpses. I can’t even imagine what it was like for her to deal with that every moment she was outside her house.
Speaking of the paparazzi footage, that was easily the element of the film that I found most haunting. Not only did photographers (as well as comedians & talking heads) make a literal killing off of exploiting Winehouse while she was still alive, but because the footage was valuable to telling her story, those snapshots are still making money today merely by appearing in the documentary. One shot of her estranged best friend weeping at her funeral particularly stuck with me. Someone filmed that intimate moment without permission & sold it to a publisher, who then printed it for a profit and now can sell it a second time for the purposes of a documentary. Again, although the active parties are obviously skeezy for doing this, there’s an unspoken implication that the audience is largely to blame as well. By giving so much attention to a person who obviously did not want it, Winehouse’s unwitting fans made a market out of her gradual death. Again, it’s very similar to what slowly killed Kurt Cobain as well & I’m sure there are to be more examples in the future.
A lot of what makes Amy interesting as a documentary is not necessarily the details of Winehouse’s personal life that it turns into a fairly straight-forward narrative, but rather the way it subtly makes you feel like a murderer for wanting those details in the first place. As I mentioned before, there are several people that the movie scolds for not doing something to save her while they still had a chance, but the audience is far from innocent on that account either. While a real life person was hurting & intentionally destroying herself in the public eye, she was met with jokes at her expense instead of sympathy. She was booed offstage & harassed by the press, despite the blatant signs that something wasn’t right. It’s a disgusting instinct, but it’s also powerful enough to support a market. Even now, years after her death, we’re still giving her more attention than she ever wanted. It’s difficult to shake that feeling while watching her hide her face & drink herself numb in a documentary that continues the very thing it’s condemning.
A lot was said last year about the state of the romantic comedy, a genre long considered creatively bankrupt. An unexpected crop of mischievous, wild child rom-coms felt like a breath of fresh air for a genre that had become hopelessly stale. It’s a still strange to think that only two rom-coms I saw in the theater last year, Obvious Child & Wetlands, were about an abortion & an anal fissure, respectively. Driving the point home was the ZAZ-style spoof They Came Together that pointed out just how bland & cliché the genre had become by turning each of its recognizable tropes into a throwaway gag.
With all of this focus on retooling the romantic comedy, though, it’s been interesting that the same effort hasn’t been made for the romantic drama. Typical rom-dram genre fare like the bull-riding nonsense The Longest Ride & the ludicrously titled The Time Traveler’s Wife haven’t had their own creative antidote quite the same way the rom-com has. Last year’s rom-dram Beyond The Lights was a good start, though, even if it didn’t re-invent the wheel. Instead of deviously playing with genre expectations the way Wetlands & Obvious Child did with the rom-com, Beyond the Lights reinvigorates the romantic drama while still playing by the rules. It’s an exceptional example of a typically bland genre that somehow manages to excel without challenging rom-dram’s parameters.
The movie’s story is fairly a straightforward. After saving a budding pop star’s life by literally talking her off the ledge, a sweetly sincere police officer suddenly finds himself romantically involved with the floundering starlet. Worlds collide as the hot cop’s challenged by the reality of press & paparazzi coverage and the woman he loves struggles to break free from the overbearing control of her record company & momager. While the protagonist wants to write & sing Nina Simone-type barn burners, her mother fancies her to be more of a hyper-sexualized Rihanna type of pop star and there’s a compelling struggle between those two interests. This plays out simultaneously with the romance plot, the pop singer’s hot cop boyfriend reminding her what “real” life is & how to be true to herself.
Beyond the Lights‘ more creative tangents are confined to its pop music angle, finding an authentic visual palette in its mock music videos, BET Awards appearances, and music festival performances. The movie has a generally handsome look to it otherwise & puts a great soundtrack selection (featuring songs like M83’s “Midnight City” & Beyonce’s “Drunk in Love”) to great aesthetic use. The most impressive thing of all about Beyond the Lights, however, is how effective it is without being showy. Lines like “She needs to be in a hospital, not in front of cameras,” would play for a laugh in a Nicholas Sparks style melodrama, but some how works perfectly well here. Beyond the Lights does little to revolutionize the romantic drama genre, but instead shows you just how effective that formula can be when executed well.
If you’ve seen the ads for Dope, it’d be forgivable if you mistakenly assumed the film was set in the early 90s. Very much conscious of its use of that visual palette, Dope is smart to declare itself set in 2015 from the get go, opening the film with the protagonist Malcolm explaining to his mother how Bitcoins work. For every 90s-soaked skateboard, flat top hairdo, and A Tribe Called Quest music cue, Dope also features references to memes, smart phones, and online black markets, presumably so you don’t lose track of exactly when the film is set. The reason for all the 90s cultural markers is fairly straight-forward: it’s been long enough that the era has been deemed vintage cool, at least by the three high school geek main characters. Of course, since they were but young pups during the 90s, their understanding of the era is flimsy at best, as hilariously skewered by A$AP Rocky (making his acting debut here) within the film in his role as Dom, a drug dealer who sets the plot’s wheels in motion, in one of the movie’s more amusing & self-aware exchanges.
Dope is the coming-of-age story of three high school geeks who are used to pursuing good grades unexpectedly getting suckered into selling drugs. Set in a neighborhood called “The Bottoms”, a particularly rough area of Inglewood, CA, the protagonists are basically just trying to survive. Of course, because they are teenagers, they’re also trying to look cool & get laid, which complicates the task at hand at nearly every turn. Dope has a lot to say about racial identity, social inequality, and teen sexuality, but at its heart it’s really just a sweet story about three awkward high school students finding themselves having to grow up very quickly (due to a misplaced hand gun & an enormous bag of drugs). The movie doesn’t get everything right in the details (the trio’s “punk band” plays songs hilariously over-produced by Pharrell), but it’s mostly on point in capturing a very specific cultural subset that’s never received the big screen treatment before.
Watching Dope, I was reminded of my experience with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, except with the manga & video game references swapped out for 90s hip-hop. I enjoyed the film, but like with Scott Pilgrim. I’m certain that a very specific target audience of younger folks are going to latch onto it much, much more enthusiastically than I ever could. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is going to be someone out there’s favorite film, if nothing else because they’ve never seen themselves represented on the screen before. Where I see a fairly funny, vibrantly shot high school movie with wonderfully eccentric moments & a killer soundtrack (the Pharrell songs excluded), I expect someone else will see The Greatest Movie of All Times Forever. Even if that’s all the movie accomplishes, that’s still pretty dope.
I was recently presented with a question that I never expected to be asked: “Would you be interested in free tickets to see New Kids on the Block, TLC, and Nelly in concert?” As far as surprise concert tickets go, this event felt particularly odd because I couldn’t piece together exactly why these three acts would be touring together. They’re all coasting on nostalgia at this point, sure, but their heydays were all entrenched in separate decades. Having been an impressionable youth in the 90s, TLC was the most exciting act on the roster for me. If I were born a decade earlier it would’ve been NKOTB; a decade later & it would’ve been Nelly. While TLC didn’t put on the most spectacular show out of the three (that honor belongs to the surreally over-the-top NKOTB performance, another story for another day) they did touch on very emotional pleasure zones of my brain, unlocking a forgotten past of obsessively listening to the album CrazySexyCool for the majority of 1995 & beyond.
The strangest thing of all about TLC’s appearance on the concert bill and, naturally, their set itself was the absence of their deceased member Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. Far from a dutiful background singer, Left Eye was one of the group’s strongest voices, a hip-hop vocalist that dominated their earliest effort Ooooooohhh…On The TLC Tip and helped distinguish their later records from more one-dimensional R&B fare. Left Eye’s death raised some questions about how TLC would continue to tour in her wake. Would they replace Lopes with another rapper to mime her contributions, karaoke style? Would they just skip her verses entirely? The answer happened to be neither option. Instead of altering Left Eye’s contributions, the group simply played her verses through the sound system, with her words & image displayed on a screen above the stage. It was the most tasteful option possible, for sure, and one I’m glad that they ultimately pursued.
In the days before the concert, I decided to get myself psyched up by watching the few TLC movies available for the world. It turns out that all three pieces of TLC media I uncovered were produced by VH1. In tone, they ranged from lovingly sentimental to grotesquely exploitative, each one’s good will surviving on their treatment of Left Eye’s life & death. In their three TLC movies, VH1 alternates between abusive & loving, not sure how to reconcile its own feelings on the group. I had a similarly complicated relationship with the details of their legacy, both wanting to know the grisly details of Left Eye’s untimely demise and wishing that she’d just respectively be allowed to be remembered for how she lived, as TLC’s surviving members T-Boz & Chilli allow her to be in concert.
CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story (2013)
The most recent entry of TLC Cinema also happens to be the best & most comprehensive. A made-for-TV (VH1’s still on TV, right?) biopic about the group, CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story is about as trite & by-the-books as a TLC movie could possibly be. Assuming you have a tolerance for made-for-TV biopics, CrazySexyCool (much like the album of the same name does for their music) defines the heights of where TLC cinema can go as a genre. Posed as a rags-to-riches story that follows the three budding starlets from humble Atlanta beginnings to international stardom, the film relies on constant narration from actresses portraying all three group members, offering the story as not the Official Truth, but with the framing “Here’s what I remember . . .”
The movie is heavily concerned with establishing the respective personalities of each group member. For short-hand: Left Eye is crazy, Chilli is sexy, and T-Boz is cool. In the film, T-Boz is posed as the group’s most aggressive member, standing up to the men in her musical scene & fretting over being reduced to being in a “girl group.” Chilli is locked in an extended, tumultuous affair with a record producer. Left Eye is a free spirit who begins her career rapping on sidewalks for tips, muses about how when she was a little girl all she wanted to do was to “be in the jungle with animals and just be free,” and dreams about taking the group’s aesthetic into the futuristic territory they eventually sought on the album FainMail (as epitomized in the music video for “Scrubs”). Although the real-life Left Eye was not around to tell her third of the story, the film is smart to portray her as a real person instead of an angel. It doesn’t glaze over petty conflicts she had with the group or the more infamous instances of her romantic conflicts (including the one where she accidentally burned down a mansion).
Although CrazySexyCool hits every possible biopic cliché within reach, including the classic hearing-your-song-on-the-radio-for-first-time freakout, it still manages to find ways to feel cool in its own authentic way. The 90s fashions on display here are pure gold, especially in an early scene set at an Atlanta roller rink. There’s also a thorough breakdown of how a pop group can sell millions of records and still be in debt, a sequence involving a veritable girl gang breaking into a record label’s office to take back what’s theirs, and an aggressive feminist bent in statements like “Safe sex: that’s our message, okay? We’re girls that stand up for ourselves.” It’s not all hunky-dory, though. A particularly regressive scene that depicts an abortion as The Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened was a nice reminder of why films like Obvious Child are still refreshing & necessary. Despite its strict adherence to genre & brief foray into pro-life politics, however, CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story was a surprisingly enjoyable watch, a must-see for fans of the pop group. Its seamless inclusion of real-life music video & crowd footage, tasteful depiction of Left Eye’s death & aftermath, and overly sentimental statements like “Every single one of our songs came from the heart. The love we had & the loss we went through: those songs told our stories. For real,” all ended up winning me over, despite genre-specific reservations.
Behind The Music: “TLC” (1999)
While the documentary series Behind The Music isn’t typically known for good taste, it’s still surprising that the same television network that produced such a loving portrait of TLC with the CrazySexyCool biopic was once so mean & exploitative about their career’s pitfalls. The Behind The Music episode hits a lot of the same Wikipedia bullet points as the biopic, as to be expected, but without any of the film’s tenderness. The 1999 special aired around the financial success of FanMail & looked back at the group’s bankruptcy, label disputes, and mansion burning as points of interest. A later, “remastered” version of the episode was released to update their story with Left Eye’s passing. The original 1999 airing is highly recommended, as it not only features more in-depth interviews with the group’s estranged manager Pebbles (who was publicly spanked in the biopic), but also just shamelessly rips into Left Eye’s mansion incident with phrases like “sickness, arson, and bankruptcy”, “TLC was almost reduced to ash when one of their own exploded in a fit of rage. The blaze turned up the heat on TLC’s red hot career,” and, I swear to God, “TLC burned up the charts and Lisa Lopes burned down the house.”
There’s some new information to be found in the Behind The Music episode that wasn’t covered in the biopic, like a second teddy bear fire that caused a lot less damage & some really cute baby photos, but for the most part CrazySexyCool makes the whole affair feel redundant. Left Eye’s math lesson about how a successful group can owe their record label money, an anecdote about how a rainbow inspired the rap verse in “Waterfalls”, and remembrances of eating “watermelon & popcorn for dinner” as a maker for childhood poverty were all later included in the biopic in much more satisfying ways. The most interesting thing here is just how trashy VH1 can get, despite their later affectionate portrait of the group (and their reality show Totally T-Boz).
The Last Days of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes (2007)
If Behind the Music was an experimental dip into trashy territory, The Last Days of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes just gives up and gobbles the trash with wanton abandon. Part of the VH1 rockDocs series, the exploitative documentary aims to finish a project Left Eye began while still alive by capping it off with grisly images of the scene of her death. As suggested in the CrazySexyCool biopic, Left Eye had a desire when she grew up to be “In the jungle, naked, with friends with animals.” In her Last Days documentary, she documents herself achieving this dream in the jungles of Honduras. Left Eye films herself during her final 26 days of life. She obsessively documents her final trip to Honduras, vowing “I’ll never shut my camera off. The camera will follow me into my dreams.” Because she was so interested in preserving that time of her life on film, it’s difficult to say whether or not VH1 was morally wrong for releasing the film onto the world. There’s an undeniably grotesque feeling to the whole production, though, which is not helped at all by the way the film was completed after her death.
It’s difficult even to say if Left Eye was in the right state of mind to even authorize the release of such footage. The camera acts as a form of therapy, if anything, and the whole affair feels like a private diary of someone losing grip of their mind. Left Eye found her way to Honduras via Dr. Sebi, a natural healing guru who introduced her to numerology & homeopathic medicine. On this final trip she brought along a girl group she was managing called Egypt, intending to introduce them to Sebi’s spiritual way of life. As she opines, “You’re not just a physical being, okay? You are an entity with an energy source that is responsible for your physical well-being,” and “Day 15, 1 +5 = 6, 6 = love, 6= jealousy, 6 = sexual tyranny” it’s difficult to believe she was recording this trip out of sound mind. There’s just too many personal revelations, like her comparisons of her own mother to Mommie Dearest, her admission that she liked the strictness of rehab because it reminded her of her father, and the rehashing of her experiments with suicidal cutting for the movie to be read as anything but utterly tasteless, something that should’ve remained private.
Outside of some talent show footage of her rapping & dancing as a young teen, a mention of a group called 2nd Nature that she was in before TLC, and the assertion that she was the TLC member that called out the record label for their thievery, there isn’t much new here that feels like we should be privy to. A lot of The Last Days helps sketch out a detailed portrait of who Left Eye was as a person, especially in casual moments where she’s simply drawing or sowing while talking about her past, but it’s not necessarily our business as an audience to be exposed to that side of her. By the time the film is reveling in the actual footage of the car accident that ended her life & photographs of the resulting wreckage, the entire existence of the film feels wrong, spiritually bankrupt. It’s an interesting film, but not in a way that ever justifies its own exploitative existence. I left the film with some engaging questions about how Left Eye’s obsessive return to nature relates to the futuristic aesthetic she reached for with FanMail (as well as her solo album Supernova), but those were ideas that were also touched on in the biopic. And the biopic has the distinct advantage of not exploiting her death to appeal to viewers’ morbid curiosity.
By the time I saw TLC live they had smartly decided not to replace Left Eye or erase her presence. They weren’t always that considerate. A mere three years after their collaborator’s death, T-Boz & Chilli launched a reality show on the now-defunct UPN network called R U the Girl? in an effort to replace their missing member. It took time & wisdom to learn how to continue the group in her absence in a respectful, non-exploitative way. It turns out that this was a struggle that VH1 had to live through as well. By the time they produced the CrazySexyCool biopic, the network had released more or less the perfect TLC movie. Everything else that came before it was on highly questionable moral ground.
Swampflix 