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
Swampflix 