'Sinners' Puts Ryan Coogler In The Pantheon
#316: "Sinners," "The Last of Us" S2, "It Takes Two," "The Harder They Fall"
Edition 316:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: We’re getting visceral! A true-life war movie followed by a really fake-y one in theaters, a 40-year-old one that came true this year and a horror movie that I pray never comes true. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” horror master Ari Aster is taking on the culture wars.
Sinners
Good movies create culture. New touchstones. New references. Think about the sunken place from Get Out or the peach fuzz from Parasite or “may thy knife chip and shatter” from Dune 2. Those are moments only movies can give us.
In comparison to the BCE “content buckets” I described in relation to A Minecraft Movie and the others like it, which can only hope to reflect some pre-existing culture that the fans have come to see repeated, you can see how the two are completely separate categories.
I just don’t understand how someone can go see a Movie movie like Sinners and still prefer the latter.
Ryan Coogler’s allegorical vision of 1930s Mississippi as a breeding ground for racism and vampires (yes, vampires) is so bold and so cinematic that it stands as a distinct, unmistakable artistic statement made by the writer-director. He is, at 38 years old, already in the highest pantheon of current filmmakers capable of making commercial studio movies that have depth and substance. (That current Mount Rushmore is probably Chris Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, Coogler and then either Jordan Peele or Greta Gerwig?)
Don’t take this for granted: Creed is a legacy sequel to a six-installment franchise about a boxer, and he made it a powerful story about legacy for both his young and hungry protagonist and aging mentor. Black Panther isn’t just another superhero movie, it’s a treatise on isolationism vs. internationalism.
The lines aren’t drawn quite as cleanly this time around, though one could argue that makes its text even richer for dissection. Michael B. Jordan stars as identical twins who quite clearly represent the dueling desires within us — one the id, one the ego. I suppose that leaves the audience to be the superego, who must determine which character is most worth of the movie’s title.
Jordan — more movie star than actor — is fantastic as the bootlegging brothers, who open a blues juke joint where the towns black population can drink and dance, only to be visited by vampires disguised as Irish folk singers. It’s not as clear as “the white man is the devil” (to quote my fav If Beale Street Could Talk). Without spoiling anything, it’s far more complicated than that…to the point of making a viewer question if the vampires don’t have a point.
The tricky thing about giving so much respect to the ideas contained within this movie is the threat of alienating viewers looking for escapist entertainment. To those people, I’d like to reiterate FREAKING VAMPIRES ATTACK THEM. It doesn’t lack for excitement of narrative propulsion.
It’s got the legendary Delroy Lindo for comic relief (this movie is very funny). It’s got Hailee Steinfeld for sex appeal (anyone who has been online this past week has seen the clips). It’s got the emergent Jack O’Connell for menace (though he too is funny). And it’s got tons of blues music — including one incredibly ambitious and boundary pushing sequence that is equal parts impressive and divisive.
The exciting thing about those really risky swings is that even in the instances where I don’t love the choice, I love that he made it. This movie is full of specific choices. The things he wanted.
It’s incredibly rare to see a mainstream studio movie that still has the filmmaker’s fingerprints visible in the final product. You watch this movie and you know only Coogler could’ve made it (that’s a compliment reserved for like Wes Anderson, Tarintino and maybe a handful of others).
(That’s to say nothing about it being a mainstream movie that is only for adults — including gore, language, and the recurring subplot around cunnilingus.)
A lot of discussion around the movie has centered around its box office performance — an impressive $87 million so far, but against a $100 million budget — and the fact that Coogler got Warner Bros to agree to give him the IP rights to the movie back after 25 years. Considering one of the explicit themes of the movie is black ownership, I can’t help but wonder if Warners execs are chuckling at the back-and-forth “controversy” that has drummed up tons of free publicity (whether they seeded it or not…). It’s certainly doing far more good than harm.
This hand-wringing over studio profitability is, outside the context of my day job as an entertainment business reporter, actually kind of laughable. Why do normie movie fans care about who owns the underlying IP of these movies, or whose money is being won or lost?
This money was used to make a movie that enters the movie canon forever. It’s the kind of movie that people can go see and enjoy that will increase their appreciation for movies in general. Even if it doesn’t become one of my instant personal favorites, it represents everything I want movies to be.
Something New
The Last Of Us S2 (Max): Even in a week with a big splashy capital M Movie, TV continues to dominate the cultural conversation. Players of the original videogames knew the big plot twist was coming, but dropping that shocking revelation in this week’s second episode and combining it with a show-only, mass scale zombie battle was a massive flag in the ground from HBO declaring this its biggest show since “Game of Thrones.”
Obviously I won’t spoil the show here, but if you care at all about keeping up with the proverbial water cooler, it’s clear that this show comes first in the “did you see that?” power rankings ahead of any movie or the other great shows currently airing.
Readers of this newsletter and fans of independent film already know Kaitlyn Dever is absolutely fantastic, even in the difficult role of joining a popular show in its second season and then immediately doing something that will be very unpopular to the majority of the fanbase. But she is an electric screen presence and I hope this show is the thing that officially launches her to stardom. Preferably movie stardom…
Something Old
It Takes Two (1995, Tubi): Imagine being the star of a movie at nine years old — and not just the star, but the whole reason the movie exists — riding through the streets of midtown Manhattan from the pilot’s seat of a horse-drawn carriage. Oh, and you’re being paid $1.6 million to do it.
And did I mention, there’s two of you? Yes, there was a time in movie history where Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were bonafide, get-movies-made stars. And boy did they take advantage. They made 14 movies and two seasons of TV in a 12-year span! The best of these, according to internet research and not my personal testing (I swear), is 1995’s It Takes Two.
This one has basically the same plot as The Parent Trap, where one of the girls is an orphan with a wonderfully single social worker and the other is the daughter of a rich widowed dad. From that one sentence you can probably extrapolate the plot, though that is nothing more than an excuse to put the twins in situations that allow them to be precocious. And boyyy do they bring it. There is so much sauce on every line delivery, and so much confidence that everything they say is hilarious and adorable, that it’s impossible not to agree with them.
Something To Stream
The Harder They Fall (Netflix): With its all-star cast (Idris Elba, Zazie Beetz, Regina King, Lakeith Stanfield and even Delroy Lindo), and defiantly black retelling of well-worn genre tropes, the best double feature pairing for Sinners might well be this Netflix western.
Visually, it copies the swagger of something like Django Unchained (who himself copied the 1970s blaxploitation movies). It’s story is familiar but feels fresh and has so much swagger. (And this is the part where I have to disclose that its star is Jonathan Majors — if that makes you squeamish.)
Trailer Watch: Heads of State
When reporting out my list of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors for Forbes this year, one of the most surprising names on the list was John Cena. Seriously no one is doing more with B-movies, car commercials and professional wrestling (congrats to the newly crowned WWE champion).
This time he plays a buffoonish American president who fights off terrorists — the plot of Air Force One and XXX: State of the Union — but the new twist is that he is teaming up with the British prime minister played by Idris Elba (!!). It looks like exactly the kind of dumb fun that could be hit for Amazon Prime this summer.