BLACK LEADER

Isn’t It Romantic! Medicine for Melancholy

I Am the City...Ina Archer on Medicine for Melancholy 
My debut (essay) for @reverse_shot
I’ve always wanted to write about Barry Jenkin’s Medicine For Melancholy and I was pleased to be given this opportunity. 

"Medicine for Melancholy, which received a 2008 Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature, stands out as both a “first” of its kind and as a disciple of earlier duet films like Before Sunrise (1995) or even Something Good Negro Kiss (1898), the newly uncovered film fragment of a Black couple (vaudevillians Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown) playfully canoodling. It is a quiet but influential work in its depiction of blackness, of Black romance and alterity in a shifting urban landscape. The film is both elegiac and symbolic, yet precisely located in San Francisco and true to the early 2000s—the beginning of the diversifying representation of Black lifeworlds that was ignited—underlined—by the Obama candidacy. A 2009 article by Dennis Lim quotes Jenkins, who said he wrote the film two years “before Obamania took off.” Obama opened up the representational arts to the notion that American identity is complex and situated and that it could be read through the experiences of the (Black) people right next door."

 

Sorry To Bother You d. Boots Riley

 

Have you seen Sorry To Bother You yet? Excellent! Now you can read my featured essay in the July/August copy of Film Comment Magazine. (BTW--NO SPOILERS here)

 

"That first screening of Sorry to Bother You I attended was framed by the release of Childish Gambino/Donald Glover’s “This Is America” music video, directed by Hiro Murai, which at the time was being celebrated and widely parsed on social media and podcasts. There are relevant parallels between the sardonic music video and Riley’s satirical film: both are entertaining and disturbing at the same time—highly designed, layered, and musically structured works with fluid transitions but odd shifts in mood. They are consistently surprising and even shockingly dark. Stanfield is another common denominator between the film and Glover’s video, linked via his role as laconic and vaguely magical Darius in another project by Glover, the Emmy Award–winning TV series Atlanta, for which Murai often directs episodes. In Sorry to Bother You, the actor has the opportunity to create a full, sympathetic leading character (as much as a satirical film can withstand), and his deep relationship with Detroit, the love story at the core of the film, prevents its polemics and lampoons from pushing any sense of alienation into extremes. Furthermore, his presence evokes the work of Jordan Peele, who featured Stanfield as the expropriated, youthful black body of an elderly white man in his Oscar-winning “social thriller” Get Out."

 

But wait, there's more! Here's a link to a STBY podcast, a conversation between "white voice" me and Film Comment's Editor in Chief, Nic Rapold. We vainly attempt to wrangle additional details about the film that couldn't be included in the article using words and without spoiling! like the below:

 

"As the film grows increasingly bizarre there is scene that provokes queasy laughs leave a bitter aftertaste. At a debauched house party straight outta of Eyes Wide Shut, Steve Lift (a quasi Jobs/Zuckerberg figure as played by Armie Hammer) cajoles Cassius into attempting to "free-style" for his guests. Initially, the all white crowd is bewildered by his awkward rhymes, only accepting (and joining in) Cassius rhythmically shouting a racist epithet, in a desperate and reductive parody of hardcore rap, as his authentic “black” voice."

 

Keep Print Alive! 

 To read the full article, please buy a print copy of the magazine.



 

 

G E T O U T! directed by Jordan Peele

I was happy to write a review of Get Out for Film Comment's blog! I worked hard to be spoiler-free:

excerpt: Get Out self-consciously and subtly mines the conventions of the horror genre to create a film that resonates on multiple levels. It applies the universal concerns of horror movies (such as providing catharsis for our fears) to specific issues of race and racism, and particularly of blackness, effectively linking a nuanced storyline to the familiar signifiers of the genre—a sense of paranoiac dread, sudden scares, and requisite carnage—making visible the all too familiar microaggressions experienced daily by African Americans...

But srsly, speaking of self-involved girlfriends, I wonder what the opinionated Meegan would think of G e t O u t?

Here's what she thinks about HER (2013):

Trail-Her from Ina Archer on Vimeo.