Risky Flicks: American Sniper

American Sniper (2014):

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Written by Jason Hall

Starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller

The Challenge: 

It’s an annoyance that I even have to talk about this one at all, but I guess since this is apparently some huge earth-shattering fucking deal that the whole culture lost its goddam mind over and it made piles of cash and was nominated for a raft of awards (it won only one, best sound editing) and made everyone on the internet go all gamergate all over each other, I’ve gotta step in and set you people right. So let’s get to it.

What’s the risk?

• Conservatives loved it, and they let their love be known in the most unappealing way possible: subliterate bloodthirsty tweets, a phrase so profoundly unpleasant that just by forcing me to write it, the movie has one strike against it.
• It has American in the title, the preferred go-to hustle of dull, pretentious people trying to distract from their moronic pablum by insinuating their drivel is really about something. (exceptions: AMERICAN MOVIE and AMERICAN SPLENDOR, both of which preceded the trend)
• Disease-of-the-week melodrama about PTSD and patriotism? What is this, the Lifetime network?

Possible Mitigating Factors:

• Clint? His classical, reserved and actor-focused directorial style can be dynamite when he’s working with a good script. Which is, you know, a good 30-40% of the time.
• Hello? Best sound design?

The Case:

So, the liberals called this bloodthirsty, xenophobic, dishonest, flag-waving war-justifying unapologetic Bush-era propaganda. The conservatives agreed, but said that was a good thing. To some extent it may be those things, but mostly its ambitions are more modest. It wants to be a good war movie (it mostly is) and also seems to feel obligated to be a persuasive melodrama (it mostly isn’t). Unfortunately it had the misfortune --or bad judgement-- of undertaking those goals with a story about a war which is still painfully present in people’s lives, and believing there was be no need to actually make a clear statement about that war. And that’s where the trouble started.

See, the movie is about a bull-riding, God-and-country lovin’, modern country-music listening, polo-shirt-tucked-into-jeans wearing, red blooded simple kind of man honest American American Sniper type guy, Chris Kyle, who, depending on who you ask, is either everything that is good and upright about America or a sociopathic racist murderer. Actually if you ask him, by way of his autobiography, he makes it pretty clear that he at least aspires to be the latter, with his open xenophobia (he calls the Iraqis “Savages”) and claims to shooting looters during Katrina -- but even so, screenwriter Jason Hall (minor recurring character “Devon MacLeish” in seasons 2-4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) disagrees, saying that he spent time with Kyle and felt his autobiography misrepresented him. An odd claim, I know, but if there’s one thing not in dispute by anyone, it’s that Kyle’s four tours in Iraq and his 255 claimed kills (160 officially confirmed) kinda messed the dude up a little. It’s not entirely inconceivable to me that, as Hall claims, the book was a bit of self-mythologizing by a bitter, unstable guy who had just returned home from a decade at war and was putting up an angry tough guy facade.  

So what’s the real truth here? The movie’s big problem --and its most interesting quirk-- is that it either doesn’t know or isn’t saying. Just like his autobiography, the movie lets Kyle tell us what he thinks --he’s in Iraq to kill the bad guys, he isn’t bothered by all the killing, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a coward or a traitor--, and then lets us judge for ourselves how much he really believes his own story and how much is just a cover for the immense psychological damage this war has done to him. Kyle gets plenty of time to offer his opinions about what he’s doing and how it’s affecting him, and the movie mostly never contradicts him. In fact, it sometimes even twists the facts a little to better fit his right-wing point-of-view, most notably when the movie cuts from Kyle’s horror over 9/11 to his serving in Iraq, as though the two were related. That obviously raised a lot of hackles among the lefties, and maybe rightly so. But of course, the movie is from Kyle’s perspective, and it’s not surprising that the connection made perfect sense to him and a lot of other people at the time. Besides, if people don’t get that those two things were not connected by now, we can hardly blame the movie for not enlightening them, that one’s on us.

Freedom, justice, the American way.

So we know what Kyle thinks, and we also know that what he thinks isn’t going to sit real well with a lot of people, myself included. The question is, what does the movie think about all this? To both its credit and its detriment, it simply refuses to say conclusively. Of course, there’s not much in the film’s style to suggest that Kyle’s somewhat warped perspective is merely the subjective interpretation of one man. The film is shot with a clear eye towards realism, not subjectivity, and moreover the movie tends to set things up to prove him right when the chips are down. Still, while there are many things here which present Kyle in a positive light, there are also some pretty noticeable details (mostly in Bradley Cooper’s macho but sad-eyed performance) that suggest that maybe there’s more going on here than Kyle is either willing or able to admit. There’s a provocative opaqueness to his character and a general layer of ambiguity about the whole enterprise; Eastwood seems to have been bound and determined to make a movie which could be seen either as a love letter to wartime jingoism gilded in passion play martyrdom, or a searing indictment of an ethos which takes people with good intentions and turns them into emotionally ruined, ideologically rigid killers. By never directly challenging Kyle’s conflation of militarism with patriotism and warfare with morality, it dares us to either accept it as correct (as, it turns out, a lot of people did) or to critique it by way of its obvious destructiveness on Kyle’s psyche. On balance, it probably leans more towards the former (little wonder, since Hall would hardly have been able to pitch a script criticizing the guy after spending so much time with him and his family and then having him, spoiler, die) but there’s just barely enough room in Cooper’s portrayal of him to allow for some doubt.

In theory, that sounds like kind of an interesting idea, but unfortunately it’s severely undermined by two important factors. The first is that it’s probably a terrible idea to try and make an ambiguous film about an issue that it’s pretty much impossible for people to not have a strong opinion about from the start. I know every single fucking asshole with some jackass opinion these days feels like what the world needs is “starting conversations,” (translation: “I’d like an opportunity to lecture you about why you’re wrong”) but honestly this is not a very good conversation starter. There’s not really much conversation to be had which hasn’t already been run into the ground over America’s painful decade and more at war, and even if there was, this movie probably doesn’t have much to contribute to it. Especially since they have sanded a lot of Kyle’s more unpleasant tendencies off in order to make it “fair and balanced” to both sides, just like reality is. I know Hall thinks he was a nicer guy than his autobiography made him out to be, but come on man, he said that stuff. Even if you don’t believe it, you gotta try and explain the character well enough that we could understand why he would make it up. I mean, I don’t think Charlie Kaufman believes that Chuck Barris was actually a superspy, but by the end of CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND we understand him well enough to get why he’d lie about a thing like that. Not so here. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine Cooper’s humble, stoic movie Kyle saying the things that real-life Kyle said in his book, regardless of the circumstances. So not only does the movie not have a lot of real insight into the war, it also doesn’t really offer much insight into this real historical person, does it?

I mean, if we’re not going to be honest about who this guy was and his own claims about what he did… what are we even talking about here? Do we really feel like we can have a meaningful conversation about this topic by sanitizing this guy’s own autobiography so he seems nicer and more reasonable? I don’t think it needs to judge him or present him as a villain, but if there really is something to be learned about this man, I don’t think we can really learn it by turning him into a sanitized, fictionalized Hollywood version. You gotta either tell it like it actually was, or you gotta just change the name and admit that you’re making up a new character to tell the story you’d rather tell. Nothing wrong with that either; I imagine the fictionalized movie Kyle probably resonates with a lot of real soldiers who really did feel more conflicted than he (claims he) did. But you can’t have both — you can’t do a character study about a real person and then change the stuff you find unappealing about them. It’s no longer an actual character study then, more like wish fulfillment.

If this view makes you feel a little uncomfortable, don't worry, this is mostly done by robots now. Whew!

And that leads us to the second problem, and one which is probably much worse for the movie itself: even if we generously assume the most interesting possible interpretation (Chris Kyle is the product of a brittle, spirit-crushing way of thinking that he’s impossibly ill-equipped to overcome, and he’s gradually crushed by it)... he’s still not a very interesting character. He’s just kind of dull and pedantic in the most broad possible way (actually, it’s frankly a little surprising that conservatives weren’t more offended by how completely the character plays into every possible stereotype about them). There may be something kind of tragic about how his iron-clad ethos prevents him from effectively dealing with the messy, complicated real world, but even at that we spend entirely too much time with him for this to be consistently engrossing. If there’s anything interesting here, it’s what he’s not saying, which is a pretty thin thread to hang an entire movie on, and never explicitly drawn out enough to be a genuine conflict.

The real Kyle seemed full of contradictions -- in reality, he praised the anti-war letter written by his colleague Mark Lee that he fumes about in the movie, even as he seems strongly in favor of the conflict; he repeatedly uses the word “savage” to describe the Iraqis in his book, but seemed to take his responsibility to protect their civilians seriously, even categorically refusing to kill children (a stance the film version of him doesn't share). Watching his interview on Conan O'Brien's show, he seems a little squirrely, even goofy, talking his way through his work with a professional’s ease, but with a little kid’s equal parts enthusiasm and embarrassment at being the center of attention. It’s a weird, somewhat awkward conversation -- Conan is trying to make light TV out of the experience of a guy who is famous for killing more people than any other sniper in history-- but it’s also sort of impossible to not find Kyle likable. He has a winning, self-effacing sort of smile, a wide, open face which veers between unselfconscious earnestness and sheepish bemusement. Even on an O’Reilly Factor clip unencouragingly titled “Navy SEAL Sniper Chris Kyle Enemy are Savages/ www.RightFace.us,“ he comes across as sincere and nuanced, which is especially interesting since the story he’s telling --punching out Jesse Ventura in a bar-- seems likely to be total fiction, and, in fact, Ventura sued him for slander and won. It’s hard to know what to make of this Kyle, but I have to say, even in these pandering talking-head TV interviews, he seems vivid and alive in a way which sad-eyed, glowering Cooper’s movie version of him never does. The real Kyle was, as we all are, a messy, tangled web of contradictions and conflicting impulses, but the movie turns him into something much more dull: a symbol, a symptom.

Lacking an ability to probe Kyle’s inner conflict, a huge chunk of this story is just the normal subplot from an action movie where a tearful wife (Sienna Miller, “the military science fiction action film G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” as her wikipedia page eloquently puts it) wants her husband to stop being so awesome and badass and stay home with her in placid domesticity, but he’s restless because he’s a man of action and knows that evil will prevail unless he personally stops it. This conflict is in every action movie ever made, so it’s no surprise it’s in here too. Except that instead of wasting 5 minutes of our time like a normal action movie, AMERICAN SNIPER makes it arguably the central conflict, without really adding any depth to this rather banal disagreement. Seriously, probably half the movie is two kind of shallow, uninterested characters played by terrific actors arguing about why he’s never around and it’s hard to raise kids as a single mom and it’s scary to never know if he’s gonna live or die etc etc. While obviously this is a real hardship for families of people serving abroad, the movie version of this conversation finds nothing interesting to explore that couldn’t have been covered in an obligatory 20-second montage. It just goes on an on, around and around again, without revealing anything new about the characters or resolving in any way.

Oh yeah, I should mention that the plastic babies they use in this are a little stiff and apparently it's some kind of big deal for the internet. I can't say I noticed it while watching, but yeah, looking at this image, that is one plastic baby, all right.

Fortunately, the movie isn’t a total loss because the scenes that aren’t about that are pretty good. Not in an interesting, thought provoking way, but definitely in a gripping war movie kind of way. They’re generally pretty kinetic and exciting, especially for Eastwood (who doesn’t usually go in for fancy editing and big setpieces). The military parts combine a sense of lived-in-realism (particularly the very convincing cast) with some legitimately harrowing gunfights and a healthy dose of entertaining Hollywood bullshit, right down to the black-hatted enemy sniper who provides some narrative structure as a main villain. Unlike most of the movie, these scenes seem to find the right tone -- respectful enough of reality to want to get the details right, but clearly designed to be exciting. And they are exciting; there are at least three fairly elaborate street-battle sequences, including an adrenaline-soaked sandstorm escape during the finale. Again, maybe you don’t like the idea of such a recent national tragedy being milked for entertainment, but you gotta admit that as pure cinema, these sequences work well.

In fact, if the ratio of battle scenes --or even military scenes in Iraq-- to domestic ones had been even a little higher, this one might have actually managed to overcome the obstacles stacked against it and won me over. Sadly, it was not to be. The military scenes are clearly where the film’s strengths lie, but it is stubbornly committed to its idea of itself as a weepy, repressed melodrama, and that’s where it ends up again and again, every time without any real idea of what to do with it. It's so relentless and repetitive that I'd almost be convinced that in itself is the point, if I were even a little more confident the movie has any clear point at all.

That weird sense of a film lacking in any kind of concrete conception of why it exists is heightened immeasurably by the epilogue, which features a happy ending for Kyle so exuberantly overblown and unearned that it borders on parody, and then immediately fades out to text stating that he got murdered by a disturbed ex-vet later that day, and then rolls credits! It's so stunningly poorly thought-out that it borders on the amateurish. Some other movie might find this turn of events ironic, or tragic, or infuriating -- or, it might simply find it unimportant to Kyle’s journey and not worth including. AMERICAN SNIPER, however, seems to feel it’s important enough to warrant mentioning, but not important enough to make any kind of comment about or to connect to the narrative, as apt an example as any of the film’s clunky narrative ambiguity and undercooked perspective.

The Verdict:

Well, I ended up being right that I wouldn’t much like this one, but not necessarily for the reasons I thought. I wasn’t much offended by it. I think lovers on the right and critics on the left both saw what they wanted to see; the movie might have a slight ideological bent --depending on how you want to interpret its view of the intentionally ambiguous central character-- but even if it does, there’s really not much there. And that’s the big problem: it’s a movie about a real person which doesn’t have much to say about that person, and it’s a movie about a real war which doesn’t have much to say about that war. It’s got some fiercely intense battle scenes and a clear-eyed realism about military life, but frankly it’s a little light on actual content for a 132-minute movie about a hugely controversial topic. If we weren’t living in such a toxic swamp of bitter culture-war nonsense, I can’t imagine anyone would have gotten too excited over this glum and unfocused wartime melodrama one way or another. Oh well, hopefully it’ll inspire Clint to make a better sequel focusing on the other side of the conflict like he did with FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS / LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA. I’m sure Twitter will like that a lot better.

Demolition Derpy.

Album review: Ghost City Searchlight: "Desperate Measures"

Ghost City Searchlight

“Desperate Measures” 2015

(Full Disclosure, before we get into this: I’ve known singer Tommy Coupar for most of my life, and the rest of the band about as long as he’s known them, so you could say that I’m not an objective witness here. But as they well know, I love music too much to be dishonest about it; if I thought this album sucked, I simply wouldn’t write about it. Fortunately, it kicks ass, so I’d like to tell the world. Take from that what you will. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.)

“We’re gonna drink, we’re gonna dance, we’re gonna sin so well/ we’re going to H.E.L.L. HELL... hell yeah!” sings Tommy Coupar and the Ghost City Searchlight gang in A Dark and Stormy Night, the second track on their very first full-length LP. And that sums up their intentions as eloquently as one could hope for: the album is a masterclass in scruffy, debauched barroom folk shout-alongs with a mordant wit to offset their dark implications. Through eleven punk-infused slices of gothic Americana, Tommy and the gang will introduce us to drunks, addicts, bad wives and worse husbands, self-serving hypocrites, bandits, betrayers, vampires, vicious mercenaries, barroom shootouts, debauched killers of every imaginable flavor, and even the end of the world. And they’ll make it all sound like a party no one wants to leave. We’re going to hell, hell yeah, indeed.

It’s been three years since Wasted on the Young, the excellent debut EP from the Ypsilanti, Michigan-based group, and since then they’ve grown quite a bit, both in skill and in number. With Desperate Measures, they’ve added two new members to their already strident 6-piece sound -- Casey Lee on violin and Rick Dempsey on kit drums-- piling on ever more possible textures and layers to their deceptively simple folk rock ruckus. Consequently, the rhythm section --in the past notable for its primitive unobtrusiveness-- is much more assertive here, with lightning drumwork and groovy basslines occasionally clamoring to the top of the musical pile in addition to the acoustic guitar, electric guitar, violin, accordion, mandolin, banjo, and dueling lead vocals.

It’s a tricky balance to keep that many instruments going, but it can pay off in spades: tracks like the killer Dark and Stormy Night feature a clever interplay between the cocky fiddle and the spaced-out guitar noodling that perfectly carve the band a place somewhere between Charlie Daniel’s Band and Steppenwolf, with an eccentricity all of its own. On The Wall, the addition of a jangling banjo to the regular rock regimen somehow adds to the apocalyptic fever instead of softening it, and on the crunchy Killer Responsible for the Death of Five in Downtown Shooting Still on the Loose, Dempsey lets fly with a maelstrom of double bass pummelling under the slinky fiddle hook, a move which would have been impossible for the old lineup. Sometimes more really is more. Even so, the real genius on display here is the band’s restraint more than its indulgence. Considering the number of personalities and instruments on display here, their instinct for stripped-down, classically structured pop songwriting demonstrates an impressive maturity and vision. A band of musicians this good is a rare thing; a band of musicians this good with the discipline to tone it down and make room for each other -- that’s something close to miraculous.

Their effort is paid off with a run of simply terrific songs, efficient little gems of acerbic  gothic storytelling, genuine pathos, and sharply crafted pop hooks. Coupar’s genius is for compact, evocative little folk tales with a dark edge and a flurry of deftly descriptive language (check out the way he coquettishly talks his way around the word “vampire” in Bloodlust, or the keen-eyed subjective detail in the bleak sci-fi epic Last Two Legions.) He’s not much for flowery poetic metaphors, but he has a knack for turning a phrase which begs for a shout-along chorus but lingers afterwards, hitting you with its full impact only after the heady rush of the music has settled (“life is for the rich, my boy, and death is for the poor!” he gleefully shouts with characteristic gallows humor in the ironically titled Health Care Plan). Desperate Measures, for all its energetic punch, is a surprisingly mournful album, full of vivid portraits of despair with just enough of a knowing grin to make them sting afresh each time. The band plays with a raucous energy, but there’s a note of real pain underneath, running through the entire album from the very conceit --the lyrics are framed in the booklet as the final work of a dejected writer who is losing himself in his stories-- to the vocals, where singer Sian Miller’s strangely plaintive voice (sometimes a hair too low in the mix for my taste) dances nimbly around Coupar’s weatherbeaten growl. It’s this bruised heart that adds pathos and dimension to the irresistibly danceable backbeat and rousing choruses, and it’s a mark of the band’s unique voice that it deepens the pop sensibility rather than clashes with it.

It doesn’t work every time. An over-busy production slightly weakens what should be a straightforward rocker in Blood Lust (does it really need a tinkling mandolin in there?), and an ill-advised country shuffle seems like an unnecessary gimmick distracting from the caustically hilarious lyrics in Prisoner's Dilemma.* Those are minor concerns, but a bigger misstep is the turgid, vaguely martial Anna Marie, a flat-footed ballad with a cast of more names than a Dune sequel that turns the band’s usual strengths --Coupar’s descriptive, rapid-fire lyrics and the band’s generous sense of leaving room for each other-- into weaknesses, resulting in a ponderous, languid tale without the band’s usual strong melodies to hold it together.

Even with a few trifling missteps, though, Desperate Measures is an accomplished triumph for this hard-working, hard-drinking folk-punk gang. Drag The River is as perfect a murder ballad as they come, a heady blending of Nick Cave and Goodbye Earl. Damn My Eyes expertly marries gloomy blues sensibilities to a prickly feverish pace. And Auld Acquaintance --which brilliantly weaves the melody of the beloved New Year’s tune in and out of a bracing punk gallop-- feels like the masterpiece this group was always meant to create, and one that only they could create. Like nearly all of Desperate Measures, the secret is in the unlikely balance between opposites: closely observed and resolutely specific lyrics which still manage to stay evocatively mysterious, timeless melodies meshed side-by-side with brash punk tempos, dark folk tales belted out with a hearty abandon that all but dares the listener to resist singing along -- tricky balances, to be sure, but you’d never know it from the effortless confidence with which it’s pulled off here. The protagonists of these eleven songs may be reduced to desperate measures, but Ghost City Searchlight has never seemed so confident. Hell yeah!

Don't believe me? Listen to the full album here!

* Which seems to be a bizarro alternate-universe version of the blues classic Delia’s Gone, with the twist that the problem here is Delia is actually not gone.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)

Dir. Spike Lee

Written by Spike Lee & Bill Gunn

Starring Stephen Tyrone Williams, Zaraah Abrahams, Elvis Nolasco, Felicia Pearsons

So, it turns out Spike Lee’s contribution to our current cultural movement of pushing the media ever further into an all-vampire-all-the-time format is pretty weird. I mean, it’s even weirder than the phrase “Spike Lee is making a vampire love story” would suggest, and frankly I’m not sure that sentence even makes sense. If I just read that phrase and I hadn’t seen the finished product for myself, I would assume there was a translation error or something before I would believe it was a real thing. But nonetheless, I can assure you, it is real. I have seen it. And it’s a weird one.

When last we checked in on the ongoing and baffling trend of indie auteur darlings making inexplicable vampire films for no discernable reason, it was Jim Jarmusch’s ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE which was flummoxing us. That one was almost wholly an exercise in dreamy atmosphere -- probably a little too dreamy, in fact; at times it’s nearly comatose. So I was counting on Lee to address the balance by making a different kind of vampire film. Lee comes with his own set of problems, but the one thing he’s never been accused of is understating anything. So even once you’ve managed to accept the idea that he’s making a vampire film, there’s at least one more shocking surprise in store for you: DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS is, if anything, even more slow, quiet, and dreamy than ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE. What the fuck is happening to the world!?

Now I gotta be honest with you. I have a superpower. It’s not super strength or telekinesis or something useful like that. I’m more like one of those poor sad mutants you see in the background who have an extra eye that can see microwaves, or they lay eggs, or they’re just real ugly. The kind that never get invited to join the X-Men, and when they ask there’s a real awkward moment where Wolverine or somebody has to unconvincingly tell them they’re all full up at the moment but if you’ll just leave your resume dot dot dot. In my case, my superpower is that I’m incapable of not enjoying a Spike Lee movie. I’ve seen, I believe, every one of his theatrically released films except HE GOT GAME and SHE HATE ME, and liked all of them and loved most, even the ones that most people hated. From wildly unwieldy recent fare like MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA to wildly uneven masterworks like RED HOOK SUMMER to wildly provocative button-pushers like BAMBOOZLED to wildly ingratiating crowd-pleasers like MALCOLM X to even the wildly unnecessary OLDBOY REMAKE… they’re all fierce, wild things of beauty, filled to the brim (and often spilling over the brim) with ideas, love, anger, politics, and raw, ragged humanity.

But DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS isn’t like that. Where Lee is usually passionate and provocative to a fault, here he takes the exact opposite approach: JESUS is languid and vague and cold. It’s a very strange approach that doesn’t really suit his talents very well and results in the first and only Spike Lee movie that I probably dislike more than I like, though of course there are pockets of greatness here as well.

A big part of the problem is that this isn’t really a Spike Lee movie at all. Despite the credits identifying the film as “an Official Spike Lee Joint” (a jab at his previous film, the studio-compromised remake OLDBOY, which carries the more impersonal “A Spike Lee Film”), there’s a ghost haunting the entire production, one Lee seems beholden to to the film’s detriment. That ghost is the 1973 avant-garde horror(?)/art film GANJA AND HESS, and its writer/director/co-star Bill Gunn. DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS is not billed as a remake, but in fact it’s in many cases a direct scene-for-scene, shot-for-shot copy of its predecessor, to such an extent that Lee gives co-writer credit to Gunn (who died in 1989).

That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. GANJA AND HESS is a pretty amazing movie; a talky, philosophical, sexy, mysterious and engrossing acid trip through some bizarre funhouse mirror of Black American anxieties in the early 70’s. And DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS clearly understands and aspires to those superlatives as well; it mimics the movements of GANJA AND HESS obsessively, changing a few details but openly and faithfully aping GANJA AND HESS’s unique blend of dreamy philosophy, mysterious plotting, and sexual frankness.

The story, such as it is, is pretty simple: wealthy anthropologist and African art collector Dr. Hess Greene (Stephen Tyrone Williams, primarily a stage actor) is attacked by an unstable assistant (the excellently-named Elvis Nolasco, small parts in CLOCKERS and OLDBOY REMAKE), who stabs him with an ancient African dagger and then kills himself. Greene seems to die, but then mysteriously awakens as an invincible, immortal being who must have human blood in order to live. When the assistant’s estranged ex-wife Ganja (Zaraah Abrahams, British TV shows Waterloo Road and Coronation Street) shows up looking for her husband, she and Greene quickly become lovers and in time she becomes a vampire too. Eventually, however, Greene begins to tire of his new supernatural life.

The story itself isn’t particularly the point, though; Gunn wrote the original with the stated intention of using vampirism as a metaphor for addiction, but the finished product is even stranger and more surreal than that -- it’s a disorienting, mysterious dream. The problem with Lee’s remake here isn’t that the source material isn’t great, or that Lee isn’t great. The problem is that they’re both great for entirely different reasons with staggeringly little in common save their interest in race, which is somehow both a completely central and maddeningly inconsequential point of reference. Race is obviously enormously important to the film and its whole perspective, and yet it’s in subtle, slippery ways which don’t exactly add up to a coherent point. What does GANJA AND HESS have to say about the African-American experience? I don’t know, exactly… and the problem is I don’t think Lee really knows, either. Lee obviously knows the movie is great, but I suspect his slavish devotion to the inexplicable narrative rhythms of the original are the result an attempt to backward-engineer a intricately complicated device which he does not fully understand.

That’s a problem for an artist as strong as Lee is, because it means he’s unusually restrained here. He seems fearful that if he adds too much of himself, he’ll alter the delicate chemical alchemy that make the movie great to begin with -- and he’s right. But he’s also incapable of exactly recreating the original work --let alone the context-- in a way that recaptures its original potency. His attempt to rebuild a piece of art which he doesn’t entirely understand --and maybe doesn’t even have a concrete explanation-- piece by piece ends up feeling alienating and disingenuous. It’s like George Carlin once said about playing the blues: “its not enough to know which notes to play, you gotta know why they need to be played.”

The result is a wildly schizophrenic film which boasts numerous strong sequences but just as many that are absolutely stultifying, a word which I would never have guessed could be fairly associated with a Spike Lee film. Many of Lee’s films have an overload of ideas which don’t necessarily hang together --a problem for a lot of critics, but never for me-- but here Gunn’s original work and Lee’s new additions openly negate each other. Mixing Gunn’s stagey, wandering soliloquies with Lee’s own ear for modern patois results in jarring shifts that sound like they’re coming not just from different movies but different planets. Lee, ever the literalist, also can’t resist trying to explain a bit more about what’s going on here than Gunn ever attempted --in the movie’s worst scene, the protagonist explains he’s a vampire, a word which I don’t believe is ever actually uttered in the original-- but making parts of the plot lightly more concrete just emphasizes how nonsensical the rest of it is. Gunn couches his ambiguity in drug-tinged 70’s hallucinatory cinema; Lee steadfastly keeps things concrete and grounded in at least some kind of realism, which just makes the movie’s inherent strangeness feel like a mistake rather than a central feature. You get the sense that Lee is trying and failing to communicate a story here, whereas his 70’s counterpart never had any intention of doing so to begin with. Attempts at modernization like a brief sequences that references AIDS and a lesbian gender switch near the end find Lee feeling a bit more in his element, but they also seem maddenly isolated from the rest of the movie.

The performances, too, suffer in comparison to the original. Stephen Tyrone Williams is perfectly serviceable as the opaque, isolated Greene, but the actor seems uncertain and a bit timid in the role. He’s got a genuine charm  --immediately evident on the few occasions he gets to smile-- but the role clearly doesn’t play to his strengths. Original star Duane Jones (known for his only other major film, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) had a fierce, imperious take on the role which made him magnetic and compelling despite his elusive character. Williams simply feels reserved and a little bored. Zaraah Abrahams, as Ganja, fares better with a more active and relatable character, but doesn’t come close to Marlene Clark’s effortless portrait of gilded toughness. Clark is just naturally commanding; Abrahams feels a little more needy and demanding, even a little bitchy (her suffocatingly posh British accent doesn’t help matters; not that it’s her fault, but that voice is the quintessential embodiment of vapid English upper-crusty spoiled brats). Nothing about her feels steely or damaged the way Clark originally did, though her performance is sympathetic enough to effectively command our attention, and as the movie rolls onward she seems to find enough confidence in the role it make it her own. Really, though, the person best served here is Rami Malek, as Greene’s amusingly resentful butler. Even with very few lines, he’s allowed to instill his character with a lot more personality than either Williams or Abrahams are, which makes him instinctively more appealing to both Lee and the audience.

Oh by the way, Snoop from The Wire is in here.

Watching Malek, it’s easy to remember what a great filmmaker Lee can be, but it’s also obvious why his strengths are ill-suited to this particular adaptation. Lee thrives on colorful, larger-than-life characters, rich humanism, and provocative social experiments -- all things which are fundamentally the opposite of GANJA AND HESS’s icy, surreal, fractured intellectualism. Plenty of Lee’s personality sneaks in around the margins, but he’s so beholden to the spirit of the original that the real meat of the story seems to be actively working in opposition to his best instincts. And when he applies some of his trademarks --earthy, lurid realism, long dialogue takes, sly humor-- to Gunn’s material, it’s sometimes a flat-out disaster, as the painfully amateurish scene where Hess explains his vampirism demonstrates. Even so, as the movie gradually winds towards its climax (and in doing so, generates some fitful stirrings of intelligible drama) the beautiful photography alone is ample reminder that Lee is a talent to reckon with. He may not always make the best choices (the aggressive, sometimes seemingly deliberately out-of-sync musical selections here, for example*) but he’ll never be uninteresting. An extended long-take seduction sequence --which starts off a bit awkward but gradually builds a real sexual and dread-inducing power-- is a stunner. A lengthy musical sequence near the end --strikingly similar to his previous RED HOOK SUMMER, but also a fairly direct lift from GANJA AND HESS-- is mesmerizing, and finally engrossing and mysterious in exactly the same way its progenitor was. And as the movie reaches its final destination, Lee finally seems to find his footing and lets the movie’s enigmatic symbolism speak for itself, creating some genuinely haunting --if still totally inscrutable-- images.

With all its contradictions, dead-ends, and surreal plotting, this was already going to be a film for a very select audience, and having seen it I can understand why even a lot of that audience was put off by it. Frankly I’m not even sure what the point of making this film was; Lee, like Gunn before him, still seems to suggest that the film is in some way about addiction; it seems like it should be, but the final product suggests nothing of the sort, as neither vampiric character seems especially bothered or really even interested in their so-called addiction and are really too opaque for us to really understand what they’re thinking in the first place. Certainly there are other intriguing elements here --the film’s curious Christian imagery juxtaposed with its explicitly African curse, the isolating effects of Greene’s wealth, the contrast of vampiric death and rebirth-- but nothing resolves into anything resembling a specific point. This, then, is ultimately a film not to be parsed for meaning but to simply experience. If that experience is a somewhat less fulfilling one than the original (perhaps always destined to be the case when remaking movies so strongly of their time in a vastly different era), well, at least it’s still a unique one. I’m glad to live in a world where “Spike Lee’s Vampire Film” is a real thing that exists, but I hope the next movie he makes has a little more of himself in it,** especially after two remakes in a row. Remembering the greatness of the past is important, but let’s not let it take over our future, OK Spike? Ancient African daggers are not the only thing that can turn us into bloodless vampires -- overly respectful tributes to the cinema of the past can do it too.

That having been said, if you could drop a vampire or two into your upcoming CHIRAQ, I ain’t gonna complain. Or get a wolf man in there or something. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

*Culled from over 800 unsigned artists who submitted music to him specifically for the movie

**Speaking of which, why the hell is he not playing the part of the unhinged assistant, which was played by Gunn himself in the original film??