Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) Review

rating: ****

the story: Black Panthers organizer Fred Hampton becomes the target of the FBI.

review: The big draw, for me, is watching Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) and LaKeith Stanfield. I assumed Stanfield, who has showed up in a number of interesting projects in recent years, was going to be my favorite of the two, but it’s actually Kaluuya who lights up the screen as Hampton, speaking with rapid fire, charismatic ease. Stanfield is usually pretty subdued, but his presence alone tends to be eloquent. Here he can’t really contend with Kaluuya.

The story is pretty even-handed, even though Stanfield plays the informant who eventually sets up Hampton’s assassination. We watch as Stanfield’s handler, played by Jesse Plemons, grapples with the morality of their assignment, working under the famously heavy hand of J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen).

The results are perhaps best appreciated for what they’re not: Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, a bafflingly lighthearted but on the whole similar story. I was never that enthusiastic about Lee’s film, but seeing this is all the more proof of how easy it is to improve upon. I get that Lee basically saw room for a farce (black guy infiltrates KKK!), but for a filmmaker so well known for his passion, the results were inert. 

Not so with Black Messiah. It even manages to get me onboard with Plemons, a supporting actor who’s gotten a steady amount of positive buzz recently. As the FBI liaison, he at last finds a context that makes sense to me. 

Hampton’s legacy is relatively small as a leader of the black community. His story plays out in the shadow of far more famous assassinations: MLK Jr., Malcolm X. The movie posits that Hampton was poised to succeed them, and that the FBI was desperate to prevent that from happening. That he was militant, at least in rhetoric, is where viewer interpretations of his potential will come into play, but the film itself stays away from judgment.

Suffice to say, his death still plays as tragedy. This is a story that needs telling, and this is a fine way to experience it. It might even be a great way. I will periodically revisit to ascertain.

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

rating: ****

the story: A black man encounters the full absurdity of the workforce.

review: Director Boots Riley was worried about comparisons to other black filmmakers, but I think Sorry to Bother You will enjoy its greater legacy in comparison to other workplace comedies, chiefly Mike Judge's Office Space (1999).

Riley's perspective stems from the fact that on its surface, Sorry to Bother You comes from the same recent surge of black filmmaking as Get Out (2017).  On the surface, its story arc is chiefly concerned with the role of black people in white society.  But it can be a universal message, too.  By the time the movie reaches the concept of equisapiens, I think my point has been proven.

I mean, equisapiens, right? 

Maybe my greater point is that you don't need to be black to enjoy the movie itself?  That seems needlessly reductive.  You don't need to be black to understand it, either, you don't need to be black to enjoy it, and you don't need to be black to get something meaningful from it.  I mean, on the one hand it seems to be satire from a black perspective, but it's also...just satire.  Hilarious satire.  I mean, equisapiens.  That's an iconic movie image regardless of context, but the context grounds it, too, even while it's so absurd that the whole movie might end up being remembered for it.

The cast is impeccable.  I caught Lakeith Stanfield in a supporting role in Girl in the Spider's Web (2018), and he was compelling even in a fairly limited capacity.  Here, in the lead role, he remains so.  Tessa Thompson is fast becoming one of my favorites.  She stands out in everything.  Armie Hammer has found new life as a supporting actor.  Danny Glover and Steve Yeun are among a strong supporting cast.  Patton Oswalt and David Cross are hilarious as a few of the "white voices" in another of the film's hilarious digs at society at large.

Basically, a movie that succeeds well past its initial goals. 

The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018)

rating: ****

the story: The focus shifts squarely to Lisbeth Salander.

review: Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy became a full-fledged literary phenomenon a decade ago, a Swedish sensation that made its way to Americans with the first entry becoming known as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is the name it went by for the 2011 Hollywood adaptation headlined by director David Fincher and actors Rooney Mara as Lisbeth and Daniel Craig, then still at the height of his 007 fame, as crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist.  Arguably Craig's Blomvist was the lead character in the movie.  Hollywood, unlike Sweden, never adapted the rest of the trilogy, which heavily swings the attention toward Salander, as with the later books written by David Lagercrantz, the first of which Girl in the Spider's Web adapts.  With popular phenomenons, you never know exactly what audiences are responding to.  I naturally assumed everyone else gravitated to Salander as an ultimately sympathetic figure, but now it seems attention was gained over morbid curiosity.  If more fans had been like me, Girl in the Spider's Web would've been received quite differently.

As it is, the second Hollywood Salander movie landed as a dud.  It's not because of the movie.  Blomkvist, as in the books, take a clear backseat to Salander this time, cast as with much of the film without a star in mind.  Lisbeth Salander is herself once again played by a relative unknown, a would-be star-making role for Claire Foy (as it more or less failed to be for Mara as well, somehow).  The biggest name in the cast is actually Stephen Merchant, who wears a number of creative hats, playing the guy who creates the program celebrated hacker Salander spends the movie trying to protect, as well as his son, while she battles her evil twin sister. 

The movie, as with its cast, seeks to present an authentic version of Sweden, moreso than its 2011 predecessor, and as such feels far more European than Hollywood.  It's otherwise a fairly standard stylish thriller, except that it centers on Lisbeth Salander.  The movie pivots but doesn't dwell on her real world mystique, hinging on all the familiar elements but more or less expecting audiences to care as much about Salander as they did a decade ago.  Clearly a miscalculation.  The trailer, featuring a hostile Salander attacking a man suspended upside down, didn't sell the story so much as the hope that Salander remained an icon, an archetypal feminist for a feminist age.  But I think she ended up seeing too hostile, too alienating.  This is a character who became increasingly humanized and sympathetic, as I said, in later book appearances.  I cried reading Larsson's final entry, when the justice system finally acknowledges her, vindicating her. 

But we don't really live in a world where we easily accept iconoclasts, rebels like Lisbeth Salander, and ironically a movie that celebrates her as her own worthy lead character ends up rejected, just as Salander was always envisioned by Larsson in his fictional tales, as just another eccentric outsider.  But she is compelling, and she is worth celebrating, and Girl in the Spider's Web does an excellent job conveying that, as well as her infinitely complicated family history.  Even heroes have sibling rivalry issues. 

Bottom line, this is a movie that will remind you of what made Lisbeth Salander so memorable to begin with.  You just have to remember that she was memorable, in and of herself, in the best possible way.