Alexandria

Actually saw THREE movies this week: Dolemite is My Name, The Lighthouse, and Tel Aviv on Fire. (This is the reason for the odd title.) I can't say that I was particularly blown away by any of them, so I figured I'd just do a three-fer and include them all in one post. Normal service should resume next week. (Yes, I know the title only properly references two of them, but that's because I couldn't find a decent way of working Master Shake in there.)

Dolemite is My Name. On the face of it, it's a cute film. It's nice that Eddie Murphy is still around and still able to entertain and he does an excellent job portraying Blaxploitation legend, Rudy Ray Moore. Likewise, it's great to see people like Craig Robinson, Keegan-Michael Key, and especially Wesley Snipes, ham it up to the maximum possible degree. The problem is that Moore's story is as close to a boilerplate Hollywood script as you're going to get. He really was a self-made star and he really did succeed when everyone doubted him. That note-by-note storytelling really saps the film of any plot-driven energy and forces us to rely on the performances. That's great in stand-up and sketch comedy (not surprising, given the huge number of them among the cast), but doesn't do much else. Murphy recreating Moore's non-kung fu fight sequences would be great as a sketch, but here it's worth a couple laughs (most of them generated by Snipes' disgust with the whole sequence) and then we're back to the bog-standard story progression. On the one hand, it's weird to be denigrating what is essentially a true story. On the other hand, when sitting in a theater, you're usually expecting truth to be stranger than fiction, or at least more interesting, and this simply isn't. It's worth a watch on Netflix if you enjoy any of the actors and/or have a passion for 70s schlock film.

The Lighthouse. Continuing the train of mild disappointment, I have to say that this is a decent, psychological horror film, but has more than one stretch where it becomes kind of tedious. I thought Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson were great in their roles, even if Dafoe was a little trying. I think the decision to film it in black-and-white to emphasize the use of light and shadow, as well as the late 19th-century time period, was a great one. I think the use of the dream/delusion sequences was subtle enough to keep the audience just on the edge of knowing what was real and what wasn't and made good use of the kraken/squid imagery in what was a borderline Lovecraft-style tale of eerieness. But it was also rather slow and the characters spent a long time on camera doing not much of note. There were also some things clearly played for shock value. Pattinson jerking off to a mermaid statue that he'd found in his bunk isn't that much of a departure from some guy with a Victoria's Secret catalog if he's been stuck on an island with one weird, old guy for a few weeks and no one else. Is that interesting? Not really. Certainly the one thing that the film lacked was any sense of build-up to the atmosphere. They were dropped on the island and things immediately became strange because of Dafoe's character and his attachment to the light. There were very few quiet moments where any sense of danger or the unknowable emerged, since there weren't many quiet moments to begin with that weren't interrupted by the two leads shouting at one another. Put simply, I can certainly appreciate the craft that went into shooting the film and which the actors used to perform it, but overall, it just didn't give me what I'm usually hoping for in a horror film.

Tel Aviv on Fire. This is the film that everyone was most interested in seeing, partially because of the premise, but also because the trailer made it seem like it was going to be an intelligent farce. It comes in hard on the 'farce' part, but not quite as much on the 'intelligent'. I feel like if Salem (Kais Nashef) had been presented as an actual writer trying to deal with the hypocrisy and procedural stupidity of the occupation, that might have been a good deal funnier. But that would have been a different story. As it is, the rather normal love story, mixed with Salem's self-affirmation and newfound purpose, hampered by the checkpoint officer's (Yaniv Bitton) determination to make the world fit the vision that he, his family, and much of the Israeli public desperately cling to, is story enough to easily make this the best film of the week. While it was kind of boring to discover that Salem's character was to be the young fool who had passed up a good thing and was now faking it to make it, he and the rest of the cast had roles that were written well enough to go along for the ride. Bitton, as the officer determined to prove his importance to his wife by engaging the very soap opera that he once derided, is really the highlight of the film. The production crew's worldly cynicism about their circumstances in the territories and what risks they can take with their varied audiences becomes another high point, when their naiveté about Salem's presumed innocence in the real world allows the young fool to inadvertently walk all over them. Whether the show elevates itself to actual art is debatable and the same can be said for Tel Aviv on Fire. Much like Dolemite is My Name, this is a cute film, but one that's heartfelt enough and not so tied to obvious Hollywood tropes that it becomes something a bit more worthwhile.