Tag: LaKeith Stanfield

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Film Features Film/TV

Judas and the Black Messiah Writes History with Lightning

In 2014, I had the privilege of helping Pritchard Smith and J.B. Horrell with their documentary The Invaders. My job as writing consultant was to punch up the voiceover and help sort out the structure of the complex story of Memphis’ homegrown Black Power militia. It remains one of my favorite film jobs ever.

The most heated debate we got into during that post-production period was about COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program, which targeted radical political groups in the 1960s and ’70s. And by “radical political groups,” I really mean, “people J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like.” It wasn’t the right-wing John Birch Society who were getting their phones tapped, their ranks infiltrated, and their leaders incarcerated. It was the Black Panthers.

Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton in Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah

These groups represented Hoover’s worst nightmare: revolutionary Black socialists. The Invaders, who were not directly affiliated with the national Black Panther organization, were mostly Vietnam veterans. Hoover and his rabid anti-communist allies thought they had been radicalized overseas by Maoist agitprop. But the truth was, it was the grinding poverty and relentless racism they experienced back home that lit their revolutionary flame.

The Invaders were blamed for the riot that broke out during Dr. King’s March 28, 1968 march in Memphis. But they denied involvement, claiming the window breakers on Main Street that day had been a COINTELPRO false flag operation. We believed them, but would the average viewer of the documentary? In the Obama era, the story sounded paranoid. Not so much anymore.

Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield

The Invaders, it turns out, got off easy. They only had their reputations besmirched. The next year, Fred Hampton, the leader of the Chicago-area Black Panthers, was killed by what can be described only as a COINTELPRO death squad — at least, that’s how we would describe it if it happened in another country. Hampton’s brief life and scandalous death are the basis for director Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah.

The film’s framework is formed by a trio of brilliant performances: Daniel Kaluuya’s turn as Fred Hampton is in the same league as Denzel Washington’s Malcolm X or Daniel Day-Lewis’ Lincoln. When he’s delivering fiery oratory to rapt crowds, you believe he could be the Black Messiah. (That term comes not from ranks of the Black Panthers, but from Hoover himself, played with oily gravitas by Martin Sheen.) Hampton’s opposite in every respect is Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), a white FBI agent tasked with infiltrating and disrupting the Panthers. He is as blandly professional as Hampton is passionate.

Caught in the middle is Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield). After he’s collared for using a fake FBI badge to carjack carjackers, O’Neal is blackmailed into going undercover in Hampton’s Panther chapter. Once inside, the people he meets aren’t the dangerous terrorists of Hoover’s vision. He comes to admire Hampton’s emphasis on small-bore community organizing over grandiose dreams of revolution. But O’Neal is not a communist “fellow traveler.” His FBI handler woos him with fancy dinners, fat wads of cash, and, when Hampton needs a driver, a new car.

With such an epic story of political struggle, it would have been easy — and perhaps even satisfying — for King to draw cartoonish good guys and bad guys. But even when he’s slam-banging big action sequences, such as the police siege of Panther headquarters, which devolves into a pitched firefight, King chooses moral complexity. Sometimes when O’Neal looks at Hampton, he sees a community-minded politician at the beginning of his career. Other times, he sees a Marxist-Leninist strongman building a cult of personality. Mitchell sees himself as a career-minded law enforcement professional who is shocked when confronted with his boss’ overt racism. But when the time comes to plan the hit on Hampton, he just follows orders.

What ultimately humanizes Hampton (and damns O’Neal’s treachery) is his relationship with poet Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback). The chairman may be a hard-nosed revolutionary, but Hampton is utterly unprepared when Johnson takes a shine to him. “I wouldn’t have thought of you as shy,” she says as she tries to goad the 21-year-old into kissing her for the first time.

Kaluuya’s earth-shaking performance may be the headline, but everything from the noir-toned cinematography to the banging score is honed to a razor edge. Whether it’s mining gangster pictures like Boyz in the Hood for tense scenes of urban combat or twisting the narrative into JFK paranoid pretzels, Judas and the Black Messiah succeeds on every level. Judas and the Black Messiah is now showing at multiple locations, and streaming on HBO Max.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Photograph.

In The Photograph, LaKeith Stanfield plays Michael Block, a feature writer for a fictional magazine called The Republic. As depicted on the screen, Michael’s job seems to consist mostly of lounging around the office looking really, really good — that is, when he’s not busy winging hither and yon on his unlimited travel budget. As someone who has actually made their living as a magazine feature writer, I have to give writer/director Stella Meghie credit for nailing the essence of the job.

I’m kidding. If Michael’s job was portrayed realistically, there would be a lot more hair pulling, imposter syndrome-inspired breakdowns, and late nights spent wondering if it’s too late to go to law school. He certainly wouldn’t be able to afford his spacious and immaculate apartment in New York.

Sorry to Bother You’s LaKeith Stanfield (left) and Insecure’s Issa Rae smolder sexily in Stella Meghie’s The Photograph.

But realism isn’t what people want out of a romantic movie. It’s one of the rules of the genre that our principals have to have aspirational jobs. Michael’s about-to-be girlfriend Mae Morton (Issa Rae) works as curator at the Queens Museum of Art — a job which would pay okay in real life, but not enough to afford an apartment with cathedral-high ceilings. It’s all part of the charm of the genre. Director Stella Meghie wants you to identify with Michael and Mae. They’re just like you, only a little better — the best version of you.

Besides posing in carefully placed pools of golden light, Mae’s current work duties include organizing a retrospective exhibit of her late mother’s photography. That’s how these two ridiculously good-looking people meet. Michael is working on a story about the disappearing culture of fishermen in rural Louisiana when he meets Isaac Jefferson (Rob Morgan). He sees a striking photograph on Isaac’s mantel, taken by Christina Eames (Chanté Adams). Christina, Isaac tells him, was once his girlfriend, but she moved to New York to become a photographer, and they lost touch.

When Michael returns to New York and tracks down the Louisiana mystery woman, it turns out she was Mae’s mother. When Michael and Mae come face to incredibly attractive face, sparks fly immediately. A few nights later, Michael scoops up an intern at the magazine office and goes to an artsy French movie at the Queens Museum, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mae. She sees him first, and their attraction is so electric, their respective wingman and wing-woman immediately fall into bed together.

Things take a little longer to develop for our classy protagonists, who, it cannot be emphasized enough, are just stupid hot. Before they get busy, they have relatable dinner conversation, like what the hell happened to Kanye West?

Seriously, what happened to that guy?

It will take an approaching hurricane to get them in the sack making the beast with two backs. As in King Lear, the intensity of emotion summons equally intense weather, only instead of grief and madness lashing the castle walls with rain, it’s the sexual energy released by these two hotties bumping uglies that’s knocking out power up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

Obviously, Michael and Mae need to be together for the good of humanity, but there are complications. Michael has applied for a job with The Associated Press in London, where he will cover Brexit with his smoldering sexuality several thousand miles away from his boo. Mae’s mom left her two letters when she died. One of them was for her, and the other for her father — but there’s no name on the father envelope. Turns out, the man who raised Mae was not her biological papa, and her mama has left her a posthumous parentage mystery.

So, in case you haven’t caught on by now, The Photograph is a fairly formulaic romance. As both a critic and a genre film fan, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with following a formula. It’s how you execute that counts. Meghie knows what she wants, and she gets it from every aspect of the production. If anything, Stanfield and Rae are too perfect, and their relationship sometimes feels conflict-averse. The variation to the formula comes from the parallel story, told in flashback with the help of some acid-washed ’80s costume design, of how Christine escaped from poverty in Louisiana to become a famous photographer in the big city, and the personal price she paid for her success.

The question becomes, will Mae and Michael make the same mistake of sacrificing happiness for success? One thing’s for sure: They’re going to look good doing it.

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Film Features Film/TV

Knives Out

Be advised: Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a great movie, and I will fight you.

Notice I didn’t just say “The Last Jedi is a good installment in the Star Wars franchise,” like I would say about a Marvel movie that adequately hits the marks of costumed heroism while setting up the next episode in the infinite saga of corporate synergy. I said it was a great movie, period. Not only does it look amazing — it’s the best-lit Star Wars movie since George Lucas got his USC film professor Irvin Kirshner to helm The Empire Strikes Back — but writer/director Rian Johnson explored and expanded all of the characters he was given to work with by Lawrence Kasdan and J.J. Abrams in The Force Awakens, leaving the story neater and better than he found it. With the much-maligned Canto Bight “space casino” sequence, he did what the middle passage of a trilogy is supposed to do — complicate the morality of the story.

With the family fortune at stake and the patriarch’s corpse still warm, can the Thrombeys get a clue?

But that move is only an echo of the most challenging part of The Last Jedi, the characterization of Luke Skywalker. Instead of the gung-ho farm boy ready to take on the galaxy single-handed, he is a depressed hermit who no longer believes his youthful heroics made the world a better place. For a lot of disillusioned Gen Xers who grew up idolizing Luke, this was just a little too real. Johnson shepherded the best performance of Mark Hamill’s career as he rediscovers the heroic heart that still beats within him.

In a just world, Johnson should still be at the helm of Star Wars for the final installment of the trilogy of trilogies, which will hit theaters later this month. Instead, he and his producing partner Ram Bergman reunited most of the Last Jedi crew and knocked out Knives Out in about a year.

If you want to see what the real pros think about Johnson’s abilities, look no further than the incredible cast he assembled, starting with James Bond himself.

Daniel Craig plays private detective Benoit Blanc, who, in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie-derived whodunits sports an absolutely outrageous accent. Instead of Hercule Poirot’s bombastic Belgian, Blanc has an exaggerated Southern drawl, which prompts Hugh Ransom Drysdale (Captain America himself, Chris Evans) to call him “CSI: KFC.” Evans plays the black-sheep grandchild of Harlan Thrombey (Captain von Trapp himself, Christopher Plummer) the wildly successful writer of mystery novels whose untimely suicide on the evening of his 85th birthday party Blanc is hired to investigate.

Captain no more — Chris Evans is the black sheep of the family in Rian Johnson’s new whodunit, Knives Out.

But who hired Blanc? That’s a question that no one, not even the detective himself, knows the answer to. Was it eldest daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), the self-made real-estate mogul? Or was it Walt (Michael Shannon), business head of Harlan’s publishing empire? Or maybe it was closeted fascist son-in-law Richard (Don Johnson) or lifestyle guru daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette). The one person we know for sure it is not, is Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s immigrant nurse who finds herself caught in the middle as the children of the fabulously wealthy family jockey for a share of the inheritance.

Johnson’s script for Knives Out is the kind of thing Hollywood craftspeople like Leigh Brackett and Dalton Trumbo used to churn out on the regular: a tight, fun genre piece suffused with contemporary politics. Johnson delights in pulling the rug out from under you, then leaving you to wonder how long the floor is going to last.

Blanc, the eccentric detective, is a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes, only he has a pair of Watsons in local cops Lieutenant Elliott (LaKeith Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan). As necessary in byzantine mysteries, the dialogue is heavy in exposition. But it goes down easy because all the actors are having so much fun. Craig chews the scenery like it’s a plug of tobacco, while Curtis projects raw, feminine power and Shannon plays against type as a subservient failson. Only de Armas is truly playing for sympathy, as the sole poor person in the cast, who, coincidentally, vomits every time she tries to tell a lie.

What makes Knives Out a meaty murder mystery is its subversive portrait of the American ruling class. They’re all feeding on the corpse of a fortune made by someone smarter and kinder than they are, and their thin veneer of niceness is stripped away the instant an iota of their privilege is threatened. That’s why it’s immensely satisfying when Johnson delivers their collective comeuppance.