Tag: Teyonah Parris

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Film Features Film/TV

They Cloned Tyrone

Foxx, Parris, and Boyega deliver near-perfect performances in this film.

They Cloned Tyrone seems like one of those movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf or Snakes on a Plane where they came up with the title and worked backwards. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, have you seen Sharknado? They made six of them!

Whatever method director Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier used to come up with the concept, they should keep doing it. To me, They Cloned Tyrone is a very pure form of science fiction. Even after towering masterpieces like Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The War of the Worlds, sci-fi struggled to gain acceptance in the literary mainstream. The genre was mostly relegated to cheap pulp magazines with pictures of little green men menacing scantily clad women on the cover. But many of the stories inside those lurid covers, from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” were serious works of art.

They Cloned Tyrone leans hard into disrepute with an appropriately sleazy Blaxploitation setup: Fontaine (John Boyega) is running a two-bit drug trafficking operation that is threatened by his better-capitalized rival Isaac (J. Alphonse Nicholson). One typical day on the job, he violently evicts one of Isaac’s guys from his territory and shakes down pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and his ho Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) for some money he’s owed. But after the shakedown winds down, Isaac’s enforcers catch up with Fontaine. Slick Charles and Yo-Yo see him gunned down in the parking lot. They’re shocked when Fontaine shows up the next day, none the worse for wear, demanding the money they already paid him.

Fontaine, it seems, is a clone. But who cloned him, and why? (We meet Tyrone much later in the story. Spoiler: He’s a clone, too.) Yo-Yo obsessively collects Nancy Drew books, and she’s itching to play girl detective in real life. The three not-quite friends start to see weirdness everywhere; little things they overlooked or took for granted start to take on a sinister aura. What is fake and what is real starts to get hazy. So does the question of who is fake and who is real. And just because you’re a clone, does that mean you’re not you? Since Fontaine is a clone — albeit one with a mixture of fake and real memories — whose side is he really on? Does he even know?

Imagine if Philip K. Dick wrote Hustle & Flow, and you’ll get a sense of what They Cloned Tyrone is like. Taylor is heavily influenced by Craig Brewer’s Memphis hip-hop opus. Parris plays Yo-Yo with the same sass-mouth accent Paula Jai Parker used as Lexus. Yo-Yo even says she’s just trying to get enough money to get back to Memphis. Very relatable.

Throwing DJay and Shug into They Live in the hood makes for some wildly entertaining scenes. But Taylor and Rettenmaier have a lot more on their minds than trash talk and jump scares. They stretch their premise into allegory like Jordan Peele, whose epochal Us is another clear influence.

Three near-perfect performances from Boyega, Foxx, and Parris keep all the plates spinning. When confronted by big weirdness, they freak out appropriately, then get down to the business of saving their hood. Boyega plays multiple scenes with himself but never looks like he’s bluescreening it in. Foxx’s “Playboy World Pimp Champion 1995” is funny but never demeaning. (Get well soon, Jamie Foxx! The world needs you!) Parris is constantly revealing new layers of Yo-Yo, who is largely responsible for keeping the plot moving forward. In the final act, when the screenplay starts to struggle to stick the landing, all the hard work the actors have done keeps the increasingly strange proceedings grounded in reality. They Cloned Tyrone smuggles gold inside a trash bag as only good sci-fi can.

They Cloned Tyrone is streaming on Netflix.

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing: Tom Cruise and Clone Tyrone

Tom Cruise hangs on in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning pt. 1.

After many pandemic-related delays and a storm of publicity, Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are back with Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Pt. 1. This time, the Impossible Mission Force is sent to take down The Entity, an advanced AI that has gained sentience and is threatening humanity. How does that lead to Tom Cruise jumping a motorcycle off a frickin’ mountain? We’re about to find out.

John Boyega stars with Jamie Foxx in They Cloned Tyrone, a sci-fi action comedy which pays homage to/sends up 70s Blackspolitation films. Teyonah Parris, David Alan Grier, and Kiefer Sutherland also star. Expect multiple Tyrones. 

Hey, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is still in theaters, and it’s still good! Harrison Ford’s victory lap as the beloved archeologist/adventurer delivers the Spielbergian action beats you crave — even if James Mangold is at the helm this time. 

While the big studios pour six-digit budgets into tent poles expecting to hit home runs, Blumhouse moneyballs the game with consistent base hits like Insidious: The Red Door, which made its $15 million budget back in two days. 

On Wednesday, July 19, at Crosstown Theater, Indie Memphis will present a selection of short films from the Odú Film Festival in Brazil, which is a production of the Black Freedom Fellowship. These shorts include “Ara” (“Time”) a ghost story from director Laryssa Machada imagining a dialogue with her grandfather, whom she posthumously discovered was gay.

“Ara”

Then on Thursday, July 20, Crosstown Arts Film Series presents John Waters’ Female Trouble, the film which introduced viewers to the immortal drag legend Divine.

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Film Features Film/TV

Candyman

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II fears the Candyman in the new horror film by Nia DaCosta.

Like the most famous resident of Cabrini-Green, J. J. “Dynamite” Evans, Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is a painter. But the Downtown Chicago neighborhood he inhabits is quite different from Good Times. 

In the 1970s, Cabrini-Green was notorious for violence and a symbol of inescapable, generational Black poverty — the go-to example of everything that was wrong with the concept of “public housing.” In 1992, Cabrini-Green was the setting for Candyman. Director Bernard Rose, who had made his name creating classic music videos for Frankie Goes To Hollywood, switched the setting of the Clive Barker story “The Forbidden” from Liverpool to Chicago in order to explore themes of race and class in America, while delivering the chills and gore horror audiences demand. 

Just say “Candyman” five times in the mirror and see what happens.

Memorably portrayed by Tony Todd, the Candyman was a hook-handed spectral killer who appears when you say his name five times while looking in a mirror. But Candyman is as much a victim as he is a boogeyman. Like Freddy Krueger, he was killed by an angry mob, and comes back to haunt the people in the neighborhood. (The mob rubbed their victim with honeycombs, and he was stung almost to death before being lit on fire. As someone with a stinging insect phobia, I found that part especially traumatizing.) But Candyman’s backstory as a Reconstruction-era painter who was lynched because he was romantically involved with a white girl gives the film a layer of meaning rare in the horror genre of the time. It also makes it a perfect property to revisit among our current moment of thoughtful horror. 

Written and produced by Jordan Peele and directed by Nia DaCosta, this Candyman is a direct sequel to the 1992 film. Now, instead of a crumbling public housing project, Anthony lives in a swanky high-rise with his art dealer girlfriend Brianna (Teyonah Parris). She believes in him, but he’s having a hard time breaking into the art world, until he uncovers the legend of the Candyman. Soon, inspiration becomes obsession. His first installation based on the Candyman mythos, where he hangs a mirror in Brianna’s gallery and dares people to defy the urban myth, ends predictably badly. But that only stokes Anthony’s smoldering psychosis. As the gruesome murders pile up, the press and the art world’s interest in the artist’s work grows. His deep dive into the bloody history of Cabrini-Green uncovers his own connection to the original Candyman. 

Director Nia DaCosta includes shadow puppets in her bag of tricks.

What’s great about Candyman is DaCosta’s direction. Depicting a spectral villain who appears only in mirrors gives her plenty of opportunity for creative shots and staging. For flashbacks, she uses some beautiful shadow puppet work that brought to mind Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed. When Anthony, visiting the University of Chicago to find the files of the first film’s protagonist Helen Lyle, steps into the mirrored interior of an elevator, you clench the armrest, just knowing some crazy stuff is about to go down. 

Teyonah Parris as Brianna, the art dealer about to come face to face with Candyman.

DaCosta has a pair of dynamite leads. Abdul-Mateen is, as always, magnetic on screen. Like the best actors from the glory days of ’80s horror, he shares the audience’s disbelief at the weirdness taking over his life. Parris carves out her own character as neither stupid victim or savvy final girl, but an educated woman whose rationality won’t let her believe the supernatural menace she is facing until it is almost too late. 

The weakest part of Candyman is the script, which is frankly kind of a mess. Maybe it’s because Peele and his Twilight Zone collaborator Win Rosenfeld are too dedicated to connecting this film to the first one. It’s episodic, prone to going down rabbit holes (or, to remain thematic, listening to the voice of the beehive) when it needs to be cultivating narrative drive. The critique of artist-led gentrification is solid, if a little too self-hating. The real villains of the story, the forces of capital who are bankrolling this forced social change for their own enrichment, are completely absent. There are some great individual scenes, but when the climax tries to weave all the half-wound threads together, it kind of falls apart. The writers should have taken the advice they writes for one art critic in the film: “You can really make the story your own, but some of the specifics should stay consistent.” 

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Film Features Film/TV

Chi-Raq

There’s so much to say about Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, I don’t know where to begin.

One of the film’s themes is the nature of power. Since its inception, the film industry has been characterized by a struggle for power between directors, producers, stars, and writers. As seen in Trumbo, the first to lose the battle were the writers, so they decamped to television. The power of the old-line Hollywood studios declined in the late 1960s, so the 1970s saw the ascendance of the director and, as a result, a second golden age of American film. In 1980, the directors’ power was broken on the rocks of Heaven’s Gate, and by the end of the decade, movie stars like Arnold Schwarzenneger and Tom Cruise were in charge, commanding high salaries and exerting creative control. The indie film revolution of the 1990s, which Spike Lee helped kick off, was on some level an attempt to reclaim the directors’ power. Now, in the twilight of the movie stars, power has reverted to the producers, and so resources are tied up in making endless sequels and reboots of proven properties. Enter Amazon, the internet retail powerhouse who is making a big push into video. For their first foray into theatrical film, they tapped Lee and apparently gave him free rein. Lee responded by going absolutely insane.

Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata

2015 finds Lee in a familiar state: energized with righteous rage. The director could have taken a look at widespread reports of police brutality against people of color and the resulting Black Lives Matter movement, pointed at his 1989 masterpiece Do the Right Thing, and said “I told you so!” Instead, he made Chi-Raq, which is like nothing else in theaters today. It’s a satire, a comedy, and a musical. It’s also based on a 2,500-year-old Greek play called Lysistrata, and so it is written mostly in rhyming verse. And yet, Chi-Raq is even weirder than it sounds. The first five minutes or so are essentially a lyric music video for “Pray 4 My City,” with nothing but text and an animated image of a map of the United States made up entirely of guns. When we finally do see someone on screen, it’s the rapper Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) rocking a packed club. Then the action freezes, and we meet Dolmedes, the narrator/chorus played by national treasure Samuel L. Jackson in full Rufus Thomas mode.

I would be content listening to Jackson speak in rhyme for two hours. Fortunately, Lee introduces us to Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata, a powerhouse of confidence and sexual energy. After witnessing the horrors of street violence and having her apartment burned down by a rival gang out to kill her boyfriend Chi-Raq, Lysistrata is inspired by Miss Helen (Angela Bassett) to organize a sex strike, asserting their power by “seizing the means of reproduction.” The gangs will either end their senseless violence or go without booty. The sex strike spreads until, as Dave Chappelle says in a hilarious cameo as a strip-club owner, “Even the hoes is no-shows.”

The sprawling cast includes Wesley Snipes, Jennifer Hudson, and token white guy John Cusack as a priest who shouts himself hoarse at a funeral for a little girl killed in the gang crossfire. Cusack looks more engaged and passionate onscreen than he has in years, but his big scene is also a symptom of what’s wrong with Chi-Raq. In isolation, it’s a powerful scene, as Lee and screenwriter Kevin Willmott indict the whole sociopolitical system that keeps African Americans locked in cycles of poverty and violence. But in the context of the film, it’s a momentum killer. Free to follow his wildest impulses, Lee constructs one killer image after another, but little thought seems to have been given as to how it all fits together, which means Chi-Raq adds up to less than the sum of its impressive parts.

It’s inspiring to see a talent of Lee’s caliber swing for the fences. Chi-Raq may not be perfect, but I can’t stop thinking about it.