Different Slants

Now, here’s a perfect reason for me to wish I had a world-wide readership of hundreds of millions of movie lovers who shared my taste in great films:

Along comes a truly superb new movie, “Honeydrippers”, a new John Sayles film that is playing in probably twelve art theaters, total, across America and it’ll probably disappear beneath the radar without making barely a ripple.  What a travesty!!

To me, power is the ability to do good on a large scale, not just to savor one’s invincibility.

If I had power like that, I’d compel writers all across America to command movie theater-goers to rush down to their local movie houses, buy lots of tickets and to support Sayles’ wonderful new movie.  Or maybe people would go just because I told them to, because they trusted my taste and judgment.  I’m pretty sure I’m not there yet, in terms of my powers of persuasion.  But…that could change.  Persistence helps, and this is my column # 5.

I met Sayles once, years ago, at the Javits Center in New York City where they held the National Stationary Show every May.  I had a bookstore at the time and we sold tons of postcards and movie posters and other items you could only find at a giant showplace like the Javits Center.  I was addicted to independent cinema since I was a teen, so even though indie movie director/writer/producer John Sayles was not a face you’d ever see on the cover of any magazine, like say, Alfred Hitchcock was, years ago, or Martin Scorsese might be today,  I knew immediately who he was. 

He was there to promote a movie, maybe to give away posters…something like that.  It was an international marketplace.  A good place to be seen, if you wanted to rent some expensive booth space to help spread word about your new product, or movie. 

I didn’t ask for an autograph or anything like that.  I just walked up to him– I remember he was very tall– asked him if he was who I thought he was, shook his hand and told Sayles I admired his movies.  He smile was very gracious and I think very pleased to be recognized not all that long ago, when he was barely known anywhere in America.

Honeydrippers is an intimate story about a couple of music places next to each other supported by the poor Black community just outside of a small, mostly white town, in Alabama, 1950.  One is an old “juke joint”, a dilapidated wooden shack that featured old Black singers or musicians, sold beer or hard liquor and people would come there to dance close.  Very close.

The other was a more up-to-date place, where there was a hot new “juke box” which played much more modern tunes and attracted a bigger crowd of younger people.  The fact that the local, white and sinfully corrupt sheriff was a silent partner in the newer place didn’t hurt their opportunities for bypassing building inspection rules and in general being insulated from any difficulties…..as long as the mean old sheriff got his cut.

I looked up the word “juke”.  The Oxford College Dictionary suggests that it was derived from a West African language called Wolof.  Their word, ‘dzug’ meant: to misbehave 

The movie closely examines a wide range of overlapping relationships, failed ambitions, old regrets, bright shiny new hopes, lust, grudges, schemes, fears, gumption, and surprising developments. 

That it spends over 90% of its running time exploring the long-time inhabitants of a small Southern town, is one of its fascinations for me.  The movie has an easy rhythm to it, a relaxed pacing that is very pleasing, and picture postcard vistas that are worth the price of admission by themselves alone. 

The actors, mostly unrecognized by me, are so real, so authentically portraying their characters from that time, almost 60 years ago, including the routine humiliating deferential behavior that Blacks were expected to display when in the presence of a white person.  Especially an employer or local cop.  Prison and pain were just one step away, if some Black man dared to speak up for himself out of an irrational need for self-respect in those repulsive days gone by.  Self-respect could get a man killed.

Go see the movie.  The music is wonderful.  The many talented actors the movie portrays acting, singing, dancing and capturing a certain culture…from a certain place…at a certain time, so completely, is a wonder to experience.  Yes, there are a couple of famous faces, but they are not more than part of the fabric of the story.  The talent pool in the Black community is immense, and invisible to me, on screen.  

That should change. 

It will change is enough people go to carefully and lovingly crafted movies like Honeydrippers or The Great Debaters, which I wrote about in column # 3 recently, or another gem called Eve’s Bayou from some years back, in 1997, set in the Louisiana Swamp/Creole country.  I bet it’s on video now, if you want to see something you’ll remember. 

Money talks.  It screams, yells, sings and dances in Hollywood, too.  If the combined mostly Black talent in these small movies make enlightened people urge their friends to go out and see the movies, those actors will get a chance to appear in other, maybe larger-budgeted movies, to all of our benefit.

So, even though I’m not an internationally-known ‘all powerful’ movie critic, just listen to me anyway.  I know what good is, and the movies I’ve described above are so good, it’d be a crime to let them wither and die at the box office.  

John Sayles needs you. 

Now.

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