Jackie Brown and the Blaxploitation Revival

Remembering Pam Grier, again! 

Pam Grier, this legendary name brings an image to mind instantly. Jive-talkin' dope pushers, cat-fighting go-go dancers and, of course, a kickass afro woman who can hide anything from razor blades to a small handgun. And she's been thrust back (periodically) into the mainstream with a vengeance. Her last big comeback vehicle was the 1997 blaxploitation themed crime thriller - Jackie Brown where she plays a struggling midddle-aged flight attendant caught up in a dirty money crime tangle. Jackie Brown incidentally was the third full-length feature film from Quentin Tarantino, Hollywood's favorite former video store clerk. 

Amidst a growing anti-Tarantino backlash, the director hoped to quiet critics with Jackie Brown, his adaptation of Elmore Leonard's 1992 novel, Rum Punch. The unlikely star of Jackie Brown was the then-48-year-old Grier, best known for Coffy (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), Sheba, Baby (1975) and a host of other AIP classics. The question was whether Tarantino's latest disco-era muse will be able to capitalize on the same magic touch that introduced Harvey Keitel (Reservoir Dogs, 1992) to a new generation of film buffs and made John Travolta  (Pulp Fiction, 1994) filmdom's $20 million man. Fortunately, Jackie Brown lived up to the expectations grossing $74.7 million, against a budget of $12 million and earning Pam Grier several awards and nominations including a Best Actress at the Golden Globe. Her co-stars Robert Forster and Samuel L Jackson also benefited with Forster getting an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor and Jackson winning a Silver Bear Best Actor award at the 1998 Berlin International Film Festival where the movie was also nominated for the Best Film Golden Bear.

Not every '70s comeback case is as lucky. Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan saw his US career finally take off with Rumble in the Bronx (1995), but subsequent films, merely re-releases of older Hong Kong films, didn't catch fire at the box office. It was only when he started making US features, like the 1998 action comedy Rush Hour with Chris Tucker, that he was able to maintain his buzz in this country. 

The difference between them may be this. The genre of film that Grier is best known for is (still) undergoing something of a revival. From the resurrected career of Rudy Ray "Dolomite" Moore to the remake of Shaft (1971), Blaxploitation icons are everywhere. Why have these films, and the people behind them, become such critical darlings? 

What many in the mainstream press are finally picking up on has been known to film scholars and students for at least the last decade. These films are among the most important and best documented examples of ethnographic filmmaking available. They were, for the most part, produced by black filmmakers, with black casts and crews, for a black audience, much like early "race" films of the teens and twenties that have become required viewing in film history classes. 

As such, they present a view of 1970s America from a black, urban perspective, something missing from even the best intentioned, Norman Jewison directed mystery drama  In the Heat of the Night (1967) or Stanley Kramer's comedy drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) - both starring Sidney Poitier or other racially tinged, socially conscious films of the previous decade. 

It was almost a comically distorted view to be sure, a world of pimps in velvet suits and kung-fu fighting call girls, but it addressed issues like social and economic injustice from both within and without the community. "The Man," specifically the crooked white cop or politician, was the least of the problems facing those inhabiting the world of Blaxploitation features. More often than not, much as it might hurt some egos, "whitey" was only a passing presence in the hood, a cop on the take or a mafia figure out for a cut of the action, not a central part of urban inner-city life. 

Ironically, most of the major blaxploitation films people remember today were second generation films with a Hollywood pedigree. Films like Shaft and even Pam Grier's biggest hits were signaling the death of the independent black cinema of the '70s through assimilation. With Jackie Brown, and later, the new Shaft (2000), or Robert Downey Jr's risky role in Tropic Thunder (2008), filmmakers have been hopping on the same bandwagon, some would say honoring, others would say harvesting, the morally ambiguous feel and flavor of this genre. The most notable examples have been Pootie Tang (2001), the very funny Undercover Brother (2002) starring Eddie Griffin and Black Dynamite (2009) starring Michael Jai White besides the more recent Taraji P Henson and Danny Glover starrer Proud Mary (2018) and Superfly (2018)

With a big budget and even bigger stars, it may be, as fellow pop culture connoisseur (and, some would say, washed-up hack) Bono would say, "even better than the real thing". Long live the Blaxploitation revival! 

P.S. Remember to checkout Brown Sugar, a reliable Netflix-style VOD streaming service that claims to offer the “biggest collection of the baddest movies” in the Blaxploitation genre on the internet. Pam Grier, now 69 is coincidentally the Ambassador of the Brown Sugar Network! 

This post originally appeared in the Axiom magazine. It's been updated and revised to make it more relevant to current audiences.

The Love Captive (1969)

Bewildering soft-core weirdness from the 60s

"This painting is a bit obscure in meaning; it was painted by a madman a week before he died." so say Sybil, the fugitive on the run.. A conscious evocation of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, The Love Captive, is a 60s pioneering stream-of-consciousness sexual horror narrative in which a painting figures prominently as a metonymic representation of the text's overarching structure. This insightful comparison (if I do say so myself) only collapses once you realize that Virginia Woolf was one of the great writers of the twentieth century, whereas the makers of The Love Captive were probably drugged-out, illiterate maniacs. 

A blonde woman steps out of a subway stop and strolls down Greenwich Village while a narrator monitors her, making sure not to help us at all by confining his observations to the visually obvious -- "she's evidently a stranger to these parts," he informs us. "With a [hand]bag like that, she could be a model, or an actress." Yeah. Thanks. 

The woman, Jane, checks into a hotel and as the desk clerk moves his lips to the accompaniment of silence, we realize that the film has no synchronous soundtrack. Instead, director Larry Crane has tried to dub the film in post-production, and poorly -- spoken lines often follow lip movements by several seconds, or emerge magically from closed mouths. 

Jane takes a guided tour of a museum of the macabre next to the hotel, and gets locked in. She appears to have done this intentionally. A vampire rises out of something, a hunchback shambles around for a while, and another vampire (indicated by the presence of makeshift fangs) is remarkably sanguine while a slobbery werewolf kind-of drools on her. Piercing screams surge from the soundtrack, but the vampire actually seems to be suppressing laughter. She and two other gals bob up and down with the werewolf for about five minutes and forty-five seconds while bongos play. Maybe they're supposed to be phantasms who haunt the museum, but it's hard to say for sure. Jane watches patiently, with no appreciable reaction. 

Back at the hotel (the next day, the previous night, ten years later?), the desk clerk strolls in and casually undresses Jane, and the two make out while the narrator expresses his disapproval. Meanwhile Gail, another tenant, straps on a dildo alone in her room. Cops next door are pursuing a fugitive, Sybil, and play a series of tape-recorded accusations ("We know who you are, girly") through speakers pressed against the hotel-room wall. But they don't know which is Sybil's room and press the speaker to Gail's wall by mistake. Gail hears the disembodied voice, freaks out, and flees to Jane's room. Jane and Gail make out. This time, however, the narrator doesn't complain. 

The sinister Sybil, as close to an antagonist as a film without a clear conflict can come, is unperturbed by the accusatory voices. She seduces the owner of the museum, then takes over the establishment after convincing him to go on a long vacation. Her guided tours are more suffused with sex and violence than the museum owner's had been, and she figures out how to make a little money on the side by selling Gail into prostitution. The cops come back and play the tape recording some more, once again using the wrong wall. This puts Jane into a confessional mood and she opens her closet door to reveal that she's been keeping the cowed hotel clerk in shackles as a "love captive." Once more the narrator disapproves. Where would we be without his moral guidance, I wonder? Trying to summarize this "movie" is like trying to tell somebody about a dream you've had. Its narrative is largely incoherent, and the only way to understand it at all is as the cinematic equivalent of a psycho-sexual rant. Then it starts to adopt a sort of deviant logic: the clumsy voice-overs throughout make the characters' conversations almost indiscernible from internal monologue, as though they were communicating by telepathy. The cops, with their motiveless surveillance and their accusatory tape recorder, embody a sort of hallucinatory paranoid delusion. In no way, though, is the film about these things; it's more accurate to say that the film is affected by them, that it is, on some level, an acting out of hallucinatory and delusional fantasy. 

When Gail straps on the dildo while evaluating her reflection, Freud's primal scene and Lacan's mirror phase simultaneously spring to mind: "Aw, that should do it," she says, "I'd fool my own mother." She really wouldn't, of course - though she has this funny thing stuffed into her underwear she's still every inch a woman. Perhaps in her own mind she appears literally male, and this is Lacan in its essence: our sense of identity is troubled from the outset, presenting us with a self-image immediately distorted by cathexis and psycho-sexual illusion. Strange enough. Naturally Larry Crane manages to make it still stranger, introducing this fascinatingly perverse notion of fooling one's mother by wearing a prosthetic phallus. Fool her in which sense, Mr. Crane: by preventing her from recognizing you, or by using it and making her believe the phallus is the real thing? 

This is one of many scenes that raise the question whether Larry has packed enough sandwiches for his picnic. It's probably relevant that the narrator never ponders the reason behind Gail's autoerotics, instead praising her for how well she's managed to make herself look like a man. I reach for the rewind button here, figuring I must have missed the scene that explained why Gail's doing this in the first place. But it's never explained, just as it's never explained why the two cops broadcast recorded accusations instead of eavesdropping, or why Jane imprisons the hotel clerk. They are simply to be taken on faith, just as the schizophrenic never feels it necessary to clarify the mechanisms by which he has mysteriously become Lyndon Johnson, or reveal who paid to launch the satellite that is now beaming microwaves into his brain. These events exist not to forward a plot or to get at any character's interior life* but to construct disconnected images. In other words, they are fantasies apparently intended to assuage the sting of some psychological pain, since obscured by the passage of time and by the sufferer's lack of insight. 

This person suffering this pain is probably not Gail but the narrator - and probably, by extension, Larry Crane. Among those with severe personality disorders Crane is at least fortunate enough to be able to turn his image formations into feature films, however shoddily crafted. Another of his works - on my "to-see" list, as soon as I recover from this one - is instructively titled All Women Are Bad. Poorly sublimated much? 

And yet for all The Love Captive's unembarrassed weirdness, it is most entertaining and informative (all the time despite itself) when you realize that this is, after all, a soft-core porno movie from the late 60s. This coarse act of genre classification serves to answer some questions, though maybe not others: why does Gail get mostly naked and strap on a dildo? Why does a werewolf appear from out of nowhere and molest a vampire, who also appears from out of nowhere? What's with all that languid bobbing up and down, and who's playing those bongos? 

Well, the most obvious answer is that it's all an excuse to show nude or semi-nude women. And though that interpretation encourages a dismissive response to more interesting interpretations of The Love Captive, it also helps illuminate a notion that's lost in better-made adult films. Whatever else these movies are about, they are also about fantasy, and its oft-forgotten connection with confusion and pain. Remember that the next time you check out some flick such as White Bun-Busters or Gang-Bang Girls . They lie. At least The Love Captive gives it to you straight. M.W

The Israeli Way to Divide and Conquer

Third Class Citizens in their own country!

The Palestinian people may aspire for a single national identity but sadly Israel even controls that!!

Lovelace (2013) - Official Trailer is Here!

The Original Trailer - sponsored by Lionsgate

In 1972 - before the internet, before the porn explosion - Deep Throat (1972) was a notorious social phenomenon: the first scripted pornographic theatrical feature film, featuring a story, some jokes, and an unknown and unlikely star, Linda Lovelace (real name Linda Boreman).

Escaping a strict religious family, Linda discovered freedom and the high-life when she fell for and married charismatic hustler Chuck Traynor. As Linda Lovelace she became an international sensation - less centerfold fantasy than a charming girl-next-door with an impressive capacity for fellatio. Fully inhabiting her new identity, Linda became an enthusiastic spokesperson for sexual freedom and uninhibited hedonism of those days. Six years later she presented another, utterly contradictory, narrative to the world - and herself as the survivor of a far darker story. 

Lovelace is that autobiographical dark story directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman based on a script written by Andy Bellin. Starring Amanda Seyfried in the title role of Linda Boreman, it also features a stellar cast including Peter Sarsgaard, Sharon Stone, Adam Brody and Juno Temple in important roles besides significant cameos by James Franco, Eric Roberts, Hank Azaria, Robert Patrick, Chloe Sevigny, Wes Bentley and Chris Noth.

Lovelace originally premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and is releasing worldwide shortly! Here's the original trailer exclusively for all Websnacker Blog readers sponsored by Lionsgate!

Fat is Beautiful!

Fat Acceptance or Fat Liberation ?

When I decided to do fat liberation stuff for a mag it was mainly because there is so little out there for a "fat" person especially a "fat" woman. This is a very small attempt to fill a void that’s in the consciousness of most people, regardless of size, but especially of other fat people.

I see fat people divided from each other because they’re only allowed to accept parts of themselves, rather than the whole. Hell, they’re not even allowed most of the time to identify as “fat” unless they’re apologizing for it. Think about it, when was the last time you heard someone say “I’m fat” without it being followed by a tirade on how awful they thought their body was, how they were going to go on a diet to ‘fix’ that, or how it was an excuse for that laziness or gluttony that all fat people are supposed to be part of.

When was the last time you heard “fat” said, where it was devoid of a negative judgment, let alone a positive thing? I’d wager a guess that it’s been a while. You can’t even say “I’m fat” in a matter-of-fact sense, without people jumping in to defend you against your own description - “You’re not fat, you’re chubby/ pleasingly plump/ fluffy/etc.” the word fat has such deeply ingrained negative connotations that you can’t even describe your body without someone interpreting it as an insult. I find that insulting. That people buy into this belief that fat is the worst thing you could possibly be, and therefore, fat people can’t even acknowledge their size.

We can bring up anything about ourselves except our bodies... those we’re only allowed to talk about if we’re being self-deprecating. And it’s not like it’s something that no one notices even if you keep your mouth shut about it, it’s still there -- everyone still knows -- but it’s such a dirty word that fat people aren’t allowed to talk honestly about their bodies. That’s wrong.

It sucks to be so alienated from one’s own body, and to be divided from one’s physical self. I don’t ever want to hear a fat person apologize for not living up to “perfection.” And you don't have to put up with that shit anymore! I defy a single person on earth to tell me who has a ‘perfect body’ and what makes that body better than yours, or better than the fat girl who thinks the most surefire way to change her life for the better is to lose weight.

Biologically, thinness is certainly not considered anywhere near the perfect body. For bodies to function at peak performance, they have to have -- by today’s standards -- relatively high levels of body fat. And for most of the earth’s history, voluptuous and fat women were sought after as examples of great beauty and prosperity. If a woman was well-fed, it meant she was healthy and did well for herself. Fat was (is) beautiful! Where did we lose that?

Dværgen - The Sinful Dwarf (1973)

Jake Speed revisit's the demented sexploitation English flick from 70s Denmark!

"What was the terrifying secret of the attic?" The Sinful Dwarf's tagline asks in a panic. Oddly, the secret of the attic isn't a secret at all: an ex-nightclub singer and a not-very-charismatic midget who's fond of toys own a London boarding house that's actually a front for a sort of bordello in the attic. Only the women aren't prostitutes; they're captives. On of them receives a steady supply of heroin but the other three are kept from escaping only by a curious sort of languid docility -Zorben the Dwarf is a far-from-fastidious jailer and yet not once is a break made for the attic door he frequently leaves open and unattended.  

A pair of likable newlyweds comes to stay at the boarding house while the husband, an aspiring writer, looks for a job. The wife claims to hear noises from the attic and comments about the parade of people marching in and out of it all day, but the husband dismisses her concerns as childish. When he's called out of town for an interview she goes to the attic to find out what's going on - foolish girl - and is promptly taken captive. 

The nightclub singer and her impish sidekick forge a "Dear John" letter for the husband and when he returns they tell him his wife left him. Eventually, though, the husband learns about Zorben and the singer's drug connection and he puts two and two together. A quick call to the cops lowers the boom on the villainous duo. Husband and wife reunite, through the latter - having had to turn an unconsensual trick during her stay in the attic - is substantially worse for wear. Isn't it funny how the really screwed up movies all have happy endings? 

It's a shame this movie's so screwed up because otherwise, it's not that bad. The title sequence kicks ass, the newlywed couple is genuinely sympathetic, the nightclub singer and the sinful dwarf inspire loathing in a manner appropriate for horror movie antagonists. The director must have just gotten through a unit on match-cuts in his intro-to-film class, because The Sinful Dwarf sports a lot of them, and some of them are pretty clever. When the husband overhears the dwarf harassing his dealer for more goodies, for instance, the husband looks at a toy police car and there's a cut to a radio-car beacon barreling down the road - a match used to externalize the husband's line of thought. All right, so it ain't the shot through the Copa Cabana's skylight, but it does reflect a formal vocabulary much broader than is generally the case with 60s and 70s nudie movies.*

There are also some passable cross-cuts between the nightclub singer's act (she performs pathetically for a drunken, solitary friend to bring back the good ole days) and the screams of one of the attic-dwellers, and the theme of the dwarf's toys is played pretty well throughout. 

This would make for a good movie (tolerably interesting, anyway) if it weren't for the attic sequences themselves, which, through phony as hell, are incredibly unpleasant to watch. Part of the reason these sequences are so unnerving is that most of the sex scenes are set in the attic (it is a nudie, aftter all) so that the lingering camera gives the impression that rape, torture, drug addiction and captivity are supposed to be sexually exciting. Not that they aren't to some, but if the movie meant to imply this, it might as well have made the dwarf the good guy. On the other hand, if The Sinful Dwarf is so disturbing and irredeemable, I wonder why I can't seem to stop talking about it...

*More in keeping with the genre is the movie's handling of the wife's decision to call the police earlier on -- done by having her say out loud, to herself, "I've got to call the police; I've got to call them right now." Talk about applying the hint with a sledgehammer. 

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