chaos-rampant

This was a smash apparently. The first thing to note is that it's part of a newer crop of black films that examine black experience in different guises and contexts, venturing in search outside the narrow scope of 'hood' or inner city like older counterparts did.

There are two films here. One is about African American life, the fabric used is 1930s Mississippi, so the heartland of historic oppression. For the flmmaker this becomes an opportunity to explore various emblematic images; the cotton field, sharecropping in the wooden shed, blues music. There's the contrast, deliberate of course, between 'uppity' Chicago blacks and their more meek relatives down home.

Familiar tropes, but they are also presented with a whiff of stultifying Tarantino-ism; being content with stylized stereotype. The cocksure brothers from Chicago are shown in a Superfly light reminiscent of black movies from the 70s (incidentally bootleggers rather than drug dealers), the first crop to lionize stereotype as a way of reclaiming narrative agency in the world of oppression.

But this all here for us to also acquire weight and gravitas for the ensuing horror film, real world grounding.

The other film is the horror one where black experience of community summons white vampires from the night.

It's actually a bit different than that; the white vampires are shown as Irish, rather than local Southerners, the Irish at one time being maybe just a rung up from black people in the ladder of racism and mistreatment. They're also portrayed as representing a kind of assimilatory hive mind; rather than hatred of black people. Actual Klansmembers will later show up fr that.

The most rousing sequence here involves black people, away from oppressive whites, experiencing a night of orgiastic autonomy in a secluded makeshift honky tonk. Tied to music, the camera pans around the room with future black consciousness (electric blues, hip hop) being summoned for the occassion. And that's followed by an equally ecstatic Irish jig out in the night.

It's more ambitious than the filmmakers were actually able to execute I think, but I'll gladly take the roaming eye that ecstatically hovers between worlds rather than the short-term satisfaction of Tarantino-isms like gunning down hateful Klansmen.

I can somwhat wistfully imagine the black audience entering a kind of mystical communion with their fabric of shared experience.

Luridly titled, in two parts, most likely to offer micro- and macro- views of the subject, this is on illicit, shady financing of the political machine. In the great American narrative tradition we swoop in to investigate.

In the first part we zoom in on a corner of Ohio state politics to find local legislators running a scheme; thwarting a referendum in return for huge bribes from the local energy company. This is incidentally uncovered when FBI wiretaps are set up for another reason.

The second installment is the story of far right-wingers, the Federalist Society, trying to usurp the Supreme Court, a perhaps 30 year scheme that is by now well documented and climaxed with the Merrick Garland fiasco.

This last part surveys a much broader swath, covering the alliance of religious zealots, big business, and corrupt officials, including SC justices. We're shown documents that advertise influence and proximity to judges for right-wing mega donors; a lot of it boggles the mind that it has transpired so, including the bribes paid to judge Thomas.

It boggles the mind that so much effort by a small group of extremists, an immense amount of it in slow, inglorious beginnings attended by handfuls, long before the recent triumphs of the Federalist Society, would yield the fruits it did for a whole country, to no real tangible benefit for people. Other than foisting a belief system and, of course, helping line the pockets of the already rich.

The weasely Ohio scheme makes this even more clear; these people could really use the bribes, the fancy car and renovated kitchen, and thought that maybe this time, as probably a countless times before, no one's watching. What's the harm?

But now put yourself in their shoes and, whether they get away with it or not, imagine the anxiety and sense of a persnickety life entailed with having to scheme like this. They may be well-off eventually (in this case not), but is this a happy life? Is Clarence Thomas, vacationing in a brand new camper truck that he knows was bought by influencer money for him, in anticipation of future favors, happier on it than not?

Outrage at the illicty of it all is one response, but tonight I found myself laughing at the smallness of it.

The Iraq war era, and assorted US presence in the Middle East era, is long gone, so for this to be made so long after, you'd think there must have been a particular set of reasons to make.

The obvious one and emphasized everywhere is the extreme fidelity to actual combat as experienced over the course of a few hours. In a normative mode of portraying war, we'd rush through explosions making heroic dashes across a whole landscape. Here the whole story is soldiers struggling to leave a single house. We do not see the enemy (until the end) but trust they can be anywhere, this is their home.

But there's nothing particularly novel about this and seems rather a mainstay of the Iraq genre. It does seem rather small. Even the Michael Bay film about Libya was an iteration of this, flashier.

What else is there? War is company (in the corporate sense) teamwork, with rote meetings and phonecalls between branches. The effort of logistics and coordination required to crawl though a single neighborhood is immense and really gives a scale of war, both in the small and the large view.

And there's of course, in spite of all this preparation, war as blunder and unforeseen chaos that upends the best laid corporate plans.

BUt how also about this? This war as half-finished, gruelling but largely pointless exercise, in other words this film about it.