School Daze
Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For March, we celebrate the birthday (and the decades-long filmography) of one of America’s most pioneering Black filmmakers, Spike Lee. Read the rest of our coverage here.
It’s been 32 years since the release of Spike Lee’s 1988 hit School Daze, a film that tackles the tough conversations and experiences of young educated black people through music, dance, and situational confrontation. It’s Lee’s third film, one where he’s still finding his footing, and yet he already has his finger on many of the issues that affected young black audiences at the time, and still do today.
Set in the fictional historically-black Mission College, viewers are first introduced to young black activist Dap (Larry Fishburne) when his boycott of apartheid in South Africa is interrupted by Greek life (and social order) leader Julian (Giancarlo Esposito) and his pledges. Throughout the film, the pair butt heads in more ways than one, but the confrontation at its core is who really brings power to black people. Continue Reading →
Ricki and the Flash
Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here.
2015’s Ricki and the Flash doesn’t know what’s about to happen. It doesn’t know it would silence the successful string of Singing Streep films. It doesn’t know it’s Jonathan Demme’s final film. And it doesn’t fully realize the changing conservative political tide that was about to crest over America the following year.
Ricki and the Flash is a rock ‘n roll fable about Ricki, a prodigal mother (Meryl Streep) who returns to bourgeois Indiana from her life as a working-class musician to help estranged daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer) through her divorce and suicide attempt. Her return reignites hostilities with ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) and sons Josh and Adam (Sebastian Stan and Nick Westrate). But with a little classic rock, the atypical family learns to accept one another. Sorta. Continue Reading →
Caligula
The most expensive porn film of all time turns 40 this year & remains a body fluid splattered tribute to hubris & incompetence.
Pull up a holochair and let me tell you about the days long ago, the 1970s, when if you wanted to see images of naked bodies (let alone naked bodies rubbing up against each other), you had to leave the privacy of your home and buy them, either in a magazine, or at a movie theater. Despite the risk of embarrassing encounters with neighbors or co-workers, porn was a booming business back then, and nobody was raking in more money on it than Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, and Bob Guccione. Hef cornered the market in presenting pornography as a tasteful pastime for distinguished gentlemen, something Flynt didn’t bother trying, and Guccione continuously fell short on. Guccione did triumph over Hef in one way, however, by producing the most expensive pornographic film ever made. Regrettably, that movie was Caligula.
Guccione wanted to produce a movie that could be shown in more than just dark, foul-smelling theaters with sticky floors, and luckily, he happened to run into writer Gore Vidal. Vidal wanted to make a serious historical drama about Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, nicknamed Caligula, one of the best known yet least interesting of the Caesars. I say this because Caligula was known for only one thing, and that was being a horrible person who did horrible things. It may not necessarily be accurate, but it’s what history has proclaimed, and it’s not like anyone’s going to suddenly pop up and provide irrefutable evidence that he was kind to animals and helped old ladies cross the street. Caligula lacks the “even Hitler loved his mom” duality of nature that makes villains fascinating. He seemed to emerge from the womb a murderous degenerate, and is boring as a character in the same way that people who are constantly happy and carefree are boring.
“Degenerate” was all Bob Guccione had to hear before putting up the bulk of the cost to film Caligula, however, and his money paid for Italian shooting locations, costumes (for those characters who wore clothing) and set design, and even appearances from elder statesmen of cinema Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud. Rather than focus on Vidal’s original story of absolute power corrupting absolutely, Guccione wanted to focus more on what Caligula did in his off-time from being emperor of Rome, namely raping, killing, torturing and, most especially, engaging in (or watching) kinky, debauched sex. It’s easy to see how Caligula became such a bloated, appalling mess -- in short, it could be blamed on the clash of egos between the notoriously cantankerous Vidal, who apparently didn’t realize that whoever provides the most cash for a movie has the most say over how it turns out, director Tinto Brass, who had his own, allegedly even more incomprehensible vision for the film, and Guccione, who just wanted to be taken seriously as an auteur, preferably while still being able to get away with money shots. Continue Reading →
Stop Making Sense
Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here.
The greatest concert film of all time begins with Talking Heads’ lead singer, David Byrne, sauntering onto an empty stage and putting down a boombox before mumbling, “Hi. I got a tape I want to play you.” It may be the most chill line to ever start a movie, but for Byrne, it’s his way of letting us know we’re about to go on an epic journey. It also lays the foundation for one of the most staggering on-screen performances of the 1980s. Stop Making Sense was filmed and edited together from four different concerts at Hollywood's Pantages Theater in December 1983, but, unless you study it closely, it just looks like one glorious night.
Byrne was in his early 30s, and his bandmates were already legends of the NYC art-rock scene following a string of Brian Eno-produced albums. The Stop Making Sense tour was a victory lap after achieving commercial success with their two-time platinum 1983 album, Speaking In Tongues. They were only seven years away from disbanding, but this was their moment. Continue Reading →