O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Regarded as a welcome return to form by critics, O Brother, Where Art Thou? melds the dark vision of the Coen Brothers with the grotesque imagery of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Joel Coen directed, Ethan Coen produced, and both wrote the script, which is the most audacious rewrite of chain gang films since I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (1932).

Loosely structured by Homer's Odyssey, the adventure-satire chronicles what happens when Everett Ulysses McGill (George Clooney) and his two companions, Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Delmar O'Donnel (Tim Blake Nelson), are sprung from a chain gang in 1930s Mississipi. As the fugitives try to reach Everett's home to recover the buried loot from a bank robbery, they gatecrash a revivalist baptism, meet a Cyclops and a blind prophet, evade a homicidal southern Bible salesman named Big Dan Teague (John Goodman) and encounter bank-robber George "Babyface" Nelson (Michael Badalucco), who is very annoyed by his nickname.

The silver-tongued conman McGill resembles Clark Gable, and the Coen Brothers layer the fatalistic universe with menacing imagery and kitsch references. The film has surprises (Holly Hunter turns up as McGill's ex-wife) and tour de force sequences (notably a KKK confrontation sequence shot as a Busby Berkely musical number). The soundtrack, featuring hillbilly songs, black spirituals and old-style country numbers, is richly evocative.

What also gave O Brother, Where Art Thou? some resonance was the trio's journey into the underside of gubernatorial politics. Facing re-election, the corrupt Governor Pappy O'Daniel (Charles Durning) is a reminder of how the West was lost long before "chads" entered America's political vocabulary.

Bamboozled

2000 was the year that Spike Lee harnessed the liberating power of Digital Video.

Film critics lavished praise on The Original Kings of Comedy whereas Bamboozled was subject to a media blackout by comparison (bad pun not intended). Another dark conspiracy? Lee's satirical attack on the television industry was an uncompromising reminder that racism still sells in the post-millennial entertainment economy. For many viewers, Lee's vision of a revitalized minstrel show, starring black actors with even blacker make-up, was too confronting or "difficult."

When Michael Franti (Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Spearhead) rapped about "Myth of the Happy Hobo/COINTELPRO/The Cosby Show," he reminded listeners that the "Black Intellectual" has been complicit in supporting the very corporate-media stereotypes that oppress non-Eurocentric cultures. Spike Lee picked up this "Financial Leprosy" firebrand with Bamboozled.

It's a pity that "auteur" is now just a marketing label, and that many cinephiles will consequently miss Lee's important mess-age.

Gimme Shelter

"Altamont was the product of diabolical egotism, hype, ineptitude, money manipulation, and, at base, a fundamental lack of concern for humanity," Rolling Stone Magazine stated in January 1970.

Gimme Shelter (directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin) captured the fiasco at Altamont Speedway when the Rolling Stones staged a "free" concert at last minute for 300,000 fans. Hired as security for $500 worth of beer, the Hell's Angels beat Meredith Hunter, an eighteen year-old black man, to death, whilst Mick Jagger strutted the stage, invoking his most prideful Self.

Many critics gushed over Richard Lester's enjoyable Beatles documentary A Hard Day's Night (1964), which also enjoyed a cinema re-release. I prefer Gimme Shelter, which has more to offer than just the famous clip of the Stones in a film editing suite, glancing numbingly at footage of Hunter's murder.

If you want to blame the Altamont concert for ending the ephemeral promise of Woodstock Nation, then pay closer attention to the vignettes. Sporadic violence, as when Jefferson Airplane's Marty Balin is knocked unconscious whilst attempting to help a concertgoer being beaten by pool-cues, hints at what is to come. The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir offer a prescient warning about the "vibe" when the band arrives by helicopter, and have second thoughts about performing. Dialogue between attorney Melvin Belli, concert organizer Michael Lang and Altamont Speedway owner Dick Carter proves that pragmatic moneymaking had, already by late 1969, replaced any pretense of communal spirit.

In the liner notes to his In The Flesh (Columbia, 2000) live album, Roger Waters offered some comments about what happens when performers lose connection with their audiences. "These arenas are perfect for sports, political rallies, and Billy Graham-style revival meetings . . . I mean, they suit God and football, but I don't think their scale is appropriate for rock'n roll which has always worked at its best in circumstances which allow for a much greater degree of intimacy, and contact, between the performers and their audiences."

A Hard Day's Night may have created the long-form music video, but it was Gimme Shelter that revealed how corrupt and short-term focused the music industry (and, by extension, the dot.com industry?) could be. It was Gimme Shelter that gave credence to evangelical Christians like Jeff Godwin, Jacob Aranza and Bob Larson, who believed that heavy metal rock concert promoters had hired Black Magicians to summon demons during live performances. It was Gimme Shelter that rehearsed the Lucifer Principle prerogative of groups unleashing "mindless oblivion." And it was Gimme Shelter, in the year of Survivor and Big Brother that reminded us of how voyeurism can become self-destructive. Can't it?

The Virgin Suicides

Depending on which cinema studies course you took, Francis Ford Coppola was either mythologized or reviled as the architect of the "Brat Pack", the 1970s cabal that shaped post-classical Hollywood. When he cast his daughter, Sofia Coppola, in The Godfather, Part III (1990), critics savaged her performance. Oh, where is that chorus of disapproval now?

Based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides is Sofia Coppola's directorial debut. Cinematographer Ed Lachman injects a lyrical feel into the journey of the teenage lovers, Lux Lisborne (Kirsten Dunst) and Josh Hartnett (Trip Fontaine), dwelling on how pop culture trash imprints our fragile memories (promising "secular salvation"), and how rites of passage (the prom) reconfigures them. Fontaine's glance through the rear-view mirror (he is played in 1997 by Michael Pare) hints at how nostalgia can transmute the most painful personal losses into black comedy.