blog Simbarashe.

My eyes are becoming bloodshot. I’m developing chair fatigue. It’s like sitting in an airplane and flying coach from Los Angeles to Africa; there’s a point, maybe a quarter-way into the flight where you just can’t sit still anymore, where your legs needs circulation and you lower back needs more support. This can also happen while sitting in a car or bus for long distance road trips. For me it’s happening because of the Tribeca Film Festival. I’ve seen a ton of movies these past couple of weeks.

Now that the embargoes are over, I can actually start telling you about some of the films I’ve seen, my recommendations and the ones that have thus far left the biggest lasting impressions, and first up are two World Narrative Competition works that share remarkable similarities despite being so vastly different.

The first film that I screened for this year’s festival was Dog Pound, a story of three juvenile delinquents (unrelated) who travel very different paths to end up in a Montana juvenile detention facility at the same time. Through circumstances of being “fresh fish”, they’re forced to band together against the forces unknown. I use the term band very loosely—the three boys never become friends, per se. It’s more one of those situations where because they knew each other upon arrival before meeting anyone else, there’s a common rapport that’s lightly treaded and never quite called upon until one of the boys finds himself in serious trouble.

We meet Butch, a perpetually incarcerated individual who’s become notorious amongst the correctional ranks for taking out an officer; Davis, a pretty boy who’s presumed to be a lady killer (socially speaking) who got busted with a bag of drugs; and Angel, a younger Hispanic youth arrested for carjacking and assault. Director Kim Chapiron is subtle in making us understand Angel’s solitude; the boy rarely talks and generally does what he’s told. Instead, he focuses heavily on the stories of Butch and Davis. Butch, as we come to learn is on a potential reprieve: if he can go just a little while longer without getting into more trouble, he won’t be transferred to prison upon becoming an adult. The other boys know who he is, but he turns dormant in hopes of becoming, for lack of a better term, a free “man”. Davis, on the other hand, has all sorts of problems. The bigger boys have singled him out as a mark and continually punk him in a series of incidents that grow steadily more alarming.

All three boys have very specific issues that they must confront while in detention and none of all of the seem doomed—at least this is the impression that struck me after Angel and his immediate CO get into a tussle. Butch tries his damndest not to unleash his Sleeping Lion, but it’s proving to be more difficult by the day. Davis, god knows how, finds himself if the most dire of correctional situations. Dog Pound sort of plays like a cross between HBO’s Oz and Kids; it’s the type of film that’s only worth seeing if you have an appetite for hardcore drama in your bones (ie, if you like The Wire, you’re in; if you like The Bachelor, you’re probably out).

But if Dog Pound is a dark film that will resonate more with the male demographic, allow me to serve up an equally troubling When We Leave for the women. Carefully crafted by Austrian-born Feo Aladag, When We Leave follows the plight of Umay (played by the ridiculously beautiful Sibel Kekilli . . . and before I exit out of this parenthesis please allow me just a moment to say that I cannot, cannot overstate enough how beautiful she is. Go ahead and Google her . . . this article isn’t on a timer or anything). Let’s just say that Umay represents what the entire Western world would like for oppressed women, especially in the Islamic world, to get for themselves: emancipation. For all of you feminists out there, Umay is your girl. The film opens up with a boy who pulls a gun on Umay and her son on the street. We then see this boy running, for his life it seems, and then he’s on a bus peering out the rear window in horror. We’re then taken back to the beginning of when it all started. Living in Turkey, Umay is married with a son, and she lives in a Muslim marriage that at first glance seems like the most subtle form of oppression: she doesn’t love her husband but she can’t leave him. But she does(!) and bounces from her stereotypical husband with son in tow and flees Turkey for safer pastures in Germany, where her family resides. Only problem is, her family are staunchly Muslim themselves and well-rooted in their Berlin community where Umay’s father is highly regarded. We also learn that the boy who pulled the gun on Umay is her youngest brother, whom she has an affectionate attachment to.

When they find out that she has no intentions of going home to her family, their happiness soon turns to worry and frustration (what will your husband think of this? What will our friends think of this?). All it takes is for Umay’s husband to declare that she is a whore for the real fallout to begin. But Umay doesn’t care; she’s a woman on a mission, a mission for all womankind(!), and the new life she leads comes head-on with the old life her family are fighting to preserve. And maybe this is where some readers and moviegoers will be upset with me for saying this, but throughout the film there was this ill feeling that I couldn’t shake about Umay’s character and it’s this: when you’re a mother, and you have a son, at what cost is freedom when it is clearly at the detrimental expense of your child’s happiness?

Throughout Umay’s struggle to break free, her son witnesses her being abused by her husband, her father and her brothers, and even her mother must decide whether or not to turn her back on Umay and her son. He plods through the film like a little tragedy, and though none of her friends ever say it, I’m sure some of them wonder. I can’t imagine how complex of a situation something like this must be for someone in her situation, but honestly, there came a point where I wondered if I should be rooting for Umay anymore. In the end, I was convinced that sometimes, freedom is a selfish want and not necessarily a best choice. And Aladag, for her filmmaking genius, may have wanted it this way.

Both Dog Pound and When We Leave do brilliant jobs of questioning one’s moral compass. If you’re looking to be riveted and nothing more, consider Dog Pound your film. If you want a film that you can talk about and argue about over dinner, When We Leave is perfect. So far it’s been the most devastating film that I’ve screened in my three years covering Tribeca films, and if it makes its way to an IFC channel near you, you’ll definitely want to save the date.

Grades:

Dog Pound: B
When We Leave: A

Back in 2008, I had recently moved to New York wanting to fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a writer. I’d just come from California where I fulfilled a different dream of becoming a musician (or rock star, I’ll leave that up to you to decide) and thought, if I could be writer anywhere, it might as well be here. I got a gig writing columns for Starpulse and after a couple of months, my editor Pete approached me about covering the Tribeca Film Festival. The craziest part? I was a music writer. I’d sort of decided early on that I would write these long-winded musical thesises, partly to exercise my brain of all of this musical data that I had stored up and would be a shame to part the earth without, but also because it’d always been my dream that someday I’d publish a complete anthology on the subject. Writing about music in this way, for me, was so much more liberating than reviewing albums. Critics always work off the same template: start with some piece of irony (read: everything I’ve said up to this point), and then give some opening and lasting impression of the work and throw in some facts about the project itself in the body. The difference between being a movie critic and an album critic have some slight subtle differences, like, with albums a critic will always talk about the artist or band’s previous work as some measuring stick for the newest project, while movie critics—the high brow ones at least—go into their Tarantinolike cinema vaults for brains to compare the latest movie to some other super obscure flick from thirty years ago that nobody under twenty-five has ever heard of before. And somewhere along the line I turned into parts of both but luckily, neither at the same time.
It’s important, I think, to mention this because my first year covering Tribeca felt like a really awesome summer camp that privileged kids get to go to. I got to see a bunch of films that most of you will never, ever see, I got to write about said films with the very conscious understanding that because you may never see those films, I could be bolder, more honest in my writing, and I got to interview some kick-ass filmmakers, producers and actors all at the same time. I came out of my virgin Tribeca experience with a new snobbiness as a writer. The kind of snobbiness that makes a writer fearless. And gets him published.
2010 is a completely different landscape. Everybody knows about the Tribeca Film Festival now. People seem to understand and respect the major difference between it and say, Sundance (the latter includes many independent films that have major Hollywood involvement, like say, Up in the Air; Tribeca, while some major Hollywood are lurking, is straight-up indie through and through, with a great emphasis on foreign films and documentaries). I’ve seen a couple of films during the pre-screening which I’m not allowed to discuss [yet] that will be Oscar contenders in ten months, the sort of films your friends will make you look like an idiot because you haven’t seen and the film has been playing at your little indie house for the past three weeks. For you, this will probably mean September or October of this year. But I feel as though I understand now what it truly means to have an Independent film festival, to get to witness and experience the sort of true filmmaking that can’t be made on the lot of Paramount Studios in Los Angeles. And guess what? The festival starts today.
For the next two weeks, scattered locations throughout Lower Manhattan will be screening hundreds of some of the finest films that Hollywood—at least until now—didn’t get to take part in. And it’s nothing but good times. I could spend a weekend watching Kick Ass and the American version of Death at a Funeral or whatever else you got in mind. Or I can say, hey, Metropia, that sounds like the title of a film I’d go see! And so I probably will. And for the first time ever, so can you! At http://www.tribecafilm.com you can sign up to watch movies on demand. And maybe I’ll just find a whole new way of telling you about the films you should—and really should—see. Maybe this is the year we can all be snobs together.

I turn thirty in ten days. Which means that I was two years old when Off the Wall was released. And everybody talks about Thriller. Over the years, I’ve been on record to argue that while it was the greatest album of his career, arguably of all time, I always proposed that as a record, Bad was better. I’ve been yelled at by fellow musicians, called crazy by fellow black people, but I was just being honest. It was in Michael’s passing, however, that I was able to reflect on Thriller in a way that perhaps I never have before.

I was three years old when Thriller was released. I remember my mother bringing home the vinyl, I remember opening it up, seeing Michael in his white suit sprawled out… But what got me above all else was the tiger he was cuddling. Michael Jackson has a pet Tiger! I thought. And the first Michael Jackson song I remember listening to, now in my adult age, was “You Wanna Be Starting Something”. And like every other kid around the world who stood in front of their parent’s record players, I wanted to dance. His was probably the first music that I danced to. But Michael wasn’t the greatest entertainer who ever lived, not yet. The moonwalk wasn’t invented. At least not quite yet. So the dance moves I knew were still from Off the Wall, from “Rock with You”.

I remember my mother and her roommate sprawling all of their Jackson 5 records across the floor, my mother showing me which Jackson was hers, and which Jackson was her roommates. Her sister Greta had claimed Michael, God rest her soul. And before my exodus from being a tot, I remember the competition that had heated up. Madonna had “Like a Virgin”. Culture Club had “Karma Chameleon”. Prince had “1999”. But Michael Jackson had “Thriller”. And I was too young back then to know what “the greatest ______ of all time” meant. But I knew that that video was special. It wasn’t a video, a short film, however it is that you see it in 2009. In 1983 it was an event. You couldn’t find one person disrespecting that album. That was insane. Unthinkable.

Upon his passing, the arguments began. Was he the most famous person on the planet? Sure he was as big as Elvis ever was, as big as The Beatles ever were… But he was bigger than everybody else. Everybody else. If Madonna died tomorrow, they’re probably not going to have 1.5 million people putting in for lottery tickets to attend a sold-out memorial at Staples Center. There are so many kids now who were born after Thriller and Bad, who are very easy to say how great Michael Jackson was. And there are many people now in their 30s and 40s who casually say now upon his death that he was great.

But Michael Jackson was great. He was Princess Diana great. If the Beatles invented Beatlemania, then Michael Jackson globalized it. His image was Jesus-like; he reduced people to their knees, to tears. To spiritual awakenings. There aren’t many stadium anthems bigger than “Man in the Mirror”. Sure you have “Stairway to Heaven” and “Hey Jude” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)”… But those songs don’t make you cry when they’re performed live. They don’t tear out your heart and leave it splattered on the floor, hopeless and desperate for the angels to descend down and save it.

Michael Jackson was so big, that nobody ever cared that he lip-synched over half of his performances post-Bad. Nobody every cared that his messages seemed to be more choir-church oriented and save the world than anything else. When other artists go down this road they’re mocked and taken for granted. Which may explain why so many have started charities. It’s so much easier to talk about a cause than it is to get up on a stage and throw your entire body and soul into it.

He was so big that he couldn’t just appear on television and perform or give an interview. It had to be an event. Kissing Lisa Marie at the MTV Video Music Awards might have saved a floundering franchise. Performing at the Super Bowl saved the NFL’s halftime draw. He was so big that all of his self promo videos were shots of millions of fans around the world losing their minds. Self-indulgent? Sure, but who else had the resources to pull that off. And he was so big that he didn’t just move into a house, but an amusement park, where he would live out his life the way he wanted, whether we agreed with it or not. We can go fuck ourselves.

But all of that is just ancillary; Michael Jackson wasn’t so big because of those things. All of that about Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the moonwalker that was the golden age of the black Michael wasn’t just why he was. Michael Jackson has been big since he was ten years old. He grew up when my parents grew up. And they embraced him because he was one of them; young, full of wonder. A minority. When I was an adolescent, all of the famous prodigies flamed out. Greedy parents. Drugs and alcohol. Suicides. But they still had Michael. And he was a teenager when they were teenagers. And he had bad skin when they had bad skin. And his music matured as their musical tastes grew.

And so instead of having my own Michael Jackson to grow up with, I got Usher, and I got Justin Timberlake and some guy who used to be around called Ginuwine; artists who are really just his disciples and nothing more. Michael too was a disciple, of James Brown most notably. But he eclipsed James Brown, took his dancing and turned it into something grander. Stevie Wonder put on brilliant shows. Michael Jackson stopped shows. Prince brought the house down. But nobody could build a house like Jackson’s. Timberlake and Usher will never be able to eclipse what he did. Kanye West is way out of his league. But I digress. There will never be another Madonna or Prince, and there will probably never be another Bono. There certainly will never be another Paul McCartney. But those stratospheres I fear would be infinitely closer to catch than the territory that Michael has carved out among the cosmos. Because he became a God amongst men. And for me, for many of us, he will forever be remembered as a legend. For my mother, and many her age, he will forever be remembered as that little boy with the afro from Gary, Indiana. Maybe he wasn’t her favourite Jackson, but he is more hers than he is mine. And I suppose he is more mine than he is some of yours.

Tony Kornheiser said of Michael Jackson’s passing, “In my lifetime there were three great icons… Frank Sinatra, there’s Elvis Presley, and there’s Michael Jackson.”

Since Michael Jackson’s untimely passing this week, there have been a slew of TV and radio personalities lamenting on the loss of this generation’s greatest entertainers, and it seems as though most voices with the power of offering opinion/editorial don’t want to count Jackson’s post-Bad legacy in his greatness. And since so much as been said about his Thriller era (beyond covered), and his days as the wunderkind singer of the Jackson Five, it’s almost a shame how easy it has been for the media to discount the fact that Jackson was great for his entire life, and not just some fifteen year span from the mid-sixties through mid-eighties.

How easy it is to forget, for instance, that when Dangerous dropped in 1991 it was essentially going to be the Thriller of that decade. It was the fastest selling record of his entire career. Yes, Thriller was his greatest album; yes Dangerous was a commercial beast that somehow got panned years later for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with music. This is an album that spent more weeks in the Billboard 200 than Bad. “Black or White” was his greatest hit since “Billie Jean”. The album gave him one of (if not) the greatest music video premiers of all time when the song premiered at the end of a Simpsons episode. And his halftime performance at the halftime show of Superbowl XXVII was the first and only time the ratings of the halftime show were greater than the ratings for the game itself.

How easy it is to forget that his concert in Bucharest, Romania to support the Dangerous Tour in 1992 was not only a huge deal worldwide, it cost (according to the NY Times) almost $20 million dollars just to broadcast it. The consensus is that it was one of the finest moments in his career (and is now available on DVD).

How easy it is to forget the amount of interest in Jackson through to court trials, his one on one interview with Oprah and Diane Sawyer for 20/20 in which he sits down and discusses his much speculated marriage then to Lisa Marie Presley. In the twilight of his career, he was still a huge deal when he made special appearances on MTV’s Video Music awards. The now-lost London residency that he was to take up at the O2 Arena on the heels of the success of similar stints by Prince and Led Zeppelin sold out instantly. More shows were reportedly being scheduled to accommodate demand.

For those people under 25, this is the Michael Jackson that they will have grown up with, not the “ABC” or “Man in the Mirror” Jackson, but so much in his life during these years kept the media in such a slant towards him that the only Jackson they really know is the “Wacko-Jacko” coined and personified by the National Inquirer. There are so many young people (and some older people) out there who are quick to say in his passing that the man was a genius, but that the genius was 66-82 Michael. There is so much evidence out there to suggest otherwise; just look at the Chris Browns and Justin Timberlakes of the world. Beethoven never stopped being a genius, and neither did Michael Jackson. Because if he was truly a genius, which he absolutely, positively was, then maybe people simply need to be reminded of what they think they already know. Because they have no idea.

Dear Slim,

I’m writing this on behalf of many fans, who once upon a time believed that you were it—the Man.

In 99’ I heard “My Name Is” for the very first time, and instantly believed it was the most entertaining rhyme,

That I’d heard since Busta Rhymes, back in 97’, but I leap-frogged you ahead of a ton of rappers to maybe top eleven.

I was so friggin sure that you were the genuine article, that I jammed out to your album way more than Wyclef’s Carnival.

Gimmicks aside (and forget the potty humour), whenever your name was mentioned I would proclaim that He’s Arrived.

The Great White Hope, the Incomparable Slim Shady? You were gonna revolutionize the game like Michael in the 80s!

And boy, when your second LP dropped, it was over! Top eleven? Now the debate was ‘you? or Hova?’

Top three emcees alive? Nas, Hov… wait… Eminem?

Rakim still had a lot of votes back then, but to us, you were in.

“Kill You” was an all-time gangbuster of an opener, and then you kept going on about Kim when you were choking her…

And “Criminal”, while that track was just as good as “F tha Police”,

Everybody in their right mind considered “Stan” a masterpiece. A MASTERPIECE! An classic opus genius work of art!

And then you rocked with Elton John at the Grammy’s and showed your heart.

That’s the way I remember Slim: ferocious, genius and hungry,

Even though “8-Mile” was “Purple Rain” remade, that’s still an on-me!

Why? Cos’ I saw it; opening night. Paid my money, middle seat, and enjoyed it all right…

But then something happened. I can’t put my finger on it.

Wait—actually I can! You started to double-track your vocals and used it as a stamp.

“Lose Yourself”, all right, that was a pretty hot track. But then it turned into your recipe for everything else and you never looked back.

And while it’s hard for a fan like me to every call an artist’s work that I look up to as whack (see: PRINCE),

I gotta say, Slim, some of your later records “is whack.”

In every album cycle the formula’s been largely the same, a mad-funny single followed by an album that put the rest to shame.

First was The Eminem Show¸ and it was… eh, it was cool. Compared to the last one though it didn’t quite break any new rules.

But you sold a whole bunch of copies, and well, I guess that’s okay too,

Actually still a bit of an accomplishment in light of what Napster tried to do to you,

But Encore? Come on, man, you basically phoned in half the tracks!

It was the first time it had occurred to me that you might have put out something that was whack.

God! I was so annoyed that I gave you thirteen dollars! Outside of “Toy Soldiers” I was convinced that you were a robber.

You robbed me! In a hip-hop way I felt superiorly violated. I can’t even explain it—it was like… The Blueprint II—violated!

You were supposed to be that rapper who didn’t put out any crap albums. But because your pedigree was fantastic it wasn’t a critical problem,

And something that could certainly be salvaged…

Until of course the second D-12 album dropped; top-eleven worst hip-hop album of all time

The amount of disgust that I had at that album can’t even be properly articulated in a rhyme

Cos’ I only listened to it one time!

With frown because you were legally committing crimes!

Crimes against your fans for letting people like Bizarre rap on an album with your name on it.

Bucket!

Curtain Call? The Re-Up? OMG Slim!

Even longtime Shady haters were going like, “What’s wrong with him?”

“I hated him before because he was about violence and hating gays,”

“Now he raps like he doesn’t care and I’m super duper amazed…”

Slim, I know I’ve written a whole bunch of negative,

But as a fan, I only do it because your people want a return of the positive

So let me tell you what I want for Relapse 2,

Whatever rhymes you got, trash ‘em.

Lock yourself in the closet until you get really pissed off,

Then come out and hit the mic like it’s your last chance to show off

I want that simple, single-tracked vocal that was just you back when you were raw,

Forget the money, and bring back the days when you put the whole world in awe

I want you to LYRICALLY MURDER fools—chop me up if you have to!

Just bring back the Shady who was crazy before the after.

So I can take your name off the top twenty list and pin you back in the top five,

Er—top three. My bad.

Show the rest of the world what I still see.

Sincerely yours,

This is Sim