A CONVERSATION WITH GUY MADDIN

I had the pleasure of interviewing Guy Maddin a few weeks ago (this was supposed to happen last year but my second kidney transplant got in the way and we had to postpone). We talked about Eraserhead, L’Age d’Or, John Paizs, Canadian Patriotism, American patriotism, Kenny Omega and so much more.

This is a big deal to me as he is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers. If you haven't already, make sure to get familiar with my coverage of his work over the years on this blog (Brand Upon The Brain, The School Of David Lynch: Guy Maddin, Rumours, The Saddest Music In The World, My Winnipeg, Cowards Bend The Knee)

Enjoy.

Zebras In America · A conversation with Guy Maddin

KIDNEYS ON FILM: ONE SPOON OF CHOCOLATE

I guess we can add Rza to the list of filmmakers that thinks the only prerequisite for making a grindhouse homage is giving your movie a grainy filter aesthetic. I’m a little tired of modern directors thinking their 8 figure budget films with “un-woke” dialogue and tons of blood splatter equates “grindhouse” or an exploitation film. But missing the mark on the grindhouse genre is the least of this movie’s problems. The racial issues and social commentaries found in the Rza’s latest film really need to be addressed. My god…

Much like how I compared The Testament Of Ann Lee to Barbie in my last post, One Spoon Of Chocolate and Rebel Ridge have similar connections. Both are Rambo/Walking Tall/Reacher-coded stories about lone Black veterans trying to take down a small racist police department after the deaths of their cousins (while the immediate villains in One Spoon Of Chocolate aren’t cops, we come to learn later that they work for the police department). Seriously - it’s like the same premise made under vastly different ideologies.
Both movies missed their mark in some aspects but I can say that I mostly enjoyed Rebel Ridge whereas One Spoon Of Chocolate is kind of reprehensible. Somewhere between Rebel Ridge & One Spoon Of Chocolate lies a potentially good movie. One plays out like a centrist’s wet dream where almost no one dies (Rebel Ridge) and the other plays out like a pandering white guy making cartoonish revenge porn on behalf of the type of Black folks that are easy to impress (One Spoon Of Chocolate). You know…the type of Black folks that cheered for Django Unchained. This makes sense because Quentin Tarantino was a producer on this. Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of slave owners and slave catchers getting murdered in the most brutal way. But at the end of the day, Tarantino used slavery to fetishize Blackness and slavery and I'm just not cool with that. But that's just me...

And as a sidenote - I always get frustrated when folks talk about how much they liked Rebel Ridge because no one died when in fact someone did die. Sure it was off camera but there was still a casualty in the movie. Somehow all the evil racist cops got to live while the main character’s cousin (a Black guy) still managed to die in the story.

Anyway...

Because this is another Rza/Tarantino collaboration, you can expect lots of references and homages to older films. This might be the only thing I liked about this movie. Outside of obvious sources like Rambo and Walking Tall, Rza reaches back to everything from John Carpenter to cult horror.

It [CHRISTINE] pops up in [One Spoon of Chocolate] as the black truck.. The idea is that when that truck shows up, it's gonna be trouble - Rza, Conseuence

Christine / One Drop Of Chocolate

When I finished this script, I remember thinking about the scene of the doctor, and I said, ‘I'm going to try to find that movie, because it scared me, and I want to put fear in the audience’ - Rza, Consequence

Zombie Hol0caust / One Drop Of Chocolate

And because this is a Rza film, you can expect plenty of classic Kung-fu movie homages…

5 Fingers Of Death / One Drop Of Chocolate

In One Spoon Of Chocolate we follow “Unique” - a veteran/ex-con who goes to stay with his remaining family in Ohio only to find out he’s living in a sundown town ran by a corrupt police department and a vigilante gangs of racist white nationalists that kill Black people to sell their organs on the Black market. As a two-time kidney transplant recipient and a life-long fan of the Wu-Tang Clan, you’d think this movie was tailormade for me. But it wasn’t. As I said earlier, this movie is like a white guy trying to make a violent blaxploitation film to prove he’s down with Black people. But writer/director is Black. It doesn’t take much to impress certain lanes of Black viewers. All you have to do is murder the racist bad guy and somehow that makes things better (Rza didn’t even have the balls to show the audience if the main racist villain dies in the end or not!).

Besides his well-known love of Kung-fu movies and martial arts in general, the Rza’s personal life and other various Wu-Tang lore is all over One Spoon Of Chocolate. Naming the main character Unique is a nod to his cousin Ol Dirty Bastard’s 5% name; Ason Unique. In Rza’s pre-Wu Tang Clan days he fled to Ohio to stay with family after getting in to trouble. Some of the cast members in One Spoon Of Chocolate appeared in the Wu-Tang Hulu show as well. In my opinion this makes things all the more embarrassing because I would not want anything personal or close to my heart connected to this mess of a movie.
Things are just violent for the sake of being violent and the usage of the N-word would make producer Quentin Tarantino proud. I guess in a sense the Rza did achieve some level of exploitation. He just used Black pain and trauma to do it. It doesn’t make sense because this movie doesn’t really align with the 30+ years of socially conscious Rza lyrics I’ve listened to over the years.

What’s also disappointing is that even Rza fell in to the Get Out trope that a majority of modern Black films do these days. In the opening scene a young naive Black male walking on the side of the road is lured by a car full of flirty attractive white woman only to be set up and murdered by the film’s antagonists. It’s almost exactly like the opening scene of Get Out with Lakeith Stanfield mixed with the very real story of Kendrick Johnson.

similar opening scenes...

Get Out / One Drop Of Chocolate

moments later they’re subdued and abducted…

Get Out / One Drop Of Chocolate

Can modern Black cinema exist without some form of “watch out for the white boogeyman” trope???


Outside of real cases like the death of Kendrick Johnson who, like the victims in One Drop Of Chocolate. was murdered and had his organs stolen, Rza uses the imagery of racist white supremacist rallies as an influence which is so cheap to me...

One Spoon Of Chocolate (below)

Speaking of the film’s antagonists, Rza can’t make up his mind if the bad guys are torch-waving proud boys or wiggers. They’re racist but dress like they actually listen to Rza’s music. Now…I’m fully aware that there are plenty of white hip-hop fans that love the music and adopt the aesthetic of hip-hop fashion all while hating Black people. Just look at underground rap music forums or some of Eminem’s fans. The confused villains could have been some type of commentary on all of this. But this movie is so dumb that I can’t give Rza credit for that type of insightful commentary. I don’t even feel like getting in to the nitpicky stuff like the stupid decisions made by the characters in the movie or casting someone like Shamiek Moore as someone that’s supposed to be an intimidating tough guy. All of that is overshadowed by the cheap exploitative racist bullshit that this movie pulls off. Not only is Rza a coward for not showing the death of the main villain, but all the deaths of the Black men in the film are extra violent and realistic while the white bad guys get murdered quick and fast.


This is all so unfortunate because while Rza has made some dumb statements in the past, he is an intelligent artist with unique perspectives. The problem is none of that is on display here. 

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE

The Testament Of Ann Lee certainly passes the look test. It’s what some might call visually stunning but it kind of lacks in the typical substance that one might expect from a biopic. Now…I don’t think director Mona Fastvold was trying to make a typical biopic so perhaps this criticism doesn’t concern her. As flawed as this movie is, I find it interesting (interesting can be a good thing). It's part biopic, part dance/performance piece and part musical.
In my personal opinion, this is the perfect response to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Both movies exist on some kind of a feminist spectrum, but Ann Lee is able to do so without all the surface-level “girl power”/“men are dumb simple creatures” messaging that the Barbie does. Another big similarity between the two films is that both movies are centered around female characters that have no interest in sex or romance. Ann Lee preached heavily about celibacy and Gerwig’s Barbie rebelled against the idea of the title character being the romantic interest of Ken. 

A big difference between the two films is The Testament Of Ann Lee doesn’t really think about men in comparison to Barbie. One could argue that Barbie accidentally centers the male characters at certain points. Think about it - Ryan Gosling's performance as Ken is just as synonymous with the Barbie movie as Margot Robbie. Amanda Seyfried completely carries this Ann Lee biopic. There are male co-stars but none are as memorable or as important as her. I appreciate that approach. Barbie tries to provoke and lightly troll a particular type of male at times ("film bros", misogynists, women-haters, loudmouths, jerks, etc). Ann Lee doesn't really concern itself with men. There’s nothing more silly and pointless than putting in a lot of effort to troll a group of people that already can't stand you or don't care what you do. We've reached a point where changing the gender or the race of a character in a story is done mostly now to annoying and poke at people rather than to make a genuine piece of art. There's nothing worse than grown adults like Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh crying over updated iterations of things like The Little Mermaid or Harry Potter using female, trans or Black actors. But at the same time, I can't stand people who can only approach art from the standpoint of just bothering or annoying someone. How old are we??

The Testament Of Ann Lee certainly shows the evil that men do while still making women the center of the story. It should also be noted that the different religious sects that the movie focuses on are all based in the belief that the second coming of Christ will be a woman.

I don’t have a "fragile male ego" either. If you think men are big dumb children - fine. Just stand ten toes down on your opinion. Don't dip your toes in and out. Don’t pander to septum nose ring twitter and instagram moms that lie about their life being hard when it isn’t if you only half-heartedly feel that way. It’s phony and disingenuous.

Barbie / The Testament Of Ann Lee

I don't think any of this was intentional but even the moment where we are introduced to Ann Lee's husband is right out of the scene in Barbie where Ken first tries to dance with her...

Barbie / The Testament Of Ann Lee

To Be Clear - I enjoyed Barbie overall but a big portion of that movie plays out like it was made for people that like to mindlessly retweet and reshare lighthearted surface-level “men are dumb” posts all while adoring their husbands and wearing “boy mom” shirts. Hating men and/or thinking they’re trash is perfectly fine I guess. Just be genuine about it. I respect folks that claim to dislike men as long as they really live that life. If it’s just your online persona or something you like to profess only when you’re around other women, then you’re just corny and pandering for nothing.

 

The Passion Of Joan Of Arc / The Testament Of Ann Lee

If I had to compare Ann Lee to something else - I’d say it’s very "Robert Eggers-coded". Eggers is a heavily influenced director himself and he hasn’t done or created anything new in cinema, but I don’t know if there would be a lane for this movie to exist right now without semi-recent stuff like The Witch or The Northman.
And, similar to Eggers' films, Ann Lee has some light Dreyer imagery. While they aren’t identical in any way, the funeral scenes at the end of both films are kind of similar to me (minus the resurrection in Ordet). 

Ordet / The Testament Of Ann Lee

A big flaw with this movie is the weird run time and all the history that is skipped over. This is a highly speculative retelling of the life of Ann Lee - an influential figure in the evangelical movement during the mid-late 1700s. The film starts at her birth and ends with her death which was brought on from complications of a physical attack. In between, we follow her religious journey from joining the Quakers to branching off to the Shaking Quakers to forming her own religious sect; The Shakers. There’s a lot of religious and world history to cover in her story. I wouldn’t have been mad if this was a mini-series or a show on a streaming service for the story to flesh out more (the movie also has voiceover narration that feels like it was tacked on after the fact in order to make it easier to follow).

You should never expect a biopic to capture and address everything, but this movie has the time to drag out elements that aren’t all that necessary while speeding through entire periods of Ann Lee’s life that are incredibly important (her various times in jail, the loss of all her children, her travels outside of just New England, etc). The Testament Of Ann Lee has a runtime of 2 hours and 17 minutes which is such an odd length for a movie. I’ve been saying this since the start of this blog but a biopic needs to be an 85 minute film focused on a specific isolated period of time or it needs to be a minimum of three hours if we’re going to cover someone’s entire life like this movie does. The same core team behind this movie was also behind the almost four hour Brutalist. I wonder why Ann Lee wasn’t fleshed out the same way The Brutalist was. I would have loved to see this movie take the same approach as Peter Watkin's Edvard Munch.

I don’t really like this movie but I'm glad that it exists because it can’t be digested or critiqued by simple-minded disingenuous folks like Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh. Male and male-centered critics that want to preemptively tear apart a movie for having feminist ideals or not making men the centerpiece can’t really process something like The Testament Of Ann Lee because it doesn’t have an evil central male character to represent all men. Again - this movie is very flawed to me but I'm glad it exists.