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Posts Tagged ‘Oakland’

Freaky Tales

Wednesday, August 13th, 2025

I don’t know much about Oakland, but FREAKY TALES seems designed to be the Oakland-est movie of all time. So Oakland that Too $hort is the narrator and one of the producers and has a cameo as a cop and is a character in the movie played by rapper Demario “Symba” Driver. Also they have a cool retro synth type score but they got Raphael Saadiq to do it.

It’s presented as an anthology film, but it’s the type where each of the stories intersects a little bit and ultimately becomes one story in the last chapter – actually not that far off from the structure of WEAPONS, which I watched the day after I watched this. What it made me keep thinking of though is the made-for-cable movie COSMIC SLOP, even though this is pretty different and definitely way better. I guess just because it’s weird stories hosted by a music icon and named after one of his works.

Although there’s a sci-fi element in a stylishly fake looking “cosmic green stuff” that pops up occasionally (Short Dog figures it “was just one of those freaky things that made the Bay Area so damn fresh” at the time) I think it comes closest to being a crime movie. There’s a hitman, a corrupt cop, and everything revolves around a botched robbery of Golden State Warriors point guard Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis, TOP GUN: MAVERICK). I of course enjoy that type of story, but the standout chapters for me are the two about circa ’87 Bay Area music scenes, following some punk rockers and then a female rap duo, each group having a fateful incident after leaving the same showing of THE LOST BOYS. (read the rest of this shit…)

Blindspotting

Monday, December 10th, 2018

BLINDSPOTTING follows BLACK PANTHER and SORRY TO BOTHER YOU to complete 2018’s Oakland cinema trilogy. The home of Too Short, MC Hammer and Digital Underground has been making big moves on screen this year with these three unrelated groups of artists. This is the one written by and starring two life long friends and spoken word/poet/rapper type guys, Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs, who (among other things) were in a group called The Getback together.

Diggs and Casal play Collin and Miles, best friends and life long Oakland residents. Collin has recently been released after an at-first-not-specified felony. The days left on his probation are used as a countdown and we watch in constant dread of some dumb thing putting him back in. The problem is perfectly illustrated in the early scene where he’s in the back seat of a friend’s car and Miles, riding shotgun, finds an actual gun between the seats and thinks it’s funny to start waving it around. Collin wants no part of it and wants out but it’s a two-seater and they ignore his pleas. He should be furious but he has a bleak sense of humor about it because Miles is as funny and charming as he is a total fuckin dumbass. But he’s kind of the Bishop in JUICE of this movie, the ticking time bomb of bad influence. And I’m sure he would take that as a compliment. (read the rest of this shit…)

Sorry To Bother You

Monday, July 23rd, 2018

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU is an absurd, inventive new comedy that’s so playful and funny that its acidic satire of soul-crushing capitalism comes across a little more like an inspirational rallying cry than blind fury at a seemingly insurmountable wall of corporate greed and dehumanization. Though it’s that too.

If I was required by law to describe it in terms of movies that already exist, I’d say “low-wage OFFICE SPACE by way of Michel Gondry.” But fuck the law, because it feels like something very new, distinctive and of the moment, from the cast headed by Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson to the soundtrack to even the cool fonts and logos by children’s book illustrator J. Otto Seibold. Stanfield plays Cassius Green (yes, it’s a pun), who lives in his uncle (Terry Crews, STREET KINGS)’s garage until he finds his calling (oh shit, another pun) at a new telemarketing job. I mean, the place is a hellhole on the verge of a strike led by Squeeze (Steven Yeun, formerly of The Walking Dead), but he turns out to be really good at it after co-worker Langston (Danny Glover, PREDATOR 2) teaches him the secret of the “white voice.” It’s not mere code-switching, but a near supernatural channeling of a voice with no worries that he manifests by being dubbed by David Cross (ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS). It’s a broad and hacky joke made almost profound by its layers of subtext and power to creep out his friends and loved ones. (read the rest of this shit…)