ZONE FILM CHALLENGE: POP AND CIRCUMSTANCE

John Wright: Good evening one and all and welcome to the Zone Film Challenge. We are back with another heater of a prompt. This week, Pop and Circumstance — pick a movie starring a famous musician. There were a few different routes we could have gone for this. My first thought when we were kicking around potential subjects was Mick Jagger’s Freejack. You had some other interesting suggestions, Alex, most notably Britney Spears’ Crossroads.

Alex McDonough: Yeah, I was shooting for Crossroads, Madonna’s Body of Evidence, Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon. All three of which represent different approaches to this sort of pop star turned actor phenomenon. You chose something at the opposite end of all of that. We went down the rarely chosen 4th path which would be 1998’s Belly directed by Hype Williams, starring Nas and DMX.

John: Yes. Belly. Has a score of 36 on Metacritic, it’s one of those movies that completely bombed when it came out but we both watched it and loved it.

Alex: It’s really good. I see why film critics at the time may have disliked it. If you think about what those critics studied as examples of “good filmmaking,” Belly doesn’t apply in the Pauline Kael/John Ford model of how to compose a movie. There’s a lot of meta stuff going on in the background with this movie’s reception. In the modern era Belly has an unanimously positive reputation. It’s one of those movies where if you get the chance to see it on 35 millimeter, block out time in your day to go do that. It looks unlike anything else and that can be attributed to its director who was most famous for being a MTV mainstay in the 1990s. John, you did the research on this…

John: We can certainly come back to that because Hype Williams is absurdly prolific. Thirty years of American culture, whether you know it or not, was shaped by the videos this guy made. Though I’d like to take a holding pattern on that subject just to say that Belly isn’t one of those situations where it’s unclear what exactly the critics disliked so much — this is a movie with a lot to dislike especially if you are one of the older white critics who were occupying most of those jobs at that time. For instance, we are here for the musicians in the starring roles. DMX is pretty okay at being DMX but Nas may be one of the worst actors I’ve seen in a lead role.

Alex: Yeah, Nas doesn’t put in the best work. It’s important to note that it wasn’t just white film critics, though they certainly contributed to its negative critical score, but Magic Johnson owned a chain of theaters when the movie came out. He refused to exhibit it because he thought it gave a negative portrayal of black men. White critics were responding to that assessment before they were responding to the film itself.

John: Even beyond the performances of its leading men and their actions, the cinematic language of Belly is the opposite of what one would consider good filmmaking in the traditional Hollywood style. It rarely maintains coherent space, it’s often more akin to montage filmmaking. It is most comparable to music videos which were Williams’ bread and butter and continued to be after Belly came out and flopped — ha ha — it more or less represented his one bite of the apple as far as feature films go. Just to give some context — he directed Notorious BIG’s Big Poppa, Montel Jordan’s This is How We Do It, Wu Tang Clan’s Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nothing to Fuck With, R Kelly’s I Believe I Can Fly, TLC’s No Scrubs, Jay-Z’s Big Pimpin, collabs with Kanye, Travis Scott, etc. It says something that you can be in demand for that long, especially in an industry that changes as quickly as pop music.

Alex: From 1995 to 2001, the videos to talk about were Hype Williams videos and what came directly after were either responses to or imitations of his videos. He set the visual style for the era. He’s undoubtedly one of the most important people in black visual media and Belly is — like you said — his one bite of the apple, his one foray into Hollywood. He was attached to some other projects like Speed Racer but those all fell through — but he‘s another black director who in the 1990s was given a totally raw deal. He was given creative freedom, a small budget that he had vertical control over and execs said “go make us a movie.” He gave them his movie and the industry immediately decided they hated it and never gave him another shot. This happened constantly.

John: I’ve seen Belly compared to — although he’s not black — Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. A complete career killer in Hollywood that would go onto be loved.

Alex: Richard Kelly is a different case but in the 90s — there’s a great NYT article on it called They Set Us Up to Fail about black directors speaking out about how they were given one film festival favorite that the critics loved and how they were never given another chance. They were ignored and Hollywood studios tried to give them TV shows to shoot and sidelined them. The studios wanted a new Spike Lee or John Singleton and when they didn’t net that same acclaim, they pushed them out the door. With Belly you see something similar, you have a bankable director with a distinctive style and he made a movie in his style — and immediately the industry lined up to criticize Belly not just as bad but as singularly bad. It has a 16% on RottenTomatoes and for a crime film, that’s really low. I think Boondock Saints came out around the same time to slightly more acclaim and this is leagues better than Saints.

John: It’s not just that Williams made this movie in his style, it’s that his style is all encompassing. Belly looks so unlike any Hollywood production not just of the era but really, ever. You have to reach to start finding stuff that looks and feels like this. The names that came to mind were Dario Argento & Seijun Suzuki

The studios wanted a new Spike Lee or John Singleton and when they didn’t net that same acclaim, they pushed them out the door.

Just the lighting — the crazy lighting — and there’s these sort of spaces that feel unreal — not dreamlike — just non-Euclidean. This is rippling with an apocalyptic angst about the upcoming Millennium. That vibe is what it’s about more than the actual plot.

Alex: I hate to use this comparison because he comes up so often in this column but it’s similar to Michael Mann movie, especially Miami Vice.

John: The lighting absolutely screams Mann.

Alex: Obviously the best point of comparison are Hype Williams’ own music videos. You see it with the film’s preponderance of low angle fish eye lens shots that tracks the action in fascinating ways. Motions onscreen often contrast with the direction the camera is moving. Williams pulls off this trick not just in action scenes, but in scenes of people dancing back and forth at parties.The people will go to the left and the camera will pull to the right, they’ll meet in the center and separate again.

John: The opening sequence, the nightclub scene, is overlaid with this aggressive strobe effect. I imagine in a theater — you know how every year at these big film fests there’s some movie that drops that they report half the audience walks out of — I can imagine Belly getting that kind of reaction because it hurt my eyes. I loved it but it hurt my eyes.

Alex: Belly has these art film aspirations but it never got festival play. You can see that it has these aspirations — in the opening ten minutes of the film, Buns brings everyone back to his house, turns on the TV and he’s been watching Gummo. He puts it on to show them what he’s been getting into now that he’s rich and has money and is expected to absorb culture. He picks an extremely current film that had gained a reputation for being a miserable, smart, and pretentious piece of work and I think that had Belly been shown overseas first and then brought to the States, Belly would have had a cult audience built in.

The way it built up its audience instead was people picked it up and and likely thought “oh, I thought this would be a crime film with musicians I liked but it’s a really unique art piece that has a real sinister energy to it that you don’t get with most movies.” You’d think it would be another hood film but it’s really the hood film to close out the decade.

They were not then and I don’t they’re interested now in promoting black art. They are interested in co-opting the aesthetics of black art to sell to their audience.

John: Yeah, you brought up John Singleton earlier and I do think that this 90s hood movie boom is something that hasn’t been given its due attention in our autopsy of the culture of the recent past. If you wanted to point to a reason why a lot of these directors got their one shot and were sidelined, it was because when they were told to go make a movie in “your style”, what they meant was “make something that John Singleton makes.”

Alex: Yeah, they wanted their own Boyz in the Hood or Do the Right Thing.

John: Exactly they wanted Boyz in the Hood again and again and again because that’s what the model was.

Alex: Even in the 2000s, you saw Singleton and Lee’s careers take a tumble. John Singleton could not get the financing to make a movie where he had creative independence, he did 2 Fast 2 Furious and that was just about the end of his career. And Lee has spoken extensively about how difficult to get funding. After the stock market collapse, he wasn’t able to get studio funding. Some of that has to do with market conditions but it also has to do with how the fact that Hollywood views these black directors with creative independence as disposable, as the first out the door.

John: They were not then and I don’t they’re interested now in promoting black art. They are interested in co-opting the aesthetics of black art to sell to their audience. What was happening in stereo with this boom was the emergence of hip hop into the cultural limelight. It pushed the decaying corpse of rock and roll off the cultural pedestal and said “this is ours now” but the reaction of majority white, majority male audiences was not like it was against disco. The younger generation sided with this newer movement and markets followed. It became very profitable to target those overwhelmingly white suburban teens who would buy the movies, the jeans, the music, and all the rest.

Alex: Now, Belly came out in 1998 but if you think about what was just on the horizon, you have Eminem, Limp Bizkit, rap-rock groups. The culture had changed significantly from what it was in 1994 when Cobain died. In that six year period, there was a massive transformation and Belly catches it right at this moment before the total co-option happened. Hollywood’s rejection of this film is evidence that they were never interested in actually helping black filmmakers and storytellers make their art. Like you said, they were only interested in co-opting the aesthetics of it in the hopes of turning a tidy profit.

John: This is what I’d like to talk about because Belly gets it, there’s this sense — this angst about what comes next. I think Williams gets it as a guy who is deeply rooted in the business of hip hop. I think he gets that the wave they’ve ridden up til this point is beginning to break and he’s asking “what does that mean for us?”

Alex: Right, so let’s summarize real quick; Belly is about two guys who are in the street life and have just broken through and are extremely wealthy.What comes next? They’re living at a very precarious moment in their lives, violence can break out at any moment, everything they’ve worked for can be taken away. Buns [DMX] is the more hotheaded of the two while Sin [Nas] is going through an internal journey.

John: It’s the classic dichotomy of this situation, Buns is the committed gangster — about that life — and he’s kind of to some degree deploying bravado and machismo to assure himself that it doesn’t inherently have an expiration date. Sin is in a stable, committed relationship and has a newborn kid and is thinking “I gotta get out, I gotta do right by my family.” It’s interesting, you’d expect them to come into conflict with each other but they never really do. Their stories diverge and they come back together and they say “We’re different people now. You’ll always be an important person to me but we can’t be in each others’ lives like we were.”

Alex: We talked about how the mood of the film is despair and that it’s an anxious film. It’s quietly anxious and that undercurrent runs through the entire film. It has a nervousness that cuts against the toxic masculinity that it’s portraying onscreen, what Magic Johnson and the film critics said the film was promoting. What the film is saying is that this toxic machismo is a put-on that’s done because the other option that is afforded is despair. This is a classic gangster film trope dating back to the 1930s, you can see it in The Public Enemy.

John: So, the whole film is set in 1999. It begins in February and it always timestamps the current month in blood red font to let the viewer know that the new millennium is this hazard coming on . The film ends on New Years’ Eve 1999 and it ends with a man telling Buns — paraphasing— “look, we all have a choice here. We can keep killing each other or we can choose a degree of self determination, we can choose life, we can choose to be better in this new millennium.”

This is just rippling with this apocalyptic angst about the upcoming Millennium. That’s what it’s about more than the actual plot.

Alex: The 21st century represents the promise of the future, it’s a future that was promised and it’s asking, “What are you gonna do with that future?” Williams’ directing style cracks a bit in the film’s last scenes because he has trouble shooting monologues. It’s not so much that he has trouble making the monologue sound interesting or engaging — Benjamin Chavis does good work there — but Williams isn’t so interested in hearing people speak for long periods of times. He puts in Sin’s voiceovers that Sin does but those are interspersed with striking visuals. This monologue is interspersed with visual that were previously seen in the film. You see the budget fizzle out here- supposedly the opening in the club used up most of the budget.

John: I can see that, yeah.

Alex: There’s a few tricks that Williams uses to cover up the lack of budget. He reuses a tunnel for a driving scene that was also used in a DMX video that was shot concurrently. There’s definitely moments where the budget constrained him and the ending is among them.

John: There’s these contradictory feelings — there’s this idea of the 21st century, the new millennium representing this opportunity, this bright futurism but there’s also a sense that your sins echo in eternity — you’re unable to free yourself from your actions— whether it’s something as beyond the pale as murder or something as common as being unfaithful to your partner.

Alex: Right, it’s got this strange idea of cosmic justice but Williams wants to close the book on this century. There’s this notion that the next century is a clean slate and with that transition of time, you should feel empowered by the newfound freedom.

John: But there’s also a sense that if you want to take part in that new century and you want to be empowered by that new vitality that the onus is on you to rise to meet that ideal.

Alex: The onus is on you and it’s also on you to cast away the violence of the last century.

John: Exactly.

Alex: It’s a powerful message that few other films have. Other films have hints of it but because of when this movie takes place, it really hammers it home. Another point of interest is that a lot of the film takes place in Omaha, Nebraska which — this is a hood film — Omaha might be one of the last cities in America someone would pick for one. I can’t say I know too much about Omaha culture but I have to imagine that there’s a small scene and while you could make money there, it’s likely tightly knit among those who are there already.

John: If I can double back briefly, I referred to Nas earlier as an especially bad actor and while I think that’s true, there’s something weird where he feels bad in a way that feels naturalistic rather than him failing at acting.

Alex: That’s the case with a few performances here. You see this a lot with musicians-turned-actors, that they aren’t pros in the same way. With this film, it’s able to create this uneasy atmosphere and these characters fit it in but the actors aren’t attempting traditional acting class routines. They work in a stagey way where it feels like there’s no camera around, it feels natural. I like it over what you would traditionally consider “great acting” because it put the viewer in a state of — some people may say “unease” but what it’s doing is making the viewer more open to what’s happening in the film and the way the film plays with its visual language. It makes viewers more accepting of the film’s weirder choices.

John: Yeah, every scene in this where people are standing around and talking feels like the 30 second skit that plays before the track kicks in.

Alex: Yeah, there’s a little bit of that. Instead of telling a full coherent narrative through action, Sin explains his feelings through voiceover more often than he talks through his feelings with other characters. You get a better sense of where Sin is at in those voiceovers than through conversations. When he talks to other people, he’s talking about plans. When he talks to us, he’s talking about what motivates him. It’s a good balance because Williams doesn’t want to shoot full talking scenes, it’s not his thing. I respect that, it’s fun to watch a mouth move but it’s a lot more fun to watch multiple parts move and not just the face.

John: A lot of the dialogue in this is unintelligible and I do think the movie is telling you to not pay too close attention to it, like Ox [Louie Rankin], the Jamaican drug lord, speaks in thick patois and you get maybe every fourth word. You get the emotion that’s being communicated though, it’s like watching a foreign film without subtitles.

Alex: Yeah, I think part of that is because we’re white.

John: Oh yeah, someone had to say it.

Alex: It is a heavy accent but Sin’s response to Ox communicates that he gets it and that’s pretty realistic. People have parents or grandparents who speak with a heavy accent that me or you would have trouble understanding but they hear totally clearly. It’s something we should implement more in films. We applaud when there’s a deaf characters communicating through ASL and this is another version of that.

John: One recurring theme in these late 80s/early 90s inner city in crisis films is there’s always one character whose more educated and well spoken than everyone else — the one I always go back to is Larry Fishburne in Boyz in the Hood — this is the guy who gets it — you can say that guy is kind of in Belly, the minister, he’s not so much a character than a MacGuffin.

Alex: Yeah, he’s more a symbol of a potential future than someone with relationships. There’s Knowledge [Oliver Grant], his character is purported to be smart.

J: His name is Knowledge but he’s just like everyone else.

A: Yeah, he’s quick and smart but he gets ahead of himself.

J: Before I forget, beyond the two main stars, we have Method Man and a brief cameo by Ghostface Killah. So four for the price of two.

A: And Tionne Watkins.

J: I can unambiguously recommend this movie to anybody. You will know that is unlike anything else you’ve ever seen in ten minutes or less.

A: Yes, that opening scene alone is one of the most striking openings I’ve seen. I’m counting Miami Vice in there. An all-timer club scene.

J: Let’s head for the barn, fifteen words or less.

A: I still don’t know why it’s called Belly.

J: Hype Williams: “I Just Got Fired For Being Too Cool”

Seijun Suzuki: “First Time?”

Wanna take the Challenge? Next week’s prompt is: Gamer Cinema. Pick a film that features video games as a recurring motif. (We swear this one is not a lie.)