Queen & Slim (2019, R)

I was already interested in this movie, but that interest kicked into high gear after screenwriter Lena Waithe appeared on The Daily Show talking about all that went into her feature film debut. This film is both hard-hitting and beautiful, doing everything by extremes in a truly-gripping way.

They connected on Tinder. After a rocky first date, he was driving her home when he was pulled over for “failing to execute a turn signal.” Minutes later, he was on his knees with a gun pointed at his head. She tried to intervene, the cop shot at her, and he scuffled with the officer to prevent a more lethal shot. They grappled, and the officer wound up dead. Now, they’re doing everything they can to get out of the country. They kept their lives from ending that night, and they’re not about to let those lives become “property of the state” without a fight.

So much amazing stuff in this movie. I love the discourse that immediately surrounds the pair (we’ll go with the title and call them Queen and Slim,) with people in the Black community in particular hailing them as the new Black Panthers and claiming they were avenging an unarmed Black man the officer killed two years earlier, but when it happened, Queen and Slim weren’t thinking about political statements or justice, they weren’t looking to start a hashtag. They were just trying to survive, and for them, their desperate race to the border is an extension of that, but for the communities they pass through, it all becomes so much bigger than the two of them.

I also really love how, while the film gets into both deep social drama and taut suspense, it’s not unrelentingly bleak, not centured wholly on Black pain and racial injustice. Instead, having escaped one brush with death and trying to avoid another (the opening scene reminds us that Ohio is one of the 30 states that still has the death penalty,) Queen and Slim recognize that they need to grab small moments when they can, not putting off brief opportunities for joy in the midst of all the uncertainty and fear.

Daniel Kaluuya is fantastic as Slim, overwhelmed by all that’s happened and wishing he could just go home but trying to be decisive and brave. (Side note: it’s wild to think that I first knew him as Posh Kenneth on Skins. Reminds me of my post about actors I used to think were mediocre, when it turned out I’d just never seen them in a role that was worth their time. In the last couple years, Kaluuya has ably demonstrated that same principle.) I’m not familiar with Jodie Turner-Smith, but she makes an excellent Queen. She can come across as perfunctory and a little brittle, but she’s been scarred from seeing what the system does to the people it dehumanizes, and she throws the full weight of her intellect at the question of their escape.

I won’t get into the details, but the final scenes are truly affecting. It’s been a while since the ending of a movie hit me so hard.

Warnings

Strong thematic elements, violence, sexual content, language (including the N-word,) and drinking/smoking/drug use.

The Book of Rannells: Another Period: Season 2, Episode 9 – “Lillian’s Wedding” (2016)

I’d previously seen ads for this show on Comedy Central, but I never saw any episodes of it until I started going through Andrew Rannells’s work.  It’s actually quite a bit cooler than I would’ve guessed from the previews, historical jokes mixed with social commentary mixed with sly feminism, all with strong comedic acting.

Sisters Lillian and Beatrice are the Kardashians of turn-of-the-century Newport.  It’s all about money, bling, and sex, each sister going about it in her own way.  While Lillian schemes to marry a geriatric millionaire before he drops dead, Beatrice is forced to do some soul-searching after finding herself on the wrong end of a sex scandal.  Meanwhile, third sister Hortense (not included in the Kardashian comparison above due to her much-maligned homeliness and journalistic pursuits) may have unexpectedly stumbled across love.

It’s very funny, cartoonish at times (there’s a scene of the women’s brother Frederick, evidently having lucked his way into the vice presidency, failing to spell “vice president” at least half a dozen times on a sheet of paper) and always irreverent.  I like the parallels the show draws between the culture of excess/self-absorption/scandal that exists both then and now – for every joke about how different things were in the early 1900s, there’s another that could’ve easily been tweaked from last week’s tabloid headline.

Rannells plays Bertram Fussleforth VII, the grandson of Lillian’s decrepit fiancé and potential thorn in Lillian’s side.  Bertram is very upper-crusty, quite congenial, and constantly keeping Lillian on her toes with comments that could easily be taken as digs or innocent coincidences of word choice.  Bertram is also Hortense’s maybe-beau, an even greater injustice for Lillian – having hitched her wagon to Bertram’s fast-fading grandpa, it seems ludicrous to her that her ugly sister might wind up with the much young/more handsome Bertram.

It’s not too often that Rannells plays a character in a straight romance, so that’s fun to see.  The wooing between Bertram and Hortense is very over-the-top, full of dramatic proclamations tinged with absurd observations.  Bertram is all about Hortense working as a writer and dazzles her with his enlightened views on women, nothing that perhaps women wearing pants shouldn’t be illegal, “as long as her doctor approves.”  I also get a kick out of his interactions with Lillian, especially her increasing aggravation at him amiably calling her “Grandma.”

Recommend?

In General – Definitely.  This is one I’d like to go back and watch from the beginning.

Andrew Rannells – I would.  Rannells is funny here, equal parts blueblood, clueless, romantic, and deadpan goofy.

Warnings

Swearing, sexual content (including incest,) gross-out humor, drinking/drug references, and thematic elements (mostly via the extremely-irreverent jokes.)

Favorite Characters: Uncle Six (Wu Assassins)

Everyone knows that a particularly-compelling antagonist can become a fan favorite on a show or in a movie, and that definitely holds true for Wu Assassins. While I do enjoy the series as a whole, the character of Uncle Six tops my list of reasons to watch (Uncle Six-related spoilers.)

I won’t lie: the setup of all this is both predictable and a little hokey. I mean, Kai, our would-be mythic hero and thoroughly decent guy, is the surrogate son of the neighborhood crime lord, who also happens to be one of the five deadly Wu he’s tasked with killing in order to save the world? We’ve all heard variations on that song before. We’re also no strangers to frenemy narratives, featuring charismatic villains who, partway through the story, start aligning themselves with the heroes to varying degrees. The bones of Uncle Six are nothing we haven’t seen before.

But as a character, he’s proof that storytelling doesn’t have to be hindered by the fact that we hear the same stories over and over again. The recipe is the same, but it’s all about the technique in bringing it to bear. From his introductory scene, in which he stands around in an impeccable suit giving a history lesson on the first kingpin of Chinatown to someone he’s about to kill, I could tell that Uncle Six was going to be executed superbly. He carries himself with an effortless cool, like someone with swagger but also like someone who knows he’s holding all the cards at any given moment. He’s mysterious enough that you can never quite tell if he’s going to shoot you (or burn you with his Fire Wu magic, since that’s also an option for him,) grant you a one-time reprieve, or even risk his life for your sake.

From the start, Uncle Six is more of an antagonist than a villain. Even though he’s both a gangster and a Wu, he never intentionally positions himself against Kai. From a personal standpoint, he repeatedly tries to bankroll Kai’s cooking career, though Kai keeps turning down his dirty money on principle, and while he has a cosmic-enemies thing going on with the Wu Assassin, he doesn’t realize at first that the assassin is Kai. Once he does, that makes all the difference, and you quickly understand that there are very few lengths Uncle Six won’t go to on Kai’s behalf.

This is a smart tack for the show to take. Fan-favorite villains can be tricky to maintain, because the audience wants to keep them around, but you can reach a point where it stretches credibility that the hero doesn’t just take them out once and all. Here, the unofficial family ties makes that complicated for Kai – even when he dislikes and distrusts Uncle Six, he doesn’t want to murder the guy as part of an ancient ritual – but as in most cases, the best option is to work on at least quasi-redeeming your baddie. But that can be tough too, because you risk declawing them and losing what made people love them in the first place. Wu Assassins strikes just the right note with Uncle Six’s turnaround. More shade is given to aspects of his past to better inform how he got where he is, and working with the good guys doesn’t make him any less cool or badass. For evidence, look no further than the fabulous “diner scene,” where Uncle Six schools a bunch of hostile rubes on the Chinese Exclusion Act before throwing down hard. We may have seen his basic story a hundred times before, but we’ve never seen it told in precisely this way.