A few reviews

[mnkykungfu]

She's Gotta Have It (1986)

I've only seen a couple of Spike Lee joints, and what I've seen mostly hasn't been my speed (though I did quite like Inside Man, but that seems like an outlier).  Watched this as another alternative Thanksgiving movie.  haha  Honestly, it's pretty ahead of it's time.  I don't really know how much it spoke to any kind of typical black experience, but it does definitely mark Lee as a unique voice.  He's by far the best part of the movie, both behind the camera and in front (as the above trailer shows).  The dialogue for the film is a little bluntly realized at times, and hard to deliver, though Lee makes it seem natural.  The other actors don't have the chops though, and the film kind of clunks along without anyone really pulling you in.  I was never really sure what the motivations were of any of the characters too, as everyone seemed pretty 2-dimensional.  But it's an interesting little indie film, and I'm sure it spoke to some people quite loudly back in the day.

Black Mirror: S2E4 - White Christmas (2014)

I'm not really a huge fan of Black Mirror and have only watched a few episodes.  The ones I've seen, well...I don't know a nice way to say this.  They seem like what dumb people think "smart" writing is.  Don't get me wrong, there's always an interesting idea at the core, but the writers never figure out a way to see that idea all the way through.  There's a beginning hook, and then a big pop ending, but somewhere in the middle they jump the shark with character decisions or logic conveniences that are completely unbelievable.  It if were a big, dumb action movie, I could look past it.  But when the whole point is that you're cleverly envisioning a wicked future, then the emphasis had really better be on the clever.

Well, this particularly standalone mini-movie came quite recommended, so I decided to give it a shot for some Christmas viewing.  And it does really have its moments.  There is a Russian nesting doll type story structure so that the 3 short-stories in this film actually continually relate to each other, despite appearing to be separate.  If you're paying attention while watching, it is quite clever that what you see in one section comes to have a greater impact on the others.  The performances in each are quite good as well, in particular Jon Hamm of course, who brings the right combination of cool confidence and dark cynical humor that makes the role shine.

Where the film falls apart a bit is in it's portrayal of human psychology.  It's a common flaw in the series.  At a certain point, they just assume that people will go along in a behavior that allows the story to continue, and the audience is so interested in seeing how the idea pans out that they just let them get away with it.  But real people aren't so simple, and that's what holds this series back from really being great.  There are examples like this in the choices people make in the 1st and 3rd stories (the logic of giving consent to view recordings of people is wildly inconsistent for example) but the most glaring case is the 2nd story.  It essentially posits that solitary confinement turns people into compliant computer programs when we presently have lots of evidence to the contrary.  As much as the show posits what might happen in the future, I'd like them to ground it a bit more in present day research, and a bit less in a kind of clingy nihilism.