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Coming Out of a Sundance Blind Spot by Doniphan Blair
(lf-rt) 'Blindspotting' star Daveed Diggs, director Carlos Lopez Estrada, and other star Rafael Casal, who also co-wrote with Diggs. photo courtesy: CL Estrada
IT WAS A HO-HUM SUNDANCE FESTIVAL,
from January 18 to 28, according to cineSOURCE contacts, despite the fact the snowy streets of Park City, Utah, were burning with sex: an excess of inappropriate in some quarters, an absence of consensual in others.
Bigger than sex, however, was the absence of a door buster. Although the first Sundance in 1978 featured “Mean Streets” and “Midnight Cowboy”, and “Sex, Lies and Videotape” and “Reservoir Dogs” swept the hipster fest in 1989 and 1992, respectively, they don’t make indies like they used to, according to many viewers and reviewers.
Oakland to the rescue with “Blindspotting”, which world premiered Sundance's opening night, “the most exciting cinematic take on contemporary race relations since [Spike Lee's] ‘Do the Right Thing’ nearly 30 years ago,” according to Variety’s critic-in-cheif Peter Debruge.
Although some critics carped “too slick for its own good,” and “too many crane shots,” “Blindspotting” is the highest profile locally-produced film since “Fruitvale” (2012), which launched the stunning career of Oaklander Ryan Coogler, now in theaters nation-wide with the highend Hollywooder, “Black Panther” (2018).
Unrelated to the Black Panther Party, which also started in Oakland in 1966, “Black Panther”, the film, comes from “Black Panther”, the Marvel Comic, which appeared six months earlier in 1966 and covers a prince's return to a high tech but isolated African nation.
Returning to today’s Oakland, “Blindspotting” is a hybrid, appropriately enough, given the city's multicultural character. While titled a comedy, it involves race relations, gentrification, violence and a protagonist—played by Daveed Diggs, fresh off the massive Broadway hit “Hamilton”—about to go to prison. It also morphs into a musical, with people periodically bursting into song.
Diggs, who is Oakland-born and raised by an African-American father and Jewish-American mother, played “Hamilton”’s Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette, from its off-Broadway origins in 2015 to its Broadway triumph. The most acclaimed musical of recent memory, Diggs took a Best Featured Actor in a Musical Tony and a Grammy in 2016.
Diggs also wrote “Blindspotting” over the last ten years with his old friend Rafael Casal, who plays the same in the movie. Directing is first-timer Carlos Lopez Estrada, originally from Mexico City, now established in Los Angeles as a music video and commercial maker and Latin Grammy recipient.
Liking what they saw, the well-known indie distributor Lionsgate gobbled up “Blindspotting”, shortly after opening night, for $3 million.
Another Oakland offering, “Sorry to Bother You”, directed by local music legend and character, Boots Riley, made waves and was signed by Annapurna Pictures, renown producer of “American Hustle” (2013) and “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012).
“Sorry to Bother You” follows a black white-collar working stiff played by Lakeith Stanfield, who also stars in another East Bay film at Sundance, “Quest”, in an oddly-modern Oakland as he starts to climb the ladder of success but soon enters “a macabre universe."
Riley (47), who also wrote and produced, is well known as the lead rapper of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club.
Other Bay Area films shown at Sundance were “Quest” by Santiago Rizzo, concerning a young graffiti artist (see cineSOURCE article); “Hale County This Morning, This Evening”, a documentary by RaMell Ross, which took a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision; “Monsters and Men” by Reinaldo Marcus Green, which got the Special Jury Award for Outstanding First Feature, takes place in Brooklyn but was post-produced in the Bay Area, and was picked up by Neon; and “We the Animals”, directed by Jeremiah Zagar and written by Dan Kitrosser and Jeremiah Zagar, which garnered the NEXT Innovator Prize.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Feb 02, 2018 - 12:00 AM