Dec 13, 2024
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Four Indies Out of Oakland, Some with Bullets
by Doniphan Blair
D, beautifully rendered by Stanley Hunt, tries to separate from his homies as they rob a store in "Licks" (2013), one of Oakland's hottest films in recent years. photo: courtesy J. Singer-VineTHEY SMOKED A KID NAMED MARIO
behind my building three weeks ago. Three nights later, dozens of candles, balloons and notes honoring him were alongside the parking lot fence when I drove in. In the warm, flickering candlelight, two women were praying.
Maybe if Mario had been shot by a cop I could find out his last name. But it was not in the news and an internet search and a call to the Oakland Police Department (OPD) revealed nothing. Probably just another Oakland kid trying to get his groove on when he stepped into a drug turf war.
54 Oaklanders have been murdered so far this year, many for that very reason.
As sick as it sounds, however, 54 puts us on track to a 40-year low, a fantastic achievement, especially given the underage sex scandal eviscerating the OPD for the last two years—three police chiefs in ONE WEEK last summer!
Admittedly, “The Celeste Guap Story” is a fascinating one, as indicated at the end of “The Force”, the interesting new documentary about the OPD, both of which we will get to below.
But prostitution and rape are second-fiddle social disruptors compared to murder. And most Oakland murders are drive-by misses, botched robberies and “send-a-message” slaughters like Mario, making them even more disgusting.
On August 9th, Dave Deporis gave chase to the guys who grabbed his computer, while he was sitting in a café in North Oakland in broad daylight. A 40 year-old singer/songwriter, Deporis’s entire oeuvre was on that computer. After confronting his assailants at their car, Deporis was dragged to his death.
Who amongst us is truly trying to tackle this sociopathology: the schools, the social workers, the black churches, the police, the art press?
Arguably the best feature out of Oakland in decades, “Licks” is so studded with the n-word and local slang, like “whip” for car, as to be almost unintelligible, while its denigration of women—many of its protagonists are pimps, although they adore their mothers and grandmothers—makes it almost unwatchable.
Rell, intensely rendered by Koran Streets, comes in for the kill during a home invasion in "Licks", until he notices a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr on the wall. photo: courtesy J. Singer-Vine“The audience must be assassinated, killed, destroyed... they must leave the theater as new people,” according to Alejandro Jodorosky, the visionary director of “El Topo” (1970). "Licks” does exactly that, first by feel, then intellectually, until it unfolds into a fully metaphored and moralized journey.
When the downstate studios saw "Licks", they sat up and grabbed their checkbooks, albeit under one condition: director Jonathan Singer-Vine, 29, clean it up. He declined with extreme prejudice, I assume, since not a single n-word appears to be missing.
First released four years ago, although now with a 2016 date, “Licks” finally appeared on Amazon, where I was able to catch it, after hearing about it and emailing its producers for three-and-a-half years.
Once you get over "Licks"' abusive price of entry, you enter the circumscribed world of D as he is confronted by and confronts thug life. It would be comic—he is nicknamed “Li’l Pimp”—if it wasn’t so tragic and well produced.
Played by Stanley “Doc” Hunt with a wickedly slow and deep enunciation, which should make him the Clint Eastwood of West Oakland, the film opens in deep romantic territory but soon segues to D and his crew prepping to boost a liquor store, the titular “lick.”
And what a crew it is. Scary as hell, Rell is a rasta-haired cat with a face full of scar tissue, although we later see him helping his grandmother. Played to the hilt by Koran Streets, who suffered a fire in childhood (making those injuries real), Streets is also a trained actor and the son of Ayodele Nzinga, founder/director of Lower Bottom Playaz, a West Oakland theater company.
Incensed that D doesn’t have his “hammer,” which he left at his girlfriend’s, Rell hands him a mirror, the handle of which might pass for a gun barrel when waved in the face of a person beshitting themselves. An odd prop and story twist, that mirror signals “Licks”' ambitious metaphorical journey, especially as the robbery goes from bad to worse, from action-adventure to tragic-comic and finally romantic sadomasochism.
The story restarts with D’s release from prison two years later. Attempting to reenter the real world, he deals with his old buds and girlfriend (now a mother) and his parole officer, replete with a piss-in-the-cup scene, also played for odd irony. The desperate need to find work is a leitmotif throughout, right to the film's finale.
Big John, one of the toughest characters in "Licks" (Steve Joel Moffet Jr.), tests out his machine gun. photo: courtesy J. Singer-VineThe entire film has only two white people—an elderly woman, on the floor with a knee in her back and gun to her head, and a fat john slithering out of a sleazy motel room—and no police whatsoever, be it in contact, sight or even mention.
Although the director and story developer, Singer-Vine, is “a self-described ‘white guy from Berkeley,’” according to SF Chronicle reporter Chip Johnson, he obviously did prodigious research and had immense assistance (writing credits are shared with Justin 'Hongry' Robinson and Nicholas Philipides).
"We know those situations very closely,” “Licks” producer and technical adviser Adrian Burrell, 27, told Johnson in 2013, when the film showed at Oakland’s Parkside Theater for only a week. Burrell, who’s black, was just starting his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute’s film department, which recently expanded its scope under the leadership of Christopher Coppola.
“Licks” took awards at South By South West and other festivals and showed at the 2013 Oakland International Film Festival. “It was one of the top films,” recalled David Roach, that festival's dedicated director, when we chatted recently. “When we showed it at the Grand Lake Theater, it sold out and we had to add a show. The director and a lot of the actors were there.”
“There was a lot of energy around the film. I wouldn’t call it thug energy: it was a peaceful and attentive crowd. But some people thought we had seen that story before, that Oakland didn’t need that story right now.”
That's an understandable complaint: Why show the psychologically at-risk extreme violence, be it tigers tearing apart gazelles or anything else?
Alas, art can engage the heart and tame the wild beast. Indeed, “Licks” is both real and moral enough to seduce even full-fledged thugs into—if not abiding the law—at least doing the right thing, as much as difficult circumstances will allow. It certainly shows the "shaman's way" more successfully then guidance councilors let alone parole officers could ever hope to do.
Burrel, Singer-Vine and the rest of their talented team of actors, tech, and other advisors (some undoubtedly deep undercover) did a fantastic job. Like Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch of “Tangerine” (2015) and now “The Florida Project” (2017), they researched their subject so thoroughly, they created what appears to be a documentary, betrayed only by the symmetric and slow-tracking cinematography of Rob Witt.
Arlen (Kelechi Nwadibia) and Lenora (Sarah Rose Butler) relax in their favorite Cali paradise (Bodega Bay) in the sophomore feature from Frazer Bradshaw, "The Deep Sky" (upside down in the original). photo: courtesy F. BradshawWorlds away from D is Arlen, the twenty something industrial designer at the center of Frazer Bradshaw’s long-awaited new feature, “The Deep Sky”, who happens to be black.
Well-rendered by Kelechi Nwadibia, if a tad too smiley, there’s no hint Arlen would have the faintest idea about the Oakland of “Licks” or that he is even black, in anything more than melanin levels, until the stunning reveal of that film’s finale. Oakland itself is not even mentioned in “The Deep Sky”, since Bradshaw, a well-known local cinematog and long-time North Oakland resident, has it crossdressing as San Francisco.
Which is just as it should be. Oakland is the Walt Whitman of American cities: “I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Multi-classal as well as -cultural, -racial and -tribal, Oaklanders like to blow bud and discuss Sufi love poetry on Ikea couches while over the rooftops echoes the sustained rattle of automatic rifle fire.
It’s hard to appreciate the raw feelings in “The Deep Sky”, given Bradshaw’s first feature was the very Oakland, working-class and hipster “Everything Strange and New” (2009), except for the fact it concerns polyamory.
As it happens, polyamory is a greater threat to Oakland couples, even the miscegenating ones, than murder or racism. A seemingly-solipsistic exercise for cool West Coasters, polyamory has been challenging Oakland’s romantic culture for decades, some insisting it’s the only way to be an honest and loving person, others reviling it as ridiculous. Can you really say you love someone whom you call your “secondary”!?!
It’s also a very European issue, where having a mistress or a lover has long been accepted. His eye on that market, Bradshaw features long, slow shots of Arlen talking with his girlfriend Lenora (Sarah Rose Butler—it’s her second and Nwadibia’s first features), replete with them voicing their emotions and philosophies directly to camera.
When they finally agree to "open" their relationship, they invite into their bed Nina, nicely acted by Luise Helm, who happens to be German, an utterly irrelevant fact until, like Arlen’s blackness, it’s suddenly not.
After the difficulties of “Everything Strange and New”—it was rejected by distributors but hailed by critics, including cineSOURCE (see article), Bradshaw decided to school his sophomore feature for success by adopting an even tighter budget, financing it himself, exerting more control (he also wrote) and going cool.
Luise Helm, who plays Nina, takes a selfie in a 'The Deep Sky' shoot in Bodega Bay, while the film's star Kelechi Nwadibia looks on. photo: courtesy F. BradshawIndeed, “The Deep Sky” looks good, given Bradshaw’s unobtrusive but excellent cinematography, subtly lit with stuff enunciating the frame edges. Although in desperate need of a plate-throwing scream fest, “The Deep Sky” thoroughly examines a critical issue among young couples today—especially in Oakland—and pays off in the end.
“The Force”, the documentary about the Oakland Police Department by Peter Nick currently in theaters, starts arty, in keeping with a style he established in “The Waiting Room” (2012), his investigation of Oakland’s Highland Hospital and its famous gunshot-expert MDs. Although that style didn't quite capture the Highland chaos I've experienced—sharing a waiting room with a hundred gun shot, chainsaw and car accident victims, many moaning in pain, in “The Force” it works, allowing you to relax into cruising around with an OPD officer with the incongruous last name of Cairo.
Nick, whose is black and an Oaklander, allows ample time for community members to air their opinions of the OPD (not good—indeed, some African-American friends of mine will not call the OPD under any circumstances), but riding around with Officer Cairo makes him rather sympathetic. And "The Force" does much the same for his boss, Police Chief Sean Wendt.
A well-spoken, calm man, even under withering criticism or hysterical circumstances, Chief Wendt was making progress in Oakland, helping reduce the murder rate from a horrific high of 145, in 2006, to half that today. Alas, Wendt was inattentive to the underage prostitute scandal brewing in his bailiwick and resigned immediately after it exploded, which was right in the middle of Nick’s shoot, blowing a massive hole in his narrative arc as well as Wendt's moral authority.
To do justice to the sex scandal story, Nick would have needed a whole ‘nother doc—BUT it could have been a masterpiece, given the colorful characters, the sex and the fact that almost everyone involved is in denial about its root issues and dramas.
Titled “The Celeste Guap Story”, such a doc could have followed the well-endowed as well as beautiful young heroine, who used to go by that name, on her long peregrination from Nicaragua to Oakland, where her mother found work as a dispatcher for the OPD.
Oakland Officer Cairo makes a collar in the 'The Force', from the established Oakland docmaker Peter Nick. photo: courtesy P. NickAt some point “The Celeste Guap Story” could detail what “Licks” shows from the male street perspective: that Oakland is an internationally-famous prostitution center. While this is understandably upsetting to many, and others are dutifully working their damnedest to diminish it, it is perfectly logical since A) San Francisco was once the Brothel of the West, B) prostitution was only outlawed here 100 years ago, C) the brothel madams married judges and police chiefs, and D) the poor of any urban area will excel at whoring.
This pertains everywhere on earth, Oakland is no exception and the Bay Area is filthy rich.
From that harsh awakening to our actual history, “The Celeste Guap Story” could suddenly turn romantic with the colorful and wily adventures of the 16-year-old Celeste as she learned to walk the often-mean streets of East Oakland but also got involved with and won the hearts of first one cop, then another, and then another. Ultimately, there were almost thirty, from San Francisco and San Leandro as well as Oakland, in a homoerotic officer orgy of incredible proportions, now morphing into a long courtroom drama and the decimation of the OPD.
Fortunately, the force installed a female police chief, Anne Kirkpatrick, who seems functional, and Ms. Guap will emerge a millionaire, triumphant to tell her own story, set up a foundation or, at the very least, attend cocktail parties around town (like the madams of yore).
A million miles from the travails of Ms. Guap, not to mention D and Rell, or even Arlen and Lenora, is the existential angst of two twenty-something women addressed in the comedy “#wanderlust”, the freshman film from Maggie VandenBerghe.
“I was going to get certified in yoga,” says Diana, one of those women, sharply if subtly acted by director VandenBerghe, to her friend Alex, nicely played by Liz Clare. “But then I realized I don’t even like yoga.”
There's also "I have no clue what I am going to do... Marriage isn't exactly what I expected..." until the very "booshy" Diana decides to join Alex on a trip to Hawaii, where Alex is trying to become an Instagram star, "glamping" around in a supposedly shabby but actually rather deluxe van.
Liz Clare (lft) and Maggie VandenBerghe, who also directed '#wanderlust', realize they're unfulfilled and need a road trip. photo: courtesy M. VandenBergheAlthough the comedy is a notch too dry to be fully recognizable, Oakland's film scene also needs spaced-out white chicks in existential crisis who figure out how to function—in Diana's case with the help of Guru Rah (Mark Wilson), the only African-American in that film, although he may just be well tanned.
"#wanderlust" does feature some quality acting and self-deprecation as well as a nice track by Benjamin Michael Bruce and decent cinematography by Leonides Jaramillo, who uses the "white look" (the opposite of chiaroscuro), despite some annoying lens flares. And it does highlight "Man's Search for Meaning," to crib Victor Frankl's eloquent title, albeit in this case, "young women's rummaging around for relevance."
Indeed, that is the big question: can we evolve fast enough to fashion a worldview functional enough to stay one step ahead of the bullets or Trump's catastrophes, not to mention the ridiculous male sex scandals or the strange strategies of some of our most eloquent activists.
Speaking of which Blackpantherparty.com is for sale, only $24,000 from UniRegistry out of the Cayman Islands, all you have to do is beat the latest offer of $10,000.
The only hope for all this confusion, I believe, is a place like Oakland, where reasonably real versions of a wide variety of difficult stories can be told, acted out and, to some degree, understood.
Hopefully, those stories will also include Mario, and his last name.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Oct 16, 2017 - 08:33 PM
by Doniphan Blair
D, beautifully rendered by Stanley Hunt, tries to separate from his homies as they rob a store in "Licks" (2013), one of Oakland's hottest films in recent years. photo: courtesy J. Singer-Vinebehind my building three weeks ago. Three nights later, dozens of candles, balloons and notes honoring him were alongside the parking lot fence when I drove in. In the warm, flickering candlelight, two women were praying.
Maybe if Mario had been shot by a cop I could find out his last name. But it was not in the news and an internet search and a call to the Oakland Police Department (OPD) revealed nothing. Probably just another Oakland kid trying to get his groove on when he stepped into a drug turf war.
54 Oaklanders have been murdered so far this year, many for that very reason.
As sick as it sounds, however, 54 puts us on track to a 40-year low, a fantastic achievement, especially given the underage sex scandal eviscerating the OPD for the last two years—three police chiefs in ONE WEEK last summer!
Admittedly, “The Celeste Guap Story” is a fascinating one, as indicated at the end of “The Force”, the interesting new documentary about the OPD, both of which we will get to below.
But prostitution and rape are second-fiddle social disruptors compared to murder. And most Oakland murders are drive-by misses, botched robberies and “send-a-message” slaughters like Mario, making them even more disgusting.
On August 9th, Dave Deporis gave chase to the guys who grabbed his computer, while he was sitting in a café in North Oakland in broad daylight. A 40 year-old singer/songwriter, Deporis’s entire oeuvre was on that computer. After confronting his assailants at their car, Deporis was dragged to his death.
Who amongst us is truly trying to tackle this sociopathology: the schools, the social workers, the black churches, the police, the art press?
Arguably the best feature out of Oakland in decades, “Licks” is so studded with the n-word and local slang, like “whip” for car, as to be almost unintelligible, while its denigration of women—many of its protagonists are pimps, although they adore their mothers and grandmothers—makes it almost unwatchable.
Rell, intensely rendered by Koran Streets, comes in for the kill during a home invasion in "Licks", until he notices a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr on the wall. photo: courtesy J. Singer-VineWhen the downstate studios saw "Licks", they sat up and grabbed their checkbooks, albeit under one condition: director Jonathan Singer-Vine, 29, clean it up. He declined with extreme prejudice, I assume, since not a single n-word appears to be missing.
First released four years ago, although now with a 2016 date, “Licks” finally appeared on Amazon, where I was able to catch it, after hearing about it and emailing its producers for three-and-a-half years.
Once you get over "Licks"' abusive price of entry, you enter the circumscribed world of D as he is confronted by and confronts thug life. It would be comic—he is nicknamed “Li’l Pimp”—if it wasn’t so tragic and well produced.
Played by Stanley “Doc” Hunt with a wickedly slow and deep enunciation, which should make him the Clint Eastwood of West Oakland, the film opens in deep romantic territory but soon segues to D and his crew prepping to boost a liquor store, the titular “lick.”
And what a crew it is. Scary as hell, Rell is a rasta-haired cat with a face full of scar tissue, although we later see him helping his grandmother. Played to the hilt by Koran Streets, who suffered a fire in childhood (making those injuries real), Streets is also a trained actor and the son of Ayodele Nzinga, founder/director of Lower Bottom Playaz, a West Oakland theater company.
Incensed that D doesn’t have his “hammer,” which he left at his girlfriend’s, Rell hands him a mirror, the handle of which might pass for a gun barrel when waved in the face of a person beshitting themselves. An odd prop and story twist, that mirror signals “Licks”' ambitious metaphorical journey, especially as the robbery goes from bad to worse, from action-adventure to tragic-comic and finally romantic sadomasochism.
The story restarts with D’s release from prison two years later. Attempting to reenter the real world, he deals with his old buds and girlfriend (now a mother) and his parole officer, replete with a piss-in-the-cup scene, also played for odd irony. The desperate need to find work is a leitmotif throughout, right to the film's finale.
Big John, one of the toughest characters in "Licks" (Steve Joel Moffet Jr.), tests out his machine gun. photo: courtesy J. Singer-VineAlthough the director and story developer, Singer-Vine, is “a self-described ‘white guy from Berkeley,’” according to SF Chronicle reporter Chip Johnson, he obviously did prodigious research and had immense assistance (writing credits are shared with Justin 'Hongry' Robinson and Nicholas Philipides).
"We know those situations very closely,” “Licks” producer and technical adviser Adrian Burrell, 27, told Johnson in 2013, when the film showed at Oakland’s Parkside Theater for only a week. Burrell, who’s black, was just starting his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute’s film department, which recently expanded its scope under the leadership of Christopher Coppola.
“Licks” took awards at South By South West and other festivals and showed at the 2013 Oakland International Film Festival. “It was one of the top films,” recalled David Roach, that festival's dedicated director, when we chatted recently. “When we showed it at the Grand Lake Theater, it sold out and we had to add a show. The director and a lot of the actors were there.”
“There was a lot of energy around the film. I wouldn’t call it thug energy: it was a peaceful and attentive crowd. But some people thought we had seen that story before, that Oakland didn’t need that story right now.”
That's an understandable complaint: Why show the psychologically at-risk extreme violence, be it tigers tearing apart gazelles or anything else?
Alas, art can engage the heart and tame the wild beast. Indeed, “Licks” is both real and moral enough to seduce even full-fledged thugs into—if not abiding the law—at least doing the right thing, as much as difficult circumstances will allow. It certainly shows the "shaman's way" more successfully then guidance councilors let alone parole officers could ever hope to do.
Burrel, Singer-Vine and the rest of their talented team of actors, tech, and other advisors (some undoubtedly deep undercover) did a fantastic job. Like Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch of “Tangerine” (2015) and now “The Florida Project” (2017), they researched their subject so thoroughly, they created what appears to be a documentary, betrayed only by the symmetric and slow-tracking cinematography of Rob Witt.
Arlen (Kelechi Nwadibia) and Lenora (Sarah Rose Butler) relax in their favorite Cali paradise (Bodega Bay) in the sophomore feature from Frazer Bradshaw, "The Deep Sky" (upside down in the original). photo: courtesy F. BradshawWell-rendered by Kelechi Nwadibia, if a tad too smiley, there’s no hint Arlen would have the faintest idea about the Oakland of “Licks” or that he is even black, in anything more than melanin levels, until the stunning reveal of that film’s finale. Oakland itself is not even mentioned in “The Deep Sky”, since Bradshaw, a well-known local cinematog and long-time North Oakland resident, has it crossdressing as San Francisco.
Which is just as it should be. Oakland is the Walt Whitman of American cities: “I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Multi-classal as well as -cultural, -racial and -tribal, Oaklanders like to blow bud and discuss Sufi love poetry on Ikea couches while over the rooftops echoes the sustained rattle of automatic rifle fire.
It’s hard to appreciate the raw feelings in “The Deep Sky”, given Bradshaw’s first feature was the very Oakland, working-class and hipster “Everything Strange and New” (2009), except for the fact it concerns polyamory.
As it happens, polyamory is a greater threat to Oakland couples, even the miscegenating ones, than murder or racism. A seemingly-solipsistic exercise for cool West Coasters, polyamory has been challenging Oakland’s romantic culture for decades, some insisting it’s the only way to be an honest and loving person, others reviling it as ridiculous. Can you really say you love someone whom you call your “secondary”!?!
It’s also a very European issue, where having a mistress or a lover has long been accepted. His eye on that market, Bradshaw features long, slow shots of Arlen talking with his girlfriend Lenora (Sarah Rose Butler—it’s her second and Nwadibia’s first features), replete with them voicing their emotions and philosophies directly to camera.
When they finally agree to "open" their relationship, they invite into their bed Nina, nicely acted by Luise Helm, who happens to be German, an utterly irrelevant fact until, like Arlen’s blackness, it’s suddenly not.
After the difficulties of “Everything Strange and New”—it was rejected by distributors but hailed by critics, including cineSOURCE (see article), Bradshaw decided to school his sophomore feature for success by adopting an even tighter budget, financing it himself, exerting more control (he also wrote) and going cool.
Luise Helm, who plays Nina, takes a selfie in a 'The Deep Sky' shoot in Bodega Bay, while the film's star Kelechi Nwadibia looks on. photo: courtesy F. Bradshaw“The Force”, the documentary about the Oakland Police Department by Peter Nick currently in theaters, starts arty, in keeping with a style he established in “The Waiting Room” (2012), his investigation of Oakland’s Highland Hospital and its famous gunshot-expert MDs. Although that style didn't quite capture the Highland chaos I've experienced—sharing a waiting room with a hundred gun shot, chainsaw and car accident victims, many moaning in pain, in “The Force” it works, allowing you to relax into cruising around with an OPD officer with the incongruous last name of Cairo.
Nick, whose is black and an Oaklander, allows ample time for community members to air their opinions of the OPD (not good—indeed, some African-American friends of mine will not call the OPD under any circumstances), but riding around with Officer Cairo makes him rather sympathetic. And "The Force" does much the same for his boss, Police Chief Sean Wendt.
A well-spoken, calm man, even under withering criticism or hysterical circumstances, Chief Wendt was making progress in Oakland, helping reduce the murder rate from a horrific high of 145, in 2006, to half that today. Alas, Wendt was inattentive to the underage prostitute scandal brewing in his bailiwick and resigned immediately after it exploded, which was right in the middle of Nick’s shoot, blowing a massive hole in his narrative arc as well as Wendt's moral authority.
To do justice to the sex scandal story, Nick would have needed a whole ‘nother doc—BUT it could have been a masterpiece, given the colorful characters, the sex and the fact that almost everyone involved is in denial about its root issues and dramas.
Titled “The Celeste Guap Story”, such a doc could have followed the well-endowed as well as beautiful young heroine, who used to go by that name, on her long peregrination from Nicaragua to Oakland, where her mother found work as a dispatcher for the OPD.
Oakland Officer Cairo makes a collar in the 'The Force', from the established Oakland docmaker Peter Nick. photo: courtesy P. NickThis pertains everywhere on earth, Oakland is no exception and the Bay Area is filthy rich.
From that harsh awakening to our actual history, “The Celeste Guap Story” could suddenly turn romantic with the colorful and wily adventures of the 16-year-old Celeste as she learned to walk the often-mean streets of East Oakland but also got involved with and won the hearts of first one cop, then another, and then another. Ultimately, there were almost thirty, from San Francisco and San Leandro as well as Oakland, in a homoerotic officer orgy of incredible proportions, now morphing into a long courtroom drama and the decimation of the OPD.
Fortunately, the force installed a female police chief, Anne Kirkpatrick, who seems functional, and Ms. Guap will emerge a millionaire, triumphant to tell her own story, set up a foundation or, at the very least, attend cocktail parties around town (like the madams of yore).
A million miles from the travails of Ms. Guap, not to mention D and Rell, or even Arlen and Lenora, is the existential angst of two twenty-something women addressed in the comedy “#wanderlust”, the freshman film from Maggie VandenBerghe.
“I was going to get certified in yoga,” says Diana, one of those women, sharply if subtly acted by director VandenBerghe, to her friend Alex, nicely played by Liz Clare. “But then I realized I don’t even like yoga.”
There's also "I have no clue what I am going to do... Marriage isn't exactly what I expected..." until the very "booshy" Diana decides to join Alex on a trip to Hawaii, where Alex is trying to become an Instagram star, "glamping" around in a supposedly shabby but actually rather deluxe van.
Liz Clare (lft) and Maggie VandenBerghe, who also directed '#wanderlust', realize they're unfulfilled and need a road trip. photo: courtesy M. VandenBerghe"#wanderlust" does feature some quality acting and self-deprecation as well as a nice track by Benjamin Michael Bruce and decent cinematography by Leonides Jaramillo, who uses the "white look" (the opposite of chiaroscuro), despite some annoying lens flares. And it does highlight "Man's Search for Meaning," to crib Victor Frankl's eloquent title, albeit in this case, "young women's rummaging around for relevance."
Indeed, that is the big question: can we evolve fast enough to fashion a worldview functional enough to stay one step ahead of the bullets or Trump's catastrophes, not to mention the ridiculous male sex scandals or the strange strategies of some of our most eloquent activists.
Speaking of which Blackpantherparty.com is for sale, only $24,000 from UniRegistry out of the Cayman Islands, all you have to do is beat the latest offer of $10,000.
The only hope for all this confusion, I believe, is a place like Oakland, where reasonably real versions of a wide variety of difficult stories can be told, acted out and, to some degree, understood.
Hopefully, those stories will also include Mario, and his last name.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Oct 16, 2017 - 08:33 PM
