I say a lot of things.
Who knows, I might end up writing about all of them. But I'm writing about this one for a number of particular reasons, certainly not listed in the order of their importance, or if anything, listed in the inverse order.
1. The cover of this DVD I bought from a closing video store back in 2015. It's like an archeological find that captures the video store at the exact moment before its death. At this point they were renting out videos for a whole week for only $1.90. So it went from $1.90 to borrow it for a week to $3 to own it for the rest of my life. RIP, video stores.
2. Something funny I noticed on this cover. It has a picture of Taryn Manning with her eyes closed and her lips basically touching the microphone that she turns a trick in order to acquire. But she never actually sings in the film. I suppose maybe this image was just intended as a metaphor -- almost like a sexual relationship with the microphone? -- or maybe it's from a scene that ended up on the cutting room floor.
3. My region-free DVD player, one of our first purchases after moving to Australia, might be dead. For a while now I have had trouble with its tray ejecting properly. When I watched Looking for Richard the other week, which I also bought during the closure of the aforementioned video store, I got the tray to eject well enough to receive the disk, but it could not identify the disk. I thought it might have been an issue with the DVD itself, but it played fine on my computer, which is where I ultimately ended up watching it. My computer was where I ended up watching Hustle & Flow, though I did connect it to our TV via HDMI so as to get the maximum size of the image. I had to do this because in trying to wrench open the DVD tray, I ended up pulling it out of the player entirely. I'd like to take a pass at opening it up and fixing it, but it might finally be time to replace this stalwart piece of technology -- or else admit to ourselves that DVDs are a thing of the past and not get a replacement. I can watch DVDs from the correct region through my computer, but any of my collection originating in the U.S., which includes dozens of titles, will be inaccessible to me if I go this route. Sad face.
4. Because it was a shitty video store DVD, the image quality was not great. I don't think the video store pirated it or anything, that would be pretty shady and this was a legit store. Plus Hustle & Flow is supposed to look a little, or a lot, grungy. But I reckon the image quality would have been a lot better on BluRay or streaming, and I hope this didn't impact my feelings about the movie as I was watching it. (Incidentally, when I was having those problems getting the DVD player's tray to open, I checked to see if I could find it streaming anywhere for free. Nope, only for rental.)
5. As I was updating my list of rewatches on Letterboxd, I noticed I had given Hustle & Flow only 4.5 stars when I retroactively assigned star ratings to all my previous viewings upon first getting started with Letterboxd, just about exactly ten years ago. (Hey, another occasion for an anniversary post if I weren't already flooded with content just waiting for its chance to get posted online.) This is significant for two reasons: 1) I was much less generous with my star ratings when I first started on Letterboxd. I gave Tangled only 4.5 stars, which now seems insane. 2) I had previously thought Parasite was my only #1 I had given less than five stars on Letterboxd, a star rating I would now boost to five if I were putting it in the first time. Parasite remains the only #1 I gave less than five stars in real time on Letterboxd, but having at least Hustle & Flow joining it in a retroactive assessment is an interesting wrinkle.
6. It's Black History Month, and this is the only #1 I've ever chosen that has Black themes of any kind.
This is what I really want to talk about.
I've only had one #1 film that contained more than a token representation of Black characters, and it couldn't even be directed by a Black director.
Craig Brewer does not seem guilty of cultural appropriation in Hustle & Flow -- this is not something we were talking about so much back in 2005 -- but it has always gnawed at me that the one time I picked a film about Black people, it's directed by a white guy.
But it's the only one time selecting a film about Black people that really gnaws at me.
I'd say I need to do better on this, but making it a conscious thing is a recipe for disaster. A #1 movie of any year is such a cherished object -- by me, anyway, as evidenced by the rewatch of #1s I'm doing in 2022 -- that if you try to boost a movie to that spot artificially, even based on admirable goals like trying to be more woke, you aren't being honest with yourself or anyone else. If I purposefully set out to "do better," I'd be polluting a process that should be pure.
The closest I've gotten in recent years was when Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman was my #2 of 2018. I felt it had a real shot at #1, but in the end I knew my appreciation for Paul Schrader's First Reformed was greater. And since I saw First Reformed first, I don't think it even spent any time in the #1 position before ultimately ending up at #2.
I'm desperate for this to occur organically, as you can probably tell. But there have not been any serious contenders since then, and I can't remember the last serious contender before that. If Beale Street Could Talk would have been a serious contender, as it finished even higher in my top 25 of the decade than BlacKkKlansman, but I didn't see it in time to rank it -- it was a very late release in Australia, not until after I'd closed my list. Besides, that was also the year of First Reformed, which was a very tough competitor -- I've already seen it four times in less than four years since I first saw it.
The real dispiriting element to this is that Black characters are few and far between in all of my #1s. I ran through them in my head the other night. I won't list all the titles that are painfully white, but instead, list the remaining options that at least have some decent Black representation on screen. And I can count them on one hand, other than Hustle & Flow: Children of Men, First Reformed, Our Friend. Crap, I don't even need all the fingers on the hand. That's not to say there are zero Black characters in the other films, just that they don't have any significant role in the story.
To be fair, it was more common back then for films to feature exclusively white people and for this not to raise any eyebrows. Only in the past decade have we made genuine strides on representation in film. Plus, five of those are foreign language films, where you are even less likely to find people of color.
Still, the whole thing feels pretty shameful.
I'd examine how this state of affairs has come to be, except it increases my sense of shame. Well, this is my blog and I always try to be honest with myself in this space, so let's do it.
If I were being as harsh on myself as possible, I'd say I need some sort of white character for a film to achieve maximum resonance for me. Even Hustle & Flow has two significant white characters, the sound engineer played by DJ Qualls and the prostitute played by Taryn Manning. (Interestingly, I noted Manning plays the ultimate white character in 2021's Karen, a multi-Golden Raspberry nominee, which I have rented and will watch within the next month.) BlacKkKlansman is notable for being told almost equally through the eyes of Adam Driver's character as John David Washington's character. I hate that the evidence suggests this is a contributing factor, but I'm not going to ignore the evidence either.
This is not to say that movies without white characters don't resonate with me. Take the If Beale Street Could Talk example. The only two white characters with any sort of dialogue are a malicious police officer played by Ed Skrein and a nice landlord played by Dave Franco. It would be silly to suggest that either character's perspective had anything to do with why the film resonated with me. It's just that a film starring exclusively people of color has yet to achieve the maximum resonance implied by naming it your #1. Barry Jenkins' film had two things going against it, the latter of which made the former moot: 1) It was going up against the juggernaut that was First Reformed, and 2) I didn't see it in time to rank it anyway.
In letting myself off the hook a little bit with this, I have to recognize exactly what I've concluded in the paragraph above: Some of this is just random. Had Beale Street been released a little earlier, and had I not caught First Reformed at MIFF, one might have been #1 and the other might have been the one I didn't see, given that First Reformed had a weird release strategy in Australia and I never actually observed it playing in theaters. It happened the other way around, and the history is what it is.
But speaking of history, Black History Month is a good time not only to rewatch this #1 -- remember I still had more than 20 others to choose from -- but also to examine some of the reasons it's so lonesome in my history of best films. I can tell you that as a cinephile surveying the slate of new releases each year, I sit there in a constant state of optimism -- some might say desperate hope -- about new Black-themed projects directed by Black directors, and the impact they could potentially have on me.
One hasn't risen to #1 yet, but I hope it's only a matter of time.
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