Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/04/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot, 2019)

Cast: Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, Rob Morgan, Tichina Arnold, Mike Epps, Finn Wittrock, Danny Glover, Willie Hen, Jamal Truelove. Screenplay: Joe Talbot, Jimmie Fails, Rob Richert. Cinematography: Adam Newport-Berra. Production design: Jona Tochet. Film editing: David Marks. Music: Emile Mosseri.

With Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada, 2018) and Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018), The Last Black Man in San Francisco forms a kind of trilogy of films about gentrification in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first two films are based in Oakland, but the center of gravity in the area is what people continue to call The City. Jimmie Fails (the character and the actor-writer have the same name) is obsessed with a Victorian house in which his family used to live, back when old houses were cheap and many of them were located in predominantly black neighborhoods. He has convinced himself somehow that the house was built in 1946 by his grandfather, who settled in San Francisco after the war, and that the decline of the family fortunes, brought about by his father's fecklessness, robbed him of his heritage. Jimmie now lives in the rundown Bayview-Hunters Point area of San Francisco, bunking with his friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) and Mont's blind grandfather (Danny Glover), but whenever he can he takes the bus or rides his skateboard to the old house and surreptitiously does what he can to keep it up whenever the elderly couple who live there are away. The more realistic Mont does what he can to dispel his friend's illusions, but when the residents move out and the house is held up because of conflicts over its ownership, Jimmie moves in and tries to claim ownership himself. Eventually, Jimmie is forced to confront reality. Meanwhile, Fails and writer-director Joe Talbot craft a loving but pained portrait of what San Francisco has become in an era of severe income disparity. The film is neither as pointed as Blindspotting nor as raucously satiric as Sorry to Bother You, but it accumulates its own special poignancy in its exploration of the racial and economic disjunctions of the 21st century.