Day: June 23, 2006

I’m not even sure how, or what, to recommend–but a flat assertion that this is worth seeing won’t do.

The plot: a young man believes that aliens have infiltrated corporate culture, and are carrying out experiments on the Earth. To save all, the hero kidnaps a big-league asshole CEO and starts torturing the guy to get him to contact his e.t. cohorts and stop the destruction. The film begins in strange silly slapstick land and creeps, oddly, into serial killer territory; our hero is, unsurprisingly, a bit whacked, but a dark and often moving backstory turns the film into a kind of psychological thriller. With slapstick. And…

…well, genre’s hard to nail down. The director (Jun-hwan Jeong) has energy and style to burn, and while the film’s plot may suggest z-picture camp it’s done with A-level aesthetics. And, yeah, it actually has some emotional heft. It didn’t fully work for me, or it wasn’t the 5-star dazzle I’d hoped, but I was never less than engaged and always off-guard. Aren’t too many films that so ceaselessly, slyly tangle with genre. (‘Though I’m beginning to think that the great stuff coming out of South Korea has a lock on this hybridized aesthetic.) And now let this post linger without comment for years to come…..

Block Party is just plain fun. From the minute the menu loaded–a great clip of Chappelle, bullhorn in hand, yelling at a marching band and dancing–you get invited in; the sense of play makes this one of the best concert films I’ve ever seen, and I’m not even a particular fan of any of the musical acts (admiring all, but only really digging the Fugees on my own time). Like The Last Waltz, I ended up loving the performances because of so much context, so clear a sense of the performers’ joy, despite my prior disinterest in the musicians.

The movie does a wonderful job capturing the infectious energy of Chappelle, intercutting performances with clips of Dave preparing the site, encouraging folks from his hometown in Ohio to come (with golden tickets and bus) to the show in Bed-Stuy, goofing with the site’s residents. The film slips in sideways a pretty hard-edged critique (of racism, of politics, of the relationship between those two and celebrity) while remaining never less than party-minded; in fact, and this is what I’ve always loved about Chappelle (and separates his challenges from a comic like Sarah Silverman) is that sense of invitation. It’s a party, it’s silly… even as his material (and the musicians’ performances) remains explicitly political and incisive.

He has a fantastic joke about the D.C. snipers, that he slips in after a serious discussion of the pressures placed on black performers who are celebrated by predominantly white audiences (I won’t give it away) . . . and the joke conveys yet complicates, affirms while not simply asserting the problems discussed: the joke flirts with racism, confuses those of us in the audience just marked by the discussion as a problem. Great, great stuff. I want more Chappelle, and I’m also mightily impressed by Michel Gondry’s work directing.