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Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Granderson: Against vampires or tyrants, truth is the essential weapon
I fell in love with vampire movies after seeing the 1987 film 'The Lost Boys.' Before that movie, I had only seen those kinds of movies for the horror. Under the direction of the late Joel Schumacher, 'The Lost Boys' got me to see the storytelling beyond the scary parts. I've been hooked on vampire movies — good and bad — ever since. My favorite part of vampire movies is watching the protagonist realize the first weapon you need to kill a vampire is not a cross, garlic or sunlight. It's getting people to believe the truth. In 'The Lost Boys,' it was the ostracized who first tried to get the truth out and were ignored. Similarly, in Ryan Coogler's new movie 'Sinners' — which is set in the Mississippi Delta back in 1932 — it was the people society ignored the most who first gave warning to the masses. Don't get me wrong, I love a good vampire flick with sex appeal and blood. However, I am also fascinated with which character a director chooses to introduce the truth to the masses — and what it takes to get people to believe them. Given the constitutional crisis the nation currently finds itself in, watching the men in 'Sinners' readily accept the leadership of a qualified Black woman felt like a cinematic mulligan. The first weapon the founders established to protect against tyranny wasn't the right to bear arms. It was making sure the government could not stop citizens from speaking the truth. Corporate media outlets are a byproduct of capitalism, and so their primary concern is the bottom line. However, freedom of the press is a byproduct of the framers' desire to see democracy in this country survive. And having lived under the conditions of a tyrannical government, the authors of the Bill of Rights understood the primacy of free speech. What has always slowed this country's march toward a more perfect union hasn't been freedom of the press, but an unwillingness to believe truth. And as with the throughline in all of the vampire movies I love, it matters who is telling the truth to the masses. Back in 1938 the term 'gas light' was first introduced into the public lexicon through a play of the same name written by Thomas Hamilton. It tells the story of a wife who believes she is going insane because her criminal husband continues to lie to her. In 1944, a film based on the play was released. In one scene the husband has ensnared his unsuspecting wife in a web of lies so extensive that she questions her very upbringing with her mother. What freed her wasn't guns or laws. It was the truth. The psychological thriller was so influential that society continues to reference its premise in modern life — from personal relationships to politics — more than 90 years later. In storytelling, hiding the truth is one of the most effective ways for some characters to maintain control over others. Vampires in movies, deceitful husbands in plays, corrupt elected officials in office — their survival depends on the masses not knowing the truth. They also rely on people not believing those who are willing to speak out. The reason President Nixon was reelected after the Watergate scandal became public is that the masses were not willing to believe the truth. The thing about the truth is that it doesn't need acknowledgment from the public to exist. But to be of use, truth does need people willing to call it by name. That is the first weapon in the battle for good. Not surprisingly, it is also the first weapon evil tries to take away. @LZGranderson If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Against vampires or tyrants, truth is the essential weapon
I fell in love with vampire movies after seeing the 1987 film 'The Lost Boys.' Before that movie, I had only seen those kinds of movies for the horror. Under the direction of the late Joel Schumacher, 'The Lost Boys' got me to see the storytelling beyond the scary parts. I've been hooked on vampire movies — good and bad — ever since. My favorite part of vampire movies is watching the protagonist realize the first weapon you need to kill a vampire is not a cross, garlic or sunlight. It's getting people to believe the truth. In 'The Lost Boys,' it was the ostracized who first tried to get the truth out and were ignored. Similarly, in Ryan Coogler's new movie 'Sinners' — which is set in the Mississippi Delta back in 1932 — it was the people society ignored the most who first gave warning to the masses. Don't get me wrong, I love a good vampire flick with sex appeal and blood. However, I am also fascinated with which character a director chooses to introduce the truth to the masses — and what it takes to get people to believe them. Given the constitutional crisis the nation currently finds itself in, watching the men in 'Sinners' readily accept the leadership of a qualified Black woman felt like a cinematic mulligan. The first weapon the founders established to protect against tyranny wasn't the right to bear arms. It was making sure the government could not stop citizens from speaking the truth. Corporate media outlets are a byproduct of capitalism, and so their primary concern is the bottom line. However, freedom of the press is a byproduct of the framers' desire to see democracy in this country survive. And having lived under the conditions of a tyrannical government, the authors of the Bill of Rights understood the primacy of free speech. What has always slowed this country's march toward a more perfect union hasn't been freedom of the press, but an unwillingness to believe truth. And as with the throughline in all of the vampire movies I love, it matters who is telling the truth to the masses. Back in 1938 the term 'gas light' was first introduced into the public lexicon through a play of the same name written by Thomas Hamilton. It tells the story of a wife who believes she is going insane because her criminal husband continues to lie to her. In 1944, a film based on the play was released. In one scene the husband has ensnared his unsuspecting wife in a web of lies so extensive that she questions her very upbringing with her mother. What freed her wasn't guns or laws. It was the truth. The psychological thriller was so influential that society continues to reference its premise in modern life — from personal relationships to politics — more than 90 years later. In storytelling, hiding the truth is one of the most effective ways for some characters to maintain control over others. Vampires in movies, deceitful husbands in plays, corrupt elected officials in office — their survival depends on the masses not knowing the truth. They also rely on people not believing those who are willing to speak out. The reason President Nixon was reelected after the Watergate scandal became public is that the masses were not willing to believe the truth. The thing about the truth is that it doesn't need acknowledgment from the public to exist. But to be of use, truth does need people willing to call it by name. That is the first weapon in the battle for good. Not surprisingly, it is also the first weapon evil tries to take away. @LZGranderson
Los Angeles Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
A Reagan-era Oakland of punks, basketball and rap battles comes to life in ‘Freaky Tales'
'Freaky Tales,' a choppy curio from the writing-directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck ('Half Nelson,' 'Captain Marvel'), is an ode to the Bay Area as a boy might remember it, showcasing three semi-true stories set on May 10, 1987, that gild facts into myth. 'Oakland in '87 was hella wild,' gloats rapper Too Short, the film's narrator. Too Short is onscreen too, in a cameo as a cop. (There's also a version of his younger self played by DeMario Symba Driver.) 'Freaky Tales' gets its title from Too Short's nine-minute song of sexual braggadocio from his 1987 gold record, here foreshadowing a gender-war comeuppance he deserves. That summer, Fleck was a 10-year-old in Berkeley. He was too young to have experienced Too Short's rap battles first-hand, but old enough to lug the energy of that time around as part of his own identity. Fleck and his longtime collaborator Boden translate the feeling of that excitement — that super-sized, should-have-been-there high — into snapshots of a beaten-down city that can, on occasion, fight back and win. Most of the places and some of the people are real. But the star is the movie's hyperactive, even overwhelmingly contradictory nostalgia. Not only does the film feign to be on VHS with white static tickling through the segment breaks, it also has cigarette burns on the upper corners of the frame to pretend we're also simultaneously watching it on a 35mm reels at the local theater. Sometimes action scenes are juiced up with cartoonish doodles and sound effects; sometimes, the action is all cartoon. I'm sure the filmmakers know that Oakland's Grand Lake Theater wasn't showing 'The Lost Boys' that May. (It wouldn't open until July.) But I'm pretty sure they don't care. It's all about the vibes, dude. The movie is divided into four sections with three groups of heroes: punks, rappers and the Golden State Warriors who were in the NBA playoffs against the Los Angeles Lakers, the 'Showtime' team that would go on win the championship. On this particular night, however, game four of a potential Lakers sweep, Golden State point guard Sleepy Floyd (here played by Jay Ellis) refused to lose. He scored 29 points in the fourth quarter, a post-season record that still stands despite future Warriors like Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant trying their damnedest to knock it down. Floyd's big night is real and you can find archival footage of it online, including Floyd's court side interview with a local sportscaster who describes the player's success in mystical terms. Floyd, the newsman says, played so tr\nscendently it was like he was 'unconscious' — he went to 'another realm,' 'that other zone.' The filmmakers have taken that idea of metaphysics and spun it into a phony religion with Floyd hosting TV commercials for Psytopics, a mindfulness camp where fellow Bay residents can train their brain to battle both 'inner and outer demons.' For him, that presumably includes Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, although the script will eventually have its fictionalized Floyd beheading more hostile bad guys with a ninja sword. Three of the story arcs follow a simple plan: An underdog fights and wins. The fourth section, wedged in the middle, is a fabricated tale about a hit man, Clint (Pedro Pascal), who tries to retire, assuring his pregnant wife (Natalia Dominguez) that his fist of fury is now 'just a hand.' Pascal goes about it sincerely, but the mini-tale is so grim that it only accomplishes two things: getting Pascal on the poster, and totally scrambling the movie's tone. Otherwise, these interconnected plots are rousing pulp fictions — the Quentin Tarantino film is an obvious inspiration. Characters criss-cross each other's paths in ways that are cute but don't aspire to cosmic coincidence beyond Pascal's Clint advising two punks, Tina and Lucid (Ji-young Yoo and Jack Champion), the most vulnerable place to aim a spiked bracelet. Tina and Lucid's segment is the opener and establishes that we're in for chipper stories of success (with as much blood as possible). It's inspired by a real-life showdown between the hardcore collective 924 Gilman Street, an all-ages music venue that's still head-banging, and a group of racist rednecks. We're hurled into the atmosphere with a great tracking shot down the club's sidewalk and into a concert where teens and 20-somethings are moshing so hard that the camera gets knocked down and stumbles back to its feet. Later, when Tina and Lucid kiss, we soar above the action as pogo-ing dancers blur into a lovely romantic swirl. The costume department must have used every safety pin in town. Still, these tough-looking kids abide by a principle of nonviolence — until they decide they're so sick of getting attacked by neo-Nazis that they're willing to fight back. There's geysers of gore and a skinhead who gets turned into a tiki torch. It's rousing stuff and a bit glib. The film refuses to dampen the mood: all cheers and no arrests, even with Ben Mendelsohn's loathsome police officer skulking around and harassing two Black girls, Entice and Barbie (Normani and Dominique Thorne), at the nearby ice cream shop where they work. In a smart detail, Mendelsohn's unnamed racist shoots the other white guy in the store a complicit wink. That man is wearing a Jesse Jackson for President hat, but he's too intimidated to step in. Entice and Barbie's section is the most realistic. It's also my favorite, with the duo challenging Too Short to a rap battle in which both sides take hilarious verbal aim at each other's genitals. (When the music kicks in, you might recognize Entice and Barbie from the Too Short track 'Don't Fight the Feelin',' in which the actual girls, just 15 at the time, took down the more established artist with both barrels.) Normani and Thorne nail the performance, spitting the tight, overlapping insults about Too Short's height, girth and dental hygiene with malicious glee. Meanwhile on Floyd's ads for Psytopics, green light beams from a believer's eyeballs and goes on to light up all corners of the movie. Minty lightning bolts zap down in moments of tension. Pea-soup hues leak out of Entice's microphone, the Oakland Coliseum and yes, that spiked bracelet. The green glow seems to imbue people with extra courage — or cause bloody noses. And it's never acknowledged by the script. It's for debate what it means. Over the course of the film, my guesses included telekinesis and algae blooms wafting from Lake Merritt. But the mystery adds to the sense that even though Boden and Fleck are pivoting away from Marvel and back to their indie roots, they've made a superhero movie, after all: a street-smart update on the Toxic Avenger. Either way, they've done their research. The soundtrack of Evelyn 'Champagne' King and Public Image Ltd. and modern punk acts reworking the classics is fantastic, as is the proper score by Raphael Saadiq of Tony! Toni! Toné! Every frame is filled with details, down to the T-shirts for small regional bands like Sewer Trout. There's even a reference to rocky road ice cream, invented in Oakland in 1929. So these 'Freaky Tales' are fun, if not quite satisfying. You get why so many Bay Area-born stars agreed to pop into the film for a scene, from the real Too Short and Sleepy Floyd to other locals including Marshawn Lynch as a bus driver, Rancid's Tim Armstrong as a Psytopics devotee and Angus Cloud in one of his last roles as a criminal thug. The biggest coup is a cameo from Concord native Tom Hanks, already kind of famous at the time even if none of the other characters remember his name. ('Big' would come out the following year.) What they do know about Hanks is that he used to sell hotdogs at the Oakland A's ballpark. Here, he plays a garrulous video-store clerk named Hank who challenges customers to name the best movies about underdogs. 'The underdog believes we can achieve the impossible,' Hanks says with a grin. This film does it too, in bold neon, for a quick and cheap smile.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Corey Feldman says his drummer Duke Gadd died of fentanyl OD
NEW YORK — One of Corey Feldman's drummers, Duke Gadd, has reportedly died of a reported fentanyl overdose. The 53-year-old 'Corey's Angels' frontman and former child star announced 'with tremendous sadness' that Gadd died Wednesday in Las Vegas due to a fentanyl overdose, according to his Instagram tribute. Gadd played on the 'Goonies' star's 2023 'Love ReTours 23' tour. 'Our friend & drummer @melomaniac_graffiti aka #DukeGadd passed away in Vegas yesterday from a fentanyl overdose!' Feldman's all-caps caption read on a carousel of photos and clips of Gadd performing. The 'Stand By Me' and 'The Lost Boys' alum remembered Gadd as 'beyond talented' and said he 'was poisoned by his own struggles in life! 'What a tremendous loss of a talented young man gone far 2 soon! My heart hurts losing another friend 2 the throws of drug addiction & the insane fentanyl crisis thats taken over our country! My condolences 2 all his friends & family!' said Feldman, who has himself struggled with substance abuse. According to TMZ, Feldman identified Gadd as son of famed percussionist Steve Gadd, who has reportedly worked with the likes of Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, James Taylor and many more. Though he's no longer part of mainstream Hollywood, Feldman — a staunch critic of child stardom — reunited with his 'Goonies' co-stars earlier this month to celebrate Ke Huy Quan's new movie, 'Love Hurts.' Feldman told Variety at the time that he and fellow co-star Sean Astin had tried their hand at developing a sequel to the 1985 adventure film and had 'a really great idea.' Richard Donner, who directed the adventure classic, ultimately deemed it 'too expensive.' But Feldman still hopes a second chapter will come together. 'All I can say is, get us all together now,' he told Variety. 'We're all looking good still, and we're all alive. Goonies never say die… There's hope.'
