Ridiculous Opinions #286
"Sinners" brings me back to the fold of cinema.
It’s not often, but every once in a while I am astounded by the creativity of other human beings. These are instances where I see something done from a creative perspective that I have nothing but admiration for; something that makes me actually jealous of their skills. Most of the time, I am rarely jealous of someone creatively. I am arrogant enough to think, I could do that. But in the case of a couple of things that I’ve seen over the last few weeks, I am just in complete awe. I speak in this situation about the work of Ryan Coogler and Charlie Brooker.
Most of you reading this are going to be like, Who? so let me explain further. Ryan Coogler directed the recently released film, Sinners, and Charlie Brooker is the creative force behind Black Mirror on Netflix. I’ll get to Brooker next week.
Let’s start with Sinners. I only had a vague approximation of what Sinners was about before I went in, so if you’re worried about spoilers, I think it’s high time that you skip this newsletter, because I’m spoiling the plot and it’s much better if you go in without knowing anything about the movie.
Okay?
Ready?
Here we go…
Sinners is a genre picture in its best iteration. It’s a vampire movie and I absolutely adore that it’s a vampire movie. It has all the tropes of a vampire movie, with even the cheesiest of cliches included, like the simple fact that a vampire cannot enter a place unless they’ve been invited. That, alone, is such a superb plot point in the movie.
Vampire movies should be fun. They should be filled with moments where you, as an audience member, should be practically shouting at the screen, saying, Don’t do that! Get out of there! Don’t invite them in! Don’t get too close! The more moments a vampire movie has like that, the more successful that movie is going to be. And Sinners was filled with those moments. It was the kind of film where I wanted to shout at the screen.
Sinners is filled with blood and gore and cheesiness. It’s a true genre picture and it represents the fun of what cinema should be.
But making a genre picture is easy. Making a genre picture meaningful is hard. Ryan Coogler managed to make Sinners more than a genre picture. It’s a film that has something to say about race, honor, history, and music (!) in a way that other pictures only wish they could say. There’s a lot more beneath the surface of this film than people realize and it is a testament to Coogler’s intelligence and vision that those things were there.
But most interesting of all to me is the sense of place. Coogler shot this film in IMAX with a wonderful cinematographer named Autumn Durald Arkapaw and when I think back to the film, I think of the landscape of Mississippi. When I remember this movie, I remember it as if I was actually there, and a lot of that can be attributed to the way that she shot the film. In my mind, this is extraordinary and a testament to the power of taking the time to think through what a person is shooting and, just as importantly, a testament to the power of shooting in real places. There’s a heck of a lot of green screen work happening in films as of late, and I personally think we can feel it when we watch a movie.
This leads me to an interesting thought. Why did this film feel so real to me? Why did I feel like I was in Mississippi at that time? I think it’s because when they were in the cotton fields, they were real cotton fields. When they were driving down a dirt road, it was a real dirt road. The movie, because of the way it was shot, felt real.
I used to be someone who scoffed at directors who insisted that their movies be “shot on film”. I thought it was a waste of time and money and that most people couldn’t tell the difference between film and digital. I’m starting to rethink that nowadays.
I will never be against filming something digitally, because shooting digitally is the great democratizer. Digital cinema has opened doors for filmmakers around the world and enabled people to make films that never would have been able to otherwise. But I’m coming around to the notion that film is something special. It’s a physical medium. Whatever chemical process that a film undergoes to create that image is a unique thing and I think that…maybe…it does produce an aesthetic that is important for us to see.
I’ve said a hundred times in this forum that I think people crave real things. And I think that we crave these things without even knowing that we do. When we watch the latest Marvel blockbuster, we are subconsciously-aware that what we’re seeing, whether it’s the visual effects, the backgrounds, and even the actors, isn’t real. I think that our minds are reacting to these things and I think it’s a major reason why we no longer connect to entertainment like we used to. We don’t connect with many things because they’re not real. The things that they do could look real, but they don’t feel real, no matter how much effort has been put into it.
But seeing Sinners felt real. It’s FILLED with VFX, but like all great visual effects, those things serve the story. In the end, it’s still about the actors and the locations.
I could go on and on about this, and maybe someday, you and I can sit down, have a drink, and talk about all of my useless theories. I feel passionately about them. The bottom line is that you should head out to see Sinners immediately. It’s well worth your time.
