Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

REVIEW: Top Five by Chris Rock

Chris Rock has said on talk shows that his movie Top Five – about a stand-up comedian named Andre Allen trying to promote his “serious” film – is his make-it or break-it effort to be a director. I’m afraid I have to give him mixed grades. He knows “funny,” that’s for sure, but I was left mystified as to why he had to load up the script with unrelenting misogyny, too frequent homophobia, and a squeamishness about sex that drifted into ridicule. Rock’s character’s entire spectrum of fantasy started and ended with a blow job and it seemed like anything sexual outside of that was considered ugly.

On the plus side, the movie is fast-paced, well-shot, and laugh-out-loud in parts, not the least when we get insight into the life of a black celebrity, such as when a producer is trying to get Andre Allen to do miracles with a promotional line of dry prose. Chris Rock is supported by Rosario Dawson as Chelsea, his love interest, and JB Smoove, who distinguishes himself as the loyal childhood homey, Silk, who continues to look after him. Dawson does her best with a script that limits how real she can be as a New York Times journalist by framing her character around her boyfriend and her major crush on her subject, Andre Allen. The camera loves Dawson, so we got a lot of close-up face time. Chelsea is a ubiquitous presence as she is following Andre for a day to research a feature on him for the Times.

Andre Allen’s fiancée Erica is played by Gabrielle Union. She’s a Kim Kardashian kinda reality star who believes that if it ain’t on television, it doesn’t exist. When Andre takes Chelsea back to his neighborhood and childhood friends and family, Allen hears from his peeps that they haven’t been invited to the wedding. The producers are making all the decisions, his fiancée informs him, including changing the wedding rings Andre had bought.

Top Five is also a people-puzzle in which there are so many cameos that one regrets that opening credits went out of style decades ago. Too often I couldn’t put a name to a familiar face until the closing credits rolled. The film is peppered with appearances from Cedric the Entertainer, Sherri Shepherd, Charlie Rose, Jay Pharoah, Tracy Morgan, Luis Guzmán, Phillip Boykin, Gabourey Sidibe, Taraji P. Henson, Sway, and that’s just a taster from the list. Slightly more prominent roles fall to Whoopi, Adam Sandler, and Jerry Seinfeld, who sit around a table with Rock’s character at his bachelor party. Maybe Chris Rock decided to give work to everyone he knows in the business – which is sweet.

Despite all that talent and some good comedic routines, the puerile attitude towards sex, the stereotyping of women by a writer who seems stuck at the sexual age of 13, and the repulsion by Andre Allen and his whole posse towards the very idea of a finger up someone’s ass during sex was tiresome. Rock’s character actual pukes himself when forced to watch another man in a threesome with the same two women and doing the same exact things (i.e., getting a double blow-job, what else?) as he himself had done.

I wanted to like this movie. I’ve seen Chris Rock do some pretty funny shit. I liked him for “discovering” W. Kamau Bell and getting him on TV, albeit briefly. I made some effort to see the film. Top Five is only playing in three movie theaters in the Boston area, all the kind that offer first-run Hollywood blockbusters that are of zilch interest to me. Even though it’s just a few miles from my house, this is the first time I’ve been to this strip mall multiplex, which is apparently competing for a trophy for the filthiest women’s restroom by 2:00pm. Yuck.

Top Five refers to a person’s all-time rapper faves. The references were probably better understood by someone in their 40s (Rock is 49). The musical score was groovy – Questlove was Executive Music Producer – but the moment I would relax in a giggle, Rock would bum me out with some nasty reference to or treatment of a woman or a sexual activity. Should I mention here that Jay-Z and Kanye were co-producers? Had there been a dollop of decent gender politics, this film could have been a winner, but in fact, I felt I was being repeatedly slapped across the face with the wet fish of sexism.

Here’s the trailer:
 

Jews Say Black Lives Matter - #ChanukahAction

Last night there was a national call to have a Black Lives Matter event on the first night of Chanukah, and Boston was one of the Jewish communities that responded. Held in the main intersection (Coolidge Corner) of the Jewish neighborhood in Brookline, #ChanukahAction attracted hundreds of folks, armed with their lit menorahs.

I was skeptical – did these folks equally value Palestinian lives? However, several of us from my group, Jewish Women for Justice in Palestine, decided to attend, not the least because JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), a group that has done great work, was promoting it. Once again, the action was organized by young people and attended by many of them, unusual in this town with a very high proportion of seniors.

The intersection is very wide, having a two-way streetcar strip in the middle. We crowded onto all four corners, chanting “Eight Nights, Eight Lives,” and calling out the names of eight African-Americans who were killed by cops. Many carried posters with photos of the victims, half of whom were women. People carried lit menorahs and other candles. Luckily, they used “mic-check” – a system of human amplification developed by the Occupy movement in which the crowd serves as the microphone by repeating the words of the speaker.

Once the crowd was at its peak, we all started crossing the street. This led to walking in a thick square as we continuously crossed corner after corner in a clockwise flow, shutting down the two main streets at rush hour. Like many of the Boston demonstrations, the police were present but did not intervene (at this point in such demonstrations) - just dealt with traffic.

Song sheets with alternative words had been passed out and there was a lot of singing and chanting. After an hour, the march headed up Harvard Street, one of those main streets, and then gathered on the steps of a landmark synagogue. The bullhorn was offered to any young people who wanted to testify (“because we young people organized this.”) A moment of levity followed when a curly-haired young Jewish guy hungrily took the bullhorn. “I get it,” he started, “because I often get harassed for looking like a hippy…” He was quickly shut down with cries of “It’s not about you.” A dickhead in training.

In fact, last week I was at another local demonstration in a different middle class white suburb, led by local religious leaders, where it was all about them. Speakers referenced America as “the greatest country on earth, but we just need a little more freedom.” The leader thanked the community’s wonderful local police, blessed the banks (!) “which we trust” (there were banks at that intersection), and changed the message to “All Lives Matter,” an unconscious undermining that results in trying to make this movement about touchy-feely self-congratulation and not about racism.

Brookline was a different experience. After a moving statement from an Orthodox Jewish Black woman and then some wonderful singing, one of the young speakers actually brought the action to an end with a few clear sentences connecting activism and Chanukah. I was impressed and so glad I schlepped over. Really, the best Chanukah I can remember.

Eleanor and me. Our friends Susan and Sarah were there too, just not in this shot.

This is the Worst It’s Ever Been in My 67 Years

My life has been defined by political movements: civil rights and anti-racism; anti-Viet Nam; women’s and gay liberation; class consciousness; and the battle for justice for the Palestinians. It felt in the 60s and 70s that we were changing the world. Now it feels like the reactionaries are exacting a double measure of revenge on it. A sober glance:

RACE: American cops killed 461 suspects in 2013, says USA Today. (Compare that to Germany with three police killings and Britain with none.) According to Alternet.org, “Police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extra-judicially killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012, according to a recent study. This means a black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours.” Couple that with the vilification of Barack Obama that can only be explained by race hatred, and you get a do-nothing legislature and a toxic American ether.

WOMEN: And then there’s the continuing war on women. Says Wikipedia: “In 2011, state legislatures across the United States introduced over 1100 provisions related to women's health and reproductive rights, and in the first quarter of 2012 an additional 944 provisions were introduced in state legislatures, half of which would restrict access to abortion.” Violence against women has reached gross levels. Some celebrities have been free to rape unknown numbers of women over decades. Universities have failed to deal with an epidemic of women rape victims on its campuses. The armed forces are riddled with rape by the very people the women soldiers are supposed to report to. And a plethora of politicians have been making it up as they go along about “legitimate rape,” or pregnancy from rape being "something that God intended", or that “some girls rape easy.”

CLASS: As I said at the time, the economic crisis of 2008 was a massive and upward redistribution of wealth. Now, a half-dozen years later, the figures are shaking out. The 1% is silly rich and most everyone else is struggling. The job market has been gutted and replaced with part-time contract employment subsidized by welfare and food stamps. The 1% now own 40% of the country’s wealth. The bottom 80% has 7% of the wealth among them in total. Go ahead and wrap your brain around that. If you want some visuals, there’s a video about wealth disparity at the end of this article. Together with the mortgage rip-off, a blatantly racist and systematic theft of the property of poor people, this has left most people very much in the hole. For old people who depend on their savings for survival, the market raid of 2008 by the ruling class has diminished their savings, while too often their unemployed children and grandchildren are in need of help. It sure feels like revenge.

PALESTINE: This was a very rough year for Palestine, especially for the Gazans. An assault by one of the strongest armies in the world – Israel – on perhaps the most crowded sliver of real estate on earth – Gaza – left 500 kids dead, 3,000 injured, 373,000 traumatized, according to Democracy Now! That’s just the children. In total, 2,189 Palestinians were killed and 11,000 wounded. Compare this to Israel: “66 Israeli soldiers, 5 Israeli civilians (including one child) and one Thai civilian were killed and 469 IDF soldiers and 261 Israeli civilians were injured.” One wants to say Palestinian Lives Matter, but no other country in the world seemed to care.

At my age, I am now interested in issues of ageing and how that’s going to shake out around gender, sexuality, class, race, and nationality. What’s going to happen to undocumented immigrants who are old and poor? To elderly people who have lost their homes, their jobs, their savings? To queer elders who are much more likely to be isolated and living alone than straights?

Most of all, what’s going to happen to those of us who have struggled inside movements for justice, only to see our victories shat upon and our gains shrunk, only to be surrounded by violence, bile, and exploitation? I want to sit and write short stories, and my dear friend tells me to learn to be ruthless with my time, but I can’t bear to turn my back for a second, as inevitably something hideous is hovering, something horrible is going to happen. It could be inside the too-often violent nuclear family, at the hands of crazed fundamentalists, in Gaza, Ferguson, or Anywhere USA.

BUT WAIT! As always, the one thing that makes life worth living is seeing that there is a new generation of rebels. Politically savvy young black women seem to be leading Boston’s uprising against racism and an oppressive criminal injustice system by insisting that #BlackLivesMatter. I admired and joined the Occupy! movement, which so clearly raised the issue of economic disparity in general and ball&chain college loans in particular. The young Dreamers are fighting to protect their parents from a mean-spirited immigration system. Women on campus are highlighting issues of consent and carrying mattresses in solidarity. The international boycott and sanctions movement is building on university groups committed to justice for Palestinians. There’s some daring, creative action out there and often other generations are providing the impetus. It is a relief and a buzz and the only thing that counters the pervasive stench of nastiness.

Click here for a clip that makes wealth inequality visible.