March will get some shine with the earnest 'Sapphires'

Early 2013 has had just a few bright, fresh releases. After a few months with the best specialty films the year has to offer, there's nothing to appeal to audiences who like quality, thought-provoking features. Auteur-bait Stoker came out a couple of weeks ago, and now there's another film worthy of arthouse applause and crossover success: The Sapphires. The story of four Aboriginal young
women in Australia who style themselves as an R&B quartet and play for American troops in Vietnam is sweet story that will have you rooting for their success--but it also packs a punch, with insights about race and identity that will feel both familiar and foreign to American audiences. In Australia, the movie has been a huge success, as anyone who read a recent "Day and Date Down Under" column can attest.

The movie bills itself as a true story based on the experiences of the mother of playwright Tony Briggs, who also co-adapted the screenplay. He took a lot of liberties with the material, but the heart of what went actually happened is there. What's most shocking is how overtly racist Australia was in 1968. A trio of girls try to enter a contest at a local watering hole, where they receive a completely indifferent reaction despite their stunning harmonies. Still, their performance catches the attention of a down-and-out
promoter/manager (Chris O'Dowd), who tries to get them a contract to sing in Vietnam. In the city, the girls track down a long-lost cousin who was taken away from them as a girl, because of her light-colored skin, and raised as white--a common practice at the time. She joins the group, but the bossy leader of the quartet has trouble keeping in her anger at the light-skinned girl for abandoning her Aboriginal identity, despite the fact that as a young girl she had little choice in the matter.

Once they're in Vietnam, the girls flirt with the troops, wow them with their R&B hits, and narrowly avoid getting caught in the crossfire. Here the movie can lag a bit, but overall The Sapphires is an entertaining underdog story that offers education about another country's history of racial oppression. The Help set to music, with a less pat outcome. The girls refer to themselves as the "blacks" of Australia, sometimes as way of explanation to the American troops. In American terms, the Aboriginals suffered from the kind of government policies and cultural beliefs that oppressed both Native Americans and Blacks. They were alternately assimilated and separated out into poor, rural areas, and openly discriminated against. While thousands of miles away, the United States is something of a touchstone for the singers. They're aware of the Civil Rights movement that is afoot in the U.S, which they see expressed in the country's soul music. That makes their performances of the music that much more powerful. As they learn to sing in that style, you can feel them changing, and rebelling against the structures that have constrained them. The Sapphires is launching in four theatres this Friday, and it's my vote for those who need a reprieve from the action films and thrillers that have been dominating the release slate.

'Machete' continues exploitation film trend of highlighting racial issues

By Sarah Sluis

I had no plans to see Machete, a "Mexploitation" film from Robert Rodriguez that originated as a trailer within the movie Grindhouse. But today, I scrolled through Ain't it Cool News and discovered that a Machete trailer has been released in honor of Cinco de Mayo--and even though the movie was made a year ago, the plot

seems like a direct response to the controversial illegal immigration legislation passed in Arizona.

Culled from the Internet, the story goes like this: Danny Trejo plays a Mexican Federale (police officer) who fled the country after a bad encounter with a drug lord (rising drug violence around the Mexican border, anyone?). He's a day laborer who accepts a $100,000+ fee to kill a senator who is sending illegal immigrants out of the country. As he goes in for the kill, he's shot himself, and it turns out he's been set up in order to build support for the bill. With the help of fellow illegal immigrants, he pursues vengeance as he is hunted down by a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agent.

While it's social issues movies like Crash that get rewarded at the Oscars, exploitation and horror movies have a long history of tackling racism and discrimination. They appeal to deep emotions and fears, and it can go both ways: just as promiscuous teenage girls are punished in slasher films, often being the first to die, who can forget the black man in Night of the Living Dead surviving a night of zombies only to be killed by vigilantes at the end who assume he is the bad guy?

Pam Grier, who coincidentally has been in the news lately because of her memoir, starred in movies like Coffy

and Foxy Brown that showed strong, powerful black women and centered around issues of drugs and violence. In Coffy, she sets out to kill the drug dealers who gave her sister contaminated heroin, and in Foxy Brown she goes after the gangsters that killed her law-enforcement boyfriend. The movies can be subversive and expose issues like objectification of women (which works out fine for Grier, who seduces people before killing them). At the same time, the blaxploitation genre has been viewed as a double-edged sword: did it expose black issues or did it perpetuate stereotypes? You could say the same about Machete. The plot is driven by anger, fear, and mistrust. The Danny Trejo character embodies many negative qualities and stereotypes, from what I saw, but it's impressive that the trailer opens with him saying, "$70 a day for yard work. A hundred for roofing. $125 for septic." It's exposing the economic realities of his situation and makes his agreement to kill someone for over a hundred thousand dollars justifiable. I'm now curious to see Machete and find out if Rodriguez has packed the movie with commentary on immigration in between the sex, explosions, and guns. It wouldn't be the first time exploitation films have covered this territory.

Will 'Chief Ron' be worth the gamble?

By Sarah Sluis

When I heard the plot line of Chief Ron, my initial reaction (that one you're supposed to either trust or ignore) was extreme wariness. A huckster, who doesn't "look" Indian, poses as a member of the Mohegan tribe in an attempt to start his own casino. What's funny is that it's based on a true story, in which a blond, blue-eyed Indian successfully won a court case that established his ancestry and allowed him to set up a casino, but in the comedy version, the guy will be a fake (at least until the third act, perhaps?).

Justin Theroux, who co-wrote Tropic Thunder (which you may remember for Robert Downey, Jr.'s blackface character) will direct from a script by Jordan Roberts (Around the Bend). I'm all about using comedy to explore the racial politics that underscore tribal casinos, but will a mainstream studio picture be able to effectively do this? The premise incorporates several hotly contested issues: blood quantum, or "how much" makes you a certain race, and the political rights of tribes governed as "domestic dependent nations" (which means independent, but not really). Will it be able to engage with these arguments, or merely bow to widely held stereotypes? As someone who has lived near Indian casinos and heard both sides of the debate, often phrased in racial terms, and studied under an indigenous rights scholar in college, I'm perhaps more sensitive to these issues than most people, but that doesn't mean these viewpoints should be ignored.

Looking at debates that occurred over Tropic Thunder last year (turns out the movie also got heat for making jokes about people with disabilities), the best I can hope for is that the film's treatment of these stereotypes will bring awareness to the political issues surrounding Native Americans, much like Downey's performance encouraged debates about black/white relations, as people argued about whether or not the jokes were offensive (even in the YouTube comments section!). Last year I saw the Tropic Thunder trailer several times in theatres, and there's a particular joke (at 2:00) that inspired a wave of shocked laughter: Downey, Jr (in blackface) taking offense to a perceived racial slight, saying, "What do you mean, you people?" followed by Alpa Cino (who is actually black) saying "What do you mean, you people?" The joke seemed to relax people into laughter, by implying that being sensitive to racial slights is actually more problematic. At least that's my reading of the joke.

Who knows how much of this subtext was in Tropic of Thunder's script, and how much was in Robert Downey, Jr.'s delivery? After all, he did receive an Oscar nomination for the astounding fact that he managed to play a role in blackface without totally misfiring. I can only hope that Chief Ron will be able to handle the political issues they got themselves into with the plot with sensitivity, and, most importantly, humor. If they fail at that, you can always rent Smoke Signals.