I had a fairly ambitious plan to tackle a “vampire western” double-feature this week, but due to difficulty viewing said two films I’ll need to sign up for Netflix DVDs like a chump and focus on that next week instead. The Netflix physical media repertoire has seemingly depleted pretty significantly since I was last building up a queue hundreds of films deep about 10 years ago. I don’t know if this is due to distribution issues (as Amazon swallows up the rights to literally everything) or a depressing lack of interest in diverse cinematic programming among the increasingly sedentary (both physically and intellectually) masses, but we’re facing a pretty serious Cinematic Dystopia within our culture. I currently have access to SIX streaming services and am still struggling to see the films I’m passionate about dissecting for my tiny, distracted audience. As videostores around the country fade out to a FIN, I don’t think the public truly realizes just what it is that they are losing.
Please, please, please, if you are fortunate enough to live in one of the few remaining parts of the world that has a functional video rental shop, do everything in your power to help it survive! You don’t have to resign yourself to the limited options deemed sufficient for you by the sociopathic overlords of algorithmic nightmares. There are zillions of films floating around out there, from all over the world, representing nearly every era & subculture of human existence for the past 150 years. Seek them out, soak them up. Immerse yourself in every movement, obsess over every auteur, scour the world (and, yes, the internet) for everything that falls outside of the margins of Profitable Content. And again, if you by some miracle have access to an actual videostore, appreciate it and fight for it. I genuinely believe that cinema is our perfect art form and it will be destroyed if we allow that to happen. So dramatic!
Here is a much more in-depth and well-written plea: https://blog.blcklst.com/in-search-of-the-last-great-video-store-efcc393f2982
In the meantime, I want to take a moment to appreciate the late and great Yaphet Kotto, who passed away earlier this month at the age of 81 in the Philippines. Most filmgoers will probably remember him primarily as the technician Parker in Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece (and my personal favorite film) Alien. Only one member of an extraordinary cast, Kotto nevertheless leaves a lasting impression with his naturalistic embodiment of a forever put-upon workingman, constantly grumbling about pay disparity, unappreciated labor and the ethereal promise of a “bonus.” Cutting up and slacking off with his crony Brett (a convincingly unwashed Harry Dean Stanton) for most of the film, Parker nevertheless springs to action as necessity demands and goes down fighting. It’s a lean role in a film full of them, but everybody walks away from that movie with an impression of how Yaphet Kotto is an absolutely fucking cool dude.
Homicide: Life on the Street presented another big role for him, spanning from 1993-1999 on primetime NBC. Surrounded by yet another spectacular ensemble cast including the always reliable Richard Belzer and the quietly incendiary brooding of the great Andre Braugher, Kotto again carves out a spotlight for himself with his depiction of Al “Gee” Giardello. He was the kind of actor whose characters always had a nickname. There was just too much personality roiling beneath that thousand yard stare and surprisingly disarming smile to be contained within a regular-ass name. Homicide was the first legitimately great television show that I ever got into, and it was primarily the performances that hooked me. Yaphet Kotto was always on the periphery of my cultural intake during my most formative years, hovering in the background just outside of the spotlight, always swooping in at the right moments and making enough of an impression that he was one of my favorite performers, whether I realized it or not, without ever wearing out his welcome. He was a genre film staple, and you were always overjoyed to see him, but he never fully occupied that gross realm of Celebrity that seems to be the only bland goal of an increasing number of artists. He was just there for it, putting in the work better than anyone and seeming to enjoy the life that such a strong work ethic earned him.
It can be frustrating to fantasize about what Kotto, and thousands of hardworking actors like him, could have done with bigger opportunities and wider exposure. He was a Black man living in America, more specifically a Black man working in Hollywood, and I’m sure that had a limiting impact on his career. This country is racist as hell. But focusing on what could have been probably misses the point. Kotto did more with the roles he had than most would be capable of, and he never failed to leave an impression on anyone who caught him in anything. Everybody dies, some more famous than others, and over the past few years we’ve lost a staggering number of familiar faces from some of the most important decades of American cinema. All of these losses are sad. Yaphet Kotto’s absence will sting me a bit harder than most because, due to my particularly organized filmic history, he’s just always been there. And because I’ll no longer have that surge of familiar joy when I’m surprised by his presence in something random. In Alien, John Hurt’s character Kane is cursed with the most spectacular and iconic death scene, but I always cringe the hardest when Kotto bites it near the end. That movie, and movies in general, just feel less cool without him.
Here are two lesser-appreciated Yaphet Kotto films to check out (hopefully from your local videostore!):
BONE (1972) dir. Larry Cohen
Larry Cohen has said that he doesn’t understand why his films are considered “exploitation pictures” because all cinema is exploitation. I can’t really argue with that, but the dude definitely has a way of making his viewers feel particularly icky, like you’re watching something you shouldn’t be and that it could probably teach you something profound about yourself and the culture at large if it wasn’t making you so goddamned uncomfortable. This movie, his debut feature, is a bit more surreal and “artsy” than his later trash masterpieces, but it’s a strikingly assured introduction to themes he would later build upon with a wild abandon that you just don’t see anymore, even within the realm of modern “indie” cinema. Cohen’s movies feel dangerous.
Bone is a black comedy that eviscerates class and race relations in early 70’s Los Angeles, specifically Beverly Hills. The film is sticky in all of the most upsetting ways, but somehow skirts being completely offensive with an aplomb that I honestly can’t believe works. It pretty much all hinges on the performances, which are uniformly spectacular. Kotto’s portrayal as Bone is the lynchpin of the entire thing, somehow balancing out a narrative that swirls around insane sexual politics, victims who fall in love with their abusers, financial manipulation, crumbling marriages, impotent patriarchy, white fear of (and obsession with) Black men, failure, deception, Vietnam, the perpetual threat of rape and a mesmerizing & meaningless piece of water sculpture. Did I mention that it’s a comedy? Bone himself preemptively subverts the racist trope of the Magical Negro with his monologue about mastering the “Nigger Mystique” before being psychoanalyzed by his would-be victim, the wealthy white woman (an incredible Joyce Van Patten) who will eventually murder her husband and predictably put all the blame on the Black man. This movie could not be made today, and it would never have worked without the pathos that Kotto brings to the party.
BLUE COLLAR (1978) dir. Paul Schrader
Is anyone more slept on than Paul Schrader? Dude is a Tempur-Pedic. Sort of well-known as the screenwriter for a few of Martin Scorsese’s seediest pictures, his own directorial output is bizarrely unheralded. This is a shame, as he offers a pretty singular combination of (damaged) pop-tinged cinematic affect (he’s an avid cinephile and proponent of movie magic) and honest, hard-earned grittiness (he’s also a former coke fiend who dabbled with scumbags and still regularly dabbles with intentional provocation). His remake of Cat People (1982) might be the only erotic thriller that is both erotic and thrilling, his labor of love Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) is one of the only biopics that convincingly captures the essence of its subject, and his recent First Reformed (2017) is the only Ethan Hawke movie that doesn’t make me want to pants Ethan Hawke. Like Scorsese, his films struggle with his own religious upbringing and the tragic drive toward self-destruction, but Schrader’s characters come across as more realistic and relatable. His approach is a little less stylized, possibly due to an empathy born of his own journey through the muck & mire. His films often culminate in cathartic violence, but it’s never exactly glamorized or set to a rollicking Rolling Stones track (although Giorgio Moroder’s start-to-finish baller soundtrack to Cat People should be heard and savored by any self-respecting Cannibal Ox fan).
His debut feature Blue Collar is an already perfected crystallization of his later recurring themes and strengths as a filmmaker, and a large part of its success is the casting of the young & hungry Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and man of the hour Yaphet Kotto. This is another 70’s film that tackles the issue of race relations, although with significantly less flamboyance than Bone. Schrader posits his observations through the prism of labor struggle and financial hardship within the exploitative capitalist class structure of the still-thriving auto manufacturing industry in segregated Detroit. And, because it’s a Schrader film, there’s a cocaine orgy that is more fun than depressing. Our three protagonists, classically overworked & underpaid, embark on a scheme to rob their union, only to discover how corrupt their employers actually are and wind up in more danger than they had thought possible. Yaphet Kotto, as the ex-con Smokey, brings a playfulness to his role that never quite tamps down the underlying capacity for violence that even his two best friends are perpetually aware of. He’s the knowledgable party animal, who makes their low-key heist possible with his underworld connections and is also the sacrificial lamb to their ultimate failure, as the most expendable cog in the machine having no family of his own (ironically making him the most morally upstanding member of the trio, being the only one who isn’t intentionally neglecting his family and actively cheating on his spouse to engage in their drugged-up carnal debaucheries). But Pryor & Keitel’s characters are not bad guys themselves; this is just the blowing-off of pent-up steam that most working class people can probably understand. Work sucks, but drinking beers and bitching about work is what keeps a lot of us sane as the gears of industry grind us into our graves.
It’s an interesting film to watch in 2021, when it seems like at least half the population of the country is unemployed or precariously close to it and the debate over unions has been rejuvenated with the fresh blood of a new, growing labor movement (ironically, I had to chuck four bucks to absolutely evil union-crushers Amazon to even be able to watch the damn movie. Burn in Hell, Bezos). It’s also depressing to watch a film from forty years ago and realize that the race and class issues it deals with are not only still relevant, but quite possibly worse. The film ends on a particularly chilling note, with a freeze-frame on the expected explosion of violence, two best friends turned against one another in the best interests of their masters (sold to them as their own best interests) and Yaphet Kotto’s disembodied voice reciting his own street-smart take on the Lyndon Johnson quote that “if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” As hate crimes surge across the country and the unforgivable disparities of wealth stretch eternally outward, as corporate monoliths seek to crush the budding new labor movement beneath their inescapable boot, workplaces sit empty and the lines for food banks grow longer, and as our cultural options dwindle beneath the all-encompassing eye of Digital Content Dickheads, my childhood companion, Technician Parker (RIP) of the Nostromo, in his unmistakably gravelly voice from beyond the grave, warns us of the same future that we always should have seen coming. Maybe take some small comfort in the possibility that Yaphet Kotto, one of the best to ever do it, won’t be around to witness the worst of it.
If you’re a punk of a certain age, you’ll probably remember this album. I have no idea how this band settled on their name, but I do know that it’s the only reason I pulled their LP out of a stack of dozens just like it at some distro in the year 2000. Spoiler alert: it still kinda knocks!