Tried out the curly girl method after lots of random things, never focusing on my wavy hair... Now look! I'm so fuckin happy about this (but unfortunately I have to have it in a ponytail for work - still looks great!!!)

tonight's movie was Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song! it was kind of fucking amazing even if im not sure i fully enjoyed it or not! i was absolutely not expecting how surrealistic and experimental this movie was going to be. it's unbelievable to think that this and Shaft both came out the same year and are still considered to be cut from the same cloth, because Sweetback is far more interested in completely and utterly rejecting any kind of conventional Hollywood style or routine and blazing it's own trail of jump cuts and abrupt and at times dissonant montages that are carried out with almost a palpable and purposeful disregard for anything that cinema was doing at the time other than 'using a camera'. this cuts both ways, however, because by the end of Sweetback i was fuckin' exhausted by how bewildering and overwhelming the movie was. Sweetback tries to touch every genre in order to tell it's tonal story, with elements of expressionist horror, comedy, action, musical, porn and everything in between. and something to keep in mind is that it's doing all this with a budget of around $150k in 1971 dollars. it's genuinely incredible. the music is also just as overwhelming, with the famous Earth, Wind and Fire music scoring the action in just as dissonant a way as the visuals are. the way that the music progressively grows louder and more chaotic as Sweetback's journey becomes ever more desperate is astonishing and feels like something movies just weren't doing at this time to my knowledge. and then musical tracks start layering more and more of other motifs found throughout the movie as the film sprints to it's climax and it almost feels like EWF and Peebles started experimenting with Noise music in their goal of unsettling the viewer. before we get into talking about the negatives of the movie, i want to reiterate that the movie was shot on a budget of $150k. anyway, the acting in this movie is.........not good. i really have no idea but i do wonder if there was a dialogue script at all or if anyone involved with the movie outside of Peebles and a few others had a history in acting, because so much of the movie feels like ad-libbed dialogue. now, this might have been on purpose in order to heighten the realism and rawness of the entire endeavor as the film primarily credits 'The Black Community' in it's opening when it comes to the starring roles, but.....it's such a weird stop-start vibe. and that leads to the story which is both very simple and also very easy to get confused in. i had to read the summary of the story after watching it to make sure i knew what was going on other then the main ideas, and i didn't even realize some things. you can also possibly chalk this up to poor audio mixing and a lack of subtitles for my copy, which always puts me at a disadvantage. speaking of the story, the setup is that Sweetback is an orphan who grew up in a LA brothel who is loved by the women there for his sexual power, to the point where the child Sweetback literally becomes a full grown adult before our eyes after having sex with one of the prostitutes in a very uncomfortable scene. Sweetback continues working at the brothel as part of the sex show when the LAPD come by to talk to Beetle (Simon Chuckster) so they can frame a patsy for a murder that has recently upset the black community. the solution the cops propose is bringing Sweetback in, holding him for a few days, and then releasing him for a lack of evidence, to which Beetle agrees. while on the way to the station with Sweetback, the cops arrest a Black Panther member named Mu-Mu (Hubert Scales) who then insults them. the LAPD then does what they do best and starts violently beating Mu-Mu after uncuffing him as Sweetback watches. Sweetback then wraps the handcuffs around his knuckles and starts beating the cops so bad they fall into comas. pursuit hijinks ensue. again, i don't know if Sweetback is a good movie in the conventional sense, but it's fucking incredible to watch at least once and see the beginning of a new type of filmmaking and filmmaker be born. heavy cw for some pretty intense, possibly unsimulated, sexual acts and full frontal nudity especially in the prologue but all throughout the movie.

arbiter hall v2