The Media Tourist

Movie Review: Vampires attack a 1930s juke joint in ‘Sinners,’ a heady horror movie about…a bunch of things

Sinners
Starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Canton & Delroy Lindo
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Rated R

In theaters Friday, April 18

A phantasmagoric, blues-infused parable with a lot on its mind, Sinners brings together history, lore, music and mystical mojo into a spicy golly-whopper of a tale about lookalike twin veterans who return to their Mississippi homeland in the Jim Crow South after serving overseas in World War I.

Known as “Smoke” and “Stack” (and both played by Michael B. Jordan), the bros—toting a satchel of cash, likely from some gangsta-like postwar activities up north, in Chicago—want to open a social club where local blues artists can perform, people can gamble, drink, party and dance, and the money will flow.

But some vampires—yes, vampires—have other ideas. And they’re out for blood.

Director Ryan Coogler, who made his hit-movie bona fides with the Rocky spinoff Creed and Marvel’s Black Panther, shows he’s also adept with a rip-roaring, rampaging thriller about the undead, set to a vibe-rich soundtrack of deep-dish delta blues. Vampires, as you might recall, have always been depicted as seductive, sexually voracious creatures, and Coogler doesn’t shy from reminding us of that longtime connection. In Sinners, both the living and the dead clearly enjoy the pleasures of the flesh.

These vampires are also seductive in another way, “inviting” the living to join their ranks and exist for eternity, out of time, where all are welcome, regardless of credo or skin color.

The vampires represent several other things, too, including the “blood” ties of ancestry, the cross-pollination of cultures, a timeline connecting past and present, and the breaching of “boundaries” separating the living and the dead. The movie clearly evokes the fable of blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who was so “unnaturally” gifted that the story arose he must have breached that boundary, meeting the devil in a crossroads and selling his soul in exchange for musical talent.

In the movie, young guitar-toting “Preacher Boy” Sam (newcomer Miles Caton, making a most impressive movie debut), is chastised by his evangelist father (Saul Williams) about playing in honkytonks, making music for “drunkards and philanderers” and doing a dangerous “dance with the devil.” Sam is clearly the movie’s Robert Johnson surrogate, with Sinners suggesting that music has an almost otherworldly potency, a connective, life-changing power that can even open supernatural portals—like when the juke joint is suddenly filled for a dreamlike sequence with dancers and musicians across centuries. We see Native American spirit dancers mixing it up with hip-hoppers, twerkers and even a funkadelic guitarist. It’s a marvelously eye-popping head trip, just like when, later, a field full of vampires break into an extended Irish jig and a folk song, suggesting yet another regional current of musical heritage.

Hailee Steinfeld (above) is a femme fatale. Veteran actor Delroy Lindo plays Delta Slim, a bluesman with stories to tell. Britain’s Jack O’Connell is Remmick, the vampire chieftain.

It’s all woven into a rich, vibrantly detailed tapestry of the Great Depression South, with allusions to the region’s history of ugly volatility between Black and white culture, the concept of sin and transgression, themes of separation and segregation, and the thin line between faith and fear. It goes a bit gonzo in its second half, almost like Quentin Tarantino took the reins for the finale, when the blood finally flows and spurts, the vampires crash the party, and everything takes an explosively hyper-violent turn.

How does it all pan out? Well, you’ll just have to watch to see, but trust me, it’s a wild ride. Stay for the credits for a flash-forward with one of the central characters, now elderly (and played, in a nice touch, by real-life blues guitarist Buddy Guy).

A zestfully fresh take on thangs with fangs, Sinners invites you sink your teeth into the juicy, boldly unexpected turns of this spicy and sensual deep-South honky-tonk horror show.

—Neil Pond

Movie Review: “Art For Everybody,” about landscape artist Thomas Kinkade, shows the darker side of the so-called “Painter of Light”

Art For Everybody
Directed by Miranda Yousef
Unrated
In theaters Friday, April 18

This superbly crafted, warts-and-all documentary about the one of the world’s most commercially successful artists of all time pulls back the curtain on Thomas Kinkade, the self-proclaimed “Painter of Light,” to show how he wasn’t always so bright and sun-shiny.

Kinkaid rose to fame in the early ‘90s for his artwork featuring unnaturally illuminated pastoral landscapes, often glowing intensely with illumination from the inside of bucolic cottages in lushly rendered fairy-tale settings. His work was hyper-stylized, surrealistically calm and blatantly nostalgic. “I don’t really paint the world the way it looks,” Kinkade notes in an early interview. “I paint the world we all kinda daydream it could be.”  Fans lapped it up like syrup, and Kinkade became a multimillionaire through mass merchandised reproductions of his paintings and all kinds of spinoff lifestyle products, services and collectibles. He hawked his wares on TV’s home-shopping network QVC, and hundreds of Thomas Kinkade specialty stores sprang up in malls and retail centers across America.

But as the movie points out, critics were often dismissive of Kinkade, calling his work gaudy, garish and kitschy—or, as one says in the film, “really, really, really bad art.”

Kinkade offered populist, easily digestible, imaginatively wholesome alternatives to the edgier, often controversial and more “challenging” offerings of the modern-art world. In other words, he did paintings for the masses, art for everybody—or everybody else. Many fervent fans were drawn to his frequent professions of faith, seeing his paintings as calming, welcoming extensions of the Christianity he seemed to ardently embrace. Many of his pictures depicted religious stories or passages from the Bible.

But was all of it fakery, performance art or even fraud? Was Kinkade living a double—or triple, or quadruple—life, a man with multiple personas and personalities? The Painter of Light, as one of his daughters says, “was a side of him. But he had all these other sides.”

Told through archival film clips and narration by Kinkade’s family members, business associates, supporters, other painters and art experts, it’s a fascinating portrait of an artist who ultimately became “suffocated” by the commercial juggernaut he’d created. His empire eventually collapsed in lawsuits, financial ruin, allegations of fraud, a swirl of sexual indiscretions, and reports of aberrant, drunken behavior (urinating on a Winnie the Pooh character in a Disneyland hotel, fondling a woman’s breasts). He was accused of using evangelical Christianity as a cloak, a disguise to deceive—and sucker—an impressionable audience. Kinkade died, at age 54 in 2012, overdosing on booze and Valium.

“He had it all,” says his former wife. “And he threw it away.”

The most fascinating part of the film shows Kinkade’s now-adult daughters digging deep into his vault, a locked-away room where their father kept everything he’d ever drawn, showing us his early works and sketches—sometimes grotesque, turbulent and even violent depictions that suggest a much more tortured and troubled soul floundering in darkness rather than basking in the light he’d later make his brand. Maybe, suggests Kinkade’s sister, it had something to do with their abusive father, their parents’ divorce and growing up in a California “shack” often without heat or electricity.

In revealing the deeper demons that haunted—and possibly consumed—Kinkade, Art for Everybody shows how even the Painter of Light had a dark side. And how, as one critic notes, a cottage with such an unnatural glow just might be, in his oil-on-canvas fairy-tale world, an ideal deception for a wicked witch inside, waiting to gobble you up.

—Neil Pond