February 10-16, 2005

screen picks

Screen Picks

Lackawanna Blues

Lackawanna Blues (premieres Sat., Feb. 12, 8 p.m., HBO) "This is our story — this ain't in no history book," says Nanny (S. Epatha Merkerson) to wide-eyed Ruben (Marcus Carl Franklin), setting the stage for Lackawanna Blues, George C. Wolfe's energetic adaptation of Ruben Santiago-Hudson's one-man stage show. Set in a bustling upstate New York rooming house that also functions as a community center, hospital, women's shelter and just about anything else that fits between four walls, Santiago-Hudson's autobiographical oral history recalls the vibrant black culture that flourished under segregation (here, roughly 1956-1966) and was ironically dissipated by the victories of the civil rights movement. "That world doesn't exist anymore," says Wolfe, who spent his earliest years in segregated Kentucky. "Every group that comes to this country creates their own culture while they're waiting to be assimilated, and when they get assimilated, they give up all that texture."

"Texture" seems to be a key word for Wolfe, especially when it comes to the expansion of Lackawanna Blues from a one-man show with Santiago-Hudson playing all the roles to a full-on extravaganza whose cast includes Rosie Perez, Delroy Lindo, Jimmy Smits, Mos Def, Macy Gray and Jeffrey Wright, the last a veteran of Wolfe's stage productions of Angels in America, Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk and Topdog/Underdog. Without Santiago-Hudson as its central tale-spinner, Lackawanna Blues lacks a certain lived-in authenticity, but Wolfe counters with shots of fish frying in hot grease and elaborately staged nightclub numbers vibrant enough to shake the dust off your television set. Anchored by Merkerson's iconic performance of an all-embracing matriarch (which will stun those who only know her from Law and Order), Wolfe's film aims for (and sometimes strains for) a combination of timelessness and immediacy, the sense that good times can last forever mixed with the knowledge that they won't.

While hardly nostalgic for segregation, Wolfe remembers a community that "sheltered" him, where "the stories that were passed on to me were not 'Go Down, Moses' stories full of oppression and sorrow, but stories of rebellion and possibility." For him, Nanny represents a bygone era that, at least in the movie, dies when she does, but her vision of selflessness and interdependency we desperately need to recover. "I find it very severe what's going on in the world," he says. "More than ever, I think larger structures are not taking care of people; what structures do we have in place to care for people who are without power? What will end up happening is that different kinds of communities can be structured, so that which is the best part of us can survive and flourish. I'm not sure how much further you can push 'I've got mine,' this kind of Darwinian impulse in the world and in this country, without being devoured by it."

Unstoppable: A Conversation with Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks and Ossie Davis (premieres Sun., Feb. 13, 8 p.m., Black Starz!) Ossie Davis may have died last Friday, but he seems as present as ever. It's Black History Month, after all, and without Ossie Davis, black history would be something less than it is. Although he admitted he was initially "scared" of Malcolm X, Davis indelibly eulogized him as "our living black manhood." Two decades later, he introduced himself to a new generation as Da Mayor in Do the Right Thing, giving Lee's polemic the moral gravity that so often eludes his other films. In between, he adapted authors as diverse as Chester Himes and Wole Soyinka for the screen. (Little of his early work seems to be in print on video, but Davis' version of Himes' scabrous Cotton Comes to Harlem is available on DVD.) In this three-way conversation, hosted by Warrington Hudlin, Davis is as humble as ever, but although none of his movies hit the commercial heights of Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song or Parks' Shaft, it was to Davis that younger black filmmakers came to pay their respects. That artists like Julie Dash and the Hudlins exist to sing his praises is proof enough of his accomplishments.

Misc. Picks: Scribe and the University of Pennsylvania's Africana Studies department kick off their biweekly "Issues in Black Independent Cinema" series with a keynote address by historian Clyde Taylor. (Mon., Feb. 14, 7 p.m., Logan Hall, 249 S. 36th St.) Alfred Leslie (Pull My Daisy, The Last Clean Shirt) drops by Penn to show his work-in-progress, Lost in the Fire October 17, 1966, and answer questions, which based on the clip available at www.allanstonegallery.com should be plentiful. (Wed., Feb. 16, 5 p.m., Meyerson Hall, 210 S. 34th St.)