Article: Heist, Heist, Baby - Set it Off

Heist films are a subgenre dominated by men. Often suited and booted a la Ocean’s 11 (2001) and Reservoir Dogs. Frequently involving professional guys “doing the work”. Films such as those of Micheal Mann for instance. So often, women feel like they’re on the genre’s periphery. It’s not like they’re not involved. Quentin Tarantino’s most mature movie is Jackie Brown (1997). Harmony Korine happily dabbled with female-led heists in the hyper-saturated Spring Breakers (2013). Meanwhile, Steve McQueen’s muscular Widows (2018) is a film that feels somewhat overlooked. However, when you think of heist movies the genre is prominently male. 

One of the most notable female-driven heist movies is perhaps one of the best examples of the genre in the 90s.  F Gary Grey’s Set It Off was rejected by New Line Cinema 3 times before it was greenlit. Executives believed black males would baulk at the idea of a film which had a group of Black, gun-toting females in the forefront. Soon after people came to their senses, Set it Off was made on a budget of $9 million and grossed $41 Million at the box office. This was back in the days when movie budgets were far more reasonable. The film became New Line’s biggest hit of 1996. Opening the doors for much of the movie’s cast and director. To quote the late, great William Goldman: “Nobody knows anything”.  

With America fully masking off it is safe to reuse the old cliché: You couldn’t make anything like this now. Set it Off scores off the Republican bingo card in terms of its representation and politics. Ben Shapiro would quite simply lose his mind. While a possibly amusing sight to consider it would also be a shame. The dynamics that would make the gish galloping broadcaster plotz, are the same things which make Set it Off worth watching.

 After losing her job as a Bank Teller after a violent robbery, Frankie (Vivica A Fox) lands a menial job at a janitorial service with her three longstanding friends: Single mother Tisean (Kimberley Elise), rowdy and belligerent lesbian Cleo (Queen Latifah); and Stony (Jada Pinkett Smith), who is grieving from the recent loss of her younger brother. The foursome’s financial situations are in a crisis, with desperation leading Frankie to persuade the group that performing armed robberies is the perfect way for them to get enough money to push on with their lives and possibly escape the grim realities of their southern L.A. neighbourhood. 

One of the greatest strengths of Tarantino’s early work also became an albatross for much of film in general. Reservoir Dogs (1992) revels in its post-modernism. So much so that other genre movies of the nineties seemed to only trade in their sense of irony. When Tarantino's Jackie Brown hit theatres, a sense of frustration could be felt that Quentin had moved on from his familiar bag of tricks. Jackie Brown was *about* something. And it never seemed to be winking. The same goes for Set it Off, a mainstream heist movie, laced with sociopolitical themes built organically within the narrative. The film drops messages throughout the film. But nothing said feels like shouting. It's a subtle unsubtly that has four struggling black women, a minority group that Hollywood rarely has time for. Dealing with living on the breadline, single parenting, homosexuality and female companionship, while wrapped in golden Sunkissed visuals, and blockbuster action sequences. Set it Off is constructed as well as any piece of 90s genre work. Often better than many. But the unironic, and plausible realities that the women face within the narrative, give it an edge.

F Gary Grey has had a solid mainstream career as a director. With a filmography ranging from still amusing, black slacker comedy Friday (1995), to the brawny musical biopic Straight Outta Compton (2015). His filmmaking allows characters to have actual character. Grey knows how to breathe life into the people and world on screen.  The opening bank heist sequence scores high in its energy and violence. But Grey peppers memorable notes from minor aspects. With elements such as extras who say little but have their story etched on their faces. The focus of the scene is on Fox’s Frankie whose actions propel the narrative, yet Grey ensures that the ill-fated victims of the robbery have their place. At one point a customer catches the eye early on with the slightly haughty way they hold themselves. Making their departure more shocking. The small inhalation of breath from a security guard, not only highlights his anxiety but also foreshadows his fate. These tiny moments build a scene in a way lesser film could easily dismiss. To rag on how modern movies operate is low-hanging fruit. However, a fair few movies now tend to ignore the surrounding world the protagonists inhabit. Set it Off negates this by having a plausible world where people have their moments.

Grey is drawn to strong ensemble casts. Set it Off is no exception. The main cast is one of the things that brings the film together. Screenwriter Takashi Bufford told Blackfilm in 2011 that he had written the screenplay for Jada Pinkett Smith and Queen Latifah. Smith was known for her role as Lena James in the sitcom A Different World. Latifah, a known quantity from her rap career, leapt into acting with small roles in sitcoms and movies such as House Party 2 (1991). Interestingly, Jada Pinkett Smith had sights on Queen Latifah’s boisterous role of Celo before Grey turned her on to the role of Stony, the heart and soul of the film. Vivica A Fox performed in a range of primetime fare and had just come off a supporting role as Will Smith’s stripper girlfriend in Independence Day (1994). Though an element of luck, Fox got the role after Rosie Perez dropped out. Kimberly Elise made her screen debut in the film as the impressionable T.T. Even mixed reviews of Set it Off didn’t deny the chemistry and camaraderie of the four women on screen. These four girls feel like they’ve been a lifelong group of friends, it brings a different energy and dynamic to the typical heist movie. There are less troublesome concerns about misplaced loyalties. The interaction among the four is one of the film’s biggest strengths, particularly when it gets caught in some of the trappings of the genre.

The performances from the main cast have me questioning the ridiculous notion placed forth by the studio executives. Did they honestly believe that Black Men wouldn’t dig this? While the cast broke through and moved on to various projects after Set it Off. Arguably larger projects. They rarely produce turns as enjoyable as they do here.  Vivica A. Fox shows a ruthlessness that she never brings again until her turn Kill Bill (2003). Kimberly Elise does well with the “naïve” role that appears in many heist films of its type. For an on-screen debut, she shows very little inexperience. Larger plaudits go out to Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett Smith who play the id and superego of the group respectively. Latifah’s performance as a black lesbian is incredibly eye-catching due to being so well-rounded. Jada Pinkett Smith, who highlighted her flexibility in many roles in the 90s and early 00s comes through with a performance that perhaps shows her versatility best in Stony. At first, Smith comes across like the girl next door before growing into something different entirely. Films like Set it Off have me asking why Jada wasn’t showcased in more projects. It had me wanting to dive into more movies of hers I haven't seen, instead of just rewatching Woo (1998) and Bamboozled (2000).  

The vibrant cast bonds well with Grey’s assured filmmaking. The director, only 26 at the time, throws everything he can into the film. Often for the better. One can argue that the film is overstuffed. Grey packs everything he can into the film to give it relevance and weight. The bittersweet backstories of Stony and TT alone could make full plots for other features. There’s a feeling that the cast and crew are getting away with something here. Something that won’t be attempted too soon after. Therefore, Set it Off is filled with scenes illustrating gender, class, and racial struggle. Credit should be given to Grey’s use of form to establish this. The scene of the four women, smoking weed and bringing the world to rights is often highlighted, with the girls lamenting the now defunct factory that would have supplied all of them a living wage. However, the film never rests on its laurels with these themes. When Stony visits the home of Keith, her new boyfriend who just so happens to work high up in a bank the group have been casing, a chill of isolation can be felt. Grey forms this with simple wide framing to contrast Stony’s estrangement with Keith’s material world. “It’s not much” he claims dismissively but it’s more than Stony has ever had. 

Grey balances this with well-staged, punchy action sequences that are rich in their use of form. There’s a notable difference between the women’s haphazard first heist. The scene is full of jerky, frantic handheld camerawork. In comparison, once the girls know what they’re doing the heists become smoother, more orchestrated affairs. It’s easy to romanticise the filmmaking of yesteryear, but there’s something to be said about Set it Off’s love of push-ins and slow motion to punctuate moments of expression. Or how the film’s angles get more canted as the story intensifies later. It’s a movie in which the filmmaking feels motivated, making it hard not to feed off the energy. 

There’s something to be said about the levity of Set it Off compared to more male-orientated crime features. Set it Off still manages to deal with weighty “hood” subjects. Yet by shifting the dynamics to four black women who love each other, the film struts with a different energy. Its story isn’t out of the ordinary, yet Set it Off has these women share the screen in a way that sets it apart from other crime films. No longer is there a scene in a dark strip club with men gazing vacuously at female eye candy. Set it Off is more than happy to highlight female desires and sexuality. It is worth noting the film’s lesbian representation and how easily it’s normalised. Again, Ben Shapiro would lose his mind. In addition, many crime films have men with loyalties as the pinnacle of fragility. Set it Off views the women’s relationship with each other as a core strength. Granted this is a movie with a particular finish. Yet it is worth seeing that the strong bonds of the women don't bring them down. The film positions itself as opposed to the frantic paranoia loaded in other films of this nature. 

Recently a sequel to Set it Off has been considered. One of my favourite L.A. crushes, Issa Rae, has been attached to the production. However, this idea looks based that feels based on fuzzy-headed nostalgia and needless mining of intellectual properties. Such laziness once again neglects how many view movies. Set it off doesn’t reside in a vacuum. Nor does it hold the connective tissue to create a second story worth engaging in. Much like the girls in the movie, Set it Off had one shot to move fast and make it big and it took it with aplomb.  Leaving Hollywood to learn the wrong lessons that such a movie brings. But isn’t that often the way?

Set it Off can be found on Amazon Video

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Article: "It's a good scream" - A view on Blow Out (1981)

Spoilers abound in this piece

The way Brian De Palma tacitly Became one of my favourite directors was quite surprising. It was a seduction that occurred with a quiet subtlety. Many years ago, I watched his 1981 film Blow Out as a chance to cross off a blind spot in my long list of movies I’ve not seen. Then over the years since then, I own or at least have seen a huge chunk of his filmography. They’re not all brilliant. Many of De Palma’s works in the latter half of his career don’t shine as brightly as his iconic films of the 70s and 80s. However, De Palma’s filmmaking is so distinctive that even many of his failures have been somewhat interesting. In an age of cinema by committee where filmmaking takes less risks now more than ever, watching something by a director like Brian De Palma still elicits a thrill. You are watching something directed. Not middle-managed. 

Now over 40 years old, the themes of Blow Out still cause provocation. One element is the likes of social media allowing people to lounge within some of the more sinister sides of their interiors. The ending of Blow Out is disturbing for a few reasons. One of them being a woman’s blood-curdling last moments becoming the ADR backdrop for a glib sequence of gaudy horror. In an era where almost everyone’s phones allow one to “broadcast themselves”, it’s of no shock that many people can turn their trauma into “content”. Although De Palma’s film suggests there is a personal toll for doing this, even despite the flashy filmmaking. 

With further inspection, Blow Out is De Palma having a ball with the Conspiracy Theory thriller. A sub-genre that had its heyday in the 70s. Once the rise of Donald Trump solidified the premise of “fake news”, that and the all-encompassing force of social media helped ensure that almost all current affairs can be believed to be underhanded. Trump himself had an assassination attempt not even months ago at the time of writing this. Yet the fracturing of media now has made the idea that the man was ever shot a difficult one. The same manipulation of the medium expressed in Blow Out now feels commonplace for a larger group of people. Misinformation is now a part of the furniture.  

 Blow Out starts with a quintessential De Palma fake-out; opening with an unknown assailant leering outside a rambunctious sorority house. The killer breathes heavily while they peer through the windows of female dorm rooms. Mimicking the likes of Halloween (1979), the shot is taken from the killer's perspective. By seeing what he sees the viewer becomes a participant in what may be about to take place. Soon the killer is inside; stalking the halls of the co-ed’s living quarters. He scans the bedrooms of the young, scantily clad women. Nearly all of them seem to be indulging in some sexual activity. He spies upon a solitary blonde in a shower. She is unaware of the killer advancing upon her until the last moment. Her eyes widen and she lets out…a rather ridiculous scream. The film cuts away and we discover that this is a film. It's a scene of a movie playing within a movie. This gratuitous slasher flick is being checked out by sound engineer Jack Terry (a career-best John Travolta) who is then instructed to find more ambient sound for the movie. He’s also charged with finding a better scream for the soon-to-be murder victim in the film.

The innocuous task of finding some movie sounds kick starts a chain of events which alter Jack’s life in a way he could never imagine. While capturing sounds of wind, owls, and toads, Jack hears a tire burst and sees a car fly into the nearby lake where he’s capturing sounds. In a moment of heroism, he rescues Sally (Nancy Allen) who was trapped in the vehicle but finds out later in the hospital that the other person in the vehicle, a famous senator, drowned in the car. Questions arise about why that young girl was with a politician on the brink of an election win. She isn’t his wife. She’s substantially younger than the man she was in the car with. But a more taxing riddle is burning on Jack’s mind. He thinks he heard a gunshot before the wheel blew out. If it had merely blown out, then it’s an unfortunate accident. If there was a gunshot, then this was an assassination attempt. 

Ostensibly a political conspiracy thriller which relates more to the decade just gone, Blow Out is also an incredible movie about filmmaking and how our media distorts the truth. So much of the film is De Palma using his bag of tricks to illustrate the illusiveness of fact, and how easily an audience can be toyed with. That opening sequence starts from the killer’s perspective. We’re then told that the movie we were watching, which was at first through another person’s eyes, is not the film we will be watching. The third scene that plays while the opening credits appear utilises more De Palma favoured techniques. The scene has Travolta’s Jack working on his film while a television relays the evening news. Using the split dioptre and split screens, the film not only builds Jack’s character on one side of the screen, but it also constructs the narrative bones of much of the movie on the other. It also provides fictional information. I’m sure many people know that “Liberty Day” doesn’t exist as a holiday in America but, Blow Out shows you this information like Philadelphia has been celebrating the day for years. 

The way the camera is used to inform people of the story is beguiling. The cinematography is used in a manner that heaps layers of meaning upon each image. Midway through the film, Jack is searching for a piece of audio evidence that has gone missing. As he frantically searches the room, the camera rotates in a slow 360 pan. The move not only highlights the slowly increasing paranoid energy of the protagonist, but it also mocks Jack’s occupation as a soundman, spooling around like a reel of tape.  Split screens are used to highlight victims and murder weapons at the same time. 

Meanwhile, legendary cinematographer  Vilmos Zsigmond and the design team build multitudes of shots with Red, White and Blue to capture the film's mood. Desaturating the colour where they can. Using the colours of the American flag as the palette of the film only seems to heighten the cynicism of the film’s central conspiracy. Zsigmond in an interview on the Arrow Blu-ray, spoke about how much he dislikes movies in which the dialogue tells the story over the visuals. One wonders how he would cope with the cinematic landscape now, where some movies are mere fodder for internet meme culture.  

Brian De Palma has fared less well in his later decades. His recent efforts have faltered below the level of his earlier works, perhaps due to the changing attitudes and approaches to cinema and filmmaking. This is a shame because, with films like Blow Out, the filmmaker has things to say in abundance. First off, the film’s title and plot are a riff on Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) and more than a small nod to the world cinema that De Palma devoured during his early career. The film also feels like a response to The Conversation (1974), directed by De Palma’s friend Francis Ford Coppola. The references to Alfred Hitchcock's movies undoubtedly make an appearance as expected. However, the most notable aspect of Blow Out is how much De Palma wants to communicate the filmmaking process.  Blow Out is so fun because intermingled with all the paranoid thrills of it all, De Palma is gleefully inducting us into how the sausage is made. The fun with so many of Brian De Palma’s thrillers is how they both deconstruct their absurdity while sweeping you up within it. There are many films which love to tout the “power of cinema” yet De Palma, at this point in his career, was so adept at filmmaking, that he managed to do so by having John Travolta illustrate the potency of the moving image with a flicker book. It’s not like people haven’t done things like this before. It’s just that they haven’t done it like De Palma. Almost every scene highlights the artifice of cinema, while the same visual language is used to enthral the viewer.

In addition to this De Palma has never been afraid of pushing buttons and having his films revel in their baser urges. When combined with his technical skill Blow Out, along with the likes of Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1984), allows the filmmaker to make films that are operatic yet trashy. Lusciously crafted, but lurid in theme. While Body Double and Dressed to Kill are possibly more direct with their explicit nature, Blow Out still indulges in provocations. The death of the Governor is founded upon his fondness for escorts. The thuggish Burke, played frighteningly by John Lithgow, is killing women who look like Sally. One of them is also a sex worker (Deborah Everton). The interplay between Lithgow and Everton before her violent demise is comical, but also based on the idea of hooking up in a public station for a sex act. 

The final moments of Dennis Franz’s Manny are wryly shot with the character lying as if crucified, while the camera hovers over him a la God’s eye view. The scene's main purpose is to provide more detail into the film’s inciting incident. And it ends with Manny losing a headbutt battle with a bottle of whiskey.  His last moments are a desperate attempt to get his end away with an unwilling Sally. Bathed in red light, the death of this low-rent Jake Gittes wannabe is shown with a beauty the character doesn’t deserve. Of course, that’s the fun of it. The film loves to jump over the line between sex and death. De Palma loves to do this with panache. 

My love for Brian De Palma, particularly his more personal genre pieces, is that he knows that the audience likes to watch.  While a polarizing filmmaker, he’s also a seductive one, using the power of his technical to lull a viewer into corruption. His films wouldn’t be challenged so much if they weren’t so cinematically proficient. At his peak, the films of De Palma became fascinating because of how well they manufactured distance between a viewer while coaxing them into the heightened drama. Blow Out starts with a cheesy wannabe Halloween-style opening. Something that feels manufactured, but once Lithgow’s Burke begins to execute murders of women who share a familiarity with Sally, suddenly the film's tactics, still self-contentedly winking at the audience, operate on a different level. The cheese has gone. It is now replaced with anxiety. 

De Palma’s command of film language comes from the filmmaker he cribs from the most, Alfred Hitchcock. De Palma's filmmaking journey stems from the impression Hitchcock’s Vertigo made in 1958. The portly Brit’s ability to utilise cinematic language burrowed deep into the psyche of a then-young De Palma. In a 2020 interview with the Associated Press, De Palma details:

“As I’ve gotten older and made a lot of films, I can see there’s always lessons to be learned from Hitchcock the way he sets up certain sequences. And “Vertigo” is the whole idea of creating an illusion and getting the audience to fall in love with it and then tossing it off the tower twice. Very, very good idea.”

It's such a good idea that De Palma borrows from Hitchcock liberally for many of his films. Sometimes it was the theme, like Body Double, where the voyeurism of Rear Window (1954) plays a huge part of the narrative. Dressed to Kill is an updated reinterpretation of Psycho. In Blow Out, however, while De Palma makes his riffs to Hitch, what punctuates the matter is De Palma’s setting the film up as an example of Hitchcock’s “Bomb Analogy”:

 “Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it…In these conditions, this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the secret.”

Blow Up is possibly De Palma performing this exercise in its purest form. From the split screen news report early on that layers and primes the audience to information the lead character seems only half aware of, to the introduction of Burke, whose underhanded tasks throughout the film, which like the cheesy slasher film from the start hands the audience the perspective of the killer. De Palma goads the audience with the information. He seems to say: “Are you watching this? You’ve been given this information. Don’t you think it might hurt somebody?” De Palma constantly provides the audience with knowledge the characters are unaware of. The viewer becomes a participant. 

De Palma, despite his love of Hitchcock, isn’t fond of the idea that he imitates the master of suspense. On an episode of Dick Cavett's 1978 talk show, De Palma told Cavett that he had evolved the cinematic grammar that Hitchcock had put in place. This is true. De Palma uses Hitchcock as the basis, but there’s always as much of De Palma in his films as there is Hitchcock. Quentin Tarantino sums this up well in an interview where he gives his opinion on why he vibes with Brian De Palma over Hitchcock. In an interview, he notes that De Palma not only being able to explore the artistic minutiae of the violence in his set pieces due to the changing attitudes of the eras that each filmmaker operated in but also mentions that De Palma is a stronger social satirist throughout his body of work. It’s fascinating to hear Tarantino mention this, as I suddenly felt the director try and provide similar within his work, to mixed results.  

Both De Palma and Tarantino are similar to hip-hop producers, who have repurposed the language of the medium that they love in surprising ways. Injecting what has come before with their personality infused. It’s hardly any surprise that both directors often make commentaries about filmmaking itself within their movies. They are also directors who at the peak, were looking to see what buttons they could push from a societal standpoint. This is perhaps why Blow Out endures. In a recent interview for Vulture, De Palma claims his films have lasted out because they are cinematic in a way that modern films do not approach. It’s hard to disagree. A Guardian retrospective on the film notes how the film is broken down into visual and audio, in a way that you don’t see in modern filmmaking, despite the improvement of tech. 

But the best films of De Palma are also dream vessels for the themes they inhabit. Body Double is now revised as one of De Palma’s crowning achievements from film fans. It’s easier to see this now. Because the world we live in has become inhabited by the allure of voyeurism. We are now constantly snooping around the publicly private lives of everyone else. Blow Out is a blow-for-blow account of how the moving image helps play with objective truth and how easily we lose ourselves because of it. De Palma guides the viewer through this; the fake-outs, the split screens, the homages to cinema language. The audience is being directed every step of the way.  Blow Out’s tragic ending becomes an exclamation point on how truth is lost. The screams Sally emits before her actual death are taken, repurposed and reshaped into the shoddy horror film that Jack’s been making. Real pain into a fake entertainment. Jack finds his killer scream to finish his movie. It’s a good scream. His producer loves it. But the sound is driving him mad. And you know where it came from too. Yet if he told anyone where those cries came from no one would believe him.

Blow Out is on YouTube and Prime Video at the time of writing. There are also two exceptional Blu-ray packages floating around.

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Review: Big Bad Wolves

Year: 2013 (U.K Release 2014)

Director: Aharon Keshales, Navot Papushado

Screenplay: Aharon Keshales, Navot Papushado

Starring: Lior Ashkenazi, Tzahi Grad, Doval'e Glickman, Rotem Keinan

Synopsis is here

If you give it a moments thought, then it really shouldn’t be a surprise that Quentin Tarantino considered Big Bad Wolves one of 2013’s best movies. The words violent revenge film has become almost synonymous with the directors later works. While the description of Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s tense thriller can happily lend itself to that particular sub-genre, Big Bad Wolves like the Israeli duo’s first feature Rabies is far more interested in stretching the limits, shifting the tones and skewing the view of what we westerners are comfortably used to.

The catalyst of the narrative (the disappearance and murder of a schoolgirl) plays on the primal fears that haunt many adults, yet Big Bad Wolves approaches the subject with a caustic wit that may stun an unaware viewer. This seems to be a trademark of the writing/directing duo; who were only too happy to punctuate Rabies with similar coroner like humour. Like its predecessor, Big Bad Wolves is also willing to mine sympathy from uncomfortable areas, creating an environment of uncertainty that leaves the viewer unbalanced. More than once, we’re so sure of the intentions of characters, only for things to flip on their head and make us double take what we saw and how we felt before. Such oddball shifts not only remind us of the constant tonal shifting of Korean cinema, but also give the film a strong layer of texture. While violent, the film is not as explicit it may suggest. But the horror lies in the uncertainly of what appears to be such a cut and dry case. The fear comes from the idea that we may be siding with the wrong people for terrible reasons.

What interests me about Kashales and Papushado’s filmmaking is how willing they to allow their characters to bring, not only their own baggage, but weighty subjects of the Israeli culture to the table. Rabies flirted with bringing personal relationships, gender politics and religious elements, intelligently to the forefront. Big Bad Wolves, the trend, asking one simple question: Where are the women? This is not only a question in the literal sense, a little girl has been taken away (the wordless slow motion opening is sets the tone superbly), but the film queries the film in a more obscure way as we see all three of the main characters conduct all their relationships with women through strained phone calls. These men are amusingly always too occupied with asserting their masculinity and doing other (vicious) things that they let their relationships fracture. It’s important to note just how bad things get for each character as they take less notice from those they love.

While not as generous with the bloodletting as the likes of “Torture Porn” exploitation fare such as Hostel, Wolf Creek, et all, Big Bad Wolves,  brings the aggression and tensions that stem from the country’s history. The film also; unlike the modern films that have before it, smartly questions the nature of torture in a way that’s upfront and witty while maintaining a troubling brutality. While The film’s climax may not completely satisfy, Big Bad Wolves, provides the type of energetic ambition that horror viewers need to see more of.