Best of 2015: Tales of the Grim Sleeper (Nick Broomfield)

Tales of the Grim Sleeper. Nick Broomfield. UK/USA.

With the year book-ended by a pair of first-rate miniseries (Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx on HBO and Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi’s Making a Murderer on Netflix, respectively), 2015 felt a little bit like the year of the true crime documentary, and how fitting for a year marked by civil unrest, racial injustice, and a growing distrust in the police force. You can hear these sentiments echoed throughout Nick Broomfield’s Tales of the Grim Sleeper, a troubling mosaic about a serial killer who haunted the streets of South Central Los Angeles over a twenty-five-year period. No stranger to making films about murder conspiracies (see Kurt & Courtney and its thematic sequel Biggie & Tupac, as well as the pair of Aileen Wuornos docs he made), Broomfield takes a different angle with this film, trying to piece together testimonials about The Grim Sleeper, who was widely believed to have been able to carry out his crimes due to the racial discrimination and negligence of the local law enforcement.

Getting nowhere as a white British man with a camera in South LA, he enlists the help of Pam Brooks, a former prostitute with the sort of star quality young Hollywood couldn’t sell their souls to obtain, who helps him look for a number of missing women believed to have been victims of The Grim Sleeper. With so much time passed and so little evidence, Broomfield pieces together fragments of a terrifying portrait of America, merely scratching the surface of a story that’s pages have been torn out, raising questions that won’t ever have an answer. Tales of the Grim Sleeper is available streaming on HBOGo and HBO Now in the U.S. and was released by Sky Vision in the U.K.

The Two Worst Films of 2014

My therapist and I agreed that not dwelling on the negative (as I have been known to do) might be a fun new thing for me to try, so I'm not going to bother making a list of every crappy movie I sat through in 2014. I used to find that sort of thing fun, but I'd rather highlight the finer things in life instead. With that said, there were two films that lit the fires of hell deep in my soul, and I had to single them out here. Like every year, the film or films that I hate are almost always inexplicably liked by the general public, and in the case of these two dubious flicks, both have already won notable awards, which would stupefy me if I didn't realize how ridiculous and meaningless almost every sort of movie award actually is. I'll keep this brief (in no particular order).

The Normal Heart. Ryan Murphy. USA.

Ending HBO's unofficial AIDS trilogy that began with And the Band Played On and Angels in America with a thud, Ryan Murphy's adaptation of Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart is the most unnecessary film of 2014. Its rehashing of the early days of AIDS feels less like a timely memorial than a roundabout act of slut-shaming and PReP-bashing. I could dwell on Murphy's signature tastelessness or even the poor casting of Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts, but the truly contemptible aspect of The Normal Heart is its existence and placement in time. This isn't the story or the conversation that people should be having about AIDS. We've heard this story before, and we've heard it from better sources. So as it stands in 2014, The Normal Heart is nothing but a shining example of the continued existence of gay self-loathing, shame, and… well… bad taste.

Whiplash. Damien Chazelle. USA.

Winner of both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Whiplash is an appropriately bloated love letter to being a horrible heterosexual white man in America. It clumsily questions some of the shitty privileged, white, heterosexual mythology, only to perform an irritating bit of auto-fellatio in a laughable final scene that proves its moments of reflection were only to amplify its rousing support of those myths of greatness and the American dream. Its misogyny and homophobia are actually rather unsettling, perhaps because they aren't coded or hidden in the subtext. Instead, they're laid bare directly on the screen for the audiences who've applauded it to laugh at or blatantly ignore.

DVD Release Update - 21 July

Of the releases below, it's worth noting that TLA has started announcing DVDs again after this news came out a few months ago. It's also nice to know that Criterion won't be wasting their time on a Chasing Amy Blu-ray, as Miramax has just set a date for it.

DVD

- Classic Educational Shorts, Vols. 1 and 2: How to Be a Man / How to Be a Woman, 1948-1982, d. Various, Kino, 6 October
- The Gate, 1987, d. Tibor Takács, Lionsgate, "Monstrous Special Edition," 6 October, w. Stephen Dorff
- Mirageman, 2007, d. Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, Magnet Releasing/Magnolia, 6 October
- My Fair Lady, 1964, d. George Cukor, Paramount, 6 October
- Happy Birthday to Me, 1981, d. J. Lee Thompson, Anchor Bay, 13 October
- The Killing Room, 2009, d. Jonathan Liebesman, The Weinstein Company, 13 October, w. Chloë Sevigny, Nick Cannon, Timothy Hutton, Peter Stormare, Clea DuVall
- Love of Siam, 2007, d. Chukiat Sakveerakul, Strand Releasing, 13 October
- Shank, 2009, d. Simon Pearce, TLA Releasing, 20 October
- The Shaolin Temple, 1982, d. Zhang Xinyan, Dragon Dynasty/The Weinstein Company, 20 October, w. Jet Li
- Moonlight Serenade, 2006, d. Giancarlo Tallarico, Magnolia, 27 October, w. Amy Adams
- Perestroika [The Reconstructing], 2009, d. Slava Tsukerman (Liquid Sky), Strand Releasing, 27 October, w. F. Murray Abraham, Ally Sheedy
- Janky Promoters, 2009, d. Marcus Raboy, The Weinstein Company, 3 November, w. Ice Cube, Mike Epps, Young Jeezy
- North by Northwest, 1959, d. Alfred Hitchcock, Warner, 50th Anniversary, also on Blu-ray, 3 November
- Make the Yuletide Gay, 2009, d. Rob Williams, TLA Releasing, 10 November
- Wrecked, 2009, d. Bernard Schumanski, Harry Schumanski, TLA Releasing, 10 November
- Star Trek, 2009, d. J.J. Abrams, Paramount, also on Blu-ray, 17 November
- Three Monkeys [Üç maymun], 2008, d. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Zeitgeist, 24 November
- The Redwoods, 2009, d. David Lewis, TLA Releasing, 8 December

Blu-ray

- Kurt Cobain: About a Son, 2006, d. AJ Schnack, Shout! Factory, 6 October
- Chasing Amy, 1997, d. Kevin Smith, Miramax, 3 November
- Clerks, 1994, d. Kevin Smith, Miramax, 3 November
- The Sopranos, Season 1, 1999, HBO, 23 November

Up the Game

Television has always been public enemy #1 for cinema. Once cinema adapted to cinemascope though, the challenge of competing seemed to end there… that is until now. With the popularity of DVDs now, television series have become something entirely different, not merely just time-wasters for bored Americans. You can pick your starting point from a variety of sources as to when television became something to be reckoned with, artistically, dramatically and comedically (I’m not as concerned with the financial aspect). Perhaps it was the advent of cable television. Maybe it was Twin Peaks. Maybe it came when HBO started producing original programming. Or maybe it just came as a result of DVD and Tivo. Plenty of articles were written this past year when the definitive Twin Peaks set was released by Paramount, most of them speculating a question more fascinating than the series’ central mystery: who or what killed not Laura Palmer but Twin Peaks? Few would argue that, if the show were pitched today, it would be a Lost-sized hit, but it’s quite likely that, all the drama between Lynch and ABC aside, viewers just weren’t ready for it. That seems ridiculous now, as the most popular dramatic shows on TV today (aside from those lousy CSI shows) demand viewer participation, even if it’s just to remember what happened in the previous week.

I’m going out on a limb to suggest that it’s the growing competition of television drama that crafted 2007 into the best year of cinema in recent memory (most chalk 1999 as the last great year for the medium). How does cinema take a step up from the compelling, serialized drama and character involvement of shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost or Six Feet Under? 2007 showed us that cinema’s best bet is “taking chances” on films that were completely uncompromising in their cinematic vision and scope. There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and No Country for Old Men should be commended, no matter how you felt about any of the three, for at least reminding us of cinema’s often unreached potential.

Though I’m completely unorganized in my thoughts about this matter, not to mention that finding a definitive idea of what’s going on with the two mediums could be nearly impossible, I think this conflict could provide the best for both worlds. As both a reaction to the tripe of network programming and even the lack of compelling drama in the film world, HBO unleashed a giant of a television corporation, constantly giving their time to challenging, complex and utterly fascinating programming. As a result of this, cinema gave us films of lasting importance and of unmatched scope. We’ll always have to suffer through shit like Everybody Loves Raymond and Good Luck Chuck, no matter what happens. Cinema will never die under TV (we’ll always have Spider-Man, X-Men, and the Pirates of the Caribbean in some form to force the people off their sofas), but perhaps TV was always what cinema needed to keep it in check. Perhaps the battling forces will continue to challenge one another with their respective strengths.