One Spoon of Chocolate

...and one spoon of lemon, and one spoon of oregano, and one spoon of cayenne, and one spoon of...

This film had so many homages and styles strung together that it was too hard for me to find a foothold. The narrative broke down when each scene was playing like an individual track in an album, rather than a story beat.

I was glad to hear RZA's thoughts on the film (in the Q+A immediately following the screening), where he talked about his anchoring idea that movies can just be entertainment. Because that's what I saw: he loves so many different types of film and he wanted to have a clip of each style in his film; he likes sex scenes, so he added sex scenes when things slowed down; he wanted to be entertained. But that potluck approach made each homage feel short-changed and I never picked up a rhythm strong enough to keep me flowing in the film's story. I was entertained, but not much more.

Ned and I were eating at Little Goat Diner down the street before the showing and we were talking about why it's harder to review music than film. And one of my thoughts was that films are consumed as one piece, one package, one arc with a single storyline. And albums have discrete tracks that each rise and fall and so it's harder to assemble a narrative from the multiple pieces. This film echoes that idea, I think, as an example in the opposite direction: each scene was written and shot in a different direction, with only half an eye to the overall story. I kinda think that if RZA had actually had each scene be completely contained and more dramatically differently-styled - even as incongruuous as that would be - it would have paid stronger homage to each source and would have been a stronger statement.