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https://blackgirlnerds.com/cult-classics-the-musical-mixed-bag-of-school-daze/
Say what you will about Spike Lee, the Brooklyn-born filmmaker has never done anything in half measures.
If Lee is going to make a film about Black policeman infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, this film is going to be more bombastic than its source material — more explosions, more romance, more delightfully cinematic. Granted, in the case of BlacKkKlansman, this kind of cinematic aggrandizement of its protagonist might have seemed like wholesale fabrication to other Black politically-minded filmmakers, but you can’t say the potential propaganda was boring.
Regardless of the veracity of his story, Lee has a flair for the visual and an acute sense of mood. Stylistically, it’s easy to point out some of Lee’s mainstays: the roving dolly shot; the fourth-wall breaks; and, perhaps most importantly, the valedictory political message. It’s hard to imagine any Lee film without them, and 1988’s School Daze, Lee’s second feature, seems to be when these stylistic and thematic choices first coalesced.
Critics did not appreciate it at the time, and there is decent reasoning for that I will expand upon below. But as an artifact of a young Lee’s career and as a sign of a young filmmaker budding into the provocative, politically-minded artist he would become, School Daze is an experimental, painfully insightful exploration of colorism and the supposedly waning need for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
The colorism School Daze tackles is often hard to watch. This is not (so much) to do with the style but more with the substance. Watching the respective groups of Vaughn “Dap” Dunlap (Laurence Fishburne) and Julian “Dean Big Brother Almighty” Eaves (Giancarlo Esposito) trade barbs of “sell out” and “j*ggaboo” and nearly come to blows is painful. Watching Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) and Rachel Meadows (Kyme) have an admittedly jaunty time taunting each other about “good hair” and blue-eyed contacts gets you moving and moves you as well.
School Daze is Lee’s first film after She’s Gotta Have It (1986) and before Do the Right Thing (1989). It acts as a connective tissue of sorts, bridging Lee’s activism and provocative social commentary with his ever-present sense of experimentation and trying whatever might work. When School Daze gets hard to watch stylistically, however, it is because of this very same experimentation.
Contemporary critics largely gave the film middling reviews because School Daze largely cannot decide if it is a Grease-like musical set on an HBCU, one where the songs propel the plot and/or explain character motivations, or simply a film that occasionally lapses into unjustified musicality.
Take the talent show portion. Tisha Campbell’s “Wannabes” sing a song about not wanting to be alone tonight. It’s nice. It’s hip, funky, and CHIC’s Raymond Jones even composed the whole thing. Cool. The problem, though, is that the song has nothing to do with the plot. And the scene isn’t interspersed with moments that propel the plot forward, either. We’re just watching Tisha Campbell show us that she’s got a great set of pipes and record labels should take notice.
This was less the case with other musical set pieces. “I Can Only Be Me,” although not plot relevant, is thematically germane, as in, one can only be themself, have the eye color/hair/lips they were born with, etc. That said, the scenes spliced in don’t seem to relate much to the theme (I can only be me, and also here’s Laurence Fishburne and Kyme getting it on).
Finally, the step performance scene is one that includes key players and contains diegetic music, but the narrative consequences are negligible. Yes, Dap and Julian’s groups fight, but the fight doesn’t result in anything beyond that; no stakes are raised and no relationships are changed due to this exchange.
Besides these hiccups, School Daze is an admirable sophomore effort that attempts many things Lee would later perfect. Worth mentioning as well are the film’s comments on divestment from then-apartheid South Africa. Lee concocts a compelling reason for the film’s fictional HBCU Mission College to accept financing from persons still doing business with the South African government — namely, no one else is funding HBCUs.
The historically Black institutions increasingly seem to be a relic of the past; not even Black America appears particularly interested in monetary sponsorship. Chairman of the board of trustees Cedar Cloud (Art Evans) laments that the Mormons have Brigham Young University, Jewish people have Yeshiva, and white Americans have everything else; why won’t Black Americans invest in a spot all our own? The film seems to answer that, though we are a people united by skin color and shared experience, we are a people divided by white supremacist, colorist notions of eurocentric beauty and bourgeoisie class distinctions. Whether the complete overhaul of this mindset is possible, the film never explicitly states. As far as how to achieve such unity, the film simply exhorts us to wake up.
That School Daze is something of a structural mess should not detract (at least not too much) from one’s enjoyment of it. It ends abruptly in a way that almost makes me wonder if they ran out of financing. A big thing that’s never resolved is Jane’s sexual assault via coercion from her boyfriend. Dap is somehow able to intuit that Half Pint (Spike Lee) has done something wrong by sleeping with Julian’s girlfriend, but based on the information he knows, the scene can also be read as him simply mad at Half-Pint and the rest of Julian’s fraternity for breaking the sacred mores of monogamy.
In her essay “Selling Hot P***y,” bell hooks claimed the film undercut its potential to disrupt harmful notions about Black bodies and beauty by its “overall sexual humiliation and abuse of [B]lack females.” While I would argue that consensual, loving sex and relationships between Black men and women was portrayed in scenes involving Dap and Rachel, this does not override the fact that, of all the characters, Jane seems to be singularly “punished” via assault and gaslighting for her sin of buying into pernicious, ubiquitous eurocentric beauty standards. Julian himself, arguably the main male antagonist, never receives such a brutal comeuppance.
School Daze is a mixed bag. One part musical, one part comedy, one part soap opera, wholly politically pertinent. It is worth a viewing if only to see Lee growing into the director who would, one year later, make one of America’s most salient, enduring commentaries on contemporary race relations. School Daze is not always perfect — indeed, at times it’s a mess — but you can’t say the film bores or fails to get an audience reaction. It’s hard not to feel more enlivened, more awake, after a viewing.
School Daze is available to watch on Philo and available to rent on YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Vudu.
Say what you will about Spike Lee, the Brooklyn-born filmmaker has never done anything in half measures.
If Lee is going to make a film about Black policeman infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, this film is going to be more bombastic than its source material — more explosions, more romance, more delightfully cinematic. Granted, in the case of BlacKkKlansman, this kind of cinematic aggrandizement of its protagonist might have seemed like wholesale fabrication to other Black politically-minded filmmakers, but you can’t say the potential propaganda was boring.
Regardless of the veracity of his story, Lee has a flair for the visual and an acute sense of mood. Stylistically, it’s easy to point out some of Lee’s mainstays: the roving dolly shot; the fourth-wall breaks; and, perhaps most importantly, the valedictory political message. It’s hard to imagine any Lee film without them, and 1988’s School Daze, Lee’s second feature, seems to be when these stylistic and thematic choices first coalesced.
Critics did not appreciate it at the time, and there is decent reasoning for that I will expand upon below. But as an artifact of a young Lee’s career and as a sign of a young filmmaker budding into the provocative, politically-minded artist he would become, School Daze is an experimental, painfully insightful exploration of colorism and the supposedly waning need for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
The colorism School Daze tackles is often hard to watch. This is not (so much) to do with the style but more with the substance. Watching the respective groups of Vaughn “Dap” Dunlap (Laurence Fishburne) and Julian “Dean Big Brother Almighty” Eaves (Giancarlo Esposito) trade barbs of “sell out” and “j*ggaboo” and nearly come to blows is painful. Watching Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) and Rachel Meadows (Kyme) have an admittedly jaunty time taunting each other about “good hair” and blue-eyed contacts gets you moving and moves you as well.
School Daze is Lee’s first film after She’s Gotta Have It (1986) and before Do the Right Thing (1989). It acts as a connective tissue of sorts, bridging Lee’s activism and provocative social commentary with his ever-present sense of experimentation and trying whatever might work. When School Daze gets hard to watch stylistically, however, it is because of this very same experimentation.
Contemporary critics largely gave the film middling reviews because School Daze largely cannot decide if it is a Grease-like musical set on an HBCU, one where the songs propel the plot and/or explain character motivations, or simply a film that occasionally lapses into unjustified musicality.
Take the talent show portion. Tisha Campbell’s “Wannabes” sing a song about not wanting to be alone tonight. It’s nice. It’s hip, funky, and CHIC’s Raymond Jones even composed the whole thing. Cool. The problem, though, is that the song has nothing to do with the plot. And the scene isn’t interspersed with moments that propel the plot forward, either. We’re just watching Tisha Campbell show us that she’s got a great set of pipes and record labels should take notice.
This was less the case with other musical set pieces. “I Can Only Be Me,” although not plot relevant, is thematically germane, as in, one can only be themself, have the eye color/hair/lips they were born with, etc. That said, the scenes spliced in don’t seem to relate much to the theme (I can only be me, and also here’s Laurence Fishburne and Kyme getting it on).
Finally, the step performance scene is one that includes key players and contains diegetic music, but the narrative consequences are negligible. Yes, Dap and Julian’s groups fight, but the fight doesn’t result in anything beyond that; no stakes are raised and no relationships are changed due to this exchange.
Besides these hiccups, School Daze is an admirable sophomore effort that attempts many things Lee would later perfect. Worth mentioning as well are the film’s comments on divestment from then-apartheid South Africa. Lee concocts a compelling reason for the film’s fictional HBCU Mission College to accept financing from persons still doing business with the South African government — namely, no one else is funding HBCUs.
The historically Black institutions increasingly seem to be a relic of the past; not even Black America appears particularly interested in monetary sponsorship. Chairman of the board of trustees Cedar Cloud (Art Evans) laments that the Mormons have Brigham Young University, Jewish people have Yeshiva, and white Americans have everything else; why won’t Black Americans invest in a spot all our own? The film seems to answer that, though we are a people united by skin color and shared experience, we are a people divided by white supremacist, colorist notions of eurocentric beauty and bourgeoisie class distinctions. Whether the complete overhaul of this mindset is possible, the film never explicitly states. As far as how to achieve such unity, the film simply exhorts us to wake up.
That School Daze is something of a structural mess should not detract (at least not too much) from one’s enjoyment of it. It ends abruptly in a way that almost makes me wonder if they ran out of financing. A big thing that’s never resolved is Jane’s sexual assault via coercion from her boyfriend. Dap is somehow able to intuit that Half Pint (Spike Lee) has done something wrong by sleeping with Julian’s girlfriend, but based on the information he knows, the scene can also be read as him simply mad at Half-Pint and the rest of Julian’s fraternity for breaking the sacred mores of monogamy.
In her essay “Selling Hot P***y,” bell hooks claimed the film undercut its potential to disrupt harmful notions about Black bodies and beauty by its “overall sexual humiliation and abuse of [B]lack females.” While I would argue that consensual, loving sex and relationships between Black men and women was portrayed in scenes involving Dap and Rachel, this does not override the fact that, of all the characters, Jane seems to be singularly “punished” via assault and gaslighting for her sin of buying into pernicious, ubiquitous eurocentric beauty standards. Julian himself, arguably the main male antagonist, never receives such a brutal comeuppance.
School Daze is a mixed bag. One part musical, one part comedy, one part soap opera, wholly politically pertinent. It is worth a viewing if only to see Lee growing into the director who would, one year later, make one of America’s most salient, enduring commentaries on contemporary race relations. School Daze is not always perfect — indeed, at times it’s a mess — but you can’t say the film bores or fails to get an audience reaction. It’s hard not to feel more enlivened, more awake, after a viewing.
School Daze is available to watch on Philo and available to rent on YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Vudu.
What would you do with your very own X-wing fighter? Let all the Star Wars fans in your life take joy rides? Buzz the tower while blasting “Danger Zone?” Join the Resistance and fight the Empire? This isn’t just a fun thought experiment, there is actually one up for sale in Atlanta, Georgia. A doctor spent eight years building it and takes the ship to events like Star Wars Night at baseball games and the DragonCon parade. But now it’s up for sale, as shown off in the amusing music video below.
The builder shares other videos of the X-wing making the rounds, including training videos on how to use the controls, on the XWingHerself YouTube channel. While it doesn’t actually fly, it can drive on the small wheels hidden inside the legs. The S-foils also open and close to give that real X-wing fighter look. And there’s room for R2-D2 to sit behind the cockpit and help navigate, or just provide sassy backseat driver comments.
There’s no price listed for this X-wing so it’s anyone’s guess how much it will go for. The builder plans to donate all proceeds from the sale to support Ukraine. Another X-wing recently sold at auction for over $2 million, but it was an original screen-used prop miniature of Red Leader. If you don’t want to drop all your credits, Poe Dameron’s ship is on loan to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Or perhaps you will see this one while out and about in Atlanta.
We learned about the X-wing up for sale thanks to Boing Boing. It’s not the only amazing fan-built X-wing we’ve come across over the years. Apparently it’s many people’s passion project to have own of their own, even if it just takes up space in their garage. And who can blame them, it’s the coolest ship in the galaxy after all.
Melissa is Nerdist’s science & technology staff writer. She also moderates “science of” panels at conventions and co-hosts Star Warsologies, a podcast about science and Star Wars. Follow her on Twitter @melissatruth.
The post Count Your Credits, This Life-Size X-wing Is Up for Sale appeared first on Nerdist.
The first Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 trailer finally dropped, giving fans their first real look at Peacemaker’s Chukwudi Iwuji as the film’s main villain, the High Evolutionary. So who is Marvel’s maddest scientist? What are his powers? And how will he play into the future of the MCU? Get ready to get cosmic as we’re here to answer all your burning High Evolutionary questions.
Who Is the High Evolutionary in Marvel Comics?
1966’s Thor #133 marks the first reference to the High Evolutionary. He would make his debut on the page in the very next issue, which also included a cameo of the mutant twins who would become such a key part of his comic book lore. With Galactus planning deep space destruction as always, Thor is looking for Jane Foster. It’s on his search that he comes across Mount Wundagore, the High Evolutionary, and his New Men. Pietro and Wanda are going to Mount Wundagore to seek answers about their waning mutant powers.
It wouldn’t be until years later that readers learned who the High Evolutionary truly was thanks to backup stories in The Evolutionary War event. His human name was Herbert Edgar Wyndham and he had once been a successful academic scientist. As a child Herbert became obsessed with genetics and the possibility of “evolving” creatures. But it wasn’t until an encounter with a strange man—later revealed to be a rogue Inhuman—who enlightened him on how to “crack the genetic code” that Herbert made his dreams a reality. His experiments made him an outcast in the scientific field and he moved to Mount Wundagore with his research partner, Jonathan Drew, father of Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew. There he built his futuristic home. He began to evolve animals, creating a series of humanoid beasts known as the New Men.
How Is the High Evolutionary Connected to the Scarlet Witch?
Herbert’s first appearance alluded to a connection to the Maximoffs. A flashback in 1974’s Giant-Size Avengers #1 teased a vital Mount Wundagore backstory around the twins’ birth. Finally, in 1979’s Avengers #185-187, Herbert’s full impact on the twins’ lives came to light. It was during this iconic arc that readers learned their “true history.” Their mother sought refuge on Mount Wundagore after their father gained powers and went mad “raving with a desire to rule the world.” The High Evolutionary’s cow creature known as Bova delivered the twins and soon their mother left the children with the bovine midwife. While Bova tried to give the twins to the hero known as the Whizzer, he chose to run away. Eventually, the Maximoffs came and adopted the twins.
What does all this have to do with Wanda’s powers? Chthon “marked” her at her birth. We learn this as Chthon possesses Wanda. Speaking through Wanda, Chthon tells the Avengers that Mount Wundagore was created to imprison him and the Darkhold. Inevitably, someone used the Darkhold and Chthon was freed when this knowledge fell into the hands of the wrong person. Eventually, the demon is defeated. But in that moment Chthon decides to imbue baby Wanda with his magic, creating arguably the most famous origin of the Scarlet Witch.
How Is the High Evolutionary Connected to Adam Warlock?
In the comics, Adam Warlock and the High Evolutionary are deeply connected in a way that would make sense if translated to the big screen in the upcoming Guardians movie. Remember how we first met Adam Warlock in the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 stinger? Adam was in a giant cocoon, looked after by the High Priestess of the Sovereign, Ayesha. Ayesha calls her creation “Him” (as in Adam’s first appearance in the Fantastic Four) before deciding to name him Adam.
The reason why this all plays into the High Evolutionary joining the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 cast goes back to 1972’s Marvel Premiere #1. Bringing the story of Adam Warlock to life, the issue digs deep into his past. Created by scientists on Earth, the High Evolutionary later found Adam’s body floating in a cocoon in space. In the comics Herbert adopts Adam, names him Warlock and places an emerald upon his forehead. The comics would later reveal the emerald as the Soul Gem. It feels highly likely that we could see some version of this come to the screen.
How Will the High Evolutionary Fit Into the MCU?
The trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 gave us our first real glimpse of the Evolutionary in action, showing what appears to be his part in Rocket’s origin story. Like the comics, he “evolved” Rocket from an ordinary animal into something akin to the beings he created in the comics. We also saw a world that looked just like Counter-Earth, the artificial world he created populated by his animal/human hybrids. Given his long history with the character Adam Warlock, who is also in the film in a major role, it makes sense that Counter-Earth plays a part in the story. The trailer also shows him running people on giant hamster wheels, further blurring the lines between humans and animals.
We’re guessing that the High Evolutionary’s most important role right now will be a cosmic one. Playing the villain in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 would be a smart way to introduce him to the MCU. It would follow the comics’ path of presenting him first as a powerful and Machiavellian scientist and then later introducing the human truth of his path. Now that Ms. Marvel established the mutant gene in the MCU it feels very intentional to introduce a famed geneticist. As to whether the High Evolutionary ever visits Mount Wundagore or create Bova… well, we can dream.
Additional reporting by Eric Diaz.
Originally published July 27, 2022.
The post Who Is GUARDIAN OF THE GALAXY’s High Evolutionary? His Marvel Comics Origins and Powers, Explained appeared first on Nerdist.