Just the Ticket #181: Sinners
a.k.a. The Sinful Ticketmaster.
Happy Juneteenth, Ticketholders!
As a fractionally indigenous—but not enough of any tribe to qualify for reservation status—and mostly Caucasian child of the 80s and 90s, I must admit that I had never been educated on the holiday despite it being centuries old. Sure, I learned about the American Civil War and slavery, but until I got into high school, I had never been taught beyond the perspective of that Winston Churchill quote, like, it was always taught as just the Civil War, as if civil wars didn't happen anywhere but America and comic books, with a focus on things that happened, the dates they happened, and the famous white people who did them. Black and Asian Americans were just groups of people that bad things happened to (unless you were a smuggler or you invented peanut butter or something). If you wanted to learn that ending slavery didn't instantly fix white people or make things better for minorities, your parents had to buy the DLC from the government so you could come back to school next year. So, yeah; that's how it takes over two hundred years to make Emancipation a federal holiday, and how it takes my ignorantly conditioned, mostly white ass over thirty years to learn what Juneteenth is.
I still don't even understand why Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, the Dixie Chicks, and Lady Antebellum had to change their names and logos, but Brer Rabbit molasses, Dixie plastic ware, and Dixieline Lumber still get to be a thing. The new names are stupidly generic, and the selective nature of it all doesn't make logical sense. Change nothing or change everything, and if you do, make it something cool or appealing. Personally, I think "Ben's Classic" would have been better than "Ben's Original." Or even just take the picture of the racist caricature off of the box and still call it Uncle Ben's. Instead of just dropping "Dixie," The Chicks could have gone with "Dallas Chicks" (keeping the D.C. sound of the name and because they're from Dallas), or the oft-suggested "Texas Chicks." Lady A is admittedly kind of a cool name, but it doesn't sound country enough and it's kind of like censoring "fuck," in that the context and the letters left behind fill in what the rest of the word is. Like, you know f--k is fuck because if it was fork or folk, you wouldn't be censoring it, right?
Sorry to get all New Piece Offerings on you, Ticketholders; it's been a long, caffeinated day, and my tangents have tangents. My point was, today is Juneteenth, I just learned what that federal holiday even is as I'm drafting this up, and that fact is a sin.
Puns and my social ignorance aside, Sinners is the perfect movie for me to review today instead of doing the usual Throwback Thursday push, and it's good. Really good.
Go watch it somewhere, anywhere, any way you can, and then come back here, because Spoilers.
But then, the night of the juke's grand opening comes, and Sinners pulls a From Dusk 'Til Dawn on us. So let's talk about Miles Caton as Preacher Boy. This is his first major acting role, but Caton is a singer beyond his years, like he eats Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, and Buddy Guy (who plays an older version of Preacher Boy in a profound post-credits scene) for breakfast every morning. In the movie, this translates perfectly into Preacher Boy's voice being so powerful that it transcends time and mortality, leading to a surreal remix montage of him unknowingly collaborating with everyone from his tribal ancestry to 70s metalheads, 80s breakdancers, 90s rappers, and modern EDM deejays until they metaphorically and metaphysically burn the house down. But he also attracts the attention of Irish vampire Remmick (Back to Black's Jack O'Connell doing a Goggins-lite accent and Nic Cage face-pulls most of the time) and his two Klansmen thralls.
Those who criticize horror movies for "not being about anything" besides base emotions and bloody violence will be surprised at this point in the film (assuming the more realistic depictions of segregated society didn't grab their sensibilities earlier in the runtime), and those who criticize modern Hollywood for being bluntly "woke" will crush their clutched pearls into paste at every single frame throughout because Sinners delivers its commentary on all manner of appropriation (with a focus on Black music and artistry) with all the subtlety of an overpolished silver stake to the heart, and I don't care because said stake is a well-crafted work of art.
In the tracking shot through the train station where Stack and Preacher Boy encounter Mary and Delta Slim, the white extras are made to look uncanny, alien, and artificial. Rennick and his thralls' folk music initially lacks a bassline and is sung in a stylistically uniform, flat tone to indicate the lifelessness and conformity of the trio. But as more and more of the juke's attendees are turned, we see that vampires in the context of this movie are an obvious but fleshed out allegory for cultural appropriation. The various Irish songs the group sings soon gain a bassline. Rennick displays an ability to access the memories and speak in the languages of those his pseudo-hive mind assimilates, as well as share his own memories and philosophy among them. It's all of the expected vampire lore with an Invasion Of the Body Snatchers twist and tons of musical flare, and I'm on board with it. Yes, the "let's just send everyone home in the middle of the night even though there are vampires outside who can outrun a Model T and fucking fly" moment kind of took me out of the perfect movie that Sinners had been up to that point, and the indigenous vampire hunter character (Nathaniel Arcand, Killers Of the Flower Moon) could have used more screentime (there was a backdoor pilot feeling to his scene, like he deserved his own movie or a TV spinoff or something), but the third act and mid-credits scene stuck their many landings. I mean, aside from being a fantastic period gangster movie and a timeless, socially aware, bloody vampire movie, Sinners also wraps up with the most metal, cathartic, heart-wrenching, and powerful, emotionally conflicted moments of cinema I've probably ever seen.
A
Ticketmaster,
Out.
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