Jack Kirby's Dreamland
Chameleon Street (1989)
directed by Wendell B. Harris, Jr.
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
In his debut, Flint native Harris is purposeful, funny, and fatalistic to a degree someone like Peter Fonda could never imagine. Detroit cameraman Daniel Noga's Michigan is an impermanent and inviting place, two worlds away at least from Zsigmond's indulgent New Mexican dissolves. The pointed social commentary inherent in the story of a black con man in the cold north during the Reagan administration - or, for that matter, Harris's clinical and unsuccessful (especially juxtaposed against the early scenes Street shares with his wife) intellectual deconstruction of a marriage - doesn't do justice to the warmth Harris finds in his subject's most personal autobiographical details. Chameleon Street's best in those moments - with Street as a black bête at a Cocteau-centric costume party, or Street and his friends talking about money at the bar - and not because they're innocuous or culturally "smart," but because Harris, for all his amazement at Street's life story, and Harris's sympathy for the anger of helplessness, clearly revels in the details that would make Street unique with or without the well-known public record that made him famous.
directed by Wendell B. Harris, Jr.
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
In his debut, Flint native Harris is purposeful, funny, and fatalistic to a degree someone like Peter Fonda could never imagine. Detroit cameraman Daniel Noga's Michigan is an impermanent and inviting place, two worlds away at least from Zsigmond's indulgent New Mexican dissolves. The pointed social commentary inherent in the story of a black con man in the cold north during the Reagan administration - or, for that matter, Harris's clinical and unsuccessful (especially juxtaposed against the early scenes Street shares with his wife) intellectual deconstruction of a marriage - doesn't do justice to the warmth Harris finds in his subject's most personal autobiographical details. Chameleon Street's best in those moments - with Street as a black bête at a Cocteau-centric costume party, or Street and his friends talking about money at the bar - and not because they're innocuous or culturally "smart," but because Harris, for all his amazement at Street's life story, and Harris's sympathy for the anger of helplessness, clearly revels in the details that would make Street unique with or without the well-known public record that made him famous.
posted by NPK at 3:13 PM
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