Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp - 2012

"Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp" - 2012
Dir. by Jorge Hinojosa - 1 hr. 29 min.


by Clayton Hollifield

When I tried to search for "Iceberg Slim" on IMDB, it automatically took me to the page for "Ice Sculpture Christmas," instead.  Thanks, dorks.  Likewise, no dice on a trailer for this movie.  I guess I'll track down a poster or something, so forgive the lack of visual flair.  I recorded it off of TV, anyways, and just now finally got around to watching it.  I shouldn't have been in such a hurry.

So, who is Iceberg Slim, and why is there a documentary about him?  He's a legendary pimp (the real deal, not a comedy figure), mostly famous because he quit pimping after a few prison stints, and was urged to write about his experiences.  So he did, and sold a pretty large number of books (six million is the quoted number, which is a lot for the dinky publishing house he published through).  His books have famous fans like Chris Rock and Ice-T, thus this effort to share Slim's (aka Robert Beck) story.

Perhaps the question that should have been asked is why should people care about Iceberg Slim?  I suspect the entirety of that answer lies in Beck's books; I have one ("Trick Baby," but haven't read it yet), and I can buy the idea that an author is worth talking about.  Unfortunately, the vast majority of the world hasn't read Slim's works, and I didn't feel like this film got across the appeal of his work in a meaningful way.  Also working against my interest: the story is presented chronologically.  So Iceberg Slim is not presented as an author of important and interesting work, he's presented as a pimp (and let's be clear, that means that he ran prostitutes and took all of the proceeds from their work to pay for his own hair care products and general flyness) who bounces in and out of prison until that becomes too much for him, at which time he attempts to live a straight life.

I mean, that's not super-charming, right?  It's only after Slim reaches a breaking point with his day job as an exterminator that his then wife convinces him to write down some of the crazy stories he's been telling her, which are then organized and published, to some success.  Maybe there's a reason to have a romantic notion of what exactly a pimp is, and since Iceberg Slim is one of the few that people might have actually heard of, maybe it makes sense to introduce him as a pimp rather than an author.  Then again, it made me really not like the guy.  I don't have to like someone personally to enjoy their work,  But including a clip from an interview with Slim, where he's reunited with a former ho, he comes off cluelessly as to what exactly the girls were dealing with.  He asks, innocently enough, what made her go straight, and she tells him that people were assaulting and murdering prostitutes on the streets, and that was reason enough for her to get off the streets.  That doesn't seem to register with Slim at all. 

The best thing about "Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp" is that it did make me curious about reading some of his work.  What it did not do: make me want to watch this film again.  Pretty much every interviewee in the film stopped one paragraph short of giving some real insight.  They would, routinely, get up to the edge of something interesting, and then we'd move on to something else. 

2 / 5 - TV

Tank Girl - 1995

"Tank Girl" - 1995
Dir. by Rachel Talaley - 1 hr. 44 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

I can't help but think that if "Tank Girl" had been the exact same film that is, but with a credit that read "directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky," it might have been received rapturously, and praised as a surrealist masterpiece.  The reason I say this is that, having seen "El Topo" and "The Holy Mountain," some of the content of "Tank Girl" isn't that far off.  The only real misstep here is that there's a little too much traditional story, and not quite enough insistence that the experience of taking in this film is going to have to be enough narrative for the audience to live with.  For a film that's regarded as a disaster and a bomb, re-watching "Tank Girl" for the first time in at least a decade was somewhat of a revelation.

"Tank Girl" is based on a comic book by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett (probably better known for providing all of the visuals for the "Gorillaz" project, with Blur's Damon Albarn).  In the film, we're in the year 2033, and the world's in the middle of a decade-long drought.  Water & Power, controlled by Kesslee (Malcolm McDowell), runs everything.  Rebecca, A.K.A. Tank Girl (Lori Petty), is part of a band of squatters who have been diverting water, and are raided by W&P's troops.  Pretty much everyone is killed, including Rebecca's boyfriend, with the exception of her, who is captured, and a young girl named Sam (Stacy Linn Ramsower), who is auctioned off.  Rebecca refuses a job with W&P, and instead vows to break out and save Sam from whatever trouble she's ended up in.

"Tank Girl" is a very weird film.  I don't have any doubt as to why people responded to it in the manner that they did.  1995 was definitely before Hollywood knew what to do with comic book material.  One could argue that they still have difficulty with idiosyncratic material (of which the comic definitely is), but this didn't stand a chance.  But what resulted is so unbelievably 1995, kind of in the way that "Repo Man" or "Heathers" are like the 1980's, or the aforementioned Jodorowsky films couldn't have come from any time except the 1970's.  "Tank Girl" is 200 proof, triple distilled 1995 on a DVD.  At the time, people might have shrugged and moved on; removed from it's context, this film is insanity.  Part of that has to do with the soundtrack, which is a rock solid representation of what that period in time sounded like.  But when factors like popularity or trendiness are removed, things get really weird.

Imagine, if you will, a strip-tease scene set to a Bush song.  You don't remember Bush?  They were that British band that everyone hated because they sounded like Nirvana, but then everyone secretly bought the album anyways.  That's a pretty weird soundtrack to a seduction that includes safety scissors.  Maybe you'd prefer to imagine a world where people have to work in a coal mine (or whatever), but they have to do it while listening to Hole.  You know, Courtney Love?  But not the cleaned up, smoothed out, radio-friendly Hole that had hits like "Malibu," the weird baby-doll dress-wearing, screaming, bereaved widow Hole.  Can you imagine if you had to work in a place like that?  It's Hell.  Literally Hell.  Demoralizing, soul-devouring Hell.  Never mind that there are tons of scenes here that also look like an underpopulated Burning Man (and one is soundtracked by a Sky Cries Mary song).  I'm old enough to remember the context that these songs existed in originally, but enough time has passed that I know how weird this world sounds out of that context.

There's also an entire, separate essay that could be written on how "Tank Girl" portrays the messed-up sexuality of the early 90's.  I won't get that deeply into it, but it's how you get things like a "shower scene" with Rebecca (where she's fully clothed, and is doused with de-lousing powder instead of water), or a scene where you have an entire brothel doing a Busby Berkeley song-and-dance number to a Cole Porter song.  "Tank Girl" isn't a de-sexed film, but nearly all sexuality portrayed is either a threat or is undercut by Rebecca's girlishness (there is a reason they are called riot grrrls, not riot women).  While "Tank Girl" is rated R, it's strangely dicey in this department.

One word that you could use to describe "Tank Girl" is "frenetic," which is both its charm and its failing.  Lead actress Lori Petty is probably doing the female equivalent of a Pauly Shore character here, which works for this movie, but is also unlikely to endear "Tank Girl" to like eighty-five percent of movie-goers.  Director Rachel Talalay also throws pretty much everything at the wall, including a hallucination scene and animated transitions between segments.  It's a visually-rich approach, but can be overwhelming if you're not prepared for it.  And the entire film is built on shaky legs; the story is pretty stock (TM Lars Ulrich).  It falls into a no-man's land; not rich enough to be interesting on that merit, and not non-linear enough to really build on the strengths of this film (which, to be clear, are Petty's energetic performance, a surrealist streak, and being so 1995 that it's at one hundred twenty percent of capacity).  "Tank Girl" is not a great movie.  It is a weird movie, an interesting one, a crazy one, and that's more than enough if you're not going to make a big deal out of it's flaws.

3.5 / 5 - TV

Johnny Mnemonic - 1995

"Johnny Mnemonic" - 1995
Dir. by Robert Longo - 1 hr. 43 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Based on a William Gibson short story, this movie has a couple of my favorite things.  First, it has Keanu Reeves.  Despite what you may think of his acting skill, he's racked up a good resume of interesting films over the course of his career, and he's got to get at least a little credit for that.  Secondly, this is a mid-90's computer film.  It's as if most people knew that we were all largely headed online, but things weren't developed enough to give any clear indication as to what this future would look like.

An easy visual comparison movie is "Hackers," although this story is set in the near future of 2021.  But whereas Hackers pitted dirty computer punks against the outdated system and old fogeys, "Johnny Mnemonic" delves more into the class warfare aspect that access to advanced technology inevitably creates.  But I have to stop myself, I'm probably making this seem a lot more interesting and deep than the final product is.

The basic plot is thus:  Johnny is an information courier, augmented with "wetware" upgrades.  Keanu has an 80 GB brain!  These couriers are used to transfer sensitive information in the black market, like super-secure data sticks.  Johnny needs to pull off one more dangerous transfer in order to get out of the game, but things go south almost immediately.  The job entails putting way too much data into Johnny's head, and if he doesn't get it out of there, it'll seep into his brain and kill him.  The whole thing is a set-up, and Johnny and his bodyguard Jane (Dina Meyer, of "Starship Troopers" fame) have to hook up with a band of low-tech rebels lead by Ice-T (sporting nearly the exact same look as in "Tank Girl").  In the end, stuff blows up, and a freaking DOLPHIN ends up extracting the info from Keanu's head.  Henry Rollins also has a fun role as a really angry doctor named Spider, and there's also an obligatory goggled virtual reality sequence.

Visually, there are interesting aspects to this film.  The aforementioned early look at what people thought cyberspace might look like 25 years in the future is kind of cool.  I think the 90's cyberspace look is probably going to occupy the same territory as 80's dystopian sci-fi films do.   On the downside, this film also picks up on two of the worst trends from the 90's: a complete lack of sexiness to anything (I'll thank the AIDS crisis for that, but Dina Meyer appears to be wearing a burlap sack as a coat for much of the film.  I've seen "Starship Troopers, so I know how hot she was in this time period.  Why cover that up?), and a weird glossiness to what's supposed to be grimy, seedy areas.  People are afraid of dark alleys because they're wet, filthy, weathered, and a little rape-y, but the common approach to those scenarios was to just make everything shiny and light the hell out of it with neon.

This was not a great film, but there are a few interesting elements to it.  I giggle a little bit that an iPod now is smarter than Keanu's character in another 10 years.  But if you're a big fan of Keanu Reeves, Henry Rollins, or you like 90's computer movies, it's not terrible.

2 / 5 - NF Streaming