BEFORE: Well, this was going to be a skip day, but then I scored discount tickets to a beer festival in Brooklyn for Saturday - so I just won't watch a movie on Friday night, and I'll strike out via bus for the Navy Yard on Saturday morning. I'm not sure how long it will take me to get there, so I'd better leave early, then I think three hours of day-drinking is fairly well overdue. I haven't been to a beer festival in three years, thanks to COVID - sure, I hit RibFest on Staten Island this year and last year, and beer was served there as part of the deal, but they ran out early, and anyway, the main focus of the event was ribs, not beer. Just like we haven't been on an official vacation in three years - we've gone on weekend road trips, but that's not exactly the same thing. So if I'm going to a beerfest, and we've got a week's vacation planned for October, I have to conclude that the pandemic is well and truly over. Glad that's finally settled, then.
Between this vacation (BBQ Crawl #3) and New York Comic-Con and then the work schedule, I'll have BARELY enough days to fit in all my October movies - I did create a reduced horror film plan with this in mind, though, just 19 films, which turned out to be just enough and not too much. But I can't think about that now, I've got to get there first, as Lorraine Toussaint carries over from "Fast Color". See, I told you I'd get back to Idris Elba films.
THE PLOT: Sent to live with his estranged father for the summer, a rebellious teen finds kinship in a Philadelphia community of Black cowboys.
AFTER: This was a difficult film to link to in the first place, with just a few well-known stars, and the one kid from "Stranger Things" who hasn't been in ANY other movies yet, then they went ahead and made that worse by casting a bunch of the real Fletcher Street stable "cowboys" from Philadelphia to play themselves. Why, it almost feels like Hollywood directors don't care at all about my process of linking movies by actor, because they're sure not about making it easy for me. Well, fancy directors and casting directors, I got to this film ANYWAY, despite your best efforts to make it impossible, so there.
The takeaway here, I suppose, is that people still use and care for horses, even in urban areas - horses are still around in New York City, too, though every year we get a few stories in the news about how cruel it is to make horses pull carriages in Central Park, but there are also still mounted police in NYC, I passed one the other day. Climate change and rising temperatures affect everybody, even the horses, so why using horses hasn't fallen completely out of vogue is beyond me, but it hasn't. I think maybe horses and mankind signed some kind of contract a couple thousand years ago, and it just hasn't expired yet, though people in the early 1900's sure thought that cars would replace horses, they haven't completely done that.
The film is about Cole, a teen who's been getting into fights at school and acting up otherwise, and his mother drives him to Philadelphia because she doesn't know how to get him under control, or even discipline him any more, so she drops him off in a bad part of town and tells him his father will be there to pick him up in five minutes, then she drives home. Umm, she couldn't wait five minutes? What's weird is that his father doesn't show up, but another person recognizes him and tells him where to find his father's stables. So, did he forget his son was arriving that day, or did he not even know? Because it seems like maybe his mother just dropped him off randomly, and in a bad part of town, that's how people tend to disappear. Just saying.
Anyway, this is a real thing, apparently, the urban cowboy subculture, and I didn't realize at first this was a modern film, honestly I thought it was a Western, and I had it positioned in my list right next to "The Harder They Fall", because two Westerns with Idris Elba, right? But the only other thing these two films have in common is the black cowboy thing - "The Harder They Fall" reminded us that a significant portion of the cowboys in the Old West were African-American, and if this film is correct, then many of the modern cowboys are, too. Is "cowboy" even the correct PC term anymore, or has it also become derogatory? What about female cowboys, or are they cowgirls? Cowgals? Is there some more proper gender-neutral term I'm supposed to be using, like cow-people?
Cole has a difficult choice to make, either live with his father and accept his terms of working in the stables and learning the ways of the cowboy, or hanging with his friend Smush, who's leaning on drug dealers in the area and trying to carve out a piece of territory for himself, while also pretending to be loyal to the head dealer in charge of the town. Yeah, there's no way that plan could possibly backfire... So naturally Cole tries to do both, work the stables and hang with Smush, but he's about to learn that you can't have it both ways - how does he possibly have the energy to help Smush shake down dealers after cleaning out all those stables? Shouldn't he be exhausted? Oh, right, drugs.
The weird twist is that Smush used to be one of the urban cowboys himself, and by shaking down these dealers, he's trying to put together enough money to head out West and buy his own ranch. Well, I guess everybody's got to have a dream, but surely there must be some better way to accomplish this, no?
Meanwhile, the police get a (probably bogus) complaint that the horses at the Fletcher Street stables are malnourished, so they have to confiscate the horses, because there's simply no way for them to tell if a group of horses is being well-fed or not. (NP...) But even after Cole and his father steal back the horses, eventually the city comes to shut down the stables, too. This doesn't appear to bother anybody, I guess because they know they can always keep their horses with them in their apartments, what's the harm? Hmm, I'm thinking there's probably a reason why people don't keep horses in their houses, but I can't quite think of it. I'm sure they'll figure out what it is.
This story could have gone off on any number of tangents, from urban gentrification to racism among cowboys, or street violence between rival drug gangs, but it didn't really venture very far in any of those directions, it really tried to stick to the coming-of-age story of a teen trying to figure out his place in the world. I suppose that's fine, but as a result of staying small, the story kind of ends up being neither here nor there. There's no real happy ending if the stable closes, except that we know these cowboys will keep on riding, somehow, somewhere, so umm, if that's what makes them happy, I guess it's OK? I don't really see it myself, but cowboys gotta ride and surfers gotta surf, and gymnasts have to do gymnastics, I just don't feel like I have to get involved though.
Also starring Idris Elba (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Caleb McLaughlin (last seen in season 4 of "Stranger Things"), Jharrel Jerome (last seen in "Monster" (2018)), Ivannah-Mercedes, Jamil Prattis, Cliff "Method Man" Smith (last seen in "Peppermint"), Byron Bowers (last seen in "Honey Boy"), Liz Priestley, Michael Ta'Bon, Devenie Young, Patrick McDade (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Albert C. Lynch Jr., Michael "Miz" Upshur, Charlie "Choo Choo" Gough
RATING: 5 out of 10 barrel campfires
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