BEFORE: Colman Domingo carries over from "Assassination Nation", and I'm going to try to keep this short tonight, because I'm working all weekend at the theater. It's a special annual event that celebrates films made by the alumni of the college that runs the theater - but that means two screenings on Saturday and a third for me on Sunday, so I'll be worn out by the end of the weekend, probably. Oh, well, it's a rainy weekend so inside of a movie is not really a bad place to be, it beats going to a picnic or a baseball game that's likely to be rained out, or a football game that takes place in all kinds of weather, I've never really understood that one. Hey, if that's your idea of fun, to go to a football stadium and get soaked, you're welcome to it - but I'll be dry at the movie theater, unless the roof leaks.
THE PLOT: A stripper named Zola embarks on a wild trip to Florida.
AFTER: Well, so far this is the most popular movie ever that was based on the tweets of a stripper - sorry, exotic dancer. Or I guess technically the movie is based on a Rolling Stone magazine article ABOUT the tweets, that's an important difference when it comes to assigning screenwriting credit, I guess. Actually, this movie is probably what the Writer's Guild is afraid of, a movie that's so about nothing and everything at the same time that it probably didn't even NEED a writer. Let me take this opportunity to remind Hollywood that during this difficult time when the writers and actors are on strike, my Twitter stream is completely available, for sale cheap, as I hear hardly anybody's on Twitter - sorry, X - anymore. If my limericks about the daily headlines and photos of my BBQ meals and weird beers consumed can be turned into a movie, I'm all for it.
Seriously, though, so far I've had zero luck monetizing my social media - or even my boss's feeds, and he's got WAY more followers than I do. What's the opposite of an influencer? Would it be an outfluencer? Maybe that's more my style, creating content that almost nobody is interested in. Let's face it, my life just isn't that exciting, who would even care about my thoughts and my troubles, aside from the tens of people who check in with my near-daily movie reviews? Well, at least I'll never get a swelled head about how many followers I have.
"Zola" is part of a relatively new movie genre, called "Tampa-Core", and other films in the same vein include "Spring Breakers" and - well, OK, that's about it, it's a new genre - and feature lots of gun violence, nudity, guns and I'm guessing also banned books, anti-vaxxers and alligators eating babies. Just imagine everything you hate about Florida compressed into one movie, and you'll start to get the idea. Years ago, Florida was just a bunch of retired people playing golf and college kids going to the beach for spring break, now it's still that, but with so much more crazy added to the mix. We were planning to visit Florida in 2020, to maybe hit Disney World during it's 50th anniversary, check in on the Star Wars park there too, but then COVID hit and we just cashed in our plane tickets for credit, which I think we used a year later to visit my brother-in-law in Chicago. Considering all the bad news out of Florida in the last two years, I think we totally made the right call. They're harboring a fugitive ex-President down there, after all. Better to stay away until they sort all that mess out, maybe the whole state will somehow come loose and float away from the other 49, I keep hoping anyway.
And the story does come from a dancer, and come on, like, why would she lie? According to her, Zola met Stefani, another dancer in Detroit who invited her to come on a road trip down to Florida, where they could dance at a club and make a lot of money, only when they got there, Zola found out that the club was a bust, and driver was really Stefani's pimp and they were trying to rope her into prostitution, doing threesomes in a hotel room for clients who would pay $150 each. However, this really wasn't Zola's thing, so instead of taking part, she raised Stefani's rate to $500 per client, and together they raised $8,000 in one night. The problem with success, however, is that people then want you to repeat that, so Stefani's pimp set them up at another hotel, where everything then went horribly wrong.
There's really no structure to the film, no redemptive arc, nobody learns anything or gains any valuable experience, Stefani's pimp gets rich, Stefani's boyfriend gets upset, and Zola's just kind of along for the ride in the passenger seat of the crazy bus. Then the movie doesn't really end, it just sort of stops at a random point. Well, that's what you get when you base a story on a stripper's tweets and you don't hire real writers, I guess.
What's a bit weird to me is that Riley Keough is the granddaughter of Elvis Presley and the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley - that's not weird in and of itself, because I guess somebody has to be - but Elvis was just here two nights ago, in archive footage seen at the end of "Elvis", and now here's his granddaughter, appearing in a movie where her character has sex with a lot of men, there's even an implied gang-bang scene, and OK, whatever, but I can't help but wondering what Elvis would think about his granddaughter's career, if he were still alive (and some people still believe he is, either genuinely or metaphorically). I don't know, I'd like to think that the heir to Elvis' estate (and since the death of Lisa Marie, the owner of Graceland, I think) wouldn't HAVE to do sex scenes in movies, she could afford to wait for classier roles, but I guess maybe she didn't want to? I've seen her in "Lovesong" and "American Honey", so it seems she's always in films that are sexually explicit, or where she's not wearing much, so is that a personal choice, or has she been affected by being born into fame and having Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage as stepfathers? Just wondering - but I'll admit I know nothing about how actors choose their roles or make other lifestyle choices.
Elvis Presley became the biggest movie star in the world at one point, and never got naked in a movie or appeared in an explicit sex scene, that's all I'm saying. I know, I know, it was in a different time, and things now aren't the way they were then.
NITPICK POINT: Wouldn't a very upscale hotel, even in Florida, notice that so many "gentleman callers" were headed to the same room on the same night? Wouldn't that be a violation of any hotel's terms of service? $8,000 made in increments of $500 means 16 johns in one night, and that didn't raise any suspicion among the hotel staff? On top of that, how did the bed sheets stay so clean? The maids only service the room once a day, so how did they handle this? Also, ewwwww. But I bet if I think about it I can find a lot more things like this, little inconsistencies about the logistics of this whole story. So I'm not buying it.
NITPICK POINT #2: It's 1,178 miles from Detroit to Tampa - that's a 16 hour drive, without stopping. So I guess it's possible, but with ONE driver, no breaks, and he's not even tired after that drive? Nobody in their right mind would try to make that trip in one day for a weekend trip.
Also starring Taylour Paige (last seen in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"), Riley Keough (last seen in "Earthquake Bird"), Nicholas Braun (last seen in "The Year of Spectacular Men"), Ari'el Stachel, Jason Mitchell (last seen in "Mudbound"), TS Madison, Nelcie Souffrant, Nasir Rahim, Sophie Hall, Jarquale Stewart, Tommy Foxhill, Ben Bladon (last seen in "Goosebumps 2: Slappy's Revenge"), Tony DeMil (last seen in "Escape Plan: The Extractors"), Ernest Emmanuel Peeples,
RATING: 4 out of 10 basketball dribbles
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