JuicyTalk
Truly original movies are getting harder and harder to come by. All the possible ideas have already been done, so the best hope for originality is to combine two or more existing ideas into something new. Every couple of years, a filmmaker comes along with a genre-bending vision so unique and imaginative that it feels completely fresh. Quentin Tarantino combined kung fu movies, blaxploitation movies, and spaghetti westerns into Kill Bill. The Daniels combined martial arts action, multiversal sci-fi, and sobering family drama into Everything Everywhere All at Once. Edgar Wright combined superhero comics, old-school video games, and indie 2000s romcoms into Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Last year, Ryan Coogler added his name to that pantheon of visionary filmmakers with his own mind-blowing opus. Sinners is somehow a vampire-slaying action horror movie, a fedoras-and-tommy-guns old-timey gangster movie, a harrowing chronicle of the Jim Crow South, and an enlightening history of the blues all at the same time. It’s a mesmerizing cinematic experience, carried by hypnotic music, gorgeous IMAX visuals, and powerful performances (including not one, but two career-best turns by Michael B. Jordan).
A year later, after all the box office records and Oscar wins, Sinners is no less impressive a cinematic achievement. The crowning achievement of the film, the “surreal montage” around the midpoint, is one of the greatest feats of filmmaking craft and visual storytelling to come along this side of the 21st century. It’s a watershed moment that elevates Sinners from a great genre piece to an ethereal odyssey through sounds and images.
Sinners’ Time-Traveling Oner Has Already Earned A Place In Film History
About halfway through Sinners, Miles Caton’s prodigious blues musician Sammie takes the stage and solidifies the opening night of the juke joint as a resounding success with a rousing performance of his own original song, “I Lied to You.” A line of voiceover narration from earlier in the film comes back around, this time with a more literal meaning: “There are legends told of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death.” Sammie’s debut performance is so spectacular (and Caton really sells the spectacle) that it pierces that veil, and the ghosts of great artists start flooding into the juke joint.
As Sammie plays the blues, and the camera swoops around him, an anachronistic Jimi Hendrix-style rock ‘n’ roll guitarist joins him for a duet, blaring out electric riffs like nobody’s business. As the camera keeps swooping around, they’re joined by other spirits from days of future past: hip-hop artists, West African tribal musicians, Chinese xiqu performers. They’re backed up by a gospel choir, tying Sammie’s musical revolution back to his religious roots (and touching on his own spiritual betrayal of his father, the source of all the pain behind the lyrics).
It’s a jaw-dropping sequence. It looked amazing on the big screen, and it still looks amazing on the 4K Blu-ray (which is jam-packed with awesome special features in an era where DVD bonus features are becoming a forgotten relic). I went to see Sinners twice at the theater (so, in a way, I was personally thanked in Jordan’s Oscar acceptance speech), and it was partly so I could experience that incredible “I Lied to You” sequence a second time.
The first time I saw it, it took me a minute to clock what Coogler and his team were doing. But as I realized we’d pierced the veil between life and death, and we were traveling through time, bringing different eras and styles of music together in a cosmic collaboration that defies the spacetime continuum, a big grin crept over my face and stayed there (the same thing that happened when I realized Chad Stahelski was moving into an overhead videogame-style shot for the Dragon’s Breath sequence in John Wick: Chapter 4).
On the second viewing, when you know where it’s going, it’s easier to appreciate the artistry and the craft and the sheer vision that went into pulling this thing off. That time-traveling oner has already earned its place in movie history alongside Goodfellas’ Copacabana oner and Touch of Evil’s bomb-in-the-car oner. It solidified Sinners’ place as a modern classic, and will surely give it staying power as the years go by (although predicting that kind of thing is a fool’s errand).
Autumn Durald Arkapaw Deserved Her Best Cinematography Oscar For This Sequence Alone
At this past Oscars ceremony, Sinners’ Autumn Durald Arkapaw made history by becoming the first woman in the century-long history of the Academy to win Best Cinematography. While One Battle After Another’s Michael Bauman did some incredibly impressive things with VistaVision, Arkapaw had this one in the bag. What she did with the scope and scale of IMAX photography is on par with the very best of Christopher Nolan.
That surreal montage alone was enough to secure this award for Arkapaw. The fact that she was able to pull it off, with the perfect blocking and camera movements to make every beat hit just right, is a testament to her technical skills as an artist. It has a dreamlike quality, like she ripped it right out of Coogler’s imagination and put it on the screen.
Sinners’ Surreal Montage Was The Biggest Risk In The Movie
Sinners takes a lot of big creative risks: its lead actor is acting opposite himself, its aspect ratio is constantly changing (sometimes even drawing attention to itself), and every jarring genre switch threatens to alienate a chunk of the audience who came to see a crime movie and got a horror movie, or came to see a horror movie and got an action movie.
The surreal montage was the biggest risk in the movie by far. It deliberately betrays its carefully cultivated historical setting to incorporate wildly anachronistic elements from the ancient era up to the modern era. It goes full fantastical and breaks the fourth wall in a sense (not by directly addressing the audience, but by acknowledging that this is all make-believe; it’s all an illusion), and it might’ve lost some viewers or broken their immersion if it didn’t work. But thanks to Coogler’s vision and Arkapaw’s tireless efforts bringing it to life, Sinners’ surreal montage is one of the greatest movie moments of the past decade.
