Coke Daniels

  • Karen (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Let’s admit it: It’s really hard to resist a film titled Karen when it’s about a crazy entitled racist white woman taking on a couple of likable black protagonists. It’s such an on-the-nose topic (even acknowledged by the characters in a rare clever meta-moment) that it’s barely surprising when the film pulls out all of the stops to make its titular antagonist as humanly unpleasant as possible. We all know where this is headed, from neighbourly microaggressions with a fake smile to gunning for the female lead in a rain-soaked night-time finale. It’s clearly meant not meant to be a good movie, but to satisfy some appetite for retribution and I suppose that it does exactly that. It could have been far wittier in better hands, but writer-director Coke Daniels, perhaps working according to a specific deadline, doesn’t waste much time in non-essential refinements. Karen is unsubtle to the point of being amusing, although there are a few occasional nice touches (such as the HOA refusing to go along with the antagonist’s overly racist schemes) to keep it from floundering too badly. Taryn Manning, made up to be as ugly as her character, is perhaps too good in the role considering how easily she gets to be so exasperating. Meanwhile, Jasmine Burke doesn’t have all that much to do as the female lead, but she looks good doing it. As the male lead, Cory Hardrict has a meatier and not entirely perfect character to play with — and he has the unenviable task of acting through a ridiculous scene where he discovers a bathroom filled with Confederate memorabilia, including a soap dispenser with a Dixie Flag sticker. I mean — really? If you’re not laughing at this point, you’re probably missing the point. (Although the point may be that this probably should have been turned into an overt comedy.)  In the end what we get with Karen is not a good film, but it’s an entertaining watch, and you can make a case that it’s sociologically interesting. While I’m not happy about the rise of “Karen” as a generic insult (the two Karens I’ve known best were two of the sweetest, most likable women ever — and one of them was black), I think that the concept that it vehicles is useful — highlighting a racist archetype that is more insidious and no less corrosive than the typical redneck-KKK cliché which has been a too-convenient singular shorthand for too long. Still, there’s still plenty of space for a cleverer screenwriter to explore the subtleties of the idea because Karen really isn’t interested in being more than an in-your-face movie-of-the-week.

  • Fruits of the Heart (2021)

    Fruits of the Heart (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2021) Criticism-by-comparison is rarely fair, but it’s almost mandatory to mention the similarities between Fruits of the Heart and the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment. The basics are unerringly similar: Both films are about the relationship between a mother and her daughter through many years, with an old-fashioned weeper of a conclusion to make sure that viewers understand that this is meant as drama. Even if we accept that Fruits of the Heart’s writer/director Coke Daniels may not be aware of the earlier film, comparisons between the two are not to its advantage — and I say that as someone who didn’t particularly care for Terms of Endearment. For one thing, the tone of Fruits of the Heart is all over the place, going from comedy to drama to romance to hard-hitting tragedy. There are basic credibility problems (such as the mother’s vast mansion without the means of supporting it) that exacerbate some chaotic plotting that seems even more arbitrary in the context of squeezing years of melodrama in less than two hours. Things happen, but the time-skips make those developments seem more arbitrary than organic — if there’s a kind of story that called for a miniseries, this would be it. I’m not normally so harsh on BET Original movies (there’s a reason why I keep watching them, after all), and to be fair, there are some interesting things here. There’s some visual style that could have been developed further. Dorien Wilson plays what feels like a fun supporting character that becomes annoying the moment he tries to become a main character. Lil Mama and Wendy Raquel Robinson make for good anchors for the rest of the film. But ultimately, the constant swerves of Fruits of the Heart’s change of tone are a bit hard to follow, and the ultimate aim of making viewers burst into tears does feel unwarranted by the material that precedes it. It’s a mess, and a waste as well — there are many ways the story could have gone in more satisfying ways. Terms of Endearment, it isn’t.