Zola

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🎙️ EPISODE 440: 04.07.22 *NOTE: audio is a bit fucked for this one (sorry) The main objective of this movie: it seems to be attempting to answer the age-old question, can you make a narrative feature based on a 100+ tweet thread? Our forefathers fought wars over this query, so — trust me — I do not take the debate lightly. That being said, the new liberal mindset might be so inclined to reject the premise on sight. Shoot it down with their woke agenda. For what is a Twitter 🧵 if already not a movie. What even is a movie in our modern times? And also, a movie could be and is anything.

I feel safe and secure enough to say, as an impartial judge above all, that this film is flawed. I do give filmmaker Janicza Bravo a lot of credit, though, following up her underrated 2019 debut Lemon with such a daunting sophomore effort. On paper, this seems like a horrible idea. And those are probably the only movies that should be getting made, imo. While this film fails at the task of illuminating some greater truth by propping up those who sought to embellish it, if not obscure it for clout, it entertains in the way any colorful, shot-on-16mm film about strippers and pimps and hoes likely would. The continuous interruption of dialogue with literal tweets, the sound of Twitter notifications, is meant as some meta nod: this is not just the visual interpretation of a thread online, but commentary on that outlet, that mode of communicating ideas as well.

When the movie breaks down and we get a short film-within-the-film based on the perspective of Zola's friend (adapted from a Reddit thread, naturally), the intended effects are clear: take everything you read online with a grain of salt, there's two sides to every story, la dee da, la dee da. I think most (sane) people operate under the assumptions already; we don't need a movie to tell us this. But, still, this movie entertains, and it has style. Like with any medium, any message, it's nice when it can deliver more than that, but it doesn't really HAVE to. And that's fine.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 439 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 440B ⫸

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Zola is a 2020 American black comedy crime film directed by Janicza Bravo and written by Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris. It is based on a viral Twitter thread from 2015 by Aziah "Zola" King and the resulting Rolling Stone article "Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted" by David Kushner. It stars Taylour Paige as Zola, a part-time stripper who is convinced by her new friend (Riley Keough) to travel to Tampa, Florida, in order to earn money, only to get in over her head; Colman Domingo, Nicholas Braun, and Ari'el Stachel also star. It was released on January 24, 2020.