Get together / Play a show
Today: Tommy Craggs, late of "Game Theory" on HBO, and writer and editor at Mother Jones, HuffPost, Slate, Gawker Media, and Deadspin; and Rax King, the author of essay collections Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the forthcoming Sloppy.
Issue No. 338
All Hands
Tommy Craggs
Sexfaces Live in D.C.
Rax King
All Hands
by Tommy Craggs
The first hour or so of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a classic of that unnamed but easily recognized film genre which we’ll call “the Squad Assembles.” We follow the Moore twins, both played by Michael B. Jordan, in and around Clarksdale, Mississippi, as they pull together the crew that will operate their juke joint that very night. An old bluesman is recruited out of his Jim Crow corner of the train station to play piano. A conjure woman leaves the plantation to run the kitchen. The Chinese grocers whose stores straddle the color line in town are drafted into tending bar and painting signage. A sharecropper leaves the cotton fields and enlists as the joint’s doorman. The movie scarcely needs to tell us what it’s up to: The old gang is getting back together, member by member, each with a specialty or hidden talent that will bear in some way on the events to come, just like in The Guns of Navarone or The Dirty Dozen or The Great Escape or The Sting or any of the Ocean’s movies or the Fast & Furious series. Everyone will have a job, and there will be a job for everyone. Everyone will fit somewhere.
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