Andrew Young: The Dirty Work (Surprise Inside Films, Left/Right Productions, MS-NBC Films, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched the premiere of a documentary on Andrew Young called Andrew Young: The Dirty Work. Andrew Young was born in New Orleans on March 12, 1932, went to Howard University (the most significant of the historically Black colleges and universities; among its many illustrious graduates were Thurgood Marshall and Kamala Harris), got a doctorate of divinity from a Northern seminary named Dillard in Connecticut, and was assigned to preach at a church in Marion, Alabama. He’d grown up admiring Jesse Owens and had dreamed of being an Olympic athlete himself, but the leaders of his church told him that either he took the assignment to pastor the church in Marion or they’d have to close it. While in Marion he met his first wife, Jean Childs (they stayed together until she died of cancer in 1994 and he remarried to Carolyn McClain two years later), and became interested in Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of achieving social change without resorting to violence. In 1960 Young joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization formed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to advance the cause of civil rights and equality for African-Americans without violence. Young became a personal assistant to King, and the title of this documentary came from the way King assigned him to do the “dirty work” of keeping the movement going administratively. Young was often criticized for not participating in civil disobedience and getting himself arrested along with King and the other SCLC leaders, to which he responded that someone had to stay outside and be a liaison between the leaders who had been arrested and the supporters outside as well as the media. Young finally lost his arrest virginity in Saint Augustine, Florida, when he tried to intervene between police and a group of Black children who were doing a pretend protest march. The police went ahead and arrested the kids, and took Young into custody as well.

Young was active in the 1963 confrontation in Birmingham, Alabama in which racist police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor turned fire hoses on nonviolent Black protesters and created images that shocked the world. He also took part in the protests in Selma, Alabama in 1965 that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed Blacks to participate in the electoral process relatively equally until its gradual step-by-step dismantlement by the radical-Right revolutionary majority on the current U.S. Supreme Court. And Young was with King when he was killed; they’d literally had a pillow fight in King’s room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee just minutes before King stepped out on the balcony and got shot to death. King’s murder derailed his plans for a “Poor People’s Campaign” which involved a mule train traveling by wagon to Washington, D.C. and staging a camp-out to create a so-called “Resurrection City.” This was King’s idea to bring back the Black and white constituencies that had won the great victories of the civil rights movement only to splinter under the influence of so-called “Black Power” activists like Stokely Carmichael (seen here in archival clips), who not only rejected the doctrine of nonviolence but actively discouraged white participation in the movement. They took overly seriously the writing of Martinique-born pan-African activist Frantz Fanon, who said, “The liberation of oppressed people must be the work of the oppressed people themselves.” The Black Power advocates seized on this idea and declared that the liberation of oppressed people must only be the work of oppressed people themselves, which sounded good in theory but ignored the reality that African-Americans are an oppressed minority and their only hope for equality was, among other things, winning the goodwill of sympathetic white people.

As King got older he became convinced that African-American oppression was just a part of a broader system of U.S. capitalism and imperialism, and the idea of the Poor People’s Campaign was to dramatize this and build a coalition of poor people of all colors. After King’s death the Poor People’s Campaign went ahead as scheduled but without his charismatic leadership and appeal to white Americans, and it soon degenerated into a rather squalid campground whose political point was largely lost. (In a way the Poor People’s Campaign was a forerunner of the Occupy movement of the early 2010’s.) After King’s death, Young drifted for a bit until singer and activist Harry Belafonte convinced him that the next logical step for the movement and its staff was to start running for elective office themselves. Accordingly he ran for Congress in 1970 and lost, largely due to a bizarre statement he made on camera that he wouldn’t mind seeing the destruction of Western civilization if that would mean a better replacement that would achieve true equality for all people. He tried again in 1972 and won, serving until 1977 when newly elected President Jimmy Carter appointed Young ambassador to the United Nations. Young helped broker Carter’s effort to get Israel and Egypt to recognize each other and arranged a transfer to Black rule in Zimbabwe, nèe Rhodesia. But he touched the third rail of American politics when in 1979 he met secretly with Zuhdi Labib Terzi, who’d been appointed U.N. representative of a putative Palestinian state, and thereby alienated Israel. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance gave Carter an ultimatum – either Young would resign or Vance would – and Carter, apparently to his later regret, chose Vance over Young. In 1981, on the urging of many of his associates, including Martin Luther King’s widow Coretta, Young ran for Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia on a platform of increasing investment in Atlanta, making the city a banking center, and ensuring that women and people of color were given a fair chance at the income these investments would generate.

In 1990 Young, after losing a Democratic primary for the governorship of Georgia (a story not told in this documentary), headed the Atlanta Olympic Committee for the 1996 Olympic Games, which Atlanta won over the early favorite, Athens, Greece (the sentimental choice because Athens had been the site of the first modern Olympics in 1896, 100 years earlier). Young headed the Olympic Committee and was in that job when a terrorist planted a bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Park which went off, killing two people and injuring about 100 others. Young had just left Centennial Park when the bomb exploded, along with most of the crowd that had attended a concert there, and the incident became notorious because Richard Jewell, a security guard who had spotted the bomb just before it went off, was accused of planting it. The actual bomber turned out to be Eric Rudolph, a white terrorist who set off three subsequent bombs in Atlanta and Birmingham before he was finally caught in North Carolina in 2003. Former FBI executive Chris Swecker, who participated in the case, recalled that Rudolph’s motives were what’s become the all too typical rag-bag of Right-wing terrorists: “He had borrowed ideas from a lot of different places and formed his own personal ideology. He clearly was anti-government and anti-abortion, anti-Gay, ‘anti’-a lot of things. The bombings really sprang from his own unique biases and prejudices. He had his own way of looking at the world and didn’t get along with a lot of people.”

Andrew Young: The Dirty Work was an unusual documentary about this sort of person because it didn’t feature any talking heads speaking about Young: just a steady narration by Young himself and various archival clips of people who featured prominently in his life, including Martin Luther King. It was divided into two sections; the first hour dealt with his work with King and ended with King’s assassination, and the second started with the 1996 Atlanta bombing and proceeded backwards to tell the story of Young’s political career. It avoided any depiction of what Young did after the 1996 Olympics, including serving as president of the National Council of Churches from 2000 to 2001, and working with a controversial group that attempted to whitewash Wal-Mart’s image and encourage Black people to shop there, Confronted by activists who accused Wal-Mart and other big chains of driving independent stores out of business, Young responded bitterly in a Los Angeles Times interview, “You see those are the people who have been overcharging us, and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans, and now it's Arabs.” Andrew Young: The Dirty Work was a well-made documentary even though it told mostly the “white legend” of Young’s career.

Live at the Belly Up: Sue Palmer and her Motel Swing Orchestra (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later last night (Friday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched an entertaining Live at the Belly Up episode featuring local musician Sue Palmer and her Motel Swing Orchestra: Sue Palmer on a Korg electric keyboard; Liz Ajuzie, lead vocals; April West, trombone and second vocals; Jonny Viau, tenor and baritone saxophones; Steve Wilcox, electric guitar; Pete Harrison, upright acoustic bass (he was previously a bass guitarist and he learned the stand-up bass specifically for this band); and Sharon Shufelt, drums, who also suggested the band’s name. They played 11 songs during the course of the one-hour set, and while I was a bit disappointed that only the opener, Lou Donaldson’s “Blues Walk,” was an instrumental, Ajuzie is an excellent blues shouter and a far subtler singer than Kim Wilson of The Fabulous Thunderbirds, who’d played the show two weeks ago. She’s also a Black woman who dyes her hair blonde, and while I usually don’t like that look (the only Black women who I thought looked attractive as blondes were Beyoncé and my sister-in-law Taun), she pulled it off well enough and her looks certainly didn’t take away from the legitimate power of her singing. Palmer’s repertoire was an appealing mix of old blues covers and originals in the jump-blues style. After “Blues Walk” she did “Roll ’Em,” which didn’t sound like Mary Lou Williams’s famous 1937 song of that title but was an appealing boogie blues with a strong vocal by Ajuzie. Then they did “I Don’t Hurt Anymore,” a song with an unusual history; it was originally a country lament by Dale Robertson and Jack Rollins that was recorded by Hank Snow in 1954 and became the number one country song of that year. Then Dinah Washington got hold of it and turned it into hard-core blues, and not surprisingly that was the version on which Palmer and her band based their cover.

After that they did a song called “Reelin’ and Rockin’” by late 1940’s singer, songwriter, bandleader, and drummer Roy Milton. Milton was one of the pioneers in the transition of Black music in the late 1940’s from rhythm-and-blues into rock ‘n’ roll, and Palmer announced she was doing it as a tribute not only to Milton but his piano player, Camille Howard (a woman who had a hit on her own with a 1948 instrumental called “X-Temporaneous Boogie”). Her next song was “I Put a Hex on You,” an original by Palmer’s former musical associate, the late Candye Kane. While it was hardly in the same league as the song that was clearly its inspiration, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You,” it was a fun number and a nice tribute to Kane. Then we got some Palmer originals, including “Swango” (which Palmer explained was a combination of “swing” and “tango” and therefore would not be easy to dance to), “Looking for a Parking Place” (an ironic number that ends with the punchline that the Belly Up Tavern in San Marcos is actually an easy place to find a parking space), “Have Yourself a Ball,” “Do I Move You?,” and the closer, “Ooh Wee Sweet Daddy.” Between “Swango” and “Looking for a Parking Place” they played a song which Palmer announced as a medley of George Gershwin and Thomas “Fats” Waller. The Gershwin song turned out to be “I Got Rhythm” and the Waller piece was neither “Ain’t Misbehavin’” nor “Honeysuckle Rose,” his biggest hits, but “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” a great ditty about a house party being raided by the police. Palmer said in her interstitial interviews that the purpose of a Motel Swing Orchestra show is to give the audience a fun time and a chance to dance. She recalled that during the swing-music revival of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s she drew a lot of so-called “swing kids” to her audiences because she played the kind of music they could dance to – though what the “swing kids” were listening to had little to do with the music of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, or Les Brown, as Brown himself complained about in an interview in his later years. It actually sounded more like the “jump blues” style popularized by Louis Jordan in the mid-1940’s and an important benchmark in the transition of Black popular music from jazz to rhythm-and-blues and the forerunners of rock ‘n’ roll (which Jordan bitterly denounced as “just rhythm-and-blues played by white people”).

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Clickbait" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 16, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Thursday, October 16) I watched three episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise shows in a row, including a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show, “Clickbait,” that turned out to be one of their very best recent episodes. It begins with a scene in which a school bus full of kids out for a field trip is hit by a car and crashes. One of the girls on the bus, Penny Wilson (Vaughan Riley), starts hemorrhaging in the hospital and nearly dies from her injuries. Later it turns out that she was eight months pregnant until the shock of the accident caused her to have a miscarriage. The SVU detectives find that sexually explicit photos of their victim have been circulating among her schoolmates, many of which show her in compromising positions with the school’s music teacher, a 32-year-old who was driven out of a previous school assignment by accusations that he was sexually inappropriate with a student. Of course the cops suspect Huxley is up to his old tricks again (in more ways than one), but he protests his innocence – and the medical examiner orders DNA tests that prove that Huxley was not the father of Penny’s unborn child. The actual father was Bryce Cole (Jon Martens), a schoolmate who broke up with Penny shortly after he knocked her up, and his new girlfriend, Haley (Alayna Martus), put him up to downloading an AI program to generate fake images of Penny exposing herself and having sex with her music teacher in order to humiliate her. The cops decide to prosecute the creator of the AI program Bryce used, Daniel Huxley (Matias de la Flor), for producing child pornography and allowing its dissemination. They actually win a jury verdict against him after his former business partner, Samit Junger (Owais Ahmed), agrees to break the non-disclosure agreement Huxley got out of him when he quit the company out of his disgust that Huxley was deliberately advertising his AI platform as one which could be used to create sexually explicit images. One particularly demeaning ad for the site showed a hot young woman, and the slogan was, in effect, why bother to date her when you can just undress her with AI and fantasize about her to your heart’s content? But the judge in the case uses the rarely employed power of judges to set aside a jury verdict, in this case because even though Huxley’s conduct was reprehensible, it’s not illegal under the laws as they currently stand. The judge announces that if the state’s prosecutors want a remedy, they need to persuade the legislators in Albany to change the law – and I immediately thought, “Good luck with that.” The tech entrepreneurs have become the biggest spenders on lobbying efforts of anyone in the U.S., and they’re using that money to ensure that they can do whatever they want to do with implementing AI, including facilitating the creation and distribution of fake child porn that implicates real people. Donald Trump regularly hosts big-tech CEO’s like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta, Tim Cook of Apple, and Sundar Pichai of Google, to the White House, and he’s made it clear to them that as long as they play ball with him and don’t do anything to threaten his authority (like take down Right-wing hate speech off their platforms), he’ll give them total control to implement AI however they want.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Promesse Infrante" ("Broken Promises") (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 16, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, the next Law and Order episode, an Organized Crime show called “Promesse Infrante” (“Broken Promises”), was nowhere near as good as the SVU show it followed. It was about a gang war in the New York streets between members of the Spezzano family – grandmother Isabella (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and her grandsons Roman (Alberto Frezza), Rocco (Anthony Skordi), and Pietro (Luca Richman) – and an unseen Dominican gang boss. The Spezzanos are members of the Camorra, a centuries-old criminal enterprise based in Naples which I’ve read about before, notably in Peter Maas’s book The Valachi Papers. Maas explained that there were two major criminal organizations in Italy: the Camorra from Naples and the Mafia from Sicily. Members of both groups emigrated to the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries and fought vicious wars against each other in the streets of American cities until a few level-headed people at the top of both groups decided it would make more sense if they settled their differences peaceably and worked together. So the term “La Cosa Nostra” (literally “Our Thing,” though the Italians involved in it usually rendered it as “This Thing of Ours”) was coined to allow members of the Camorra and the Mafia to work as one. The main dramatic issue is the ambiguity of the loyalties among the Spezzano family members with whom Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) interacts. He thought he had recruited Isabella as an informant when he was stationed in Italy during the 12-year interregnum between Meloni’s departure from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the debut of Law and Order: Organized Crime. Isabella is running a legal brewery in New York but Stabler suspects it’s really a front for the Camorra. Of Isabella’s three grandchildren, Roman and Rocco are hard-core Camorra members but Pietro, at 14 the youngest of them, is torn between loyalty to his Camorra brothers and a basically decent nature that more or less turns him off to the criminal lifestyle. The climax occurs at the Spezzano brewery, which Stabler is visiting to talk both Isabella and Pietro out of their involvements with the Camorra. Just as he’s trying to talk to them, the Spezzano brewery is attacked by gun-toting motorcycle-riding members of the Dominican gang. Stabler activates an electronic device he’s been issued by the police department to alert them to a crime in progress, and in the climactic scene 14-year-old Pietro Spezzano is holding a gun on Stabler. Just as Stabler thinks he’s talked Pietro into giving up and giving him the gun, Stabler’s hot-shot son Eli (Nicky Torchia) sees Pietro holding a gun on his dad and shoots him in the back. Pietro dies, much to daddy Stabler’s discomfort since he’d had hopes of talking him out of the gang life. It was an O.K. Organized Crime, though the sheer intensity of the body count started to get to me after a while, and frankly I liked the version of Elliott Stabler Meloni played on SVU – legitimately tough but also fair-minded and not bearing the unresolved burden of grief brought on by the assassination of his wife in the first episode of Organized Crime – better than what he’s become on this show.

Law and Order: "Two and Twenty" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 16, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 16) I watched three consecutive episodes of the Law and Order franchise in succession. The first was an episode of the flagship Law and Order series which had some interesting twists. It was called “Two and Twenty” and was about the murder of a hot-shot financier named Jon Geller (Tom Hammond), who was ambushed and clubbed to death with a new golf putter he’d just had custom-made and boasted, “This is going to change my life.” Jon Geller was married to a woman named Sara (René Zara) but when he was killed he was about to fly his private helicopter to a rendezvous for a weekend idyll with his Gay lover, Matt Thomas (David Edwin Williams). This sets up a couple of red herrings, especially when someone tells the police they overheard Geller on the phone with his wife threatening her and saying he’d already made his decision and she’d have to live with it. At first the cops assume that the news Jon had chosen to break to his wife was that he was leaving her to be with his boyfriend, but it turned out it was an argument between them over the education of their son Shane (Aaron Houser). Eventually the killer turns out to be Nick Rossi (Patrick Voss Davis), a staff member of Geller’s company, who was so relentlessly overworked and psychologically abused by Geller that his attorney, a heavy-set Black woman named Maria Cruz (Kimberly S. Fairbanks), tries to make a self-defense claim that Rossi was literally in fear of his life if he and Geller’s second-in-command, an African-American named Brad Addis (Alano Miller) who’d put up with Geller’s abuse for years on Geller’s promise that he’d name Addis the CEO of the company once he retired, then Geller reneged and gave the promotion to someone else (whom we never see), didn’t land an important acquisition deal that weekend. Ultimately, in the sort of spectacular cross-examination scene that happens quite often in movie and TV dramatizations of trials even though almost never in real life, Rossi breaks down on the stand and admits that the real reason he killed Geller is that he was angry with him and not that he was in fear of his life. It was a well-done Law and Order, though I wish they’d made more of the Gay subplot; at least Davis acted vividly in the final scene of his breakdown on the witness stand.

Angela Harvey, Rodney Chester, and Nathan Hale Williams: Three Black Queer Artists Expressing Themselves in Movies

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I spent five days, October 8-12, in Riverside, California for the annual Convocation of the Unity Fellowship Movement. One of the most fascinating events we went to during the convocation was a combination film screening and question-and-answer session held at the Riverside LGBTQ+ Center featuring filmmakers Angela Harvey and Nathan Hale Williams and actor Rodney Chester. Harvey and Chester were both present from the opening of the session, though Williams arrived later and Harvey left early due to another commitment. Harvey and Chester both projected enormous charisma; Harvey was dressed in skin-tight blue jeans and a simple top, while Chester looked electrifying in a powder-blue suit. Harvey’s film was called Black Rainbow Love, and was 45 minutes of interviews with African-American Lesbians and Gay men in coupled relationships with other Black partners. She said that she was having problems finding a distributor for it because at 45 minutes it’s too long to be a short and too short to be a feature. She also said that it wasn’t taken seriously by a number of the film festivals to which she submitted it because it only had two people credited with being on the crew: herself as producer, director, and writer, and Ken Branson as cinematographer and editor (though Harvey said she’d done a lot of the editing herself). Completed in 2022, it’s sort of a modern updating of the classic Queer documentary Word Is Out (1977) specifically focused on Black Queer people and the dual struggles they face with both racism and homophobia. (Blessed be, Harvey did not use the horrible jargon word “intersectionality.”) Harvey identified herself as a single Lesbian, though she’d been routinely coupled until 2019, when she finally realized she’d had a history of being trapped in co-dependent relationships and needed to break free of emotional commitments to other people.

To me the most interesting of Harvey’s interviewees were Deidre Gray, a Transwoman from the Midwest, and Rayceen Pendarvis, an older woman who said she’d been a mentor and substitute mother to a lot of Queer people who’d been cast adrift by their families of origin. Almost inevitably given that the director was a Lesbian, Black Rainbow Love featured more women than men, but Harvey proved to be a sensitive interviewer with a knack for getting her subjects to reveal themselves. After the movie I suggested that she should do a follow-up about African-American Lesbians and Gay men involved in interracial relationships – and Harvey, much to my surprise, took the suggestion well and didn’t challenge me to make such a film myself. In her opening presentation she stressed that she’s nearly 60 years old and had never even thought of becoming a filmmaker until she did this one, though she’d worked as a writer on the cable TV series Teen Wolf. Mostly she’s a motivational speaker, counselor, self-described “GROWTHologist,” and also a writer and poet who was selling two books at the event, an adult coloring book called Colorful Growth and a poetic memoir called Poetic Alchemy: Seven Intentions for Healing, Personal Growth, and Transformation. Rodney Chester turned out to have been an actor mainly known for his role as part of the cast of Noah’s Arc, a cable TV series that had a two-year run (2004-2006) on the Queer-themed network Logo. He said that despite the fact that Noah’s Arc was the most popular show on Logo for the short time it ran, it was canceled because the network couldn’t find a sponsor – which an audience member said reminded him of the fate of Nat “King” Cole’s 1957 variety show on NBC, which also didn’t draw a sponsor because no one wanted to have their product identified with a show featuring a Black host. Chester recalled that there was a lot of pressure from Logo to introduce white characters into Noah’s Arc, which the producers resisted because they wanted to keep the show all-Black and focused on the issues specifically faced by Black Gay men. He said that the actor who played his partner on the show was straight in real life, and it was a professional challenge for Chester not to cross the line that would make his co-star uncomfortable with physical displays of affection between them.

The rights to Noah’s Arc ended up with Paramount, which produced a feature-film version released this year. The feature includes the same actors as they’ve naturally aged, and one twist in the movie is that the baby he and his partner were raising in the original series has grown up and come out as Transgender. Chester also had a supporting role in the next film shown as part of the afternoon, Nathan Hale Williams’s and Jennia Frederique’s 90 Days (2016), a 20-minute short produced by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in association with Williams’s own production company, iN-Hale Entertainment, and Full Frequency Media. 90 Days seemed to me the weakest film on the program, not only because I’m still committed to the idea that we’ve been sold a bill of goods in being told that the whole cadre of diseases lumped together under the name AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) can be blamed on a single virus, the so-called HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), but because even if you accept the HIV/AIDS model as true, it’s awfully didactic. It centers around the straight relationship between Taylor (Nic Few) and Jessica (Teyonah Parris), who met at the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles (which, by coincidence, Charles and I had recently visited on a day trip to L.A. and we recognized quite a few of the locations inside that incredible establishment) and had been dating for the titular 90 days. The issue between them was that Jessica had dodged any physical intimacy between them without telling Taylor why, and on the night in question Taylor brings over a red jewel case containing an engagement ring and plans to propose to Jessica – until she tells him that (shock!) she’s HIV positive. The most celebrity-adjacent actor in the movie is Pauletta Washington, Denzel Washington’s wife, who gave up her own acting career to raise their children. She plays Taylor’s mother Gayle, and her main function in the film is to question whether it’s wise for Taylor to marry a woman he’s known such a short time. Williams, who wrote 90 Days solo as well as co-directing it with Jennia Frederique (who also is in the film in a supporting role), dared to leave the ending open rather than tell us definitively whether Taylor does or does not let the fact that Jessica is HIV positive break up their relationship. One member of the audience, apparently having missed the import of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s logo being on the credits, thought that the big reveal was going to be that Jessica was a Transwoman.

The third and last film on the program was All Boys Aren’t Blue, a 2021 adaptation of a young-adult novel by George M. Johnson, also directed by Nathan Hale Williams and produced by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation along with Williams’s own iN-Hale Productions and All Tea No Shade Productions. Johnson’s novel was published in 2020 and has become one of the most frequently banned books in the U.S. due to its open addressing of the issues facing a young Black Queer growing up in this country. (It was the number three most banned book in the U.S. in 2021, the second most in 2022 and 2023, and the most banned in 2024.) The film adapts three vignettes from Johnson’s book: a story of how they were (since Johnson has come out as non-binary the plural pronoun is appropriate) beaten up by bullies at age five (they were out with two older cousins and they were attacked by six larger boys, one of whom literally kicked most of Johnson’s teeth out, leading to them getting adult teeth way ahead of schedule and being literally unwilling to smile); a portrait of their grandmother Nanny (Jenifer Lewis), the only supportive member of their family; and their account of pledging the most prestigious Black college fraternity and having to deal with the other members’ homophobia. George Johnson is played by three different people: Thomas Hobson as a child, Dyllon Burnside as the one who relates the story of Nanny, and Bernard David Jones as a college student. The result was an incredibly powerful film that, at 40 minutes, has the same problem as Black Rainbow Love: it’s too long to be a short and too short to be a feature. Williams and Rodney Chester joined forces for an hour-long Q&A that addressed the difficulties of getting Black- and Queer-themed films out to a mass audience. They were originally supposed to show a fourth film, Come Together: Art’s Power for Change, a making-of documentary about the groundbreaking 2006 film Dirty Laundry, the story of a young urban Gay Black man who’s summoned to the Southern home where he grew up to deal with a family crisis. The film was intended as a tribute to Dirty Laundry’s director, the late Maurice Jamal, but the event ran too long for them to be able to show it. Nonetheless, Williams and Chester paid homage to Jamal’s ability not only to get the feature made but to recruit name actors like Rockmond Dunbar and Loretta Devine to be in it. All in all, the event was a tribute to the power and persistence of these Black Queer artists not only to get their films made but to present them to the public as best they can and do their level best to build an audience for Black Queer cinema.

Play Dirty (Amazon MGM Studios, Big Indie Pictures, Modern Pictures, Screen New South Wales, Servo Production Services, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I spent most of the last week out of town at a religious convocation of the Unity Fellowship Church, and as a result I hadn’t been able to update the moviemagg blog for over a week. We stayed in an old house we took as a vacation rental, and it included a television in the living room but one that was not connected to any regular network broadcasts. As a result, I was unable to watch the Law and Order shows on Thursday, October 10, as usual. Instead Charles found an intriguing and reasonably entertaining “caper” film on Amazon.com’s Prime streaming service called Play Dirty, directed and co-written by Shane Black and loosely based on the character of Parker, created by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym “Richard Stark.” Black’s writing collaborators were Chuck Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, and the three came up with a bizarre tale in which Parker (Mark Wahlberg) and associates Philly Webb (Thomas Jane) and Zen (Rosa Salazar) hatch a plot to rob a horse-racing track of its daily bet collections. (Charles questioned whether a racetrack would still be collecting its bets in cash in 2025.) The heist goes off successfully, though in a series of grimly amusing scenes Parker’s getaway car ends up driving on the racetrack and alternately spooking and actually crashing into the horses. But Zen brutally shoots Philly and the others involved in the robbery, and Parker escapes only by falling into a river and letting its currents carry him away. Parker recuperates at the home of Philly’s widow Grace (Gretchen Mol) and swears to her he’ll avenge her husband’s murder. To this end, Parker seeks out an old friend named Grofeld (LaKeith Stanfield), who runs a struggling theatre company that somehow manages to stay in business even though almost no one ever attends its plays. (The clear implication is that Grofeld is using it as a front to launder money.)

Parker and Grofeld track down Zen’s associate Reggie, who tells them that Zen is actually a trained assassin for a Latin American country (technically unspecified but pretty obviously Peru). Zen killed everyone involved in Parker’s heist but Parker himself and made off with the loot to underwrite an even bigger crime: the theft of priceless treasures dredged up on the sea floor from the wreckage of an old Spanish galleon. Zen’s country is ruled by a corrupt dictator named De La Paz (Alejandro Edda), and though he’s technically donated the treasure to the United Nations for display as an art exhibit, he plans to steal it and use the money to keep himself in power. To do this he’s hired a criminal syndicate called “The Outfit” headed by Lozini (Tony Shalhoub). Zen’s plan is to steal the treasure herself before De La Paz can get his hands on it and use the money to feed her people. Their contact to pull this off is Bosco (Andrew Ford), only Parker shoots and kills him before he and Zen can get the necessary information. Parker traces Bosco’s lieutenant Kincaid (Nat Wolff) and drops him out of a high-rise window, but Kincaid miraculously survives. The plot is that The Outfit will enter the location through a weak spot in the New York subway system and Parker’s crew will haul the loot away in garbage trucks after they derail the subway train. Only “The Outfit” moves the date of the heist up one day, so Parker and his crew have to put their plan in action a day early. Zen seduces Parker as part of the plot, arousing the jealousy of her boyfriend Mateo (Gabriel Alvarado), who kidnaps Parker and takes him to The Outfit. Previously, Parker and his crew found out that The Outfit got wind of what was going on and replaced the priceless treasure with worthless rocks.

The only thing they can still steal and make any money from is the $500 million golden figurehead from the ship that carried the treasure in the first place, which The Outfit had planned to sell to billionaire technocrat Phineas Paul (Chukwudi Iwuji). They do so, but when they have it Parker discovers it’s a fake (can you say The Maltese Falcon?). Then they trace the real one, only it’s been booby-trapped with explosives and, rather than let The Outfit and their corrupt employer get it, Parker blows it up, though he’s eventually able to profit from the heist by harvesting the jewels it contained. Zen tries to get Parker to flee with him and start a new life somewhere else, saying that she’s now genuinely in love with him and wasn’t just faking it for her own ends. Parker grimly tells her that he was faking it, and kills her to avenge Philly and the other people from the original heist whom Zen killed. When Play Dirty was over I commented to Charles, “It’s The Maltese Falcon and The Asphalt Jungle meet John Wick.” The sheer relentlessness of the death toll severely hampered my enjoyment of it, and I couldn’t help but recall that when John Huston made The Maltese Falcon he was able to create a plot (as Dashiell Hammett already had with his source novel) that was suffused with violence and the threat of it even though only three people actually get killed. Charles pointed out that Play Dirty ripped off a lot of other heist movies as well, but those were the models that stood out for me. It’s actually fairly well acted; Mark Wahlberg is surprisingly credible as the sort of good-bad guy he’s playing, one we’re kept rooting for even though he’s a pretty despicable slice of humanity. Rosa Salazar makes a good classic film noir-style femme fatale, and I especially liked Chukwudi Iwuji as the arrogant tech gazillionaire who believes his money and economic power sets him above the common run of everyday humanity, including the rules the rest of us have to live by.