Wide-ranging social commentary in Peele's 'Wendell & Wild' pillories privatization, school-to-prison pipeline

Released by Netflix in October 2022, Wendell & Wild is a delightful stop-motion horror animation and none-too-subtle commentary on the school-to-prison pipeline.

Jordan Peele and Henry Selick co-produced and co-authored Wendell & Wild, which is based on an unpublished book by Selick and Clay McLeod Chapman. Comedic genius Peele was fresh off Nope (2022), which I thought was much better than the confused Get Out (2017), though the newer film won zero Academy nods to the earlier's screenplay win and three noms in 2018. Selick is a Hollywood legend, but doesn't perennially produce new work for our pleasure. He co-masterminded The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996) in the animation vein, and he did the visual effects for a favorite film of mine, the quirky and underrated Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004).

Wendell & Wild follows teenager Kat (Lyric Ross, Déjà on This Is Us) as she battles demonic forces, including an eponymous demon pair (voiced by Peele and comedy partner Keegan-Michael Key), intent on evil works, including construction of a prison, in the down-on-its-luck earthly town of Rust Bank. Critics harshed on the film for jamming too much social commentary into one vehicle, and, admittedly, Wendell & Wild fires head-spinningly at innumerable targets.

To me, that's the fun of it. Race, education, employment, the institutional church, and the criminal justice system only outline the low-hanging fruit. Through subtleties such as plot device, semantics, and imagery, the film digs deep into nuances, even the socioeconomic layers of natural hair.

Whatever your pet peeve of social dysfunction, you can find it in Wendell & Wild, which is why I first saw the film as a commentary on transparency and accountability in urban development. The demons and their mortal allies are in the privatization-of-state-services game. They plan to build a prison that will do nothing in the way of rehabilitation alongside schools that will do little in the way of education, as building each institution to serve its purpose would be bad business for the other.

What I was inclined to see as a problem in freedom-of-information law, informed as I was by a former student's recent publication on private-prison abuse in Arizona for The Journal of Civil Information, to be fair, is just one angle on the broader problem of the school-to-prison pipeline. In this vein, I shared a scene from Wendell & Wild with my law students.

It happened that Jose Vazquez, communications director for the ACLU of Alabama, keyed in on the same scene and posted it to Twitter (embed below). In the scene, mean-girl ringleader Siobhan (Tamara Smart) starts to put together the evil plot of her parents, urban development power couple Lane and Irmgard Klaxon (David Harewood and Maxine Peake), owners and directors of Klax Corp. How sweet is that multiplicitous naming?

This clip is a spoiler but I really hope it can be used in classrooms and just generally shared because we all need to learn how prisons ruins people's lives, families, and entire towns! We can all imagine better futures and this film does a great job illustrating that. pic.twitter.com/Y2TS31lkAd

— jose bouquet (@josebouquets) October 29, 2022

Wendell & Wild is worth the watch. As Vazquez wrote of the above clip on Twitter, "I really hope it can be used in classrooms."

Multi-ethnic kid crew fights bloodsucking gentrification

Are you in need of a Stranger Things fix? Season 4 resumed filming a couple of weeks ago.

In the meantime, Netflix's Vampires vs. the Bronx offers delightful diversion.

There have been black vampires and black horror films, but not so much vampire films with human protagonists of color.  Or many colors.  Enter Vampires vs. the Bronx, a welcome addition in the open vein of comedy-horror.

In Vampires, a quartet of talented youthful stars (Jaden Michael, Gerald Jones III, Gregory Diaz IV, and Coco Jones) are residents of a Bronx neighborhood resisting a clandestine vampire invasion.  The characters casually comprise kids of African-American, Haitian, Puerto Rican, and Dominican descent.  Their cultures are not conflated as we get glimpses of their home lives.

The film collects stars and boasts a few subtle send-ups to classic comedy and horror.  An opening cameo by Zoe Saldana is especially apt, as her heritage includes all of Dominican, Haitian, and Puerto Rican roots.  Cliff "Method Man" Smith plays the local priest, who doles out the Eucharist with a steely glare to his troublesome young congregants.  Bronx-native, Dominican-American comedian, Joel "The Kid Mero" Martinez drives the narrative as beloved bodega owner-operator Tony.   

Saturday Night Live actor-comedian Chris Redd and another Bronx-native, Dominican-American comedian, Vladimir Caamaño, get a few of the film's top comic lines as observers of the action in the tradition of Statler and Waldorf, or Jay and Silent Bob. Director Oz Rodriguez also directs Saturday Night Live and is a native of the Dominican Republic.

Vampires vs. The Bronx is built not so subtly on a storyline of urban gentrification.  The Scandinavian-blonde vampire brood seeks to seize local businesses and convert the likes of Tony's bodega to high-end retail and craft coffee.  The vampires are aided by their human familiar, Frank Polidori (Shea Wigham), who brings Italian-mob-style tough tactics to persuade property owners to sell.  Acquiring a building has the spooky side effect of allowing the vampires to enter without asking permission.  

The theme carries through as vampire leader Vivian (Sarah Gadon) stops by the bodega to peruse Tony's growing inventory of new-age super-foods and settles on a purchase of hummus.  If you can't have a sense of humor about cultural stereotypes, this isn't the film for you.

At the same time, don't expect pedantic messaging on race and gentrification to run too deep.  PG-13 Vampires vs. The Bronx means mainly to make fun.  At that, it succeeds.

Here is the trailer.