By Jake Coyle, AP Film Writer
"Blindspotting," the directorial debut of Carlos Lopez Estrada, stalks the streets of Oakland with a heightened, spoken-word flow, passionately freestyling on race, police brutality and gentrification through a searing story about two friends: one black, one white.
Though stylistically scattershot and often overstated, the funky rhythm of "Blindspotting" undeniably finds a pulse. That's overwhelmingly thanks to the chemistry between its two talented stars — Daveed Diggs, the "Hamilton" Tony-winner, and his longtime pal Rafael Casal — whose characters' relationship, like in a Tennessee Williams play, steadily simmers until it boils over in an emotional, theatrical showdown.
Diggs plays Collin, who has just days until his probation is over for a violent incident vaguely referred to as a "fire technicality." He and Miles (Casal), his more hotheaded lifelong friend, are Bay Area movers who trade poetic versus along their routes while cursing the influx of hipsters to their once grittier neighborhood.
Collin is the cool, composed one, trying to lay low and get his life back on track. Miles, with a grill in his teeth and righteous fury at the changing face of Oakland, is buying a gun to protect his girlfriend and their young son. Their paths feel increasingly divergent, even as their devotion to one another remains deeply, sweetly sincere.
"We got kinda a Calvin and Hobbes thing going on," says Miles of their rapport.
While Collin is stopped at a red light on his way home one night, a black man runs in front of the truck, turns down the street and, just after pleading not to be shot, is mercilessly gunned down by a white police officer who's standing just outside Collin's window. Collin is too fearful to come forward, but the incident shakes him. In one of the movie's more vivid digressions, Collin dreams of himself standing trial with the murderous cop as his judge, while choking on bullets. In the daytime, Collin regularly jogs through a cemetery, as if he's trying to outrun the deaths of young black men all around him.
As you can tell, "Blindspotting" isn't shy about channeling topical concerns into hard-to-miss symbolism. There are coincidences, too, that stretch plausibility, as Estrada juggles lowkey scenes full of Oakland flavor with heavier thematic moments. The ride can be a riot, especially when Utkarsh Ambudkar drops in as a hyper, awe-struck passerby to relate the story of Collin's arrest. (Sample line: "Who knew hipsters were so flammable?")
Diggs and Casal, a spoken-word artist, wrote the film together, and they once considered doing it entirely in verse. That musicality remains in the film's DNA. On the appeal of his freestyling, Miles says: "They like the bounce of it." Blindspotting" bounces, too, skipping scene to scene like it's going track to track. But you can feel the movie start to impose too much on itself by the third act, when it was better just riffing.
Still, it's hard to remember a recent movie that so powerfully distilled social issues into a single relationship. "Blindspotting" is a buddy movie, at heart, about friends pulled apart by forces outside their grasp. Collin and Miles badly want to ignore the differences created by their skin color, but it gets harder and harder for them not to acknowledge their divergent experiences of privilege and justice, eventually leading to a back-alley reckoning. Oakland's identity issues become their own.
Diggs, who played Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette in "Hamilton," is quite obviously an equally talented film actor, so comfortably sliding from fiery monologues to deadpan comedy. (In one scene, the indelibly-haired Diggs gets a perm.) He and Casal together are electric, and I only wish "Blindspotting" didn't so easily distract itself from its central pair.
But there's an upside to the film so eagerly jumping from anguish to slapstick, from social drama to buddy movie. "Blindspotting" is, like the Oakland it so dearly loves, always many things at once.
"Blindspotting," a Lionsgate release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for "language throughout, some brutal violence, sexual references and drug use." Running time: 95 minutes. Three stars out of four.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More