In the third chapter of “Freaky Tales,” Clint (Pedro Pascal) has put a gun to his head, ready to end his life for reasons that would be better left unsaid, when a young boy taps on the window of his car, hoping to sell him an East Bay mixtape, which in 1987 Oakland could offer no small amount of delights from the scene spearheaded by Too Short. It’s could be a reach, but in Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s first feature since their foray into studio filmmaking with “Captain Marvel,” it’s hard not to see Pascal’s world-weary debt collector who decides against pulling the trigger because of the kid as anything but a metaphor when the buoyant anthology film is their own mixtape, full of joy, grit and grind that has the power to rejuvenate the soul after navigating their way through the Marvel machine.
You know why there aren’t other movies out there these days like “Freaky Tales,” but it’s sure be nice if there was the option for more people working at the top of their craft as Boden and Fleck are, a complete creative lark where nothing is taken too seriously except for the filmmaking. When the “Half Nelson” co-directors had the cache to secure a proper budget in the wake of a billion-dollar grossing blockbuster and the newfound chops to pull its action set-pieces to go with their penchant for creating great characters, they truly deliver something unique with four interconnected stories set in an Oakland where the city has been suffused with a mysterious green ooze and its star basketball player Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis) has used his signing bonus with the Warriors to start a wellness program Psytoptics where people can harness the power of the emerald goo for good.
The directing duo spend blissfully little time on the origin or mythology of the stuff, just an acceptance that it exists, which changes the calculus in a city where skinheads can increasingly be seen driving around in the predominantly Black community and more than a few have kept their hair to secure a police badge. Instead, their energy is deployed into making one of the best socially conscious genre mash-ups since “They Live,” taking real-life events in the East Bay and making them better than they might be remembered in more ways than one. As far as I know, Floyd never started his own wellness cult, but he did put up a miraculous 39 points in the second half of game four of the Western Conference Semifinals against the Lakers, giving “Freaky Tales” its fourth chapter when Fleck and Boden imagine the team’s homes getting robbed while the players were busy at the Oakland Arena, and although Too Short and the female rap duo Danger Zone may not have met at a rap battle, he invited Entice and Barbie (played by Normani Kordei Hamilton and Dominique Thorne, respectively) to guest on his album “Don’t Fight the Feeling,” the centerpiece of its glorious second chapter. (Surely locals might be able to correct me.) Hometown heroes from all eras make cameos, giving both a stamp of approval to Boden and Fleck’s rewriting of history when there’s a greater truth about the community at play and giving life to the film’s animating idea that there is greatness all around us and in banding together, no evil is insurmountable.
There may be plenty of nostalgia in “Freaky Tales,” but it’s designed for millennials with its interchangeable structure and “Yes, we can” ethos, with the allure of punching Nazis square in the jaw post-Charlottesville fulfilled by NOFX-era punks in the first chapter and Pascal, made a movie star by “Mandalorian” memes, roaming about as its main attraction in the film’s later chapters. By pulling in “Mississippi Grind”’s Ben Mendelsohn as a dirty cop simply credited as “The Guy” and “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” star Keir Gilchrist as one of the heavily pierced club kids, Boden and Fleck draw on their own history a bit while clearly having a blast doing things they’ve never done before, fooling around with animated interstitials and changing aspect ratios, but they’re now armed with the rare ability to make fun that hardly seems frivolous. Good triumphs over evil in “Freaky Tales,” not only in a world of right and wrong, but where a battleground has been opened up between originality and the same old, and it packs a punch on both fronts.
“Freaky Tales” will screen again at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23rd at 7 pm at the Ray Theatre in Park City, January 25th at 3 pm at Redstone Cinemas 2 in Park City and January 28th at 8 pm at the Library Center Theatre in Park City.
