The Age of Commercialism

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

I once watched the entire saga of Trapped in the Closet on IFC. It was a true train wreck in that it was awful but somehow I could not stop watching. The story was so complicated and R. Kelly was so pretentious that I simply could not make sense of or care about what happened. If the focus was supposed to be on the tangled sexual relationships of the characters, what was that whole business with the mobsters and the train doing in the film? I honestly hoped that someone would get killed since I thought that it might help end this stupid thing. I have no idea how anyone could actually find this mess genuinely entertaining and not just as a "so-bad-it's-good" alternative classic. In conclusion, it's a bad train wreck that you are better off avoiding if possible.

I don't remember how I first heard about the Trapped in the Closet series. I just looked them up one day and fell in love.Trapped in the Closet is a sort of hip-hopera or urban opera, according to Wikipedia. Written, directed, singing, and starring R. Kelly, it chronicles the bizarre twists and turns of a man named Sylvester after he's caught having a one-night stand. It's nothing short of brilliant.It would be very easy for this to get very bad. It could take itself seriously and be a joke. It could be a tremendous failure. In fact, people seem to be conflicted. They either love it or hate it. Just go look at the comments, and you'll see for yourself. But I'm on the love it side.Mostly because it is hilarious. I didn't really go into it expecting gay lovers and midgets, but that's exactly what I got. Set to repetitive background music with strategically-placed instrumentals, it's all about the amazing lyrics. So what if they don't always rhyme? So what if the music isn't that great. It's not about that.I saw it today in "movie" format, all twenty-two chapters together in an hour-and-a-half movie form. It was pretty good, and that is what I give three and a half stars. I give the fragmented series a four. It is designed to be seen in little bits with a cliffhanger. I saw it first on the internet, and actually, I would recommend that over seeing it all continuously. It's the whole suspense and the feeling like, "Oh my god, I have to see what happens next." It takes you back, in my case, before I was born, to old radio dramas and crazy soap operas and laughs at them.The series isn't over yet; there are ten more chapters coming out this summer. They'll probably be on IFC, which is where I saw the movie. And a note, there's quite a bit of violence and homophobia presented, and that's been a problem to some, too. For some reason, if it's in a movie, it's okay, but people expect all series to be like The Andy Griffith Show. Anyway, yeah, they talk about violence. Not too much is shown, but they do talk a lot about domestic violence. And there is homophobia, but there are four queer characters. The homophobia's presented as part of the story. Good lord, people, no need to get so defensive; he didn't have to put any gay people in it. And I know R. Kelly has been accused of horrible things. And that has nothing to do with this series.

Going into a little bit of a different trajectory here, R Kelly takes his Trapped in the Closet series-cum-music video into less the territory of a surreal string of cuckolded circumstances than that of the dangerous realm of your common gangster story. Well, common for what R Kelly can do with it at least. This isn't to say the second set of chapters isn't at times hysterically funny (unintentionally or intentionally, take your pick), be it with the close-ups shots of the Man With The Gold Teeth, or some more baby-daddy drama at a very "wha" moment. But... there's just something, oddly enough with such a horrible R&B beat going on behind every single repetitive, mockable 'lyric' Kelly gets into, that's a little off at times. I almost found myself actually paying attention to what the f*** these characters were saying, as if (like in the scene at the restaurant) like Kelly means it to be engaging like some convoluted 40s noir. It is convoluted, I'll give it that. After a while, despite knowing who the characters (mostly) were, I didn't even care anymore. Where as in the first dozen chapters there was some continuity to the madness of another "GOTCHA" coming out of a closet or a cabinet or behind a door, this time there's a lot more that's meant to be going on. But it only works in spurts, which are a good few (i.e. just seeing a 'double' Sylvester in his white suit, as if his God character or something), but far in between. I don't mind if it's cheesy or stupid or meant to be wack-a-doodle nuts. For something like this I DO want it to be that way to get all the camp value for a few buck's worth. But if there's no "good" end result, it doesn't click as well. If the first dozen chapters are a finely tuned train wreck, this second set is more like an Amtrak that skids a little on the rails, but stays firmly on its tracks.

For R. Kelly to have ever said that this steaming pile would be better than Thriller was the second worse thing he has done (next to peeing on a little girl while she cried for her mother). In the second installment of "Chapters" we start off right after the encounter with the Midget "Big Man"m but everyone has on totally different clothes so for the first few minutes you will think you are in a different "movie". Once again R. Kelly using stereotypes way off the scale (black people, black preacher, pimp, Italian mafia, southern white chick, etc.) While none of the characters are remotely believable, the story is very funny. No one in the world would act this way, but the fact that it is sooo off the wall makes it funny. You learn that everyone may have a "package" which is most likely AIDS given R. Kelly's hatred of the gay community. In the final scene people are being called because the "might" have gotten the "package" from Chuck and Rufus. Odds are most of them do not have the "package" since they may have not had sex with a sub-partner of chuck and rufus, or they may have used protection. On a final note it is funny that this is sold with music videos when the only music during all 22 chapters is the same 4 bongs repeated over and over (that is not music), and since nothing in the videos has ever been sung, it is just R. Kelly talking, and the fact that they were too cheap to use over voices over than just R. Kelly's makes it even funnier.