Big Amen for Rhythmic, Riveting and Sexy ‘Jason’s Lyric’

I read Peter Rainer’s tepid review of Doug McHenry’s “Jason’s Lyric” (“Ambitious ‘Jason’s Lyric’ Falls Short of Redemption,” Calendar, Sept. 28).

Notwithstanding the high regard in which I hold Rainer’s cinematic opinions, I went alone to a Hollywood theater to check things out for myself.

All I can say is that Rainer must have seen a completely different print of “Jason’s Lyric” than the one I viewed with a packed and enthusiastic weekend audience.

Unlike Rainer, I found the film to be fascinating, funny, rhythmic, riveting, tragic and very, very sexy. Indeed, in my informed opinion, the supremely talented Jada Pinkett as Lyric emerges as the quintessential female sex symbol of the 21st Century. (Pinkett’s arrival may be six years early, but, with her assets, who’s counting?) The lady’s got sex appeal to burn and the males in the theater gladly inhaled the smoke.

But no male chauvinistic pig is director McHenry. His excellent camera angles provide the very talented Allen Payne, who plays Jason, with a highly sexed ambience in which to perform. And perform Payne does, drawing impassioned shouts of “Amen!” from women in the audience.

“Jason’s Lyric” is not a perfect film. But I can count the number of “perfect” films on one hand and never use my thumb. “Jason’s Lyric” does, however, have a number of perfect parts. Jason and Lyric’s set piece lovemaking scene in the woods ranks right up there with the bathtub scene between Ron O’Neal and Sheila Frazier in Gordon Parks Jr.’s “SuperFly” as one of the sexiest scenes ever committed to celluloid.

Rainer opines that the romantic sex scenes in “Jason’s Lyric” were “inserted to boost the film’s commercial temperature.” I think not. But, let’s face it, any Hollywood filmmaker who does not consider box-office potential when making a film is at best a fool and almost certainly a failure. Is anyone naive enough to think that the makers of “Jurassic Park,” for example, didn’t have bottom-line considerations in mind when they chose the violent and carnivorous Tyrannosaurus rex as their monster-villain, instead of a more docile and herbivorous variety of dinosaur? Money talks. But in Hollywood, it screams!

We African Americans especially crave love stories like that of Jason and Lyric who are both pure of heart and completely committed to one another. And have sexual appetites! Indeed, what is romantic love without sexual spices? Blacks have too often been cinematically castrated ever since Edison invented the Kinetoscope. “Jason’s Lyric” helps provide us with a sort of cinematic “sexual healing.”

Now is the year AS 1994 (After Spike) and it falls to us African American filmmakers to help define our own unique existences. In “Jason’s Lyric,” director McHenry and writer Bobby Smith Jr. have taken us one step closer to the intellectual realization of our cultural Promised Land. Jason and Lyric represent the romantic ideal to which we all aspire. When they win, we all win! And, make no mistake about it, vicarious winning, sexual or otherwise, is one of the more exquisite rewards of good cinema.

“Jason’s Lyric” should also be credited with a couple of superb acting talent discoveries in Naughty by Nature’s Treach and his screen girlfriend, Lisa Carson, who both turn in excellent performances. And comic Eddie Griffin upstages anyone within range. All three deserve shots at leading roles.

The buzz is that Jackson/McHenry, the producers of “Jason’s Lyric,” have made Hollywood history by becoming the first African Americans with the power to greenlight mainstream films. Let the African American film community say, “Amen!”