‘Freaky Tales’ is a Love Letter for Funny Folks Fighting Fascism

The Golden State Warriors played the Los Angeles Lakers last night, as they do in the closing act of the new film Freaky Tales from filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, set in the East Bay Area (Oakland and Berkeley mainly) in 1987, in which many cultural rivalries are lovingly recreated. The genre-bending mixtape movie from the directors of Captain Marvel and Half Nelson is timely, nostalgic, punk rock and old-school hiphop, inspiring and often hilarious.

(I confess some personal bias, as a Bay Area-based person.)

I got to chat with Anna and Ryan about Freaky Tales, and they provided some context for the unique film, which is told in interlinked chapters, somewhat in the vein of Pulp Fiction or Go. The title references Too Short’s 1987 track “Freaky Tales,” and yes, Too Short himself is in the film in several iterations.

The “fighting Nazis” theme pops most in the first and last chapters, and you just gotta see it to get it, but it does involve both the punk rock scene at the iconic venue 924 Gilman in Berkeley, and Sleepy Floyd’s legendary 29-point quarter in the 1987 NBA playoffs (for the Warriors against the Lakers, ultimately a losing effort).

Oh, and Tom Hanks is in it.

As part of a diverse and delightful ensemble cast, Ji-young Yoo plays Tina, a young Korean American woman in the Gilman scene who receives magical punk-chic weaponry (think if Green Lantern had gore) to aid in the community’s fight with intrusive local white supremacists.

Freaky Tales also graces us with an old-school rap battle featuring Dominique Thorne and Nomani, a truly touching turn by Pedro Pascal as a loan shark enforcer seeking redemption, and the aforementioned basketball milestone spun into a fictionalized samurai revenge tale. And Tom Hanks (a Bay Area dude IRL) waxing romantic on obscure underdog movies in a video rental store. There’s a lot going on.

*Dominique Thorne as Barbie and Normani as Entice in* Freaky Tales. *Courtesy of Lionsgate*

Also Black Flag and Operation Ivy, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The treasure trove of pop-culture Easter eggs relating to the Bay Area, the 1980s, music, sports, and cult films is extensive. Again, my hometown bias enabled catching most of the references, so I won’t belabor the personally heartwarming aspect except to say yo look at the Grand Lake Theater’s slate of movies in ’87! IYKYK. The Lost Boys, OMG.

But there’s also a universal message in the mixtape, and that message is conveyed with the droll comedy and documentarian perspective that distinguishes all of Boden and Fleck’s films, including the big Marvel one. The somewhat subversive themes are well-served by the setting and the period, before the tech boom, indeed before the Internet. At the risk of lifting an Avengers line, there was an idea, at one point, that we could all be in the Bay Area and all co-exist in different flavors of weird, as long as we stood by some bottom-line principles, like Don’t Be A Nazi.

These days it’s all hella complicated, of course, but for a moment Freaky Tales reminded me, in ways both subtle and sensationalistic, of the catharsis felt when standing up for the underdog’s cause.