And although “Trapped” isn’t tuneless, exactly, Mr. ![]() Kelly adopts more roles, and in Chapter 15 he gets an unlikely co-star: the indie-rock hero Will Oldham, on screen for only a few seconds. There are some great and cheerfully extraneous scenes in a church, when the familiar backing track gives way to comic gospel. Talbert.Īs “Trapped” spirals out from its soap opera beginnings, the action and the songwriting get looser, in ways good and bad. Kelly is deploying some of the same dramatic devices you can find in the world of urban theater, sometimes affectionately or derisively called the chitlin circuit.” Many of his stock characters (the pastor with a secret, the nosy neighbors, the semireformed ex-con, the stuttering pimp) and melodramatic revelations would be at home in a play by Tyler Perry, Shelly Garrett, Angela Barrow-Dunlap or David E. And some IFC viewers might not know that Mr. ![]() Kelly by praising his alleged insanity or naïveté, but that’s the kind of praise that can easily sound like condescension, especially when directed (as it often is) at African-American performers. Some “Trapped” fans may think they’re flattering Mr. LeShay Tomlinson as Kathy in Chapter 14 of Trapped. Credit. ![]() “Trapped in the Closet” may be an anomaly, but it’s no fluke. Kelly takes an absurd three-word phrase - “Is you tweakin’?” - and makes it funny, scary, believable and diabolically catchy. And his most recent album, “Double Up,” contains elegant theatrical songs like “Same Girl,” the hit Usher duet about a two-timing woman “Best Friend,” a prison drama and “Real Talk,” a defensive boyfriend’s bilious rant. Kelly’s obsession with comedy is also an obsession with plot and narrative. If it is a phase, it’s an extraordinarily entertaining one. 17 in Chicago.) Or maybe it’s just a phase. Or maybe it’s an expression of his continuing anxiety about his forthcoming trial on charges of child pornography. Maybe that’s an expression of his relief at the way his career has rebounded from scandal. Ever since the appearance in 2002 of a video that the police say shows him with an under-age girl, his jokes have grown bigger and sillier. No doubt more than a few couples have used “Feelin on Yo Booty” as mood music, chuckling contentedly when the chorus suddenly morphs into a yodeling demonstration. Kelly long ago realized that a subtle joke, or an unsubtle one, can make a slow jam feel more intimate and therefore more effective. R&B lovermen have long been parodied as comically earnest lotharios, blissfully unaware of how ridiculous they sound. Why do so many people think the funniest pop star on the planet is the butt of the joke when he is so obviously in on it? It’s hard to think of a work that has inspired more parodies, from Weird Al to Jimmy Kimmel, from sketch comedy to cabaret. Kelly, not with him, as if the whole thing were some sort of glorious, terrible mistake as if the far-fetched plot turns (most infamously, the policeman cuckolded by the “midget” hiding beneath the sink) and cliffhanger endings (“Oh my God, a rubber!”) were the work of someone who set out to make a traditional musical and failed. Many of its biggest fans seem to think they’re laughing at Mr. The Web site for New York magazine () proclaimed this “the cultural event of the year,” while one fairly typical commenter at ifc.com called it “a perfect storm of the worst artistry ever.”Īnd yet there is something slightly unnerving about the kind of attention “Trapped in the Closet” has received. Kelly’s outlandish achievement seems to inspire overstatement, especially online. Kelly promised that “Trapped” would return, and now it has: the IFC channel’s Web site has been showing a new episode every day, leading up to tomorrow’s DVD release of “Trapped in the Closet: Chapters 13-22” (Jive). It was the kind of pop spectacle you had to see to believe thanks to the online video explosion you could.īack then, Mr. The DVD arrived in late 2005, just as YouTube was taking off, and “Trapped” became a viral hit. A 5-part single mushroomed into a 12-part DVD, and in retrospect, his timing looks perfect. Kelly’s unprecedented audiovisual opus, “Trapped in the Closet,” ever since its premiere, two summers ago. Because people have been talking about R. What is there to say, really, about a multipart R&B soap opera cum sex farce starring an expanding cast of actors and actresses, all lip-syncing to the increasingly kaleidoscopic story-songs of a pop star once known for slow jams and “I Believe I Can Fly”?
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