Cinema in the past year has seen not one, but two films with the premise of sex strikes against gun violence.
The first trailer for the upcoming indie comedy, Is That a Gun in Your Pocket, set in a firearms-obsessed small town in Texas, has been released today. And while it’s very relevant, it also looks similar to another movie released recently which addresses that same concern.
The film of which I speak is, if you haven’t guessed, Chi-Raq, which applied the ancient Greek play by Aristophanes to a heightened (to the point of being set in verse) portrait of contemporary Southside Chicago. There, the plot line of the play that sees Greek women rebelling by withholding sex in order to stop the Peloponnesian War was translated to a group of black Chicago women trying to end gang violence using the same means.
But the similarities are also presumably fine (if odd), because that recently released film was very much openly derived from the ancient Greek canonical sex-strike play Lysistrata — so the fundamental idea was already quite old. And the earlier film will probably end up having made far more of a cultural mark, given that Is That a Gun in Your Pocket is a tiny indie comedy that isn’t directed by Spike Lee. (In fact, it’s directed by someone named Matt Cooper.)
Is That a Gun in Your Pocket looks to be a much less serious film (that’ll also get taken less seriously — as it doesn’t look nearly as immediate or vital, even if Chi-Raq had its problems), in which a bunch of mostly white Texan women band together to make their murderous-phallus-loving husbands and their murderous-phallus-loving-culture stop loving murderous phallus so much.
The film doesn’t have many familiar faces in it, but you may recognize John Michael Higgins from the Christopher Guest movies, SNL‘s Horatio Sanz and True Blood/Veep’s Lauren Bowles (incidentally, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ half-sister). According to a press release, it has an opening in NYC on September 16 and in other select cities on September 23.
Watch the trailer:
Here’s the trailer for Chi-Raq: