by tt stern-enzi

Where in the world has Orlando Jones been?

Quick, can you remember the last time you saw that brotha in a meaningful role in a movie? Thanks to the Internet Movie Database, I know he’s been peppering and spicing up a host of television shows (unfortunately shows that have slipped underneath my film-centric radar) like Everybody Hates Chris, Rules of Engagement, CSI: Miami, and House. These appearances have been brief, but there’s something about his presence. I don’t know about you, but I have to say I’ve missed him especially on the big screen.

It’s hard to recall him from that uncredited flash in Chris Rock’s I Think I Love My Wife or from the very little seen Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, which means we’re all the back to 2002 and Drumline before you can comfortably say, “oh, that’s right, I remember him in that.” His Dr. Lee was a regimented stickler, an old school band leader confronting a changing of the guard. This wasn’t the glib, fast-talking guy from The Replacements or one of his patented straight men with a hipster waiting to rip the buttons off the suit types (think Double Take). No, through Dr. Lee, Jones crafted a performance rooted in a bedrock foundation of upstanding black folks, that righteousness we’ve come to expect from Denzel Washington when he’s not subverting the type with a villainous (Training Day) or morally compromised (Flight) turn. There was no winking or nodding, to cue us into the idea that Jones was “doing” something different than we had come to recognize from him, but Dr. Lee, the character had an arc that allowed for a small yet significant awakening, an appreciation of the new/next generation and their contribution. And we, as an audience, got that from Jones.

So, imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon the YouTube channel, Machinima Prime, and the trailer for a new web series – Tainted Love – from none other than Orlando Jones. The “graphic novel action comedy” teams Jones up with director Avi Youabian (a journeyman editor on film projects like The Call, Step Up Revolution, and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never as well as a role call of recent television shows) to present the story of Black Barry (Jones), a low level criminal type with a crazy girlfriend named Jezebel Jackson (Deanna Russo) who informs him that she’s pregnant with a baby and a plan for them to take care of everything. When Plan A (rob and steal indiscriminately) doesn’t work, Jezebel’s Plan B involves stealing from Barry’s boss (Eric Roberts), a made man unlikely to forgive and forget such behavior, even from an expectant father with a baby mama with as much sense as a coked-up baby in need of a fix.

The first episode (Chapter 1 – Baby Mama Drama) of the six-part Tainted Love series premiered May 5th with a familiar blend of graphic novel panels and live action (think Scott Pilgrim vs The World), but there’s been an effort to more rigorously integrate the competing frames to highlight certain sequences. This isn’t some studied attempt to, say, bring together hip hop and jazz like we used to get back in the mid-1990s, where each side stood side-by-side and took turns doing their thing for a few measures, hoping we would appreciate the almost truce-like atmosphere they had created. There’s something messy and improvised in the interplay of these frames, something, in fact, that feels like the duality that exists in Jones himself.

And now with the quick release of Chapter 2 – Baby Got Back – detailing Jezebel’s reckless rush from A-to-B, an argument could be made that the idea isn’t terribly new, but the style is loose, damned near frenzied, like a good comic before the dark and brooding graphic novels took over the genre. Thought bubbles pop-up fill the space just like you would imagine they might in these otherwise abandoned and boarded-up lots in the minds of these characters and murmured asides splatter and run like blood stains over the live action scenes. We’ve seen the use of animated text before (the late Tony Scott feel in love with words breaking and entering his frames from any and all cracked windows), but Tainted Love takes what has been learned on the big screen and applies it as if the technique were as common and yet, also as vital and life-sustaining as breathing. It races along, not bothering to waste our time with extraneous diversions, like the best of what is coming from the web series onslaught. The steps from radio to film to television followed a slow evolution, but the leap to the web is more than quantum (it is hard to believe that we are little more than a decade past BMW’s fledgling internet long-form ad series The Hire); it is as if we’ve figured out how to displace or fold time and space to get to this point and who knows how big a fold will come next.

Think about that as you watch the upcoming chapters (Chapter 3 is scheduled to drop on May 16th) of Tainted Love on Machinima Prime and consider what might be on the horizon for Orlando Jones. Who knows where you’ll find him next.