Casting & Race Part 2: Defacing Color

by Guest Contributor J Chang, originally published at INIT_Moving Pictures
I think I overestimated my capacity for brevity and so what was supposed to be a three part series will probably end up spreading out further as I try to unpack and look into the long relationship between race and cinema.
Last time, I established the tension [...]

B-Flix By Bloomingdales Feature Short Films with Characters of Color

by Latoya Peterson
I got a flier for B-Flix as an insert in one of my fashion magazines.  Apparently, Bloomingdales teamed up with Young Indies Films to put on a contest.  Some of the films looks like they featured PoC, so I checked them out.
“Recession Special” was interesting eye candy, but not much plot wise.  The [...]

Casting & Race Part 1: The Tension [Essay]

by Guest Contributor (and frequent commenter) J Chang, originally published at Init_MovingPictures

Ever since news of The Last Airbender’s casting broke, there’s been a lot of commotion in the Asian American community about casting and how it seems that Asians are losing to white people in playing Asian characters. Now, there are issues present in the [...]

Race and Film: The Release of Skin

by Guest Contributor Melissa Silverstein, originally published at Women and Hollywood
Interesting story out of England about how director Anthony Fabian is resorting to guerrilla type outreach tactics to raise awareness and get an audience to see his new film Skin starring Oscar nominated actress Sophie Okonedo. The film premiered at Toronto last year and [...]

An Inspired Duet: “The Soloist”

by Guest Contributor Rebecca Linz

I was looking forward to “The Soloist” for two reasons: having played the violin all my life, I love those rare contemporary films that dare to explicitly appreciate classical music, but also because I am a sucker for based-on-a-true-story films.
The dynamic between the two protagonists (Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers, a [...]

District 9 is racist [Alternate Perspective]

By Guest Contributor Nicole Stamp, originally published at [pageslap]

Saw District 9 tonight, the alien movie by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson. I thought it was appallingly racist; here’s why. (Spoilers ahead.)
Basically, 20 years ago, a million crustacean-like space aliens arrived in Johannesberg. They’re forced to live in a horrible slum called District 9, [...]

b-activists: Filmmaker shows what it’s like to be black in Israel

by Guest Contributor Akshay, originally published at b-listed

Shmuel Beru arrived in Israel at age 8 with the first wave of Ethiopian immigrants in 1984. Classmates, who’d never seen a black person before, rubbed his skin to see if the color would come off. Growing up, they called him the “chocolate boy” and worse.
Today the actor-writer [...]

Shrimpin’ Ain’t Easy: A Look At District 9

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García
Also posted at Arturo Vs. The World

The much ballyhooed District 9 succeeds at one thing – it leaves you with questions. The problem is, not all of them are of the good kind.
The film’s conceit – sticking a million-plus misplaced extraterrestrials in the middle of Johannesburg – is promising. But [...]

Beats Of Fury: Hop-Fu and the NYC/Kung-Fu Connection

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García
The scene from The Prodigal Son starts out typically for kung-fu movies of its’ era: an argument over who has the best fighting skills quickly escalates into demands of empirical evidence. As the strains of Get Ur Freak On start to play, the combatants … wait, say what?
Welcome to Hop-Fu, [...]

The Pop Culture Jump-Off: Notes from the 2009 Comic-Con

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García, originally published at Arturo vs. The World

You can trace the story of this year’s Comic-Con with a line. Not a straight line, necessarily, but one that wound all over the building at various points all day all four days. If you were at Con, it’s almost a given [...]

Ninja Assassin Trailer

By Guest Contributor Angry Asian Man, originally published at Angry Asian Man

Movie Trailers – Movies Blog
MTV just posted the online trailer premiere for Ninja Assassin, starring Korean pop superstar Rain: ‘Ninja Assassin’ Starring Rain – Watch The Trailer Here!. He plays Raizo, a kidnapped child who is raised to be a professional killer but ends [...]

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

by Guest Contributor Jehanzeb Dar, originally published at Muslim Reverie

If you’re having trouble trying to figure out what’s wrong with this newly revealed poster for Disney’s upcoming film, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” it may help if I pointed out that the title character is played by Jake Gyllenhaal. In other words, the [...]

The Racialicious Pre Comic-Con Notebook

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García
To horribly mangle The Beatles’ words, picture yourself in this hallway, on a hot July day – surrounded by more than 150,000 male and female geeks in all assortment of accoutrements. Welcome to my weekend in the world’s biggest Jiffy-Pop. If you were only able to score tix for one [...]

Homo Harlem Film Retrospective

By Guest Contributor Monica, originally published at TransGriot
Racialicious Note: This post from TransGriot is from mid-June, so this festival has passed. But we thought this great list of African American LGBTQ films was worth posting anyway.
TransGriot Note: Received this interesting e-mail from the Maysles Institute in NYC about a TBLG film retrospective slated to kick [...]

“I Shut Off My Pen Light For This?!?”: Afterbirth of a Nation

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid and Guest Contributor Fiqah
Fiqah:All right, full disclosure. I loathe Birth of a Nation. L-O-A-T-H-E, my friends. In my short time on this planet, I have been forced to endure two (!) viewings of the flick–twice the Recommended Lifetime Limit for Black people. The last time I watched this film [...]