A few things that happen in the film: a violation of sexual boundaries involving an electric toothbrush, wanton keying of limousines, smelly situations at customs, a French nudist captivates a bored American doctor, the children decide they want to be a dead princess and a dead bunny for Halloween, stoned shenanigans in the co-op elevator, and Marion sells her soul, which results in a minor brawl.

And did I mention a cardboard cutout of Barack Obama is a major character?

Delpy, who wrote and directed the film, makes the most out of the short screentime cramming in as much commentary on family life and the art world as she possibly can. A follow-up to 2 Days in Paris, Delpy balances the pace of her city subjects with the quiet calamity of modern life. The film spins so fast that in the middle of the madness, it takes more than half of the movie before I realize 2 Days in New York has managed to pull off an amazing depiction on an interracial relationship. Race is not the most important thing between Marion and Mingus, and it certainly isn’t their primary conflict throughout the film. Instead, where race intersects with their lives is subtle.

If race is blatantly brought up as part of the plot, it is often played for cringe-inducing laughs. Manu, Marion’s former flame who is currently dating her sister Rose, is a one-stop shop for racial ignorance posing as innocence. He tries to curry favor with Mingus’ sister Elizabeth (Malinda Williams) by saying she looks “just like Beyonce, only sexier.” Chagrined at finding out that Mingus doesn’t smoke weed, he off-handley remarks that Marion “found the only black guy in New York that doesn’t smoke.” And when Mingus’ friend from the Obama Administration comes to town, Mingus is mortified when Manu starts randomly calling him “Kumar.” (This friend was not played by Kal Penn.) Luckily, after a day or so, Manu is deported for lighting up in front of a police station.

2 Days in New York is a fun romp, with a strange, but satisfying ending that proves that love (mostly) conquers all.

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty defies categorization, in all the best ways possible.

The first thing to know is that the film isn’t a linear story. It’s a complex and complicated exploration of modern love, an intriguing dance between two characters circling the possibility of a relationship, born out of mutual infatuation. Avant-guarde storytelling in the key of noir, Oversimplification blends animation, live action, and narration to tell the tale of Terence falling in love with Namik. The characters are real people, based on their own lives. Nance earned his spot in the New Frontier section of Sundance – in addition to the innovative, movie-within-a-movie style of storytelling, animation also plays a key role. Exploring his inner emotions through stop-motion figure dolls and beautifully rendered scenes, Nance essentially uses this film as therapy, working out the complicated tangle of his messy romantic life.

Refreshingly, black women are Nance’s muses. Often in cinematic depictions of black love, the relationship is construed as adversarial. Here, as Nance documents the many loves that fit his archetype of “brown, maternal, well read, well traveled,” black women take center stage, his love for each of them palpable through the screen.

But is what he feels for them really love? Nance believes so, and spends most of the film trying to articulate what he loves about Namik, and how his past relationship history lead him to this point of nearly breathless anticipation. The film is ripe with themes for exploration but I will have to leave most of those paths untouched. Nance has created a work so complex, it is almost like recorded performance art. Thus, I agree with Tambay – it needs to be experienced. Hopefully, it finds a distributor because it deserves to be seen and experienced by as many people as possible. Nance’s story is both familiar and strange, and tends to provoke a lot of self-reflection in the audience. Who are we, when we are in love? I’m still mulling over my own answer.

• Young kid from the hood trying to make good? Check.
• Prerequisite positive rap song that feels like it was pulled from Ghostwriter? Check.
• Street pressures that are easily overcome? Check.
• Mandatory plot for women, involving sexing up your image to get signed to the majors? Check.

But hey, I had just gone through three really depressing movies about the fall out of the drug war. I needed something to lift my spirits, and I will shamelessly admit that I enjoyed Brown Sugar. On the real, Filly Brown could have been a Lifetime produced version of the Somaya Reece story, and I still would have watched it!

Luckily, I was wrong.

Okay, on second thought, I wasn’t that wrong. Two and a half of the four I listed above were in the movie. But the team behind Filly Brown managed to add enough new elements to make the standard tropes feel fresh.

Maria Jose “Majo” Tonorio (Gina Rodriguez) is about her business. We meet her in the an LA studio, hungry and ready to get on the mic. Her moniker is “Filly Brown” and her onstage persona is aggressive. Her clothes are made for maximum comfort and street style, and she wasn’t taking any kind of mess. She meets a clownish (yet popular) rapper before one of her sets, and when he grabs her ass, she punches him in the face. (This film is not for pacifists–Majo is quick with her hands, and there is a lot of violence.) Raw and ready, she catches the attention of DJ Santa (Braxton Millz) who unites with her to create a new kind of sound. He believes in her talent, but Majo is under a lot of pressure. Not only is she helping to raise her boy-crazy younger sister and looking after her overworked father, her mother is in jail on drug charges. After being absent for a few years, her mother Maria (Jenn Rivera) reaches out to pressure Majo to finding the money to retry the case.

Her father and uncle will not help her with the money, wary of Maria’s past history, so Majo takes matters into her own hands, leaving the comfort of her close-knit circle and doing whatever it takes to get to the top.

The film flows in two directions–the first, more predictable track is Majo’s journey through hip-hop stardom. The second plot, however, is a bit more compelling. Majo is actually a generation removed from the streets–her father Jose (Lou Diamond Phillips) and her uncle used to live fast and hard, but gave up that life as they grew older. Now as a adults, they’ve struggled to carve out a legal existence. Her father owns a landscaping company with two of his friends from the streets, but they risk losing work when his largest contract believes that the burly, tattooed workers present an undesirable image to her clients. In addition to financial pressures, Jose doesn’t want to tell Majo the extent of her mother’s drug abuse, leading the family lawyer (Edward James Olmos) to threaten to reveal all the family secrets.

The scenes between Majo and her mother at the prison are beautifully acted and heartbreaking–as Majo begins to piece together the web of lies her mother told to further her habit in prison, she becomes angry and resentful. However, her final freestyle to her mother trapped behind the prison glass wrung tears from most of the audience.

Overall, Filly Brown was a hip hop movie with tons of heart and style. It passes the Bechdel test with flying colors, and while it may feel a bit predictable in some parts, Majo is a character worth cheering for.

Writing a good divorce comedy is tougher.

So the fact that Rashida Jones nailed both her performance and her part of the screenplay entire movie is something very special.

Celeste and Jesse Forever follows a long-term couple in the midst of a breakup. Having been best friends for the past twenty years, Celeste (Rashida Jones) and Jesse (Andy Samberg) find themselves divorcing–in spite of their continued chemistry. Celeste, a trends analyst and pop-culture commentator, is the epitome of a responsible business woman. Jesse is an unemployed artist, who spends more time scheming on surfing than actively planning out his life. They bond through some strange shared loves (like masturbating lip glosses, baby corn, and other things that look like tiny penises) but Celeste initiates the divorce since Jesse has failed to grow up.

However, as the proceedings continue, and they actually start experiencing life outside of their bond, both Celeste and Jesse begin to question their initial perceptions of their marriage. The conversations between Jesse and Celeste flow easily, in that goofy style of intimate speech that’s really hard to capture on film. The film shines when it uses Celeste’s job as an endless source of pop culture commentary, from her book Shitgeist to working with manufactured pop princess Riley Banks. There’s even a cameo from internet darling Sarah Haskins. The film is smart and funny – unfortunately, like most comedies with a relationship at the core, it fails the Bechdel Test.

The Hollywood Reporter interviewed Jones about the writing process:

THR: How much is the film autobiographical for the two of you?

Jones: It’s definitely a pastiche for both of us. We talk all the time about relationships and love and what it means and how it changes — what it means to grow up and how that affects the way you love people. We’re kind of obsessed with it! The film is for sure emblematic of a couple relationships I’ve had; some of them romantic and some of them friendships. It definitely reflects my relationship with Will and other guy friends I’ve had from the time I was 15. Definitely a mashup all around.

THR: Relationships that don’t work out offer up a lot of great material to work with as a writer, don’t they?

Jones: Definitely! There’s no better way to process pain than to write. I’ve not had that experience with acting. I mean, you can momentarily get these glimpses of real pain, but it’s nice to really, really process it and get into it and figure out why it hurts so bad; be really honest about it without having it be you talking to the person you want to talk to.

Honesty is a hallmark of the film–while lots of scenes (and Elijah Wood’s entire character) are pushed over the top for comedic effect, the characters get emotionally naked as the divorce proceedings continue. Samberg does a wonderful job in exploring the vulnerability involved with divorce, but Jones manages to capture the essence of a woman without forcing her into stereotype. Celeste isn’t a bitchy, perpetually single career woman–she has her moments, but they don’t define her. The movie never undermines her character to teach her a lesson, and it doesn’t rely on the Hollywood idea of a happy ending to drive the plot home. It isn’t a coming-of-age film–it’s more about surviving adulthood.

From a Racialicious standpoint, I went into the film with no racial expectations. From the trailer, Jones’ character Celeste is in a majority white world, and that’s basically what you get. However, there are racial references that were puzzling. Celeste attends a Halloween party with a white hefty bag secured around her midsection. When people ask, she explains she’s going as “white trash.” But later, after her date plays something like “Zuleisha” in scrabble, she crows “That’s not a word, that’s like my hootchie cousin’s name!” Make of that what you will, readers.

Ultimately, the movie is enjoyable. It isn’t quite first-date fodder due to the subject explored, but would be fun in most other scenarios. And if you want to see it, you’re in luck–the movie is being distributed by Sony, and will hit theaters in summer 2012.

Latoya will have more Sundance Film Festival coverage over the course of the week, but we’d be remiss in not extending congratulations to Ava DuVernay on winning the festival’s Best Director award this past Saturday for her second feature, Middle of Nowhere.

DuVernay made a well-received debut last year with I Will Follow, which she wrote and directed.

Nowhere, which DuVernay also wrote and directed, stars Emayatzy Corinealdias (Akira’s Hip-Hop Shop) a woman trying to keep herself up in the wake of her husband (Omari Hardwick) going to jail, with the emphasis on her own struggles in the outside world, rather than her husband’s jail time.

“It touches the prison wife’s tale,” DuVernay told It’sOnTheGrid’s Jason Scoggins “But really it’s a story about a woman who’s living within a relationship that’s imbalanced, which is something that a lot of women – and a lot of people – know a lot about.”

Like her last film, Nowhere was picked up for distribution by Participant Media and AFFRM (African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement), which DuVernay founded to help African-American independent films get increased limited engagements, so her latest effort should be hitting some more film festivals later this year.

We’ve posted DuVernay’s chat with Scoggins, in which she talks about making Nowhere without telling her clients at her other job (she worked as a publicist before becoming a filmmaker), among other subjects, under the cut.

Co-directed by Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat and Israeli activist Guy Davidi, the images in 5 Broken Cameras are beautiful, haunting, and bring about dozens of other questions about the history of the occupation and the tactics around love and resistance. Thanks to their fabulous publicist Eseel, I got to interview Guy and Emad and ask them about their lives, their work, and what they think the future holds for Israel and Palestine.

Emad: It has been a sometimes good experience, a sometimes bad experience. In 2005, when I started to resist with my village, I decided to film to protect myself and to protect the other protests and to show the footage for other people, and to use the footage sometime to prove what is going on. Over the last seven years, [I documented] how what happened in the village affected me, my family, my children, and my friends, week by week. After many years of documenting, I thought that there was a huge story that I have to tell to other people. We decided to construct a documentary from my personal life and personal story. [5 Broken Cameras] is not a political film or just a film about conflict – it’s a film about life, and how the people can survive and how people live, and how kids grow up. For my kids, everyone loves those boys, and I wanted to make for them a good life, I wanted to take care of them, and protect them. I can’t tie them in the house every day, keep them 24 hours in one room. This is our life, like this. I tried to build for them a good life and a good situation. And I wanted to put my life and my experience in the village in one documentary.

Maybe [other people, in other parts of the world] see footage on the news, but they don’t know the reality and they don’t know the life of these people. I hope that this film does make some change, so we can change the life for everyone – in Palestine and Israel.

Guy: I came to Bil’in in early 2005, one of the first Israeli peace activists that came. I was already interested in what was happening in this movement, I wanted be a part of it. My first main motivation is a bit selfish, it wasn’t just to help the movement – it was also for me. Israel is like a ghetto – it is closed, like a bubble, not sensitive to the others. You’re not allowed to go here, not allowed to go there – so I wanted to break that. I wanted to live in a free way. If we live in a free way, we have to confront the shadows – and what happens in the shadow is in Palestine and the settlements.

So I met Emad. He was a very known character from the start, because he was the only cameraman who was basically staying in the village all the time. He became what we say in the film, “the village’s eye.” So we met many times while filming. We didn’t work together until 2009, when Emad approached me to make the film, so we decided to make it as a personal narrative. When I thought in the beginning to make a film on Bil’in, there were many that were similar. We had to have a new and refreshing take and I was happy to find out in the material that we could tell the story in this very intimate and personal way. You could see in the world both the context of the movement and the occupation, and you can have a really intimate family moments.

Guy: First we have to know that there are many kinds of settlements and many kinds of settlers. It is the Israeli machine that is making it move. These are not necessarily ideological settlers going because they want to conquer the land or wipe out Palestinians. They just want to improve their lives. The government is subsidizing the apartments in the West Bank, and using [the people's] financial circumstances to move an agenda forward. Some settlers don’t know what is going on – the way Israel is designed, you can travel through parts and not really know where you are. Some settlers do know what’s going on and don’t care. And then you have a very small minority, a violent minority, the fundamentalist Jews that are creating terror in Palestine. They are small, but noisy and strong. If Israel would like to change its ways, they will have to find a way to root out the fundamentalists, to pull the weeds.

Emad: I think that from the beginning in ’67, the settlements were the Israeli government’s plan to place them on Palestinian territory to confiscate land and bring people from outside to [stabilize] the settlement. If the government wanted to remove it, they could. But I don’t know what’s their problem. The settlers have power – the government helps them, the developers help them, and sometimes they do bad things to their Palestinian neighbors. They are not connected to this land or this area. When you are connected to something you love it, you want to protect it – you wouldn’t cut down the olive trees if you loved the land. Sometimes, settlers come because of the economy, but sometimes it is ideology.

Emad: I think that in our lives are about experiences. Sometimes I lived a quiet life and sometimes I lived in a bad situation. We have to continue our lives, like normal, even if we live under the occupation and bad conditions sometimes. As a father, I have to give my children some hope for the future – we have to live our life in the bad and the good. When we want to go to the sea, we go to the sea, when we have to resist, we have to resist. I wanted to share and show this experience to people who aren’t living this life. So maybe we can touch and reach their minds and their hearts, and create a good life for everyone.

Guy:I don’t want this to sound cold or unfeeling, but I think that suffering has always been with us. It was in the past and it will be in the future. Sometimes you are the victim, some times you are the oppressor. Most of the time you are both in some ways – I may be an oppressor by paying my taxes to Israeli government, and I’m a victim of these systems at the same time. And every one of us is like that. Of course it is important for us to try to change our reality out of responsibility – not blame or pity. What is important is how we carry suffering, and how we deal with it in life. Maybe [Emad] will never see peace and justice and freedom in his life. Maybe his sons will see it, maybe not. But what gives us a kind of liberty and freedom is what we do in our lives. That can bring joy and a sense of power. That’s the challenge we all face in life. I cannot say what we do will or won’t change reality – I can be pessimistic or optimistic, but in the end what’s really important is what everyone is doing in this situation. If everyone will focus on that, change will come faster.

Emad: I think there is something wrong in the system, not just where I live. There are many places in the world where something wrong has happened. You find people who live in peace and people who suffer all over the world. My message for the world and the people who have power, is to just to feel with people who have nothing – give them feeling, create something good for them, try to say something in their life.

Emad halts the interview for a moment to pray.

Guy: That’s complicated. It was a big debate in the village, and definitely with the Israeli peace activists, whether to use the Israeli system at all. Israel thinks it is a democratic country and they have a good law that balances between civil rights and justice and security needs. This is how they see themselves. But on the ground, we see that this system is so far from just plain common sense – we don’t need international courts to know that what is going on is completely unjust. We are not seeing a system that works with justice. It corresponds with political needs. So the activists and the villages are using that system to try to get some [leverage.] But no one is under the illusion that this is justice. Getting back the land isn’t a good result – we may make things better for some people, but this is not a victory, this is not a change. The aim of this movement is some kind of hint for out strength, the idea that we can do much more.

Emad: I think that with the Israeli court, no one in the village believed they would remove the court and the fence from Bil’in land. But after the demonstration and the march, the Army kept saying “why don’t you go to the courts?” The Army told us all the time they have to come here and protect the fence and the security – it is not their decision, they need to change things in court. The Army wanted us to go to court – they wanted to make a political decision, not just to give the people feeling that the protest led to the removal of the wall, they wanted to make it more beautiful – “the Israeli court chose to remove the wall.” At the same time, they use this decision to take another illegal decision for the settlement. That settlement was illegal – so they wanted to make the decision both remove the wall and legalized the settlement.

Guy: So the court is a political instrument. If you have time, you can see The Law in These Parts, about military law and how the law works in occupied territory, with a focus on Israel.

Emad: By the way, the decision to build wall was the decision by the Israeli court. They can’t just make a government decision, the court has to sign off. It’s a huge subject, we could talk about it all day.

Guy: I don’t need to speak about the future of Israel because it is already very bad. The future we have now was put into motion 10 years ago – and what we have now is horrible. We are living in an oppressive, violent society. Our rights are being taken day by day, there are new laws and new legislation targeting human rights organizations and freedom of speech. What is happening right now is worse than before. And what’s stupid about it is that Israel is in one of the best positions to create a wonderful new thing. With Palestine, all the conditions are there. In 10 years, we won’t talk about suicide bombers, because there is a period now where we can change that. But these are opportunities we don’t use and we are building the conditions for more violence. It’s hard to be Israeli in these times, I think because many people that I know, even people who are not politically engaged or didn’t care much for Palestinian issues, they feel that there is something going that is destructive in our society. And because we are so indifferent and numb in an emotional position as Israelis, we are paying for that and we are going to keep paying for that. That’s why I can be optimistic – we’re really at a bottom in our culture.

I cannot estimate how unknown forces and undercurrents will create change. We have a very strong social movement in Israel, last summer, a lot like the Arab Spring. But we don’t know how that will develop.

We’re always speaking about peace and about justice. If we’re speaking about justice we’re already good. In order to have peace, Palestinians have to live with a sense of justice, which is hard, because some things are unfixable. But for Israelis we don’t just need to confront how to create justice in theory, they have to want to heal themselves as a society. I think Israelis and Jews took a moment in their lives to wallow in their past and wallow in fears that are both justified and unjustified. We have to find a way to heal from our fears and from our past. We have to find a way to remove these destructive forces from the inside. That’s why I find the film & Emad an inspiration – he’s a victim of the occupation, but he still makes a beautiful thing out of it. Israelis, with our past and with our history, we couldn’t create a beautiful thing. And that’s very sad.

Emad: The Palestinian people decided to struggle against the occupation to get freedom – so it’s a long time for the Palestinian people and a long time for resistance – 60 years of resistance and struggle against the occupation. The people, they still have hope and think this is the only way they can get freedom – it is through resistance. It is about the future for their boys. I think for everyone who wants to create a new future for his boys, we believe and we have hope that we can do this. The only thing I can say for sure about the Palestinian is future is that no one knows what will happen. We always have hope for the situation and good luck, so we make things like films, so maybe we can affect or do something good for the future. And all of this is part of the resistance. It’s not just to make films, or play games – it’s not easy to make something like in a risky situation. This is what we are doing to create and make a good life in the future, we can do this and succeed. But nobody knows when and nobody knows what is coming up, good or bad. But I think that the Israeli government, they react like this because they didn’t care about creating good situations and a good life or future for Israeli residents. I think they have fear, they think something big will happen, so all they want to do is buy more time. This is not the right way to create a good life for the people. They don’t want to give Palestinians rights or a state, because they think it is an issue of security – if we give them power, in the future they will attack us. So they are always scared.

Guy: These are hard questions. I can say what I wish for Palestine, while thinking that the occupation will stay, and what wishes I have for Palestinians. Unfortunately, I don’t see the occupation retreating. I don’t have any evidence of reversing that process being a possibility – it would be wishful thinking to say otherwise. So what I wish for Palestinians in that situation is to provide inspirational ways to handle this situation, to find ways to get out of their despair and of their misery and their sense of dependence, and their sense of helplessness, and that feeling of helplessness, because I don’t think they are helpless and they don;t have to be victims. The Israelis and the Israeli government are putting them in the role of victims, but they don’t have to play that role in life. When I look at Emad and Bil’in, they chose not to be victims. And to do that in their lives, knowing there may not be change.

I wish that more people would find faith to do that.

“By healing, you resist oppression. – Emad Burnat”

5 Broken Cameras is a story of living in the shadow of oppression, a moving portrait of vibrant resistance through the unapologetic embrace of life itself. Set in the small Palestinian village of Bil’in, the story and narrative belongs to Emad Burnat, who became the eye of the village and ultimately chronicled over five years of activism. The people of Bil’in found their lands being encroached on by the building of a new settlement, and the wall to protect that settlement. They protest peacefully, marching up to the wall each Friday and thinking of new actions and demonstrations to stop the advancement of the settlement.

During this time, Emad also had a son, Gibreel, which brought his total brood to four. Emad mentions that each of the boys knows a slightly different world. The eldest was born during the Olso Accords which meant that he grew up with more freedom and mobility. Gibreel, on the other hand, mixes his first words of “mommy” and “daddy” with “army,” “cartridge” and “run! run!” If it weren’t for the ever present undercurrent of violence, Emad’s life would almost be seen as idyllic: a loving family; a large, involved village; numerous dances and celebrations are cornerstones of the life they create. Their marches are also full of hope and some humor. At one point, tired of the late night raids on the village, a group of children march up to the wall, chanting “We want to sleep! We want to sleep!” The situation in Bil’in gained international attention, and groups of Israeli, German, and other activists come at various points to show their support and solidarity. However, violence is never far enough away, and the promise of more hangs over Bil’in like a cloud.

The documentary is brutal to watch–at various points in the film, I wished it would end, not because I was bored, but because I wanted to stop watching the endless cycle of violence. Outside of the usual tear-gassing and violent treatment of the protestors, other army actions loomed just as large. At one point in the film, the peace activists discover that Israeli special forces have disguised themselves as Palestinians and began creating chaos at a demonstration before hauling people away to be arrested by their comrades at the top of the hill. Another scene shows one of the most outspoken activists, Daba, being isolated by a group of police officers who then calmly and deliberately shoot him in the leg.

Still, through it all, Emad continues filming, even as his cameras are damaged by human hands, stun grenades, and bullets. He questions his role as an impartial journalist the day his brother is arrested, watching his mother and father throw themselves in front of the Army van to try to prevent him from being taken. His work makes him a target, and he is aware of that. But the most devastating part of the document was watching the impact of the events and the violence on Emad’s children.

“Dreaming can be dangerous,” notes Emad. “The only protection I can offer him is letting him see everything.”

(Note: I interviewed Guy & Emad – that interview will be posted later today.)

“Though we tremble before uncertain futures/ may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength/ may we dance in the face of our fears.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Mosquita y Mari is a slow paced exploration of being a teenager peering over the brink of adulthood. Set in a Mexican-American neighborhood in Los Angeles, Mosquita y Mari follows the lives of two very different Chicana teenagers. Yolanda (Fenessa Pineda) is a studious high-achiever, a dutiful daughter from a loving home. Mari (Venecia Troncoso) is rebellious and volatile, with a chip on her shoulder that crowds out most of the world. Circumstances toss them together again and again, and they embark on a deep and intense friendship.

In her press kit, writer/director Aurora Guerrero writes:

The inspiration behind my debut feature-film, Mosquita y Mari, was my own adolescence. Initially, when I decided I wanted to write a feature-length script I kept coming back to a series of complex, same-sex friendships I had while growing up. When looking back, long before I identified as queer, I realized my first love was one of my best friends. It was the type of friendship that was really tender and sweet but also sexually charged. Despite the fact that we had the makings of a beautiful teen romance we never crossed that line. The beginnings of Mosquita y Mari was reflecting back on that time and asking myself the questions, why didn’t we cross that line and what kept us in “our place”? I didn’t grow up in a household where my parents forewarned me that if I turned out to be gay they would disown me. They didn’t wave the Bible in my face saying it was wrong. Instead the message was subtle. It was hidden in the silences around sex and desire; it was implied in society’s expectations, you know, like you only experience those feelings of love and desire with the opposite sex. I think all of us are subject to society’s rules so I think many people can relate to this story of censored friendship. That was the initial inspiration. [...]

This process of self exploration that I embarked on while writing this script led me to position this budding love story within the immigrant world. The core conflict in the story of Mosquita y Mari isn’t a homophobic parent getting in the way of their experience but rather the pressures that come with surviving as an immigrant or coming from a legacy of self-sacrifice for the sake of family and status in society. In the end, what I ended up writing was a coming of age story where both my protagonists find themselves paving a new path for themselves and their families.

And you know it’s serious when the credits include a thank you to Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.

The movie is in Spanglish, almost as if Guerrero hung this quote on her wall while she was writing:

“Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue – my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Interestingly, much of the scenes in MyM are specifically constructed to rely on a teen’s body language to convey how they are feeling. The film is constructed with care – showing the struggles between the two girls to grow into who they will become. For Yolanda (semi-affectionately termed mosquita by Mari), her relentless quest for good grades was becoming less and less satisfying, yet the world of drinking, getting high, and boys offered by her old friends doesn’t appeal to her. She finds a third way in Mari’s “live in the moment style” and soon finds herself navigating that difficult boundary between a passionate friendship and romantic love.

Mari, on the other hand, already has one foot into the adult world. After her father dies, her mother has problems making ends meet. Mari routinely blows off school to try to raise money for the household. Her mother is caught between wanting Mari to focus on school and to make a better life for herself, but the money Mari provides is too important to go without. Mari, bright but full of rage at her impossible circumstances, finds solace in Yolanda’s simplicity and steadfastness but doesn’t always know how to balance their idyllic relationship with the demands of the real world.

Interweaving themes of family, duty, love, and belonging, MyM succeeds in revealing the inner lives of teenage girls. The most devastating parts of the film revolve around the petty betrayals that anyone who has been through adolescence will remember – the betrayals by others, desperately trying to assert their identities, and the scarring betrayals of the self, knowing you are trying to be someone you are not. While the heavy emphasis on hazy, lingering shots may have some viewers wishing to hit fast forward, Guerrero nails the messy inner lives of teenagers for what they are. And unlike 2005′s Wassup Rockers, MyM places the burden of the story squarely on the teenagers telling the tale. As it should be.

By Arturo R. García

With apologies to fans of Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling, et al., by far the most pleasant surprise of this week’s Academy Awards nominee announcements was seeing Demián Bichir get nominated for Best Actor–alongside “conventional” choices like George Clooney and Brad Pitt–for his role as an undocumented single father in A Better Life. 

As Colorlines noted, Bichir’s nomination was one of several nods for Latinos in this year’s Oscar race: cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, also from Mexico, was nominated for Best Cinematography for Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life; Bérénice Bejo, a native of Argentina, earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her turn in the The Artist; Brazilian Sérgio Mendes was nominated for Best Song for “Real in Rio,” his collaboration with Siedah Garrett, of “Man In The Mirror” fame, from the animated film Rio.

But a look at some relevant figures further illustrates how painfully rare Bichir’s accomplishment is.

2: The number of Mexican-born nominees for Best Actor, with Bichir joining Anthony Quinn, who was nominated on two separate occasions, for Wild Is The Wind (1957) and Zorba The Greek (1964).

2: The number of white actors nominated for this category for playing Latino characters (Marlon Brando, 1952, Viva Zapata! and Spencer Tracy, 1958, The Old Man and the Sea).

47: The number of years between Quinn’s nomination for Zorba and Bichir’s nomination.

61: The number of years since a Latino actor born outside of Mexico and the United States was nominated for Best Actor; José Ferrer (born in Puerto Rico in 1912, before it became a U.S. territory) earned the honor in 1950 for Cyrano De Bergerac.

1: The number of:

• Latino actors (going into this year’s ceremony) to win Best Actor, with Ferrer taking the Oscar home.
• Latino actors born in the U.S. to be nominated for the category (Edward James Olmos, 1988, Stand and Deliver.)
• Latinas in Oscars history to win the Best Actress award (Rita Moreno, 1961, West Side Story.)
• Mexican-born actresses ever nominated in that category (Salma Hayek, 2002, Frida.)

0: The number of Latina actresses born in the U.S. to be nominated for Best Actress.

$1,759,252: Total domestic gross for A Better Life, per Box Office Mojo.

$75,524,658: Total domestic gross (as of Jan. 24) for Moneyball, starring Bichir’s fellow nominee Brad Pitt.

11,000,000: The total number of undocumented workers in the United States, as quoted by Bichir in a statement to US Weekly, as he dedicated his nomination to them.

6,650,000: Estimated number of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the U.S. as of 2009, according to the Department of Homeland Security (PDF).

25-to-1:  Current odds of Bechir winning the Oscar, according to Vegas Insider.

So, thanks to a fast talking friend, I ended up in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival.

I’m warning you now – for actual film coverage and movie reviews, go straight to the pros. Tambay, as always, is holding it down for Shadow and Act, and she’s already got a review up of “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which is the photo illustrating this post.

I’m trying to fit at least 6 movies into the my time here (along with some interviews and some gate crashing), so here’s what I’m eyeing:

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in “the Bathtub,” a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. Wink’s tough love prepares her for the unraveling of the universe; for a time when he’s no longer there to protect her. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack—temperatures rise, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. With the waters rising, the aurochs coming, and Wink’s health fading, Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother.

The Words
Starring: Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper

Rory Jansen, a struggling writer, aspires to be the next great literary voice. When he discovers a lost manuscript in a weathered attaché case, he realizes he possesses something extraordinary that he desperately wishes he had created. Rory decides to pass the work off as his own and finally receives the recognition he desperately craves. However, he soon learns that living with his choice will not be as easy as he thought as he faces a moral dilemma that will make him take a hard look at the man he has become.

Majo” Tonorio, a.k.a. Filly Brown, is a raw, young Los Angeles hip-hop artist who spits from the heart. When a sleazy record producer offers her a crack at rap stardom, Majo faces some daunting choices. With an incarcerated mother, a record contract could be the ticket out for her struggling family. But taking the deal means selling out her talent and the true friends who helped her to the cusp of success.

Woody, an adorable 11-year-old boy awaiting the return of his missing mother, lives with his grandmother and Uncle Vincent, who is fresh off an eight-year prison stint. For Woody, the confident, charismatic Vincent is a titan among men. When Vincent notices that Woody could learn a thing or two about becoming a man, he brings him along as he ventures forth to open his own business. But when legit life fails to support Vincent’s vision, and his old Baltimore crime boss, Mr. Fish, haunts him, the pace of little Woody’s manhood lesson accelerates.

What happens when love takes you places you never thought you would go? When her husband, Derek, is sentenced to eight years in a California prison, Ruby drops out of medical school to maintain her marriage and focus on ensuring Derek’s survival in his violent new environment. Driven by love, loyalty, and hope, Ruby learns to sustain the shame, separation, guilt, and grief that a prison wife must bear. Her new life challenges her to the very core of her identity, and her turbulent path propels her in new, often frightening directions of self-discovery.

Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century— the Great Migration of African Americans escaping Jim Crow; the rise of manufacturing and the middle class; the love affair with automobiles; the flowering of the American dream; and now . . . the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos.

With its vivid, painterly palette and haunting score, DETROPIA sculpts a dreamlike collage of a grand city teetering on the brink of dissolution.

Ai Weiwei is known for many things—great architecture, subversive in-your-face art, and political activism. He has also called for greater transparency on the part of the Chinese state. Director Alison Klayman chronicles the complexities of Ai’s life for three years, beginning with his rise to public prominence via blog and Twitter after he questioned the deaths of more than 5,000 students in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The record continues through his widely publicized arrest in Beijing in April of 2011. As Ai prepares various works of art for major international exhibitions, his activism heats up, and his run-ins with China’s authorities become more and more frequent.

Fourteen-year-old Mo is a lonely, sensitive boy whose hunger for the rant and banter of buddies makes him prone to tread dangerous territories. He idolizes his handsome older brother, Rashid, a charismatic, well-respected member of a local gang, whose drug dealing enables “Rash” to provide for his family. Aching to be seen as a tough guy himself, Mo takes a job that unlocks a fateful turn of events and forces the brothers to confront their inner demons. It turns out that hate is easy. It is love and understanding that take real courage.

Rodriguez was the greatest ’70s U.S. rock icon who never was. His albums were critically well-received, but sales bombed, and he faded away into obscurity among rumors of a gruesome death. However, as fate would have it, a bootleg copy of his record made its way to South Africa, where his music became a phenomenal success. In a country suppressed by apartheid, his antiestablishment message connected with the people.

Marion and Mingus live cozily—perhaps too cozily—with their cat and two young children from previous relationships. However, when Marion’s jolly father (played by director Delpy’s real-life dad), her oversexed sister, and her sister’s outrageous boyfriend unceremoniously descend upon them for a visit, it initiates two unforgettable days that will test Marion and Mingus’s relationship. With their unwitting racism and sexual frankness, the French triumvirate hilariously has no boundaries or filters . . . and no person is left unscathed in its wake.

Celeste and Jesse met in high school and got married young. They laugh at the same jokes and finish each other’s sentences. They are forever linked in their friends’ minds as the perfect couple—she, a high-powered businesswoman and budding novelist; he, a free spirit who keeps things from getting boring. Their only problem is that they have decided to get divorced. Can their perfect relationship withstand this minor setback?

With this auspicious feature film debut, Aurora Guerrero explores the complexities of a budding friendship between two Chicana high schoolers in Los Angeles’s Huntington Park. Yolanda is stellar in her studies and makes her parents proud, while Mari has just moved to town with her undocumented family. On her first day of school, Mari is assigned to be Yolanda’s study partner. After a rocky start, the two find a bond that confuses them at times. Guerrero’s steady direction allows more intimate understanding of the girls’ aspirations and their families’ expectations.

I’m also heading over to the New Frontier Section, which is the interactive exhibits.

I’m checking out:

Hunger in Los Angeles
Question Bridge: Black Males

And other films that look good, but I probably won’t have time to catch:

Finding North - A documentary on hunger, focusing on the working poor
The House I Live In – On the cost of the War on Drugs
The Invisible War – On rape in the armed forces
Slavery By Another Name – On the ways in which slavery “persisted as a practice many decades after its supposed abolition.”
We’re Not Broke – On corporations exploiting loopholes in tax law
1/2 Revolution – video camera testimony from Egypt’s uprising in 2011
5 Broken Cameras – A Palestinian and Israeli co-production exploring the escalation of violence around the settlements
Payback – A cinematic exploration of the themes in Margaret Atwood’s book of essays.
Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap – Ice-T’s documentary on rap music

Also, there’s an alternate festival called Slamdance, which has a Stan Lee doc. How many hours are in the day again?

Update:

It is ticket war out this piece. Apparently, there’s a magic red pass where you can just roll into whatever you want, but I am not cool/prestigious enough to get one. In my hand I have tix for: “Luv”, “Filly Brown,” “5 Broken Cameras,” and “The House I Live In.” I think I can buy a ticket to “Celeste and Jesse.” I’ve got a request in for “Searching for Sugar Man.” And I need to get in line tomorrow to request “2 Days in New York” for Saturday. I’m going to try to catch “Slavery by Another Name” and “Mosquita y Mari” in the screening rooms, though those are first come first serve. Wish me luck, y’all. – LDP

By Guest Contributor Kendra James

[Note: The version of the film I saw was a screener in NYC about two weeks ago, and I'm writing this having not seen the final Jan 20th release. If anything has drastically changed (like –I hope-- the horrid opening credits sequence in bold, unevenly placed red text) I invite notes about that via comments!]

Based on this weekend’s box-office totals, a fair number of you might already have seen Red Tails, but for those who want to proceed without major spoilers, the basics:

• The summary, as provided by IMDB: “A crew of African American pilots in the Tuskegee training program, having faced segregation while kept mostly on the ground during World War II, are called into duty under the guidance of Col. A.J. Bullard,” is fairly accurate.
• There hasn’t been a movie screaming, “GEORGE LUCAS MADE ME!” this loudly since Attack of the Clones. Sometimes, it isn’t a bad thing. (And since Lucas, the film’s executive producer, recently claimed this is as close to Episode VII as we’ll ever get, maybe that’s what he was aiming for.)
• Red Tails features a wonderful young cast of black actors who should be on all our radars. You’ll feel better for having a little Nate Parker in your life– and don’t be ashamed if you have flashbacks to the first time you saw Will Smith in Air Force gear in Independence Day. It’s okay, you’re not alone.

For all the red tape and controversy surrounding its release, Red Tails doesn’t explicitly touch upon race as much as it could. Yes, there are the requisite scenes where older, white members of the army tell Bullard (Terrance Howard) that negro pilots can’t ever be expected to fly proper cover for his white bomber pilots; a scene where one of the Tuskegee crew, Joe “Lightning” (David Oyelowo) Little, gets into a fight with white airmen inside their Whites Only soldiers’ bar; and be sure to listen for any and all references of “Black Jesus.” Race is certainly mentioned, and important part of the film. But given the time period, are there other racial issues they could have given a platform? And should the film be chastised for silencing the experience of all African-Americans of the era – specifically women?

More detailed SPOILERS are under the cut.

There’s a scene where Bullard is giving another one of his airmen, Easy (Parker) a lecture on self-pity and how easy could have it in life, after a mission gone wrong. Major Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr.) stands behind him as the lecture continues, and when all three are framed together in the shot you begin to wonder whether maybe, just maybe, the movie is about to touch on not only black/White racism, but the dynamics of colorism within the black community and the advantages/disadvantages of having lighter skin. The shot frames it perfectly. You have two light skinned men lecturing a dark skinned man about the advantages he has and should take in life, yet it’s never mentioned that perhaps Stance and Bullard’s perceptions on life have been shaped by the lighter color of their skin.

The scene isn’t totally contrived – the actual commanding officer of the Tuskegee Airmen, Benjamin O. Davis, was similar in complexion to both Gooding and Howard, who seem to play dual stand-ins for him. But it represents a missed opportunity to touch on colorism, a topic that isn’t addressed enough in a public forum (until a magazine lightens Beyonce’s image, or Brian Stokes Mitchell is cast as -Gasp! – a black man on Glee, that is …). It wouldn’t have been expected for Easy to backtalk his commanding officers, but it would have been nice to see him bring it up later, perhaps with one of the other pilots. It’s not a nuance one might expect Lucas to grasp (does he even know the definition of the word?), but one would think the film’s co-writers, Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder and novelist/ media critic John Ridley, might have. Roger Ebert makes another suggestion in his review of the film, noting, “[Red Tails] could have done more than that, by more firmly establishing the atmosphere of the Jim Crow South that surrounded most of the airmen in their childhoods.” Had this background been established, perhaps the door would have been open for a discussion on what it meant to be a light-skinned African-American in 1944.

The movie’s one romantic subplot, an interracial relationship between Lightning and a white Italian, Sofia (Portuguese-American Daniela Ruah), also blows a chance to do something different. It would have been nice to see a young Black actress snag a role in this movie. A large group of men get a great platform here, why not a woman? (Easy scenario: one of the pilots is injured and is nursed back to health by a beautiful woman at an army hospital and they fall in love.) But, fine, the writers have other ideas, and as Lucas said during his Daily Show appearance, he was already having a hard enough time selling this film staring a bunch of Black actors, so he’s hesitant to also include a Black love story as well. So they decide that Lightning will woo Sofia, yet say nothing about the implications or realities (negative or positive) of an interracial relationship in this time. It shouldn’t not be in the film, and similarly shouldn’t be disregarded as a thing that would simply never happen in the time period . However, omitting any mention of it at all seems disingenuous for a film that is about the African-American experience.

Clutch Magazine recently asked if black women should boycott the film because of the lack of a black female love interest, in response to this post from What About Our Daughters? The African-American woman’s experience is often whitewashed and written out television and films. More often than not we’re sidelined to best friends and supportive sidekicks who don’t have backgrounds of our own that aren’t directly connected to the white star’s. Cinematically, we’ve been fairly silenced, and that makes the choice to eliminate the female voice from a movie centering around an African-American struggle to be all the more troubling. Some would say in its defense that this is a “war movie” and not a “chick flick,” and as such it didn’t need another love story (or any love story) in the script. Of course when this is said they’re conveniently forgetting films like Pearl Harbor, war films with predominantly white casts where a romantic subplot is common place and even expected.

The film could have benefited from a tighter script, and perhaps that would have involved cutting any and all romance from the plot. However, that they chose an interracial romance – no matter how poorly examined it is – is no reason to boycott the film. Red Tails is still a movie starring our own. While Howard and Gooding Jr. are already established in Hollywood, they’re still not offered the array of roles that their contemporaries are (let’s consider the widely diverging career paths of Gooding and fellow Jerry Maguire star Tom Cruise, shall we?). And Parker, Tristan Wilds, Elijah Kelly, Michael B. Jordan, and Marcus T. Paulk aren’t going to be given the same big-screen exposure as the heartthrob white actors their own ages. Personally, I left the theatre wondering when I’ll get to see Parker, Jordan, and Anthony Mackie (of The Adjustment Bureau and Man On A Ledge) all starring in a movie where they just get to be dapper as hell – you know, the same thing actors like Brad Pitt and George Clooney get to do in every other movie they’re in (that’s the point of the Ocean’s Eleven series, right?).

Having once worked in talent management, allow me to speak from professional experience: When you represent a black actor who isn’t a Denzel Washington or a Will Smith, you spend a lot of time scouring casting breakdowns looking for roles in television and film that fit. Normally an age and body type description is given and if a race isn’t specified it reads “Open Ethnicity.” But here’s the thing: a lot of times that means “anything but Black,” which you find out quickly when you call the casting office before submitting your client and ask if the role could go African-American. There’s almost always a pause and hesitation before the assistant on the other end of the line finally says, “… not exactly what we’re looking for, but you can submit anyway.” The reality is that dapper, good looking black folks are not something Hollywood assumes the American public wants, and if we boycott the one mainstream film out this year with an almost entirely black cast we’re doing a disservice and making it harder for any black actor/ress to find starring work.

When it comes down to it, Red Tails is a film with a story that deserved to be told back in1988 when Lucas first had the idea (though time only helped when it came to the superb special effects). It needed some editing, maybe a third or forth pass at the script, and a little polish, but it was an enjoyable film no better or worse than the equivalent white staring action movies that come out during the industry’s dead winter months. The only difference between this and other winter action films like Gina Carano’s Haywire or Denzel’s Safehouse is a predominantly black cast and 20 years of being kicked around Hollywood because no one wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole. And that’s the rub, isn’t it?

The film has its problems when it comes to race, and Lucas has put a potentially hurtful spin on its press while doing his best to promote it (talking more about the negatives of how difficult it was to make the film, rather than the things his already loyal fans would want to hear: He’s not making any more Star Wars films and this is the closest thing they’re going to get). It’s also in an interesting place in the general release market, in that it’s a film with an all-black cast that’s not a Tyler Perry film (or the like). It doesn’t get that built in Perry/Black film audience because it’s not your “typical” black movie, but it also doesn’t necessarily get the white male audience that makes up the majority of a war movie box office. Red Tails is something of a novelty in the mainstream box office, but the more of us who go out to support it, the less of a novelty all black casts become. That’s why I say this: Read this review and any others you want, but definitely go out and see the film.

By Arturo R. García

I won’t lie – I was skeptical when I first heard George Lucas was appearing on The Daily Show to promote his new Tuskegee Airmen story Red Tails. On the surface, it represented a missed opportunity: the film centers around four black characters, with a cast that includes Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ne-Yo – why weren’t any of them getting some face-time with Jon Stewart?

Lucas’ appearance ended up being a pleasant surprise. But, both he and Stewart left one important question hanging.

In the interview, Lucas reiterated some arguments he made to USA Today last week: Tails, it took 23 years for the film to reach the big screen, was an effort he financed himself – and one he said studios refused to get behind.

“I figured I could get the prints and ads paid for by the studios,” Lucas said, “and that they would release it and I showed it to all of them and they said, ‘No, we don’t know how to market a movie like this. It’s not green enough.’ They only release green movies.”

By “green,” of course, he means money-makers – and in Hollywood parlance, that really means … well, you know. Not Black.

Stewart, unfortunately, dances around the issue. He asks Lucas, “Is it because of the pedigree of it?” and talks about Lucas discussing it in terms of an “economic and political reality” without noting any of the factors that go into forming that reality. While Stewart would be quick to point out that he’s a comedian first and a “newsman” far down the list, it’s a moment that might have benefited from Stephen Colbert’s willingness to push the envelope. (Though Lucas sneaks in a nasty little dig: “It’s not Glory, where you have a lot of white officers run these guys into cannon fodder.”)

To his credit, Lucas admitted to USA Today that his efforts could have an adverse affect on black filmmakers:

“I realize that by accident I’ve now put the black film community at risk (with Red Tails, whose $58 million budget far exceeds typical all-black productions). I’m saying, if this doesn’t work, there’s a good chance you’ll stay where you are for quite a while. It’ll be harder for you guys to break out of that (lower-budget) mold. But if I can break through with this movie, then hopefully there will be someone else out there saying let’s make a prequel and sequel, and soon you have more Tyler Perrys out there.”

But Lucas also seems to be challenging – or at the very least, counting on – his well-established fanbase in selling the movie. Instead of distancing Tails from his defining work, Lucas says, “It’s exactly like Star Wars,” in terms of the size of the story he ultimately wants to tell, and later says, “This is as close as you’ll ever get to Episode VII.” Those efforts have carried over into social media; the official Star Wars Twitter account was posting images from the film’s premiere. And that now becomes the key question: will the Lucas fanbase rally around to support him? Or is it more willing to watch aerial dogfights when they’re based on a galaxy far, far away, rather than on a step forward in U.S. military history?

By Guest Contributor Blanca E. Vega, cross-posted from Race-Work Race-Love

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.” — Frederick Douglass

Writer’s block. This is how I woke up this morning. Confronted with the realities of beginning a dissertation and working full time as a college administrator, I came up with two words:

Writer’s Block.

I write about race and education. I research racial incidents on college campuses. Every day, in my inbox, I see some article about another racist incident, form of harassment, example of violence – I go to sleep with this, I wake up to this, I eat with this racial narrative.

I wonder about those folks who are color-blind. How do they wake up every morning?

So this morning I woke up with writer’s block. And I read on my twitter-feed that The Help received five Golden Globe nominations – a story about a young white woman who desires to become a writer and focuses her writing on her Black female housekeepers/maids.

Historians, sociologists, educators, and other writers have all critiqued the book that has turned into a movie. They have pointed out facts versus the fiction that one sees in the movie. Two very important critiques can be read here and here.

Essentially, The Help is a story about a color-blind, white woman who wants to be a writer. Someone who tells the story of Black women who are domestic workers. This is not the story of Black female domestic workers.

One need not look too far to see how the author’s standpoint affects her work. The movie’s title is a great example of the author’s perspective. An author who talks about Black women from a color-blind perspective wouldn’t be able to see her own white privilege in constructing the title. A color-blind author who writes about Black women won’t be able to see how she continues to reproduce a racist narrative.

She didn’t call it the ‘The Black Help”. She called it The Help. And I will add that when I caught a quick glimpse of a preview of the film and saw that the first person in the preview was a white woman, I thought “Wow. A movie about white female domestic workers. How interesting.”

Wrong. The Help implied The Black Help. Similar to using terms such as “disadvantaged”, “urban”, “Inner city” and “at-risk”, the title The Help is a manipulation of language to replace racial specifics. We use coded terms to mark bodies, construct race to make some bodies deficient (Black/Brown bodies) and others the norm (White).

This author, like many, is getting paid and rewarded to continue a cycle of racist reproduction. We are all involved in this kind of racist reproduction in one way or another. The Help is a great example of this: nominate Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer for their roles as maids in addition to having the author of the book get accolades, a movie deal, and a pat on the back for seemingly being racially conscious.

These kinds of stories reinforce the need to maintain a racial narrative that is pleasing for and thereby dumbs-down the audience. To see Black women, really wonderful actresses, reprise the role of Mammy from Gone with The Wind, and receive awards for it, is disturbing, but all too familiar. We are all in collusion with racist reproduction of who Whites are and who People of Color are. But some of us are more willing to fight this than others. These stories also lead some of us to think that racial progress is occurring, leading to a bifurcated understanding of racial progress. In fact, Richard P. Eibach and Joyce Ehrlinger (2006) found that there is a difference in perceptions of racial progress held by Whites and People of Color. They write:

\White Americans tend to spontaneously think about racial progress as movement away from racial injustices of the past instead of thinking of progress as movement toward a system of full racial equality. In contrast, ethnic minorities seem to spontaneously think about racial progress as movement toward fully realized racial equality, and their assessments of progress accordingly take into account the distance we have yet to traverse to reach that goal… our results reinforce the point that a balanced assessment of progress needs to consider both the distance we have come and the distance that remains as we travel along the path to a truly egalitarian community (Eibach & Ehrlinger, 2006, p.76).

And, I want to believe that maybe Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer have more choices than Hattie McDaniel did over 70 years ago, but nominations for this film tells us “not really”.

We have been fooled. They SEEM to have choices, but maybe they really don’t. The work that they have to choose from, work that reproduces racist perspectives is work that people will rely on for learning history. This kind of story is privileged. Why? Because it is easy.

And here I wonder why I have writer’s block.

Of course I have writer’s block! Writing against a racist system, such as the one that would dupe people into thinking The Help is great, accurate work means that I have to constantly fight what is normal.

It is easy for people to write books and produce movies like The Help. We all know the story like the back of our hands. Any of us could have written it! It is probably why some women love it so much. It is too damn familiar! We all know this racist narrative too well. It is in our novelas, it is in our history books, it has been made into law in Alabama – they have made concessions to allow for undocumented immigrant women to work as The Hispanic Help while making it illegal to go to school, drive, have utilities in their homes if there are no papers to prove US citizenship.

But undocumented women have permission to work as The Hispanic Help in Alabama. Walking around without papers is not legal. Being an undocumented immigrant domestic worker is legal.

As a race-worker, I have to constantly write against that kind of system that makes it legal to be racist. I have to reconstruct, re-write, and develop a new racial narrative. To be constantly conscious of this takes time and effort. Where the hell are the awards for that?

How do you interrupt the reproduction of racism? Luckily, we have our heroes. People who rarely get as much attention as do writers of racially-easy work. Critical race narratives like Professor Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well written precisely in the spirit of racial justice by interrupting our post racial notions of race relations in the US. Geneva Crenshaw, a prophetic lawyer, does the interrupting by questioning, guiding, and empowering a young lawyer into thinking outside of the subtle racism that has come into existence since the Civil Rights Era. Could she be made into a movie heroine? Could an actress like Viola Davis play that role and still get a Golden Globe or Oscar nod?

Or will people say “That’s not real enough.” Not real enough that some have described critical race narratives as “sci-fi”. The “other-world-liness” of powerfully analytical People of Color is fascinating but not as fascinating as the description of Black maids by a color-blind woman.

There are people who are writing against the “Nostalgia Movement (Code for When we were Openly Racist)”. While some are desiring for The “Good Ole Days” (as some of our presidential hopefuls have freely expressed) there are others who are reminding us that a racist narrative is powerful to and desired by a mass audience because it is racially easy and nice (for more racially-easy work, go watch The Help).

Race–workers, race researchers, race educators remind us that the first step is to be racially conscious and aware – but this is not enough

They remind us that we have to think, write, and share about a racial narrative that isn’t deficient, deleterious, and disappointing.

They use Critical Race Theory, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Testimonios, Street Lit, to construct a more robust racial narrative.

Work like The Help is racially-easy. And we all know the recipe: Develop code words and people may call you complex. Add “heroic” Black characters and you will be applauded for being well-intentioned. Add a couple of white characters that then find their souls and you just may get a movie out of it. Tell a sanitized Black story through the eyes of an innocent White woman — will get you an Oscar.

So is being a race-conscious writer/researcher really writer’s block? Or is it constructing courageously, constructing outside of the racist narrative that we inherited, that we continue to privilege, that we continue to reward? What some like to call “thinking outside the [racist] box?”

I think I prefer writer’s block now than to be racially-easy. Any day.

The challenge throughout has been to tell what I view as the truth about racism without causing disabling despair. ~ Derrick Bell

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid

I saw Shame a couple of weeks ago with my homie Sarah Jaffe…and, on the real, I wanted to check out the flick because I wanted to see Michael Fassbender’s full frontal nudity. (And, considering how quick the box-office attendant was asking for photo IDs for this NC-17 flick, I guess quite a few under-17 others were trying to see the younger Magneto’s full frontal nudity, too.)

MAJOR SPOILER ALERT after the jump.

Synopsis: Fassbender plays Brandon, a white, handsome, successful office-working something-or-other (the film never states what he does for a living or where he works) living the upscale–and rather white–NYC life.  Brandon also has a sexual addiction, which McQueen frames as Brandon lacking any emotional connections and/or the ability to go about forming healthy ones–even with his own sister–in tandem with a series of sexual behaviors: Brandon inviting and paying female sex workers of various races and ethnicities; constantly masturbating (you first see him jerking off in his shower, and later he’s shown doing it in his office bathroom; and his sister catches him jerking off in a toilet); getting paranoid about the IT department talking about his hard drive, only to have his boss call him into the office about the porn found on it (though the boss blames Brandon’s intern for it, not Brandon); hooking up with a white woman at a bar that his married boss initially tried to pick up; his picking up another white woman at a random bar and, after some consensual fingering, puts his fingers under her white boyfriend’s nose to sniff (which leads to the boyfriend assaulting Brandon); after the assault, Brandon following a racially ambiguous male sex worker into the backroom of a gay bar, where he kisses the sex worker and gets a blowjob; participating in a threesome with two female sex workers, portrayed by white burlesquer DeeDee Luxe and Asian burlesque star Calamity Chang (both links NSFW).

When Brandon attempts to form a healthy romantic connection–after his sister busts him masturbating into the toilet–he throws out his massive porn collection and a couple of sex toys and approaches Marianne (American Violet‘s Nicole Beharie), who works at his office. She is one of the few Black people (let alone people of color) at the firm. They go on a date:

Then Brandon invites Marianne for an afternoon tryst at a hotel. Hepped up on a line of cocaine and the sheer excitement at this opportunity to prove he’s conquered his sexual addiction by himself, Marianne and he engage in some foreplay, only for Brandon not be able to get erect. Ashamed, he sends Marianne away and later has penetrative sex with a sex worker, a white woman, in the same room.

All of this is to give context to this radio interview excerpt between film critic Elvis Mitchell and McQueen. Towards the end of the interview, McQueen says this about casting Beharie as Brandon’s love interest (unfortunately, KCRW doesn’t have a full transcript of the interview):

Elvis Mitchell: I found interesting, too…there are women in the film and the way you sort of develop what the women do from Brandon. They really are fleshly in a way that he is not. I mean, they’re sort of in touch with their bodies in terms of living in the world in a way he is not: both his sister and the woman he courts at the office want to use their bodies for a different thing than he does.

Steve McQueen: …of course, Marianne–she, of course, is played by Nicole Beharie–I like Marianne. She’s sort of willing to try to make something out of something, which may not be a good thing to do. But she wants to take a chance.

EM: She’s also the grown-up in the movie. She represents looking for a future, which neither Brandon or Sissy are capable of doing. They’re both about the immediate. I felt it was interesting to make the one African American woman in the movie, the one person of color, [as] the person looking for a future rather than trying to find a momentary satisfaction. Even [Brandon's] boss is like that–a person who wants to be immediately gratified.

SM: That’s interesting. [Laughs] I mean, other people saying to me when I came to America and I wanted to cast [Beharie]. Because when I came to research the movie, of all the people but for this one guy–I think he was from somewhere in South America–were white who were dealing with sex addiction. I suppose it’s a different kind of situation, I’d imagine, where you’d find one kind of ethnicity. But I found it fascinating.

But when it came to the workplace it was as you see it. It was one Black person. It was like, “Wow, that’s kind of interesting.” And this girl could be Brandon’s girlfriend. But what was interesting was there was all kinds of  objections about this, of saying, “Oh, that wouldn’t happen there. That wouldn’t exist.” I said, “What, I don’t exist?” It was a very odd thing, having these conversations about having a love interest that was a Black woman with Brandon. It was interesting, that. It was fascinating, that.

But then, what also fascinates me is you have a lot of white American filmmakers who never cast a Black person in their movies and they made quite a few movies. How can you avoid that? That’s kind of weird. It’s like walking around with blindfolds on. How can you make movies in this country–and consistently make movies–and not cast Black characters in the main leads? I mean, I made two movies–and they’re art films–and the feature film are 90 percent white and my art films are 90 percent Black. There’s no distinguishing the two; it’s just one thing–it’s not “art” or “film.” That’s how it is.

EM: I waited fifty years for someone to say that.

What Sarah and I chatted about over post-movie brunch is that we really appreciated McQueen’s decision to cast Beharie as Brandon’s love interest. As Mitchell observes, Marianne is an adult, a woman with her own relationship loose ends (she tells Brandon she’s separated, not divorced) and healthy sexual curiosity and appetite (she agrees to the tryst; she eagerly and sensuously kiss Brandon back as they’re hiding behind a patterned glass partition at the office). Brandon knows, regardless of his condition, he has to come correct with Marianne; his frozen face as he watches her through the window of the restaurant of their first date displays his terror. Even in the above clip, Marianne holds her own flirting with Brandon. More importantly, Marianne and Brandon are drawn to each other in the film because they’re interested in each other, not as a Very Special Episode of Interracial Dating in America. Unfortunately, their relationship is a very short one due to Brandon’s addiction — and you never see Marianne again after she leaves the hotel.

Yet, Sarah and I gave gasface to McQueen framing Brandon having sex with another man and a three-way to signify Brandon “hitting rock bottom.” Why, we rhetorically asked, does homosexuality and consensual multiple partners — neither of which are really respected in US society — have to be the film’s shorthand for “sexual depravity”? McQueen could have shown Brandon’s nadir when the boyfriend assaulted him. To show Brandon engaged with the partners as a sign his utter debasement smells of homophobia and anti-polyamory.

Is Shame worth seeing? If the frisson of finally seeing an NC-17 film (“Woohoo! Grown-ass flick!”) making it to your movie theater is worth the price of admission, then … well, maybe. But, like all frissons, it won’t last long. If you want to see an interracial couple that’s a couple and not a Big Social Statement a la Something New, then…well, maybe. The relationship is short-lived. But just to see Michael Fassbender’s penis? You’ll be wildly disappointed because you’re not going to see it for very long at all.

H/t to Shadow and Act

Photo credit: Filmofilia

By Guest Contributor Marissa Lee, cross-posted from Racebending

Warner Bros has finally glommed onto a lead actor for its adaptation of the Japanese science fiction novel All You Need is Kill.

Set in a post apocalyptic future, All You Need is Kill is about a young Japanese soldier, Keiji Kiriya, who serves on an international fighting force fighting an alien invasion. Keiji gets stuck in a “Groundhog’s Day” scenario where he keeps reliving the day he died.

Set to play the main character in the film adaptation? On December 1st, 2011, Variety reported: Tom Cruise.

Is Warner Bros on a racebending roll?

Throughout November, Warner Bros kicked around names for its adaptation of another property with Japanese origins: Akira.

After considering Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves, WB nabbed Garrett Hedlund (Tron Legacy) for Kaneda, continues to evaluate a shortlist of unknown Caucasian actors for Tetsuo, and has offered Kristen Stewart (Twilight) the role of Kaneda’s love interest.

Gary Oldman and Helena Bonaham Carter were also propositioned for supporting roles. After Gary Oldman turned down his offer to play the antagonist in the adapted story, the Colonel, Japanese stage actor Ken Watanabe was reportedly offered the role. A casting call has also gone out for a “Japanese American” for the role of Yamagata, a side character from the manga.

Warner Bros is also jump starting an adaptation of the Japanese anime Death Note.

One of these films will have an Asian American lead, right? Or at least an actor of color in the lead role?

Why the All You Need is Kill casting isn’t subtle at all

In Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel, the lead character, Keiji Kiriya, is a Japanese soldier who is part of an international military unit. For the purposes of the American adaptation, director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity)has said that the actors will be “totally American.”

And somehow, “totally American” ended up meaning “white,” even though characters need not be white in order to be American.

In the script, Keiji Kiriya’s name was changed to “Billy Cage,” even though named Keiji have been fighting in the American military for generations.

Sound familiar? That’s because history is repeating itself. Starship Troopers, another science fiction novel about an international army fighting aliens, featured a Filipino protagonist named Juan Rico. In the 1997 film adaptation, his name was changed to “Johnny” and he was cast with a white actor. An opportunity for an Asian American actor in the genre of science fiction was completely lost.

Science Fiction/Fantasy is a genre that has characters with names like Kal-El, T’challa, Worf, Neytiri, Teal’c, Cthulhu, Meriadoc Brandybuck, Leeloo, and Slartibartfast. Why was it necessary to change Keiji Kiriya to Billy Cage?

To add insult to injury, unlike Akira (a story that only contained Japanese characters), the original All You Need is Kill already featured characters who were white!

The other lead characters in the book are Rita Vrataski and Ferrell Bartolome, both from the U.S. Armed Forces. Even with an Asian American actor in the lead role, white actors would have had ample opportunities to play important roles in the film!

Instead, the production went out of its way to retool the script, erase Keiji’s name and ethnicity, and essentially, lock Asian American actors out of one of their only chances to star in an action movie this decade.

Impact on Performers and Communities of Color

Our concern is that Warner Bros casting practices employ racebending to reinforce the systemic racism that is already present in Hollywood. Setting Akira in neo-Manhattan could have been a great opportunity to reflect the diversity in modern day New York City, opening up lead role opportunities for not only Asian Americans but also other performers of color. There was ample opportunity for Warner Bros to demonstrate a commitment to diversity by finally casting a young lead actor of color.

Likewise, casting an Asian American in All You Need is Kill would not have locked out white actors from other lead roles in the movie, especially since nearly all Warner Bros movies feature white lead actors.

Harold and Kumar (from back in 2004) aside, it doesn’t seem like Warner Bros is interested in developing unknown Asian American talent–even though they are more than ready to whitewash several lead characters that were Asian to accomodate white actors.

Not to mention, Warner Bros will also be presenting a yellowface joke in it’s Christmas release, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

(Awkward coincidence given the whitewashing of roles in Akira and AYNIKis a modern evolution of yellowface..)

Not confidence inspiring.

Maybe Asian American actors are like poor Keiji Kiriya: doomed to constantly relive missed opportunities. When the rare Asian lead character comes along…

By Arturo R. García

When last we left the American Akira, the racebending had barely started: Garrett Hedlund was only being courted to play the lead character, Kaneda.

This week, thanks to Geek Tyrant and other sites, we got some more disturbing pieces of the puzzle, when this casting call for extras and stand-ins listed Twilight‘s Kristen Stewart stepping in as “Ky” – possibly because the character’s original name, Kei, was just too long for somebody’s tastes – and Helena Bonham-Carter playing Lady Miyako.

The casting call also shed some light on how the new version’s vision of “Neo-Manhattan” might play out. As “adaptations” go, it sounds like this Akira could hew as closely to this Akira as Jesus Christ Superstar did to the Gospels. Spoilers are under the cut.

Here’s a transcript of the plot summary:

Kaneda is a bar owner in Neo-Manhattan who is stunned when his brother, Tetsuo, is abducted by government agents led by The Colonel.

Desperate to get his brother back, Kaneda agrees to join with Ky Reed and her underground movement who are intent on revealing to the world what truly happened to New York City thirty years ago when it was destroyed. Kaneda believes their theories to be ludicrous but after finding his brother again, is shocked when he displays telekinetic powers.

Ky believes Tetsuo is headed to release a young boy, Akira, who has taken control of Tetsuo’s mind. Kaneda clashes with The Colonel’s troops on his way to stop Tetsuo from releasing Akira but arrives too late. Akira soon emerges from his prison courtesy of Tetsuo as Kaneda races in to save his brother before Akira once again destroys Manhattan island, as he did thirty years ago.

Depending on how many “liberties” are taken with the source material, this incarnation of The Colonel could be more of an antagonist to Kaneda and company than the original. If the latest rumors turn out to be true, and Ken Watanabe actually does play the character, the only POC in a principal role could be playing the bad guy. As our friends at Racebending said on Facebook, “This doesn’t sound like a terrible rehash of Airbender at all.”

Besides that, this summary – again, if it is indeed the plot of the new version – points not only to a whitewashing, but to a PG-13 dumbing-down of the original: Kaneda and Tetsuo are brothers? An adult Kaneda with a job? Akira as a villainous force? This isn’t even reprehensible anymore, it’s almost laughable. Unless this unnerving theory by Cracked Magazine’s Robert Brockway turns out to be right:

With all of these factors considered — the change in race, age, and location — there’s only one thing this live action version of Akira can be about. The same thing every other “meaningful” Hollywood movie has been about since the day it happened: 9/11.

Think about it: There’s a city, emblematic of its nation, that undergoes a great hardship, but after many years of struggle, they finally rebuild. Then a group of friends, their gang analogous to a controversial real life group, ostracized and hunted by the government, somehow causes the destruction of said city. It was an important moment in our history, and of course it deserves coverage. But why choose Akira to talk about it? Well, because Hollywood believes that the only disaster Americans can relate to is 9/11, but sometimes work is hard and it takes a lot of time, and that sucks. So instead of setting to work on an original script, they’re just going to up and steal a movie that perfectly captured what it was to be Japanese in a tumultuous period of history, and make it all about white people problems instead.

And if that’s indeed the case, I hope this film makes Airbender’s box-office take look like Avatar’s by comparison.

By Guest Contributor Alyx Vesey

Warning: this post contains spoilers

Like a lot of cult classics, Walter Hill’s The Warriors has gained new audiences over the years, while maintaining a firm base of die-hard fans. Given the title, it is clear that the focus is on one particular. But for me, it’s a real shame that the film isn’t called The Lizzies. I’d much rather see that film.

The other gangs in The Warriors, vying for turf in downtown New York City, are peopled by boys and men, with their concerns privileged. But it’s the Lizzies – the only all-female gang in the movie – who truly kick ass on camera, making their brief time on screen especially frustrating. Warriors Vermin, Cochise, and Rembrandt barely escape their run-in with the fearsome group, who work together to deftly outsmart them. Of the gangs the Warriors encounter during the film, the Lizzies are their most formidable adversary.

Their resourcefulness and physical prowess as a group is in marked contrast to D.J. who, apart from her languid speaking voice and fluency in street lingo, is fairly inconsequential to the plot. Another woman, Mercy, selflessly commits herself to the Warriors’ cause. The only other woman who comes close to sharing the Lizzies’ commitment to stomping out oppressive nonsense is an undercover police officer who arrests Warrior Ajax after he attempts to rape her. Think how much more powerful these individual characters would be if they followed the Lizzies’ example and worked together.

The film, based on Sol Yorick’s 1965 novel, embeds commentary about the civic blight brought on by urban decay and provides something of a counter to often-romanticized historical accounts of New York City during a period of near-total economic collapse. It also showcases Bobbie Mannix and Mary Ellen Winston’s impressive costume design, as each gang uses a uniform to establish (and, in many cases, stereotype) group identities. Its’ stylistic indebtedness to comic books is prescient, as well as indicative of American film’s ongoing relationship with comic and radio serialization. Film franchises continue to be built on the folklore of properties owned by Marvel and DC Comics. Directors like Zac Snyder incorporate comic book storytelling devices into their films. And people still dress up as Furies for Halloween.

But plenty of folks dress up as Lizzies too. What I find especially unfortunate about the Lizzies’ truncated appearance is that they are a multiracial all-female gang. Roughly a decade after The Warriors, it became increasingly commonplace to include at least one woman or girl of color in films and television programs in groups of girlfriends. Much of this could be attributed to attention toward multiculturalism and political correctness in the 1990s. Coinciding with the decade’s commitment to inclusivity, groups like the Spice Girls were notable for their inclusion of women of color, even though Mel B. was labeled as “Scary Spice.” But for the most part, musical girl groups remain segregated, particularly as they align with certain generic conventions. 60s-era girl groups like the Shangri-Las had a direct influence on rock music, and punk in particular. Their delinquent image also helped shape the identities of bands like the Runaways, the Go-Gos, and the Donnas. Peer groups like the Supremes emphasized glamour, wealth, and elegance.

Rather than dialog the Lizzies with girl groups, it may be more useful to think of the gang in New York’s musical context. By 1979, hip hop was reaching beyond the block parties and graffiti culture of the outer boroughs and beginning to intermingle with punk. It’s easy to obscure female involvement in East Coast American punk by overemphasizing contributions from Patti Smith, Blondie’s Debbie Harry, Talking Heads’ Tina Weymouth, as well as ignore some of punk’s problems with racial appropriation and fetishization that they inherited from the Beats. However, hip hop, Afro-pop, and reggae’s influence helped prioritize musical inclusivity and eclecticism, both in generic applications and instrumental collaborations.

Furthermore, a sister act from the South Bronx formed a year before The Warriors made its debut at the multiplex. Renee, Marie, and Valerie Scroggins performed under the name ESG. The first two letters stood for their birthstones, emerald and sapphire. The last initial represented their commercial aspirations to make gold records. What resulted was an inventive combination of expressive funk polyrhythms, eerie punk minimalism, and cavernous disco breaks that left such an impression on punk and hip hop artists while offering little in the way of financial compensation that the group released an EP in 1992 pointedly titled Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills.

As it remains something of a rarity to see girls establish homosocial bonds with their female peers in television and film, it is even less likely that media texts include girl friendships across racial categories. While I’m not here to bury the Spice Girls, I do believe the seeming inability to fully integrate mediated representations of girl groups speak to the racial politics of self-selecting friend groups. Feminism, at least in western countries, continues to practice racial segregation and tends to privilege the concerns of straight, able-bodied, middle-class, cisgender white women. This was a problem at the dawning of the American women’s rights movement when suffragists lobbied for white women’s right to vote while many within the ranks feared giving black people those same rights would weaken their efforts.

Feminism’s unwillingness to see its own white female privilege continues to play out in a variety of ways, whether in popular media, professional arenas, and even political activism. How else can we explain the presence of a protest sign at New York’s SlutWalk that featured both a racial slur against the African American community? How could something like this happen in a city of such racial and ethnic diversity as New York City?

Extrapolating further, how can a group representing diverse identity categories who gathered as part of an international movement to eradicate the subjugation and brutalization of women and girls be a fringe interest? As I wish that the Lizzies were central characters in The Warriors and hope that more media texts prioritize nuanced representations of multiracial homosocial bonding, I also encourage future films, television shows, and musical groups to take up and improve upon this challenge. One example I can think of is 1996’s Girls Town. A film about three New York City high school girls who become radicalized as a group after their friend commits suicide after being raped by her boss, Girls Town suggests the possibility that girls can establish bonds across racial and ethnic categories. If we continue to insist on more nuanced representations and form coalitions in our daily lives with these goals in mind, we may live in a world where the Lizzies get their own movie and that the girl gang members of color offer more than superficial concessions toward diversity.

By Guest Contributor Roxie Moxie, cross-posted from Nerdgasm Noire Network

Last week the Hunger Games character posters were revealed to fans.

There were the usual complaints of actors not meeting book loyalist expectations.  However, among the usual complaints of “She doesn’t look as young as I thought” or “Where are Effie’s pink curls?”  There was a different kind of shock and surprise toward Rue & Cinna, who will be played by Amandla Stenberg and Lenny Kravitz, respectively.

”And most hauntingly, a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that, she’s very like Prim in size and demeanor.“―Katniss Everdeen, while watching Rue’s reaping

- The Hunter Games Wiki

She is 12 years old, with dark brown hair, skin, and “golden brown” eyes.

- Wikipedia

Rue is pretty clearly described as African-American which has been confirmed by director Garry Ross and author Suzanne Collins.

Entertainment Weekly: In the books, Katniss is described as being olive-skinned, dark-haired, possibly biracial. Did you discuss with Suzanne the implications of casting a blond, caucasian girl?
Ross: Suzanne and I talked about that as well. There are certain things that are very clear in the book. Rue is African-American. Thresh is African-American.

So then, why did comments like these show up on the Hunger Games Facebook when Rue’s poster was posted? (SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOKS, STOP AT GRACE’S COMMENT.)

Everything from the innocuous ”She’s not how I pictured her” to “I was all sad and like “she’s black!’”

Seriously? My good nerds, what in the entire f-ck?

While it is true that Rue is described maybe only twice in the entire book, she is described as having brown satiny skin that is darker than Katniss’ own tan skin.  While it is also true that the Hunger Games books are a very quick and absorbing read I don’t find that any of this an excuse to post on Facebook ”Shes Black?”

It makes me wonder if we all read the same book.

How is it, when Rue is so clearly described that fans insist they believed her to be white? White people are considered the norm in society; the default person.  It’s as simple as when you hear the words “All-American”, I can say with certainty that you are not picturing a minority person of color.  This is white privilege.

I’m a longtime Hunger Games fan and have followed many conversations on the internet concerning the casting of the film. Whenever the conversation comes to Rue there is always (1) person who is surprised to find out Rue is black and (2) another person who is upset that Rue is black. Upset as if they have been tricked or as if something has been stolen from them. Upset as if they now have to reevaluate how they feel about Rue–a character many fans love dearly because of her incredible courage.

“OMG, THERE IS A BLACK PERSON IN MY BOOK!?”

And the one that really kills me is {SPOILER AHEAD–HIGHLIGHT TO READ} “Where’s Prim? Her death is the one that gets to me most.” As if Rue’s death is not even worth this poster, and it should belong to Prim.

The reaction to Cinna is even more harsh.

Cinna:

Most people who live in the Capitol follow very absurd fashion trends. This is not the case for Cinna. The first time he is seen in the book, he is described as wearing a simple black shirt with matching pants. His one strange fashion choice is gold eyeliner, which brings out the gold flecks in his green eyes and which Katniss describes as attractive. Other than that, Cinna looks very normal, with close-cropped natural dark brown hair and slightly dark skin. {The Hunger Games Wiki}

Cinna is very different from the other inhabitants of the Capitol; he does not use surgery to alter his features, wears simple black clothes, and leaves his hair its natural dark brown color, close cropped. His only evidenced feature is a slight touch of gold eyeliner that brings out the gold flecks in his eyes. {Wikipedia}

It’s true that Cinna’s description is vague. Cinna could be absolutely any race. I felt the lack of description was purposeful. Cinna could be a hero that looked like anyone. I can’t fault anyone too much for thinking he might look like them, however …

Really, fandom? You nearly make me want to revoke my love of this series with these comments! Especially those who pictured Cinna as “sweet and loving”–A statement that implies that Kravitz doesn’t look that way.

However, many fans get it

By Guest Contributor Caroline Heldman, cross-posted from The Society Pages

Tower Heist (2011), the new movie starring Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy, is the latest installment in blatantly racist movie-making. Stiller plays a high-end condo manager in Manhattan who bails out a local criminal (Murphy) to steal a stash of cash that one of the wealthy condo residents swindled from the condo staff. It’s been nearly thirty years since Murphy played nearly the same character in his breakout role in 48 Hours, and the fact that he is still cast as a jive-talking criminal speaks to how little has changed when it comes to the portrayal of black Americans in popular culture.

Hyperbolic racial stereotypes are still sooooo amusing for some.  As LA Times film critic Betsy Sharkey writes, ”Murphy and Stiller are a good pair, with Murphy once again mainlining his ghetto-comedy crazy and Stiller suited up for another straight-man gig. These are the kinds of roles they both do best, and their face-off in the front seat of an out-of-control car is worth the price of admission.” (Now reverse the names in this quote to see how racialized and racially offensive it is.)

Perhaps more disturbing is the way in which film critics are talking about this movie as a comback for Eddie Murphy  (“Eddie Murphy’s Road to Reddemption,” “Tower Heist: Murphy is Back on Top,” “‘Tower’ Heist Features Eddie Murphy Back in ‘Classic ’80s Form“). What does it mean when playing an insultingly stereotypical black criminal is deemed “redemption” for a black actor whose movies have grossed nearly $7 billion worldwide? And where, exactly, did Eddie Murphy go? The Shrek series grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide, while his Nutty Professor and Doctor Dolittle franshises grossed $428 million and $470 million, respectively. Murphy has appeared in a steady stream of successful movies in the past decade, including Dreamgirls for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.

Closer examination of media critics’ analysis reveals a nostalgia for Eddie Murphy’s breakthrough role as a criminal in 48 Hours. Jon Niccum writes that inTower Heist “Murphy shows flashes of the aggressive, non-family-friendly persona that made him a superstar following 48 Hours. Aggressive?  Non-family friendly?

To summarize, Eddie Murphy grossing oodles of money as a successful director, producer, writer, and actor in films featuring him as a doctor, a veterinarian, a dedicated father, and the voice of a beloved donkey in the second highest-grossing animated film of all time is considered some sort of failure, but playing a jive talking felon is redemption. Huh?

There are many ways to interpret this — that Hollywood and movie critics (and many in society) are more comfortable with black actors playing damaging, stereotypical roles involving criminality, violence, and deviance (remember back in 2002 when Denzel Washington finally won the Oscar for playing a crooked cop?); that male actors are failures if they appear in family-friendly movies, regardless of how economically successful these movies may be; that to be considered successful, male actors have to appear in movies geared towards male audiences.

Whatever the reason(s), it is embarassing for Hollywood and its “critics” to continue to be so ignorant. Eddie Murphy called out the movie industry’s racism at the 1988 Academy Awards during his presentation of the Best Picture award: “I’m going to give this award, but black people will not ride the caboose of society and we will not bring up the rear anymore. I want you to recognize that.” Two decades later, Murphy finds himself riding the caboose, furnished by the creators of Tower Heist.