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.

“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.

Movie theaters used to hold a special kind of magic.

Lined up with my friends, clutching the occasional purchase of popcorn and a soft drink, or sneaking smuggled in snacks, we would watch in awe and horror as teenagers paraded around on screen, seemingly oblivious to the threat of violence lurking around the corner. When I was about thirteen years old, I sat through the original Scream. The rules of horror movies, as articulated by the character Randy, were clear and concise:

Randy: There are certain RULES that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance, number one: you can never have sex.
[crowd boos]
Randy: BIG NO NO! BIG NO NO! Sex equals death, okay? Number two: you can never drink or do drugs.
[crowd cheers and raises their bottles]
Randy: The sin factor! It’s a sin. It’s an extension of number one. And number three: never, ever, ever under any circumstances say, “I’ll be right back.” Because you won’t be back.

But there were some rules that we knew that never were articulated.

1. The black character always dies, normally first. This is normally related to not being lead characters, but easily dispensable side characters. Sure, we had Tales from the Hood, but we knew the score. I think that’s why all of us at the local participatory theater screamed the whole way through I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. “Run, Brandy, Run! You gotta make it because they already killed Mekhi!”

2. Upper middle class white kids are the stars of these things. In general, no matter how big and bad the villain is, they are still hanging out in pastoral campgrounds or tony neighborhoods, waiting for their victims to sun themselves on their cabanas. The only exception I can think of was Candyman who was black and haunted the Cabrini-Green housing projects. And later, came a few other things we need not name. But in general, horror film villains and heroes alike were in the providence of “not us.”

So when Moses and his crew took to the screen, defending their tower block from alien invasion, my inner fourteen year old wanted to jump up and start yelling.

Unfortunately, my 28 year old self knows we don’t do those things at the Museum of Modern Art, even if we really, really, want to.

[Some light spoilers ahead.]

We’ve already posted Emma’s review of Attack the Block (see here) and Kartina’s analysis of the race in the film (see here) so I won’t rehash already covered territory. Instead, we will talk about the interesting racial subtext director Joe Cornish inserted into the film.

I was fortunate enough to catch the film with a special treat: Joe Cornish was there, along with Luke Treadaway, to discuss the film after the screening. If you didn’t play the trailer above, watch for the first title screen, which reads: “The deadliest species in the galaxy” before cutting to a shot of the kids. Cornish created the film specifically as a reaction to other films that showed those people and that environment on a pessimistic way.  Cornish grew up near tower blocks, noting that they were erected after London was bombed (commonly referred to as The Blitz) in World War II. This appears to have influenced his perception of events as he reserves no sympathy for the press, who often demonize the people living in the tower blocks.

The opening scene, which establishes Moses (amazingly played by John Boyega) as an anti-hero, shows the crew robbing a young white woman. Cornish said he pulled the scenario straight out of real life: he was mugged by a group of teens. But, he explained, “Instead of being frightened, it fascinated me.” So from the start, Cornish aims to reverse the viewers thinking – to start with that act of robbery, allow all the attendant thoughts, emotions, and stereotypes to creep in, and then peel back the layers to expose the teens humanity.

Delectably low-budget feeling, Cornish pointed out that the film was influenced by older American cult classics like The Warriors, The Outsiders, Gremlins, The Goonies, Over the Edge, Predator, and ET. (“I see it as a complete flip of ET,” Cornish emphasized.)

Cornish continued, explaining “You can watch horror as genre movies or as political movies.” He give a nod to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead for the craftily included racial subtext and reveals one of his own: The idea for the design of the alien forms was to take what the press wrote about lower-class kids – feral, dark, unthinking – and physically embody it as the monsters they fight.

It was a joy to listen to Cornish – he explained everything from the awesome soundtrack (by one of my favorite groups, Basement Jaxx, and with overall director by Steven Price, who last scored Scott Pilgrim) to the symbolism behind the names. In response to an audience question, Cornish explains Moses and the theme of redemption. “Subtle, wasn’t it,” he starts, also noting that he liked the extra flourish of the idea of the naming, and thinking of the hopes that the parent had for the child they would name after such a strong religious figure. “It might be a bit heavy with the biblical stuff, but fuck it, I liked it,” he concludes.

He also dropped another Easter egg, explaining that many times, cost plays a major role in what is shown in the film. He indicated he had “an amazing, Errol Flynn style fight with Moses climbing up the balcony and fighting the aliens,” but it was too costly. He notes that sometimes, though, innovation comes from brokeness, pointing to George Lucas’ iconic Death Star as something amazing that resulted from a budget issue.

At one point, I wanted to ask a question – after being so amazingly frank on issues of race and stereotypes, how was Cornish going from a project like Attack the Block to a reboot of Tintin? After I identify myself, Cornish reveals he’s actually read some of our commentary (!) and explains that Tintin is a complex character. He notes Tintin was written from 1929 to the 1980s.  Hergé later regretted some of what he wrote; Cornish points out the most controversial title (Tintin in the Congo) is still popular in Africa. He also explains that Tintin as a character has evolved; Tintin is a pacifist by the final book, so evolution is built into the text. The movie is based on the 9th book.

As I departed, a reader named Keisha caught up to me in the hallway. We talked a bit about the film and she asked a question that I had wished I’d thought of – since the film was well-received in the UK, did the riots change that perception? It’s a question we will have to find the answer to, perhaps another time. Cornish has hinted at a possible sequel (with ideas supplied by Boyega), but the jury is still out.

Since we’ve all become huge fans of the film on Racialicious, some of the folks involved in the promotion have offered us a giveaway – one lucky reader will win a free DVD copy of the film, and one runner up will win the theatrical poster. To win, give us your best idea for what should happen in the sequel OR what they should do (or should not do) with an American remake. 300 words max, in the comments to this post, winner selected Friday. If you are not selected, don’t worry – Attack the Block is out on DVD today!

Randomly watching TV, I was shocked to see this ad for The Warrior’s Way:

Wait a minute – that was an Asian male lead. Who has a love interest. That he kisses. And she’s white!

There are a couple different reasons why this is remarkable.

One, in many American made films, the Asian guy is supposed to be the sidekick – even if they happen to be in the lead role. Therefore, no need for a love interest, much less one that reciprocates his feelings.

Two, we have an interracial couple kissing on screen in the promotional marketing material . This should not be a rare sight in 2010. Yet, here we are.

Not sure how I feel about the East meets West plot construction – this could be a really awesome, somewhat subversive way to acknowledge that there were more people in the American West than just outlaw settlers. Or it could play right into the stranger from a far away land cliche. The flying ninjas invasion scene makes me lean toward the latter, unfortunately.

From the same store that stays sold out of Princess Tiana dolls (especially the green-gowned ones), from the same store that stays sold out of the latest Black Barbies (I was lucky I got this one, button not included)….

I saw this display for some Target “Spook-tastic Savings”….

Which is fine–I still watch and collect DVDs, even though they’re becoming an obsolete medium–so I’d purchase some…until I saw exactly what was on sale.

If my photo’s too blurry or the print too small, my deepest apologies. I tried surreptitiously to take the photo.  What’s on the shelf:

The Brothers, The Color Purple, Diary of a Tired Black Man, Eve’s Bayou, The Five Heartbeats, Gifted Hands, Good Hair, Purple Rain, Menance II Society, School Daze…

…to name a few.

To those who may not know:  ”spook” is a racial slur for Black people.

To answer the question of where I saw this, the display was in a Target in downtown Brooklyn, NY, where a large number of its on-floor staffers are Black and has a very racially and ethnically diverse customer flow.

Of course, we can talk about intentions–the usual variations of “they probably didn’t mean it” that I heard from a couple of customers–but the impact is the continued perpetuation of an single old stereotype, even with a display of new(er) and varied representations of Blackness.

Just in time for the holiday.

I called over a sales associate, a very sweet young Black man.

“‘Spook’ is an offensive term referring to Black people. Having ‘spook-tastic’ and Black films together can be considered offensive.”

He looked at the display with surprise and apologized. “Oh really? I’m so sorry.  I’m not in charge of the display.”  He looked at it again, the “aha” moment spreading across his face.

“Is there a manager? If you want to let the person know…maybe I can speak to him or her?”

“Sure.” He found a manager in the next aisle.  He discussed the situation with her and came back to me.

I said to the sales associate, “Maybe you can find some horror films to put up on the display, which would be more appropriate. But “spook” and Black films…just nah.”  When I finished what I said, the manager peeked her head around the corner.

I walked away to try out my iPod on a display stereo to see if music was coming out of one speaker just on my speakers or if it was just jainking up on other equipment.

When I left the store, the associate, the manager, and a security guard gathered around the display, discussing it.

ETA: The sign was changed to something about their “low price promise.”  And I purchased a green-gowned Princess Tiana doll.

Photo credits: Andrea (AJ) Plaid

By Arturo R. García and Thea Lim

Arturo: I’ll be the first to admit it: it’s easier to talk about Machete than it is to review it. On one level, this is a “critic-proof” movie, because it was ostensibly made by Robert Rodríguez as a no-brainer successor to Planet Terror, with Danny Trejo taking his archetypal (and stereotypical?) Tough Guy character into leading-man status. And, as a guy who whooped it up along with everybody else when the original faux trailer screened after Planet Terror in theatres, I really wanted to like this flick.

But I didn’t, and was having a hard time talking about it. Enter my illustrious colleague Thea.

Thea: I was all ready to waltz around the digital Racialicious office singing the praises of Machete, when it was brought to my attention that Arturo gave the film two really big thumbs down. So I suggested we have a pop culture critics’ FACEOFF!!! Or rather, ahem, a friendly chat.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Thea: So, I thought Machete was a lot of fun.

Arturo: I thought it was a dull rehash of Planet Terror and Once Upon A Time In Mexico.

Thea: I have seen a bunch of Robert Rodriguez’s movies, but I don’t think I’m as learned in his oeuvre as you.

Arturo: R. Rodriguez seemingly couldn’t decide whether he wanted to go full-on over-the-top or craft an “epic.”

Thea: How do you think that your disappointment with the overall quality of the film connects to the race/gender stuff in the film? I was interested in the question that you posed — let me just directly quote you: “If you put a progressive message in an “intentionally bad” film, do you reduce it to a punchline?”

Arturo: Well, let’s start with this thought I had: if you set out to make an “intentionally bad” movie, you’re basically setting yourself up as an unreliable narrator, no? So, though the film was pushing a progressive message, putting it in awful dialogue all around just undercuts it.

Jessica Alba did an interview saying she hoped the film would start a conversation, and I get that. But nobody I saw the flick with came out talking about, say, Arizona’s immigration problems. Instead they were raving about Trejo doing the Intestinal Swing (which, to be fair, was one of the film’s best moments.)

Thea: Hm, I guess I don’t agree that making an intentionally bad movie sets you up as an unreliable narrator – though I think that’s an interesting question. I think that a film/book can have an unreliable narrator, but in order for that to be so, you have to have a very reliable or competent filmmaker.  To cite Dolly Parton, “it takes a lot of work tolook this cheap.”

My thoughts on Machete in a nutshell - I was really happy to see someone plonking a progressive message in the middle of an absolutely redonculous movie. Because in doing so, Rodriguez bring his message to people who will just go and see the film to have a good time – so that sort of breaks down a lot of the ideological ghettoization that happens when it’s only documentaries that are made about immigration, if you know what I mean. For me, I feel like I go to see so many movies that are fun, but I have to close my eyes and ears to the politics of the film, in order to enjoy them.
So I was delighted to a stupid film that had politics that I didn’t have to totally blank out for the sake of my enjoyment.

The people I saw it with didn’t talk about the nitty-gritty of SB 1070 on our way out of the theatre either. But that actually felt like a bonus: I don’t think that the film exists to try and actually change or speak to the law, it is more like it exits to entertain and cheer up people who are affected by SB 1070 or sickened by it … sort of a cinematic vacation for us.  So my friends and I didn’t talk about Arizona on the way out, we talked about Steven Seagal – which was nice, for a change.

In that way Machete made me think of say, D.E.B.S, another intentionally bad action film, that just happens to be about lesbians. It’s a terrible film but it’s fun, and it feels like a gift that the main love affair just happens to be between two women – so for once viewers don’t have to close their eyes in anticipation of a grossly heteronormative love scene.

Arturo: Is D.E.B.S intentionally bad, though?

Thea: I think so. It may be worse than it intended to be … but it’s definitely campy and seems self aware about that.

Arturo: Ok, campy I get. I felt that Machete’s vacillating between camp and straight-up action took away from that “vacation” feeling you talked about for me. Because, hell, man, at least give me a villain who can deliver a decent speech.

Thea: What was your issue with the senator’s speech?

Arturo: It was just bad. Like, not “MWAHAHA” bad. There was no style to it.

Thea: Did it feel too over the top to you to be seen as a threat, sort of declawing what is a real threat to people’s lives in America, in a way that misrepresents the danger people are facing? Or you just didn’t like it aesthetically?

Arturo: Both. It was like bad madlibs of my Twitter feed.

Thea: Haha. Like if they made an OKCupid graph of “Americans who think undocumented workers should be rounded up and deported”?

Arturo: Right. All they needed was, “I’m a simple guy.”

Thea: Hey! I’m a simple guy! I just want to listen to some Van Halen and deport some people!

Arturo: But back to the speech and the Senator character…

Thea: Right. This is an interesting point you raise … I think that you approached this film with discerning eyes, whereas my eyes were more yippee-guts-i-can’t-wait-to-see-jessica-alba’s-worker-rally-will-she-quote-cesar-chavez.
I think for me it really comes down to audience. I feel like the guts and campiness part of the film were for your regular Robert Rodriguez fans.

The political message was probably for Chican@s, undocumented workers, their allies and their families who just need a break from the bad news.

Arturo: But that’s the thing: I am a regular Rodriguez fan. I can tell you Rodriguez can deliver that message better, if he chooses to.

Thea: Well that is an interesting point.

Arturo: And the “turn your brain off” approach didn’t work for me here.

Thea: Right, well, it’s confusing if you are turning off the movie critic part of your brain, but leaving the revolutionary part on. What I meant to say though, by talking about target audience, is that I don’t think that Rodriguez was trying to win anyone over who hasn’t already been won over either by his films, or by the movements against SB 1070.

Arturo: Which is his right.

Thea: I can see, though, for someone who is both a Rodriguez fan and against SB 1070, you’re in a different spot.

Arturo: I don’t disagree with anything that was said. I just thought he’s championed a particular version of Mexico more skillfully in the past. Hell, Planet Terror had a Latino male as the co-protagonist.

Thea: So if you could pick say, three things you’d liked to have seen different in Machete, what would they be, in terms of the version of Mexico or Mexicans?

Arturo: 1) I’d like Rodriguez to acknowledge that Mexico has indoor plumbing and paved streets.

Thea: Fair enough.

Arturo: 2) Quit giving us at least one character who I want to see die but does not (Enrique Iglesias in Once Upon A Time and the Spy Kid redheaded cholo in Machete)

Thea: Ha! I liked the redheaded cholo! Big ups to the mixed cultural kids!

Arturo: That kid was just bugging the hell out of me. Anyway, #3: It’s not even that much about portrayals of Mexicans here, but I was just disappointed we didn’t get full-on camp or a fully-realized action thriller.

Thea: And I have to wonder how the politics of the film intersect with that.

Arturo: It just wasn’t a very clever film.

Thea: To go back to the senator, I was wondering how much CYAing was going on. I wonder if anxiety about getting into trouble for expressing pro-immigrant, anti-racist ideas made Rodriguez hold back in all departments for this film. And that’s CYA-ing that goes beyond fears of alienating your fan base, who may or may not give two poops about undocumented workers from Mexico and other countries to the south, but also CYAing in terms of not wanting to get hauled into court for inciting the shooting of a senator.

Arturo: Hmm. I see.

Thea: For example, why is the film set in Texas, and not Arizona? And why not use an actual speech from Senator Brewer, for eg, rather than making up this Texas stereotype?

Arturo: I suspect part of that is, it’s RR’s home-court: he’s based in Austin.

Thea: Yes, and that’s why I think it’s funny the way that Texas is represented.  In parts of Texas – and definitely in Houston and Austin – there are large immigrant communities of colour and areas of “progressive” politics.  But the Texas in Machete is your regular old Texas – run by maniacs in cowboy hats with shotguns whose granddaddies fought in the Alamo and who are foaming at the mouth with xenophobic racism.  So that’s not exactly a nuanced or insider view of Texas.

Arturo: And somehow the Univision equivalent has a crazy-big viewership.

Thea: Right, ha.  But I mean, I don’t think necessarily that Rodriguez was really like “oh boy, I’m going to go to treason jail for this.” But I have to wonder how much, in a sense, coming out as a politicized Chican@ in this film, affected the quality of his film.  Do any of his other films have overt Chican@ politics?

Arturo: I think Once Upon A Time comes closest. But that’s decidedly tilted toward the Mexican side of things, of course.

Thea: Right. But I think (and I could be wrong) that there is a sort of “coming out as a Chican@ or as someone with a policial consciousness” aspect to this film, considering that Rodriguez has not been, up to this point, considered a Chican@ filmmaker…he’s just considered a filmmaker.

And that’s also why I LOVED that Jessica Alba was cast in the film, especially as an ICE officer who eventually turns her back on the dominant culture.

Because Alba has also rarely been cast as Chican@ … she has even gone out of her way to get away from that. So to cast the “self-hating” Mexican-American actor who has gone so far as to bleach her hair and wear blue contacts in some of her films, as the Chican@ ICE officer who eventually sees the light: just brilliant. Even if her character and her performance were subpar.

Arturo: I read up on that a bit. What she said most recently is, she wanted to do was to get away from playing the stereotypical Latina roles – the hired help and whatnot. Which makes some sense.

Thea: I think that Zoe Saldana has said the same, but in a way that criticises the typecasting and stereotyping of Dominican Americans, rather than reinforcing it; not so with Jessica Alba.

Arturo: And yet she said she took this particular part specifically because of Rodriguez.

Thea: That makes sense – it almost feels as if they both were like “Fuck it. We’re Chican@. Deal with it.” Of course that could just be my projection…

Arturo: I’m more inclined to get that vibe from RR, based on prior history.

Thea: Not from Alba in this film?

Arturo: Well, here’s another case where the material undercuts her. I mean, here she’s somewhat of an accessory (figuratively and legally) to the Machete character.

Thea: So you mean her coming out as a Chican@ is undercut by the patheticness of the character?

Arturo: I don’t know if this is Alba really reclaiming that part of her heritage – going by prior statements, she never “gave it up,” but didn’t want to play the Hollywood Shuffle with it, either. But for Sartana to give the rally ’round the taco truck speech instead of Luz bugged me.

Thea: If I can’t agree with you that this movie felt half-assed in terms of quality, I can definitely agree that its gender politics were half-assed.  The teeter-toter of feminism: it almost, almost has good gender politics…and then oh no wait. No it doesn’t.

I felt like Luz got the shaft. I was disappointed that that character didn’t get a proper sendoff – there is no closure for her. It seemed unfortunate (and not quite a coincidence) that the only major character who doesn’t get a proper point on their story, is the strong woman of colour.

But I just felt like jumping up and down and clapping when Alba screams WE DIDN’T CROSS THE BORDER THE BORDER CROSSED US.  It was like seeing all the people of colour I know who tell me that racism doesn’t exist suddenly lead a civil rights march on the parliament buildings or something  (included in this group is my dad, and my younger self). I was just thrilled by that moment – it wouldn’t have been the same if Luz did it. Though I still think Luz shoulda gotten some speech in there somewhere. Or at least a goodbye.

Arturo: Or at least another eyeball.

Thea: Haha! A few friends were miffed that Machete chooses Sartana and not Luz. But I was like, c’mon, do you think Machete would even dare suggest that Luz “ride with him”?

Arturo: Ok, can I just say this right now? Alba and M. Rodriguez had 10 times the chemistry that Trejo had with either of them.

Thea: True!

Arturo: And I’m not even saying that in the “ooh girls kissing” way.

Thea: Haha. Point taken.

Arturo: That scene at the truck was a total Meet-Cute.

Thea: What is a meet-cute? I’m going to have to Urban Dictionary this.

Arturo: Here you go.

Thea: Aha! I learn so much from you, Art. Urgh … but I kinda felt like the chemistry there was an invention of Rodriguez, to create a kind of “girls kissing” scene for his hetero male viewers. Sorry to say. And that if they had gotten together, that’s what it would’ve been: very male gaze-y.

Arturo: Maybe, but in this case I credit the two actors for making it believable even beyond that level. I honestly thought those two people were vibing.

Thea: I’ll give you that.

Arturo: I would’ve been happy without the kiss, even. Just seeing Sartana teach Luz how to load all of her files into a spreadsheet would’ve been good.

Thea: YES! That would’ve been a way better ending than Machete and Sartana riding off together in straddle pose. As much as I liked the total ridiculousness of that final scene.

Arturo: Don’t forget her Sexy Cop outfit. Talk about Male Gaze.

Thea: Mmhm. Let’s not even bother discussing Steven Seagal’s Asian fetish…talk about unnecessary. But as for Alba’s outfit, well, baby steps. We can’t expect that much of her all at once…

Arturo: See, that’s not on her, though. Besides, two more steps in those heels and she would’ve snapped an ankle.

Thea: I do have to say, as a Racializen, I was disappointed that other immigrant communities of colour didn’t get to join in on that final run on the Minutemen compound. I also would’ve liked to have seen more of the crowd of workers … the camera doesn’t really show them in all their glory. You sort of just get a flash of feather dusters being waved and that’s it.

I would’ve loved it if somehow Sri Lankan kitchen workers got invited to the raid, and then some of the Filipino nannies, and maybe even some business folk of colour keeping their heads down and pretend not to know anything about immigration…until they snap and start throwing calculators and filing cabinets at the Minutemen. I would’ve liked that very much indeed.

Arturo: Any closing remarks?

Thea:  No, I’m happy to end with the image of Chinese American businesswomen throwing filing cabinets.

Arturo: I accept your concession.

Thea: Ha! It was a pleasure agreeing to disagree with you.

Arturo: THUNDERDOMELICIOUS

There’s been a lot of buzz amongst friends and colleagues about the film Reel Injun. The title itself says a lot. “Reel” —a reel of film—and “Injun”—a derogatory word for Indian—but the title also points to what is missing from film and from children’s and young adult literature: real Indians.

Saying the phrase, “real Indians”, makes me cringe. First, it is the year 2010, and we—people who are American Indian—encounter people who think we were all wiped out by enemy tribes, disease, or war.  Or, people who think that in order to be “real Indians” we have to live our lives the same ways our ancestors did. Course, they don’t expect their own identities and lives to look like those of their own ancestors… In principle, we are a lot like anyone else. We have ways of thinking about the world and ways of being in that world (spiritually and materially) that were–and are—handed down from one generation to the next. Though we wear jeans and athletic shoes (or business suits and dress shoes), we also maintain clothing we sometimes wear for spiritual and religious purposes. Just like any cultural group, anywhere.

Second reason “real Indians” makes me cringe is the word “Indians”. We use it. In fact, I use it in the title of this blog. But I know it references all the indigenous nations and tribes and bands and communities and pueblos in the United States, all with unique ways of doing things.

That said, I want to talk more specifically about the trailer.

Watch Clint Eastwood say he wanted real Indians but couldn’t find one. I wonder where he looked?

Watch Cheyenne/Arapaho filmmaker Chris Eyre say it is funny to watch white people playing Native roles. The trailer shows a series of them: Anthony Quinn, Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Daniel Day Lewis, Chuck Connors, Burt Reynolds, Boris Karloff, Sylvester Stallone, and, William Shatner…  All of them playing tough, savage, or tragic Indians. Watching them do it, as someone who is Native, can be hilarious, but only if you know more about who we are.

Filmmaker Jim Marmusch Jarmusch notes that John Wayne signals a moral standard of what it means to be American. His remark is followed by a clip from one of John Wayne’s movies, where he is shown kicking someone. That clip may be from The Searchers, a film hailed by many as a critique of racism.

Then there’s a critique of Dances With Wolves….

Though I’ve not had the opportunity to see the film, I love what I see in the trailer, and I think anyone who works with children’s literature ought to see it! I think it holds great promise for helping critique portrayals of American Indians in the books we give to children.

Visit the website for Reel Injun and find out when and where you can see it.

Is it a new trend in trailers to highlight comic genius and audacity, by showing just a little bit of racism? First we had the Up in the Air trailer, and now this:

From Paris With Love stars John Travolta (apparently in a reprise of his Face/Off role, plus a keffiyeh) as Charlie Wax, and the adorable little fellow from Bend it Like Beckham as his sidekick. Midway through the trailer, our two leads find themselves in a classic Chinatown fight scene. I blanch at the sight of Charlie Wax using the East Asian waiter’s “oriental” uniform to choke him, and some other shots of things emblazoned with dragons and a Ming vase…

But it’s nothing to write about. That bad feeling in the pit of my stomach is just your regular, knee-jerk (and hey, maybe not-so-justifiable) response to seeing one of my own get pulped by a member of the dominant culture.

And then my most paranoid suspicions are confirmed at 1:05, when Wax’s sidekick asks him in the middle of the Chinatown fight scene

How many more of them do you think there are?

referring to the malevolent employees of the Chinese restaurant.

Wax shrugs, there’s a cut to a women in a cheongsam, and then Wax says

My sense is…about a billion?

Classy.

Nadra and Andrea are still working on their response/conversation about the Princess & the Frog, but we have received requests for a conversation.  Consider this open thread a place holder.

Some things of note:

During the five-year runup to the movie’s ultimate release, conservative critics have regularly lambasted the project as an exercise in political correctness and knee-jerk, quota-driven multiculturalism. Well, the film’s here—and as much as I enjoyed watching it, I have a sneaking suspicion that far from being rejected by the Right, the movie’s going to end up as a GOP cause celebre.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers, because this is a film that really should be watched through eyes sparkling with innocent wonder. But the way the movie’s key themes and plot points map out to Republican talking points is really pretty stunning.

Tiana is a bootstrapping entrepreneur who refuses to ask for charity, preferring to work two jobs to make her small-business dreams come true.

She castigates those who rely on others for welfare, and only changes her ruggedly individualist outlook when she’s pointedly reminded of the importance of having a family—and finding a suitable partner in life.

There’s an amazing Messiah-metaphor moment that the Christian Right will swoon over—a moment that I will not ruin by describing, for those of you who prefer to ignore literary/political subtext. (Let’s just say that for the savvy, the name given to a particular heavenly entity in the film should be a dog-whistle foreshadowing of what happens at the film’s climax.)

And here’s the kicker. The primary bad guy in the picture is a thin, jug-eared, light-skinned black man of mysterious origins who practices an “exotic” religion, manipulates reality to suit his ambitions, hides his true nature behind a charming and verbose exterior, and literally bleeds the elite to lift up the underclass. Furthermore, in the exercise of his villainy, he manages to run up a debt of cosmic proportions—a deficit he decides he can’t repay without, uh, stealing from the rich. Cue the horrific teabagger parodies now.

Since the 1960s, marriages between black men and white women have been steadily increasing—14 percent of all black men are now married outside the race. Yet only 4 percent of black women do the same. Why? Black women, for better or worse, have always seemed to maintain a loyalty to the ideal of the black family unit. That’s understandable, even noble, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when so many black men don’t feel the same way. Combined with the disturbing number of black men in prison, that means 47 percent of all African-American women today never marry. With those numbers, I say it’s time for many black women to start thinking, and acting, like Tiana.

Oy. I’m not even touching that, especially after I saw what happened with the whole Zahara’s hair debacle.

Finally, an incident that Elizabeth Hasselbeck (of all people, I know) shared on The View reminds us of just how far we are from a “post-racial” reality:

Hasselbeck talked about the fact that her daughter’s favorite doll at the moment is Tiana, on The View yesterday. She said her daughter plays with the doll’s hair, sleeps with it and carries it around everywhere she goes. It’s nice that Hasselbeck and other non-Black parents like her don’t make a big deal out of it because essentially, children don’t see color—but she admitted that she got funny looks one day when she and her daughter plus Tiana ran errands in New York City.

Hasselbeck said that some of the looks she got were pleasant and approving, but every now and then she got looks that were reproachful. She expressed that maybe she was thinking too hard about it but Whoopi Goldberg confirmed that she probably wasn’t (this is why I love Whoopi). Whoopi G. and also Sherri Shepherd told Hasselbeck in a nice way, “Welcome to our world.”

While it’s still relatively new news, I thought I’d tackle this brief article from Variety republishing the Screen Actor’s Guild annual diversity research. While the headline of the article reads “SAG stats: Diversity lags” and the byline mentions that minorities, seniors and women are underrepresented, the racial breakdown in the article shows the following:

• 72.5% Caucasian
• 13.3% African American
• 6.4% Latino-Hispanic (?)
• 3.8% Asian-Pacific Islander
• 0.3% Native American
• 3.8% Other-Unknown

The article then goes on and adds data from the 2000 US Census, probably as a point of comparison:

• 73.4% Caucasian
• 11.5% African American
• 10.6% Latino-Hispanic
• 3.7% Asian-Pacific Islander
• 0.8% Native American

Now, if you simply compare those numbers, it only really seems like Latino/as are considerably underrepresented, if you’re broadly looking at the numbers (and assuming the US population breakdown hasn’t changed much in the last decade). Of course, the overall numbers actually fail to tell the whole picture, because there is no breakdown between the types of roles filled. As background comprises of a large number of actors, does this breakdown include background? How does the breakdown look when you examine supporting actors and leading actors? Recurring actors on television?TheTVAddict.com, upon discovering NBC’s new slogan of “More Colorful” was compelled to create this poster:

Now, to be fair, most NBC shows actually do feature one actor of color somewhere in the regular cast, but how many actors in mainstream film and television actually get top billing? How many actors of color are A-listers? Try counting the number of actors of color in The Hollywood Reporter’s list of bankable stars or James Ulmer’s A-list.

Of the actors in the breakdown, how many, by race, can earn a living from their actor’s wages? How many get steady work?

I have the strong suspicion that we’re going to find that the numbers align less with the census the higher we climb the casting tower.

While I appreciate the attempts from the industry to include more characters and actors of color in mainstream film and television, overall, the industry still a participant in systemic racism. There is still a strong and notable imbalance in representation in the top tiers of casting.

In my next segment I’ll be looking into how mainstream film and television deal with the problem of diversity (alluded to in this segment) as well as how mainstream film can maintain cinematic verisimilitude, cast white actors for character of color and not resort to colorface at all.

Saw District 9 tonight, the alien movie by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson. I thought it was appallingly racist; here’s why. (Spoilers ahead.)

Basically, 20 years ago, a million crustacean-like space aliens arrived in Johannesberg. They’re forced to live in a horrible slum called District 9, and now the human citizens want them gone, so they’re about to be evicted from their slum and relocated to a concentration camp outside the city.

If you look at the film as an apartheid allegory, it has problems right off the bat. The aliens are loathsome, trash-eating vermin who fight endlessly, destroy property for no reason, and piss on their own homes, which isn’t a truthful or flattering allegorical comparison for actual black South Africans under apartheid. Apartheid is terrible because humans were denied rights. The “apartheid” of these aliens isn’t that terrible – it’s kind of justifiable, because they’re actually dangerous, violent and destructive. I think it would be a better allegory, and a more sophisticated movie, if the aliens weren’t unpleasant. If they were peaceful and kind, but the humans still demonized them, the film would be much more chilling; the horror would be “man’s inhumanity to lobster-man”, not “eew gross they eat pig heads!”

But to my knowledge, District 9 does not explicitly present itself as an apartheid allegory, and changing the nature of the aliens basically makes it a different movie, so I’m gonna give it a pass in this post (although I’m very open to hearing other people’s thoughts about the allegorical angle). I think the choice to make the aliens disgusting was mostly artistic license, designed to make the film’s tone and visuals more gritty and scary, rather than any attempt to actually be representative of black people oppressed by apartheid. So that wasn’t my problem with this film.

The basic plot was fine: essentially, the human majority herds an alien race of minorities into a ghetto. Eventually the human protagonist gets to know one of the aliens, empathizes, and tries to help him. On some level, the hero comes to realize that the aliens are unlucky individuals who simply desire home and safety, same as everyone else.

The main human, Wikus van der Merwe (newcomer Sharlto Copley, who, incidentally, is great) is a complex character who does the wrong thing (illegally evicts the aliens), then does the right thing (tries to prevent his soldiers from killing aliens for no reason) then does the wrong thing (torches alien babies and gleefully compares their exploding bodies to popcorn), and then eventually does the right thing (risks his life to help alien Christopher Johnson get back to the mothership, albeit for self-serving reasons). That’s good drama; all of the behaviour is motivated; and the alien and his cute little kid even end up being pretty likeable. That’s all cool. I have no problems with the Wikus/Christopher Johnson storyline.

But on the sidelines of all this non-racist action, there’s a subplot storyline with a bunch of Nigerian “refugee gansters” who also live in District 9, and who traffic food and weapons with the aliens. And that’s where the racism is. The portrayal of the black mobsters is disgustingly racist.

The Nigerian gangsters are bloodthirsty, dishonest thugs, which is not a big deal- they’re gangsters, I get it. They see the aliens as mere cockroaches with money, so they don’t treat them well, and that makes perfect sense. They’re just cruel, self-interested mercenaries, and in this, they’re no worse than the film’s (mostly white) government officials, who cold-bloodedly torture and murder the aliens. So far no racism, just characters with motivations.

But!

The Nigerians have a wailing “witch doctor”. Who instructs them to eat the aliens. And they do it. Bloody, wriggling, and raw, of course.

We’re told that the black prostitutes “service” the aliens sexually. ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME??!

And when Wikus’ arm grows a claw, the Nigerian gang boss starts licking his chops, eager to commit cannibalism.

Yup, that’s Hollywood’s Africa, isn’t it. Black Africans shown as degenerate savages who’ll have sex with non-humans and are pretty damn eager to eat people.

Disgusting.

The thing that really upsets me is that most people who see this movie won’t question, or even notice, this incredibly racist portrayal. It wasn’t even necessary for the plot, and in fact the racist elements actually created some plot holes.

The gang boss could have tried to take Wikus hostage, and use him and his scaly arm as a weapon, same as the white government tried to do. By trying to eat his arm “to gain his powers” the gang boss was risking everything. If eating the arm didn’t work, Gang-Guy would lose Wikus’ arm entirely, so his hunger for human flesh actually risked the only interface he had to enable the alien weapons. Drugging Wikus unconscious then just puppeteering his lobster hand onto the triggers of various alien flamethrowers would be a much cleverer- not to mention more palatable- plan. Not only does the intended cannibalism paint the black man as bloodthirsty and disgusting, but it’s also a needless risk that could sabotage the character’s goals. (Actually, logic suggests that both the gang boss and the government probably would have taken a few aliens hostage and forced them to shoot the guns long ago anyway, but that’s another story).

And the idea that the prostitutes had been servicing the aliens actually created a huge plot hole. All of South Africa knew that prostitutes had long been having sex with the aliens; so they would also know that Wikus couldn’t have begun an alien transformation from alien sexual contact, since the sexual transmission of alien DNA had already been in place for 20 years of interspecies prostitution. (I get it that the point was just to alarm the citizens so they would help the government in its hunt for Wikus, but still, things could at least make sense).

So why the racist parts? Why can’t the Nigerians just be people with logical motives like money and weapons? Why do they have to go out of their way to be ooga-booga savages? The film would still have held up without the narrative elements of cannibalism and interspecies sex. Why do the blacks have to be sexual degenerates who will eat filth and violate the oldest human taboo by committing cannibalism? The only reason I see is to shoehorn some cheap visceral thrills into the movie. It’s lazy, sensationalist writing, and it diminishes the potential for intelligent, nuanced allegory. And it doesn’t even make sense. Man, it pissed me off.

The much ballyhooed District 9 succeeds at one thing – it leaves you with questions. The problem is, not all of them are of the good kind.

The film’s conceit – sticking a million-plus misplaced extraterrestrials in the middle of Johannesburg – is promising. But from there, the story is built on a series of cheats, the biggest one being the rather loud absence of the word that, like it or not, comes to mind once you set the story in South Africa: Apartheid.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

It’s implied that the District is a stand-in for the Soweto of our own reality. But, again, that’s a cheat: we’re robbed of a potentially more potent commentary because of that substitution. Getting viewers to say, “Wow, humans are capable of great inhumanity” isn’t as ground-breaking as writer and Director Neill Blomkamp might want to think. And to think that any government would be handling a First Contact situation (as opposed to the internment of its’ own citizens) without the U.S., United Nations or any other coalition tugging at its’ sleeve isn’t sci-fi – it’s flat-out ridiculous.

The story kicks off 28 years after the visitors’ arrival on Earth, but it’s not really about them – our protagonist, and literal tour guide is well-meaning office schmuck Wilkus Van Der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a Christopher Guest character in way, way, way over his head. Wilkus is placed in charge of serving eviction notices to the District’s residents and selling them on the new FEMA government housing they’re getting shipped to.

While investigating a squatter’s shack, Wilkus is sprayed with some of “the fluid,” a crucial biological material. Not only does it power the aliens’ rather impressive weaponry, but it’s the key to the escape plan of one Christopher Johnson, as a singularly clever Prawn is dubbed. Christopher has been plotting for 20 years to get the hell off this planet, and needs the juice to power his getaway craft and revive his people’s mothership, still hovering over Johannesburg.

It’s worth noting that Copley co-produced the inspiration for District 9, Alive In Joburg, a short film where the aliens get a fairer shake from Blomkamp; one of them gets to talk directly to the unseen documentarians and express a motivation (they just want to get off this planet) and a problem (our atmosphere is toxic to their physiology). There was a similar scene in the trailer for District, but it’s not in the theatrical cut, which makes Christopher’s positioning as the Noble Other/Savage really troubling.

Why is Christopher so much smarter than his fellow refugees? How could he be the only one trying to find a way out, or to know/care enough to clothe himself in a “human” manner? And, if humans and Prawn are able to understand each other by the time the “footage” is released, why did the documentarians – because that’s how the first half of this film is framed – exclude interviews with any of the aliens in favor of black South Africans telling us how threatened they feel, and white South Africans denigrating the species as a whole?

We get no insight into any of this, because the movie retreats, very jarringly, into the realm of summer schlock after Wilkus’ infection. As he becomes a test subject, a fugitive, and a less-than-altruistic ally to Christopher, their characters run headlong into caricatures: a wheelchair-bound, voodoo-influenced Nigerian gangster exploiting the Prawns for cash and weapons while eating their body parts on the advice of a “priestess”; and a xenophobic mercenary charged with turning Wilkus in to his slimy CEO father-in-law.

Copley isn’t bad at all – his Wilkus is a terrific anti-hero. But could Christopher and his son, both CGI characters who summon up more “humanity” than the real-life Shia LaBouf, really have been less palatable figures for the audience and creative team to rally behind? Because the story we get, with awesome-looking alien tech and a white hero standing up for the Oppressed, doesn’t end up going anywhere Torchwood didn’t just saunter through with more brains and less blood; at least Russell T. Davies would’ve given Christopher’s race a name. By the time the film reaches its (open-ended) conclusion, you’re left hoping the visitors would return for vengeance – so that you could root for them.

If you’re having trouble trying to figure out what’s wrong with this newly revealed poster for Disney’s upcoming film, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” it may help if I pointed out that the title character is played by Jake Gyllenhaal. In other words, the prince of Persia is not played by a Persian/Iranian. Big surprise, huh?

Why is this a big deal? Well, considering that negative perceptions of Middle-Easterners and/or Muslims have increased since 9/11 (and haven’t gotten better according to statistics and civil rights incidents reported by CAIR), a relatively anticipated film like “Prince of Persia” would seem like the perfect opportunity to help break stereotypes and misconceptions about Middle-Easterners. The film is based on a very popular video game of the same title, which allows you to play the role of a Persian prince who has to save his kingdom (or world) from a time-altered reality. I remember playing the game when it was released in 2003 and even though it’s filled with Orientalist stereotypes, I always felt the story and character depictions could be tweaked into a mainstream film with serious potential (and by that, I mean a film with an actual story, real character development, and appreciation for the culture it intends to represent).

Unfortunately, Jake Gyllenhaal isn’t the only White actor playing a Middle-Eastern character. Gemma Arterton, who plays Tamina, the film’s version of Farah, an Indian character from the video game, is also White. Ben Kingsley is also cast as a Persian character, and while he is of half-Indian descent, many Iranians recall how poorly he played an Iranian father in “House of Sand and Fog.” The best part (sarcasm) is that Alfred Molina will play a Persian again after his abusive and oppressive Iranian husband role in the 1991 propaganda film, “Not Without My Daughter”! As a user on IMDB commented: “Tamina = Indian / Gemma Arterton= White; What the hell is going on?”

Yeah, so what is going on? It’s not like Iranian actors and actresses are non-existent. A simple explanation may come from the fact that the film is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the Hollywood producer of “Pirates of the Caribbean” and other successful mega-hit blockbusters. It seems like he wanted to play it “safe” since casting real Persians/Iranians would supposedly jeopardize the film’s box office success. In other words, Bruckheimer is more concerned about raking in the dough than conveying important messages about a community that he’s representing (read: exploiting) in his latest B-movie.

It’s important to note that this has happened before. Remember the animated film, “Sinbad and the Seven Seas” released by Dreamworks in 2003? The legend of Sinbad, an Arab sailor, is a classic Arabian Nights tale which the animated film distanced itself from in the most direct way possible. In his article, “Why Hollywood Drew a Veil Over Sinbad’s Arab Roots,” Sean Clarke writes:

…[I]n this version, Sinbad is from Syracuse (in Sicily, as opposed to New York State). The love of his life, Marina, is a noblewoman of Thebes. His estranged best friend is Proteus, the son of King Daimas, and his most dangerous enemy is Eris, the goddess of chaos. Every Arab reference has been removed, and replaced with something vaguely Greek.

Jack G. Shaheen, the author of “Reel Bad Arabs,” added:

This was an ideal opportunity to shatter some stereotypes about Arab and Muslim villains. When I spoke to Jeffrey Katzenberg – a visionary producer – I asked him to include some reference to Arabs or Arab culture. He didn’t seem surprised that I mentioned it, which presumably means that it was discussed early on in the development of the film.

I think maybe they decided to play it safe, not to ruffle any feathers by having neither Arab heroes nor Arab villains. Basically they’re out to make as much money as possible, and I think they were worried that if they took a risk on an Arab hero they might have suffered at the box office…”

The same argument can be made about Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” where a Middle-Eastern man, Jesus (peace be upon him), was played by a White American actor, Jim Caviezel. As William Rivers Pitt wrote in his article, “‘The Passion’ of the Americans,” putting a “white Jesus Christ to the cross on film will generate a far more emotional response from the American viewing public than the crucifixion of a savior who actually looks like he is from the Middle East.” Similarly, it seems that Hollywood filmmakers don’t believe an American audience can connect with “Prince of Persia” if the main character, God forbid, was actually played by an Iranian/Persian actor!

There isn’t any doubt in my mind that concerns were raised about “Prince of Persia” among many Hollywood producers since Iran is (wrongly) labeled an “existential” and “nuclear threat” to Israel. As with the Sinbad animated film, it seems that authentic Persian history, facts, and roots are going to be ignored in favor of Hollywood’s own Orientalized and exocitized version of the Middle-East — one in which brown people are played by White actors. It’s an extremely offensive and insulting modern form of Blackface which says only White people can play central Middle-Eastern characters.

Hollywood’s ethnocentrism shines shamelessly again.

Racialicious Note: This post from TransGriot is from mid-June, so this festival has passed. But we thought this great list of African American LGBTQ films was worth posting anyway.

TransGriot Note: Received this interesting e-mail from the Maysles Institute in NYC about a TBLG film retrospective slated to kick off on Juneteenth (June 19) at the Maysles Cinema.

With arguments often eerily reminiscent of old rationales for black oppression, gays and lesbians remain openly, legally and even, ‘righteously’, discriminated against.

For LGBT people of all races, knowing ourselves, making our extraordinary history known to others, much as with blacks, becomes a key component to liberation. If LGBT heritage remains often obscured and belittled, achievements of African American lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, are less well known still.

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, the film festival, Homo-Harlem: A Film Retrospective, Friday, June 19th-Saturday, June 27th, cosponsored by the Maysles Cinema at 343 Malcolm X Boulevard with Men of All Colors Together, seeks to help to remedy this lack of recognition.

Through a series of coordinated screenings, critical discussions and walking tours, Homo-Harlem for the first time officially brings Stonewall observations uptown to focus on and honor, figures as diverse as poets Audre Lorde and Langston Hughes, social justice activist Bayard Rustin, composer Billy Strayhorn, photographer Marvin Smith and living legend Storme DeLarverie, whose courageous stand at the Stonewall Bar, 40 years ago, literally helped set in motion the entire Gay Pride Movement.

We LGBT people have always been busy making Harlem better, as one resident reported in 1928, “Never no wells of loneliness in Harlem…” Space is limited for this exhilarating experience, so be sure to make a reservation in advance and get ready to be enlightened, to be amazed and to party hard!

Homo-Harlem Curator and Author Michael Henry Adams

Please direct all press and requests for reservations to cinema@mayslesinstitute.org

Homo Harlem: A Film Retrospective

$10 Suggested Donation For All Screenings

Friday, June 19th

Opening Night at the Museum of the City of New York
(1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd St, Enter at 104th St)

6:00pm Cocktail Reception

7:00pm Discussion: Kirk Shannon-Butts, Michael Henry Adams

7:30pm Screening
Blueprint (Short Preview)
Kirk Shannon-Butts, 2008
Harlem shot and set, Blueprint is the story of Keith and Nathan – two New York City college freshmen trying to make a connection.

Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life
Robert Levi,1999, 83 min.
Today, historians and scholars agree that Billy Strayhorn remains one of the most under-recognized American composers in history. Born in 1915, Strayhorn chose to live openly as a gay black man. It was perhaps this decision-and his lifelong devotion to Duke Ellington-which contributed to his near anonymity as a major American composer. While Ellington is arguably the most influential and celebrated jazz composer of the 20th century, Strayhorn is unrecognized. Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life poses answers to the question of who was Billy Strayhorn, and why is he still relatively unknown?

(Maysles Cinema, 343 Lenox Ave. between 127th & 128th Street, June 20th-27th)

Saturday, June 20th
2:00pm
The Edge of Each Other’s Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde
Jennifer Abod, 2002, 59 min.
This powerful documentary is a moving tribute to legendary black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992). One of the most celebrated icons of feminism’s second wave, Lorde inspired several generations of activists with her riveting poetry, serving as a catalyst for change and uniting the communities of which she was a part: black arts and black liberation, women’s liberation and lesbian and gay liberation.

Litany For Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde
Ada Griffin and Michelle Parkerson, 1995, 60 min.
From Lorde’s childhood roots in Harlem to her battle with breast cancer, this moving film explores a life and a body of work and makes connections between the civil rights movement, the women’s movement and the struggle for lesbian and gay rights.

Greetings from Africa
Cheryl Dunye, 1994, 8 min.
In this highly entertaining short, Cheryl Dunye uses her dry wit to ruminate on lesbian dating ’90s style. Cheryl (playing herself) is searching for someone to date. Unfortunately, most of her friends are still stuck in those long-term “relationships from the ’80s”. Just when she thinks all is lost, she meets L, a beautiful, mysterious and captivating woman. Cheryl gets caught up in the chase and L leads her in and out of hot water.

Sunday, June 21
2:00pm
Prepare for Saints: The Making of a Modern Opera
Steven Watson, 1999, 27 mins
A chronicle of the making of the Modernist 1934 Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, (which included an all-black cast from Harlem church choirs and nightclubs.)
Q&A with Director Steve Watson

Portrait of Jason
Shirley Clarke, 1967, 105 min.
Interview with Jason Holliday aka Aaron Payne, house boy, would be cabaret performer, and self proclaimed hustler giving one man’s gin-soaked pill-popped, view of what it was like to be black and gay in 1960′s America.

Monday, June 22
7:00pm
Storme: Lady of the Jewel Box
Dir. Michelle Parkerson, 1987. 21 min.
“It ain’t easy…being green” is the favorite expression of Storme DeLarverie, a woman whose life flouted prescriptions of gender and race. During the 1950′s and 60′s she toured the black theatre circuit as a mistress of ceremonies and the sole male impersonator of the legendary Jewel Box Revue, America’s first integrated female impersonation show and forerunner of La Cage aux Folles. Storme herself emerges as a remarkable woman, who came up during hard times but always “kept a touch of class.” Storme was also a witness to the Stonewall Rebellion 40 years ago and is a founding member of the Stonewall Veterans Association.

How Do I Look
Wolfgang Busch, 2007, 48 min.
How Do I Look captures the Harlem “Ball” traditions that originated in the 70s, which was historically an off shot from the Harlem “Drag” Balls from the 20s. Because of the loss of hundreds of members and leaders of the “Ball” community due to the HIV epidemic, this film recorded an important aspect of history while it was still available.

Panel TBA

Tuesday, June 23
7:00pm
Brother to Brother
Rodney Evans, 2004, 87 min.
Winner of numerous awards including the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize and the Gordon Parks Screenwriting Award, Brother to Brother follows the emotional and psychological journey of a young black gay artist as he discovers the hidden legacies of the gay and lesbian subcultures within the Harlem Renaissance.
(with a short clip of an interview with Bruce Nugent on Gay life in the 20s.)

Q&A with Tom Wirth, Literary Executor for Bruce Nugent

Wednesday, June 24
7:00pm
Brother Outsider, The Life of Bayard Rustin
Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer, 2002, 83 min.
This meditation on the parallels between racism and homophobia illuminates the life and work of Bayard Rustin, a visionary activist and strategist who has been called the “unknown hero” of the civil rights movement. Daring to live as an openly gay man during the fiercely homophobic 1940s, 50s and 60s, Brother Outsider reveals the price that Rustin paid for his openness, chronicling both the triumphs and setback of his remarkable 60-year career.

Panel:
Dir. Bennett Singer
Walter Naegle, Rustin’s partner until his passing in 1987 at 75
Ernest Green, The Little Rock Nine
Adam Green, Historian, Author of “Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955″
Moderator: Michael Henry Adams

Thursday, June 25
5:30pm
Walking Tour*

7:30pm
Paris is Burning
Jennie Livingston, 1990, 78 min.
Many consider Paris Is Burning to be an invaluable document of the end of the “Golden Age” of New York City drag balls, as well as a thoughtful exploration of race, class, and gender in America.

9:30pm
Dinner & Afterparty at Billie’s Black*

*Complete package (walking tour, screening and after party) cost is $50.00
Contact- homoharlemtour@aol.com
60 person limit on tickets so get them while you can!
Tickets for the screening only can be purchased at the Maysles Cinema the night of.

Friday, June 26
5:30pm
Walking Tour*

7:30pm
Looking for Langston
Isaac Julien, 1988, 45 min.
A black and white, fantasy-like recreation of high-society gay men during the Harlem Renaissance, with archival footage and photographs intercut with a story. The text is rarely explicit, but the freedom of gay Black men in the 1920s in Harlem is suggested and celebrated visually.

James Baldwin: Witness
Angie Corcetti, 2003, 60 min.
A minister’s son from Harlem, James Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village and began writing essays for left-wing journals. With the success of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and dozens of non-fiction works, Baldwin became an international voice on American Black life in the 1950s and 60s. A look at this Black American Gay icon’s life.

9:30pm
Dinner at Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Too*

*Complete package (walking tour, screening and dinner) cost is $50.00
Contact- homoharlemtour@aol.com

Saturday, June 27
11:30am Brunch at Chez Lucien*

1:00pm
Walking Tour*

3:00pm
M&M SMITH: For Posterity’s Sake
Heather Lyons, 1996, 57 min
Morgan and Marvin Smith, twin brothers and prolific African American artists, boldly moved from Kentucky to New York in 1933 to pursue artistic careers. By 1937 they had opened a photo studio next door to Harlem’s renowned Apollo Theatre. Thus began 50-year-long careers as still and motion picture photographers, painters and sound recordists. This story is richly visualized through the Smiths’ photos, films and paintings and poignantly told by Morgan and Marvin Smith and friends such as Eartha Kitt.

Clip of Short Conversation with Marvin Smith
40 min.

*Complete package (walking tour, screening and brunch) cost is $45.00
Contact: homoharlemtour@aol.com

For perspective’s sake, let me start with a confession: Tropic Thunder made me laugh aloud several times, even after the misgivings I had about Kirk Lazarus. The Alpa Chino twist in the village was brilliant, even if the villagers were written like something out of an Oliver Stone wet dream. And I regularly laugh as much as I grimace at South Park and Family Guy, neither of which is exactly friendly to … well, anybody. So I’m not opposed to “lowbrow” humor.

What I cannot abide is brainless humor. And so, when I tell you that The Hangover is celluloid excrement, I don’t say it lightly. I refuse to believe that it’s “just me.” But I’m telling you, R readers: this isn’t a comedy, or even a film. I’m now halfway convinced it’s proof those cheeky Hulu “alien plot” commercials are really taunting messages of truth from our secret alien overlords. Sure, you might say, “just turn your brain off, it’s a movie,” but don’t you need a working brain to enjoy any movie?

SPOILERS AHOY!

Ostensibly a Las Vegas travel ad masquerading as a bro-mantic comedy, the root of the problem is one common to a lot of modern comedies: we’re dealing not with characters, but anthropomorphic third-rate comedic tropes – Phil the Player (Bradley Cooper), Alan the Weirdo (Zack Galifanakis) and Stuart the Wuss (Ed Helms). Coding them as such is believable when you start a film, but there’s barely a hint of personal development, let alone the “growing up” moments that usually permeate these types of films.

What makes Hangover different, I suppose, is that Doug, the groom-to-be and Sensible Guy (Justin Bartha) doubles as the Macguffin, as his disappearance spurs the remaining trio to retrace their steps around town. Along the way, they’re seemingly beset upon by “wacky” characters of various stripes – specifically, different POCs.

There’s the effeminate Asian gangster (Ken Jeong) and his aggro henchmen; the incompetent POC Officer Garden (Cleo King, playing second banana to The Daily Show’s Rob Riggle); and, of course, Mike Tyson, here playing a Dr. Evil-fied caricature of himself. Even the non-aggressive POC characters, Eddie the chapel owner (Brian Callen, who’s of Italian and Irish descent but who’s character is vaguely coded as being Not From Around Here) and The Other Doug (Mike Epps) don’t amount to anything. I swear, when Epps’ character said, “Dere you go with dat word again” – and I tell you that he said dere instead of “there” – I cringed so hard my spine must have cracked. Eddie, who tries to defend the boys against the gangsters, gets shot and is literally left behind, never to be seen again. How could we not root for these guys, right?

As is also typical in this new school of comedy, women don’t fare any better. Besides the villains in Vegas, we meet Doug’s fiancee Tracy (Sasha Barrese) and Stuart’s girlfriend Melissa (Rachael Harris), both generic hen-peckers. The former almost chews Doug out at the altar before he grovels for forgiveness, and Harris’ character isn’t allowed even one bit of humanity; she goes from Zero to Shrew instantaneously. The one woman who means well, Heather Graham’s escort/stripper with a heart of gold – wow, no lazy fetishization there, right? — is, along with Eddie, the only other person in town who isn’t trying to screw the boys over. But even Jade comes out a loser in the end; come on, does anybody really believe Stuart is going to go see her again? He barely even breaks up with Harris’ character in a wet blanket of a “comeuppance” scene.

The only POCs who seem to do well are the ones on the soundtrack – at least, in the first act of the film, when tracks by Usher, Kanye West and T.I are used to show us how “cool” the whole scene is before the evening degenerates. The film’s denouement, at the wedding, gives us a white singer “ironically” ripping through “Candy Shop” and “Fame” in what, intentionally or not, comes off like a frat-boy Sexual Chocolate ripoff. Memo to Dan Finnerty: You’re not the Eddie Murphy of 2008, pal, let alone 1988.

But the worst offense are the final three shots before the credits fill the screen. As the film concludes, we get to see pictures of what really went down during the night in question. These three doofs shown cavorting with POC strippers is one thing. The image of Stuart punching Wayne Newton might have made for part of a genuinely funny scene. But the final three shots, depicting Alan getting oral sex from an elderly woman of color, went beyond “edgy” and otherwise lazy filmmaking into something genuinely sickening. And the people around me in the theater were laughing! I wanted to stand up in the theater and yell TELL ME WHY YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY! Was it funny because she was old? Because Alan is “off”? Is this what “turning my brain off” would allow me to enjoy?

So this isn’t like I think Hangover director Todd Phillips’ other noted work, Old School, was the tops of hilarity. But even in that movie, the characters possessed humanity – a quality none of the principals here seem to posess. Also, consider Friday, another comedy that became a hit by featuring “regular guys.” Not only would Craig, Ice Cube’s character, not have wanted to perpetrate an image like Alan’s, but do you think people would have dismissed it as “mindless humor” if, as the film’s co-writer, Cube had written him to?

The audience laughing around me at those final shots left me with a scary thought: that this really could be America’s #1 Comedy. It’s little wonder Sacha Baron Cohen is able to do what he does so easily. Maybe we’ve had it wrong all along – Borat and the upcoming Bruno aren’t comedies at all – they’re horror movies, holding up the mirror to our new idea of funny. And we can’t even see the cracks, because we’re too busy being “entertained.” Turn your brain off at your peril.

We should note that the latter project has no shooting date–and the Weekly Ketchup writers slyly suggest that, perhaps, this is because there’s already a black WWII flick in the works—a Tuskegee Airmen project, currently filming in Europe.

Here’s the thing: we love heralding Black accomplishments as much as the next guy–and far be it from us to stand in the way of Our Own Stories Being Told. But aren’t most of these films rather indistinguishable from one another? If you’ve seen Remember the Titans, you’ve seen Glory Road. If you’ve seen Ray, you seen Cadillac Records (or parts of it, anyway). If you’ve seen The Rosa Parks story, you’ve seen Boycott. If you’ve seen Ali, you’ve seen… Will Smith in one too many of these vanity projects.***

It isn’t that we don’t endorse Black films being greenlighted; we do. It isn’t that we don’t love our history; we do. It’s that biopics, as a genre, are largely rote oversimplifications of incredibly complex lives. And no matter how nuanced an actor’s performance (or, as in the case of Denzel as Melvin Tolson, how phoned in), the formulaic storytelling impedes any real understanding of the person’s struggles and, more importantly, the accomplishment(s) that warranted a film in the first place. They all sort of bleed together untill you’re like, “You remember that flick where Cuba Gooding’s in the submarine and he’s a cook who manned a gatling gun?”

The best way to know your history is to research it for yourself. All the swelling music and single-teared male stars in the world aren’t going to provide you comprehensive—or even accurate—knowledge of actual events. So these “First Black ___ to Do _____” biopics work best when you go into them with your facts about the film’s subject straight. That way, you’re just watching for entertainment value and voluntary emotional manipulation.

All that said, we have to admit, we’re more than a little bit amped about Josh Brolin’s genius plan to both produce and star in a John Brown biopic. You can never have enough films about bloody, if ill-fated slave revolts.