I don’t expect you to have ever heard of For Love of Ivy. I hadn’t heard of it until a couple of years ago, one night when I was hanging out with my dad and we were trolling On Demand for something to watch.
So, as we resurrect “Revisiting The Canon” here at PB, I realize this is an out-of-place choice. This movie isn’t actually in the black canon, like previous entries Boyz In The Hood, Eve’s Bayou, and Idlewild. But it is a black movie, in the sense that it features two black leads, and was cowritten by one of the greatest stars of the 60s, Sidney Poitier. Also, it’s old, and definitely worth revisiting.
Last Saturday, TVOne aired Idlewild (as I’m sure they do pretty often) and I decided that, three years after my first DVD viewing, it might be time to give Outkast’s initially disappointing musical another try. So I buckled in for the two-and-a-half-hour screening (complete with edits and commercials) and now, I think I’ve figured out where it all went wrong.
Eve’s Bayou, Kasi Lemmons’s amazing directorial debut, is the story of a young girl who learns a public secret about her father and must deal with the consequences of her discovery. Through a combination of voiceover narration, flashbacks, and premonitions within memories, Eve’s Bayou turns out to be much more than the tale of ten-year-old Eve becoming disillusioned with her father. The film underscores how blurry truth can be when one relies on sight and memory. More…
It’s hard to overstate the impact John Singleton’s 1991 film Boyz n’ the Hood had on black cinema. It helped launch the careers of a slew of prominent actors: Laurence Fishburne, Angela Bassett, Cuba Gooding, Jr., (who would all go on to be Oscar nominees on other films), as well as Nia Long, Morris Chestnut, and Ice Cube. (Regina King, who remains the most criminally underemployed actress in Hollywood, has a bit part, as well.) It garnered lots of critical praise two Academy Award nominations, bestowing upon it broader cultural legitimacy. And it created a template for “authenticity” that other films aimed at black audiences tried to emulate, and did, for the rest of the 1990’s, with varying degrees of success.*
It’s a shame, then, that it’s such a crappy movie. [Spoilers.]More…
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