After a brief conversation about John Hughes’ 1984 teen romcom classic, Sixteen Candles, this morning, I was reminded of something I’ve always suspected by never taken the time to truly analyze: romantic comedies are never as innocuous as their writers would have you believe. For all their spin about happy endings, they’re about as kind Read More
Nai and Ta-Nehisi have both smartly weighed in on the racial politics of the new X-men movie, so bear with me if your all race-and-comics’d out. The comics book industry has always been dominated by white male artists and scribes, which makes it sorta unsurprising that the avatars for their power fantasies have historically been Read More
Of all the X-men installments from the movie franchise, hands down “X-Men First Class” is its star pupil. It has all the components: vengeance, thrilling action scenes that don’t try to bombard you with all the latest special effects, and quality actors that transform these original 2-D comic book characters into fleshy, multi-faceted beings (well, Read More
I’m looking forward to seeing this documentary.
So many good things about this video. The best thing, I think, is how Monch & Co shed light on the most important issue regarding police brutality: someone is hurt/killed by the people who are charged to protect them. That individual, immediate crime shouldn’t be forgotten, or made smaller by people who want to jump Read More
The first and second installments of a four-part series of mock commercials part of Pierre Bennu’s larger series of paintings and films “deconstructing and re-envisioning images of people of color in commercial and pop culture.” Had me chortling in all sort of inappropriateness here at the college library cafe. Check Bennu’s exittheapple.com for more thought/art-provoking Read More
Reminder: For history nuts, bio buffs and ery’one else , “Thurgood”, Laurence Fishburne‘s one-man show about the civil rights activist and Supreme Court Justice premieres tonight on HBO tonight at 9PM. (There’s an encore presentation on February 27th in case you miss it.) I remember vaguely reading Marshall’s autobiography in junior high, but on my Read More
Jamelle digs into the Times story on the growing numbers of young people who are self-identifying as “mixed race.” The great majority of intermarriages take place between Hispanics, Asians, and whites. If there is a great population of multiracial people, it’s almost certain that they will be some combination of Hispanic and white, or Asian Read More
Dee Rees‘s Pariah and Goran Olsson‘s The Black Power Mixtape deal with the Black experience in America, but very differently — after all, we are not a monolith. The first, is about a young black lesbian coming to terms with her sexuality in the heart of Brooklyn. Movie treatment of queer issues are usually reserved Read More
A while back, Stacia expressed mild worry over Halle Berry‘s coming Frankie and Alice, in which the Oscar winner plays as a woman with multiple personalities — one of whom is a racist white lady: Let’s just say we’re really, really not looking forward to this. But then, do we ever look forward to films Read More
