Balloon Juice points to ellaesther, who finally got a chance to peep Chris Rock‘s documentary Good Hair, and left the experience pretty disheartened. It was like watching beautiful women talk about their lifetime of dieting, their tricks for dressing to look thinner, their methods for cutting calories during the holidays, smiling broadly over their successes Read More
When last we saw Kerry Washington and Anthony Mackie together, they were quarreling ex-lovers She Hate Me, Spike Lee‘s epic misfire about corporate malfeasance, lipstick lesbians and, um, nontraditional family arrangements. It was hard to gauge whether the two have any screen chemistry, since they were forced to spout lots of clunky, implausible lines. On Read More
I’m wild amped to see this: A Tribe Called Quest was (is?) one of hip-hop’s seminal acts. Midnight Marauders was the first hip-hop album I ever loved, and until they broke up, they were something of a personal musical North Star. I didn’t realize, though, that things had gotten this acrimonious between them.
Dodai Stewart asks whether the casting agents for the upcoming film adaptation of The Hobbit are racist because they turned away a dark-skinned woman seeking an extra role as a hobbit. The agents’ reasoning is that hobbits are fair-skinned. The woman who got turned away says it’s racism. Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings director Read More
Will Phonte be there?!
What, you don’t think Candyman, directed by a white man, written by a white man, and starring Virginia Madsen, should have a place in the black film canon? Given those facts you may have a decent argument. But! Candyman himself is black, it’s set in the projects, and there are Rottweilers and gang-bangers. Plus, it’s Read More
There’s a scene at the very beginning of the recent animated film Batman: Under the Red Hood in which the Joker, in a characterization that is more Heath Ledger than Mark Hamill, is taunting a bound Robin while he beats him over the head with a crowbar. This homicidal Joker is the way Batman’s archnemesis Read More
Even now I remember those public school mandated Christopher Columbus day celebrations. By the third grade I learned to loathe those songs we had to sing about the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb. In school I was taught Columbus was an explorer and hero Read More
Crossposted from Colorlines: In their new music video for “New York is Killing Me,” Gil Scott-Heron and director Chris Cunningham turn popular characterizations of the Big Apple completely on their heads. The video, which was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan last week, has one simple message: it can be a Read More
Say what you will about Spike Lee’s polemics; the man knows how to craft a powerful narrative. Whereas Part One of If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise opened with the excitement of the Saint’s Superbowl win, the opening montage of Part Two—filled with footage of the havoc wreaked by the oil spill—set Read More
