Film Archives

(The whole thing is on YouTube, who knew?) 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 Read More

Every conversation I’ve overheard/overseen, either on or offline, about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (set to hit theatres March 5th) always ends up with a statement about how dark and gloomy and creepy he made it.  Why did he have to do that?  What’s his problem?  Why can’t he just leave the classics alone?  I Read More

A few  summers ago, I was keeping company with a lovely young lady who let it slip that she had never seen love jones, the moody 1997 romance starring Nia Long and Larenz Tate. Among young, aspirational creative class Negroes, the film had taken on mythical dimensions as a portrait of the kind of lives Read More

*For those who are ridiculously late (like myself) and haven’t watched  it yet, there are spoilers ahead. Consider yourself warned. Along with the Oscar buzz surrounding The Hurt Locker there has been another conversation taking place – civilian impressions of the film versus those of military personnel and veterans.  A scathing review by Iraq War Read More

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 Read More

Julia Roberts is going to play the lead in Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir that was on the best-seller list for hundreds of weeks. It makes a lot of sense to combine everything in the world we despise into one entity. Now we don’t have to divide our loathing for Roberts’s toothy, over-earnestness Read More

First things first: The Book of Eli is about religion. More specifically, The Book of Eli is about Christian religion. So those unnamed people Roger Ebert says are “attacking” it as “fundamentalist propaganda” kind of have a point. Like Ebert, I won’t tell you what the film’s titular book is: but Eli (Denzel Washington) starts Read More

I’m kind of tired of the bourgie-black-parents-have-to-deal-with-their-kid-dating-interracially thing. A lot of the humor in Our Family Wedding (and Guess Who and Something New and hell, even that terrible MTV movie Love Song) seems to rest on the fact that the blacks! are! middle! class! With their cotillions and tennis and fancy cars! Look, Guess Who’s Read More
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