Sara Libby calls Crash the worst movie of the aughts. It’s been called a “feel-good” racism movie – one that leads people to believe they’re on the right side of racism, when in fact they’re just having their buttons pushed and their preconceived notions re-affirmed. In the film, the characters exist in what former L.A. Read More
Ta-Nehisi posts a video of Gene Siskel (still deeply missed) and Roger Ebert critiquing Clueless when it came out: He adds: “Poorly drawn movies tend to depend on poorly drawn characters. And poorly drawn black characters almost always descend into stereotype and cartoon. Not that I’m an expert on Teen Movies, but I can’t really Read More
In graduate school, I had to attend a series of talks from magazine editors and one* of them, from Harper’s, faced a tough question from a friend of mine who asked a lot of tough questions of our guests. She read through the masthead’s list of all-male, mostly Anglo-sounding names and asked, “Where’s the diversity?” Read More
I’m guest blogging at Alyssa Rosenberg’s (with some other fantastic bloggers) for the next 10 days or so, while she’s living it up in Cambodia. Inspired by a post from SEK, I put up a piece on Iron Man being a thoroughly mediocre film: I managed to get through the first 25 minutes on the Read More
Via Alyssa, who says this is “like a Judd Apatow movie got stuck in a blender with a movie about a couple of Magical Africans.” I invite you to view the trailer for Wonderful World. (Video is out of sync, but that doesn’t make it worse.) My thoughts: 1) I really like the woman, but Read More
In graduate school, one alarmingly bad, blindingly obvious article about gay marriage convinced me that the New York Times Magazine, the one you get for free on Sundays, is actually bad for journalism. That the world’s pre-eminent journalistic institution can churn out, at times, such a poorly written and edited magazine has always troubled me, Read More
I saw Good Hair the night it came out, but I’ve been holding off writing about it because my feelings about it keep changing. I’m still not sure just what to make of it. It’s a really, really funny film, but it throws out all sorts of eye-popping numbers and images without really commenting on Read More
Latoya posted this short which is part of some promotion by Bloomingdale’s. (But don’t hold that against it.) It’s by Barry Jenkins, who wrote and directed Medicine for Melancholy, which I really, really dug.
Very well done. [Via Africa is a Country. h/t Winslow.]
I’m probably gonna get pilloried for this by some folks, but I don’t care much for Spike Lee. Yeah, he’s talented and a pioneer and Do The Right Thing rightly deserves the praise it’s accorded. But the quality of his work varies too wildly, there’s a weird misogynistic streak in many of his films, and Read More
