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Nov 28, 2016As a society we’ve been conditioned to be generally more tolerant of manipulative, egomaniacal behavior from white women.
↩︎ The Establishment
John Singleton, director of Boyz N the Hood, on the deep roots of black Hollywood flowering today: "If you didn't have Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night, you wouldn't have had Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in 48 Hrs. If you didn't have Gordon Parks directing Shaft the way he did, you wouldn't have Denzel Washington."
Marvel just added Luke Cage, a strong and silent black man, to its cinematic universe, and some eager audiences expected "the Black Lives Matter show." The reality is more complicated. While the show's creators were able to convince Netflix to embrace the n-word in the show's Harlem setting, Luke Cage himself delivers a blackness different from what fans expected. Notably, he's worried about black-on-black crime, respectability politics, and the like.
Luke Cage is really bulletproof Herman Cain ��
— Vann R. Newkirk II (@fivefifths) October 4, 2016
Even Cage's superpowers have left some parents wondering what relevancy the show has in pushing back against racist violence. "Cage’s skin is impenetrable—a power that many black parents wish they could bestow upon their children today."
Selma director Ava DuVernay dishes on secrets of black Hollywood, including this one: few directors know how to light actors of color. "Historically, you've had really muddy, unforgiving, unintentional images of black people. Usually, you have two people in a scene, and in the history of cinema the hero is most likely going to be the white guy. And the other guy is his friend who is carrying the bag or whatever, and you're not going to light for that guy."
Tim Burton is right about one thing in his explanation of yet another lilywhite cast: tokenism isn't the solution to Hollywood's representation problem. But he's wrong about pretty much everything else about minority representation in Hollywood, and only courageous directors standing up for art may be able to change the status quo.
As A.O. Scott says in a great conversation on American racism on film and the challenges facing an upcoming season of films by and featuring African-Americans: "Commerce can provide its own set of excuses... You can’t necessarily blame a specific movie for being about the travails of a white guy, but surely the fact that something like 90 percent of all releases fit that description is a problem."
Oct 4, 2016Witness a version of black pleasure that renders black people as sexual beings but not as sexual objects.
↩︎ LitHub
If Luke Cage seemed to shy from the Black Lives Matter mantle, The Birth of a Nation seemed to run toward it. But apparently the film isn't worth defending: its poor pacing and unselfconscious posing contribute to its inability to communicate what is so enthralling about the paradox of righteous black revenge embodied by Nat Turner's vicious rebellion. And that's without entering director Nate Parker's involvement in a college rape, rumors of which dogged the film from Sundance all the way to the Sunday pages of the New York Times.
