blackprojectionist

I have to be frank. I've been so disappointed in the cinema, these days, I had to take a break from reviewing films. I'm seeing a host of films at my job as a projectionist, and man... it's been bleak recently. I kind of had to sit back and say, "let me wait to write a review until I see something I can stand up and celebrate." That film is "42."

Chadwick Boseman is very strong in the role of Jackie Robinson. He plays it with eloquence, sensitivity, and a very tactile smoldering rage at the injustice that plays out from the white people who didn't want to see baseball integrated. As in Django Unchained, writer/director Brian Helgeland is faced with the task of making a film with a strong Black lead where most of the white characters are despicable. He does it by putting the white point of entry character right up front in Harrison Ford's Branch Rickey, who loves the game, and knows that bringing Black athletes into baseball with invigorate the sport and sell more tickets. Ford and Boseman play well together, and Helgaland doesn't fall into the trappings of making Ford's character overly fatherly... it's business, and there's no disputing that fact.

Nicole Beharie is delightful as Rachel Robinson. She didn't have a whole lot to work with, just basically there to support her man. But hey, it's just nice to see a sister supporting her man... period!

Here's where the writer comes into it. I remember reading the tell tale sign that your film isn't pro woman is if the women in the film only speak lines related to the goings on of the male characters. Rachel Robinson has no life outside of her husband, doesn't even really get to be a mother to her son on camera... which was kind of strange. But, then, it's Jackies's story. So I guess where I felt like the film fell short was in establishing a certain intimacy with the characters. It's tough with a film that's supposed to be a sports/action biopic. The other thing that I wasn't crazy about was the use of Andre Holland as Wendell Smith, basically playing the non-threatening black man with glasses who types out news for black papers on his lap at baseball games and he and Robinson take way too long to have any kind of brotherhood?

So "42" is the kind of film you can take the kids to, and not feel like you're planting seeds of self hatred in their minds... which in this day and age, is a real relief and breath of fresh air. Could it have been better? Yes. Would Spike Lee have done a better job? Well, I don't think there's a director out there who is more of a sports fanatic. I just have been so disappointed by his films of late, I'm not sure I could say "yes." I've heard rumors that he has been trying to make the Joe Louis Jr. story, the Brown Bomber, for years, but with Vin Diesel in the lead as Joe Louis? We'll see. What if a Black writer/director would have done "42." Would it have been more intimate? I tend to think it may have.

It's taken me a while to write this review. There was so much hype for Quintin Tarantino's latest film, Django Unchained! My disappointment in the film was so overwhelming, that it sent me reeling into a week-long depression. When I watched the trailer, it looked like it would be a good movie. Then I saw Spike Lee's reaction, and it had me reconsider. I began doing some research, watching some of the films that influenced Tarantino, one of his favorite films, "Mandingo" and the Norman Wexler penned Sequel to "Mandingo," "Drum." "Drum," is almost the same film with Ken Norton in the same role for Norton, basically. These films made a lot of money. Interestingly, Norman Wexler went on to write the hugely popular "Saturday Night Fever." So, it's no secret that the Blaxploitation film Movement of the 70's was heralded by white writers and directors who's stereotypical notions of "blackness" blend savage and often extremely violent depictions of black life, and cash in big at the box office. Does it sound familiar I also re-watched some spaghetti westerns, westerns that were shot in Italy and Spain by Italians, sometimes with a few American actors, on very low budgets and often scoring with a huge profit margin at the box office. I watched "Death Rides A Horse," and the original, "Django," is also available in its entirety on you tube. Then I think I made the mistake of reading Tarantino's original script. The original script has a very long, brutal gang rape scene of Django's wife Broomhilda, played by Kerry Washington, and in the original script, Django is murdered in the end. So I went into the screening expecting to be completely outraged, but also feeling excited that Hollywood had made a film so offensive to the Black community, that there would be outrage and it could possibly spark a new wave of filmmakers making much better films about our history and current state of being. Nope! The film has been reviewed and reviewed and reviewed, so I'm going to get right to the point. My problems with the film are this: 1.) The n-word is used 110 times. 2.) Django, played brilliantly by Jamie Foxx, can only become heroic with Dr. King Shultz, played by Christoph Waltz, the white savior character's help and belief in him. 3.) Absurd graphic violence, heads exploding, a slave being torn apart by dogs, a woman being shot and sent flying back 20 feet... this is all just bad taste in my opinion. Things are so much more powerful when they're suggested and not shown graphically... 4.) They put my man Sam Jackson in black-face to play the "uncle tom" character. Damn! He isn't dark enough already? He has to be darker to play more evil? What's up with that? 5.) Broomhilda, Kerry Washington's character had like six lines in the whole film. What? A sister don't have no opinions or responses to share? Jesus... it was like a non-part for an actor of her caliber. They could have just gone ahead and cast a video vixen if they just wanted a mannequin. 6.) The depiction of the slaves is generally of an ignorant, slouching, defeated characters. Slavery was brutal, especially in this country in the south, but it's been documented by historians from the period like Pierre De Vaissiére and Baron De Wimpffen that enslaved Africans were extremely intelligent, crafty, clever, resilient, powerful human beings. 7.) Slaves fighting to the death is a complete fabrication, created by a racist lens in the slave narrative films of the 70s and made more graphic in this film. 8.) The overall experience of watching the film was unpleasant. The actors are good, the soundtrack is good, but the tone of the film was drenched in a certain vulgarity and void of soul quality that I found offensive. 9.) The scene where Django is about to have his balls cut off, I felt, was a mental castration to the Black men in the audience. 10.) The fact that folks in the small town in Texas were outraged by seeing Django riding a horse was completely ridiculous as it's pretty well known that between 15 and 25% of cowboys were Black. 11.) I see audiences reactions often being somewhat racist, depending on who's in the theater. If it's a predominantly white audience, they laugh at things like Django putting on a top hat. What's so funny about that? Top hats were in style back then, suckers! There is a lot of laughter for white audiences and very quiet reflection by Black audiences. 12.) I could go on and on... but I won't. So, overall, I felt like the film is extremely toxic for young viewers, gives a distorted sense of history, was bad taste and has gotten a lot of undue praise. Django Unchained creates some satisfaction for Black folks who see a brother kicking butt and not taking any crap from white folks, killing many of them brutally, often in cold blood and it's an outlet for our collective rage... to a degree. White people who watch the film get to feel morally superior to those backwards slave holders via the German bounty hunter who has a much greater command of the English language than that native speakers in the film. What is the effect of all this graphic violence on our minds? I'm one to believe its part of why there are so many shootings in this country. Seeing 300,000 murders on TV and in the movies by the time we're 18 years old can only make such violence seem like one of our options of behavior. Does this film open the dialog for a discussion of slavery in this country? Perhaps for some. But ultimately I feel like it does more harm than good.

I'm always really happy to see films directed by African American women, period. It's so hard to get a budget, so hard to make it happen, and so few sistas writing and directing feature length narrative films, I make a point to support. When Ava DuVernay won the Best Director award 2012's Sundance Film Festival for her second feature film Middle of Nowhere, I was really overjoyed, and excited to see the film. Especially since the film covers a subject I'm very passionate about, incarceration of African American men. I was also excited to see that David Oyewolo was cast to play "Brian," as I consider him one of the greatest actors in Hollywood; the Sidney Poitier of his generation. And wow, the lead played by Emayatzy Corinealdi was a real treat to see her work, she's beautiful and has chops! Add one of the most talented up and coming Directors of Photography, Bradford Young to the equation and yooooooooo! So, I'm all the way in... and yeah... I find myself in the middle of nowhere. I want to feel more, the actors are good... and the film is kind of muted, seems to be mostly shot in natural light, lots of shadows, brooding. No commentary on prison industrial complex, this film is about relationships, in a vacuum. But I want to talk about brothers being incarcerated and an exponentially greater margin for the same crimes committed by white males, but... yeah... no, not this film. So, I got over that, and rode the film for what it is, a look at a difficult time in a woman's life, who had really invested a lot in her relationship with her incarcerated husband. You know what I dug though, we get to see folks who are living on the margins in L.A., like they don't cars and have to take the bus, folks are struggling... like in reality out there. And I really respect DuVernay for letting her characters be struggling financially, which is in itself actually revolutionary for most films that have to do with Black characters in Hollywood these days... it's like it's daring to not be corporate lawyers, athletes, marketing tycoons or whatever. Yeah, I want to see a story about a bus driver, an nurse and an incarcerated brother, here played by Omari Hardwick. So why do I feel, like I want to like this film more than I actually did when I left the theater. Is it because it didn't offer a Hollywood ending for me? Nooooo, that can't be it!!!! Definitely worth seeing, but wasn't really the film I had got so hyped to see.

Thank God I decided to take off Friday and Saturday from the job and support MIST Harlem Cinema and ACT NOW's Best of New Black Voices in Cinema Festival. First time director Wilkie Cornelius Jr.'s film Single Hills was quite the crowd pleaser and had the vibrant energy of that Brooklyn movement that seems to be a renaissance. The story follows a filmmaker's journey in commitment issues, played by J Kyle Manzay, testing the patience of his girlfriend Lisa, played skillfully by Krystal Hill. This is a really important film in this day and age. As Friday's film "Let's Stay Together," examined, Black and Latino Americans are in a cultural crisis when it comes to maintaining lasting relationships. So here's this Brooklyn wave of films coming with self reflective films that ask echo Marvin Gaye's inner questioning, "What's Going On?" What makes it so hard for us to put up our Playa capriciousness? These are real films that are being done outside the studio system on 100% passion. Jay loves Lisa but always has one foot out the door. He has a hard time calling her his girlfriend, and when she demands commitment, he fades out... like so many of us. This hit a heart chord for me personally, as I spent my 20s and 30s bouncing from one woman to the next, as is very common in NYC. As Junot Díaz says in a chorus in his new book, "This is How You Loose Her!" Cornelius gives some great lines to veteran actor, Victor Williams who plays Jay's wingman, friend and instigator. Wilkie Cornelius is a strong writer, and uses Jay's narration to carry the story through transitions, again, evidence in his years as a playwright. Overall, it's a really nice balance of comedy, tragedy and transformation. Yeah, it's a low budget film that may fall into the chickflick realm, where the male protagonist is sort of an anti-hero in the face of ever-loving and devout Lisa, but she is not one to be played, and puts dude through the ringer on some instant-karma tip. "Where can I see it?" I wish I could tell you, it's still in the festival circuit looking for a distributor. Bottom line is two thumbs up. We need more love stories that have substance and cause inner reflection. We need to work our stuff out so we can find happiness with each other. Brooklyn seems to be leading us in that direction.

With all these films with Abraham Lincoln coming out this year, I thought I'd give my two cents, beginning with Timur Bekmambetov's adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Bekmambetov is a Russian-Kazakh director who does his thing both in Hollywood and on his home turf. Seth Grahame-Smith is a filmmaker from Long Island who has been working with Tim Burton, wrote the screenplay for Burton's Dark Shadows. Grahame-Greene is a good writer. So I was interested in seeing how he would treat the story in this turning point in our country's history. He came with the idea that the South had amassed a bunch of vampires who were living off the blood of slaves. An interesting place to start a film. The film even has a freedman side kick childhood friend, "Will Johnson" in Anthony Mackey, of whom I'm a big fan. But alas, black folks were very much in the shadows of Lincoln and his martial arts master vampire killing sifu "Henry Sturges," played by Dominic Cooper. Mackey get's a tiny bit of martial arts action and even does a move that looks very capoeira-like, but this is a story about Lincoln, played with some charm by Benjamin Walker. It would have been a great opportunity to imagine Fredrick Douglass as an ass kicking martial arts knowing vampire slayer right there with Lincoln. The film is a blockbuster with all the perks of a blockbuster $69 million budget, incredible animation, sweeping animated photography, gravity defying martial arts... it's a lot of fun, really, unless you're Black and keep feeling marginalized by not having enough contribution to the vanquishing of this evil which sank its roots into the origin of slavery in this country.

My expectations were up. The preview showed some computer graphics that were some of the best I've ever seen. I had hoped that this film would be a redemption for the fiasco that was, "Avatar: The Last Air Bender," in terms of Hollywood having the integrity to cast an Indian fantastic story with an Indian protagonist complete with huge budget and high production value. As the lights went down, coming attractions past, I saw I was in for a long ride within the first two minutes of the film, as the story would be told to an American novelist in Canada, begging for a good story to write about after living in India for two years, "Because India is cheaper than Spain," while writing a novel set in Spain that he threw away. Already, my attention is being diverted from where it really belongs... this amazing story that on it's own is full of beauty and majesty, but cut short too many times to get a soggy corn flakes response from the American writer, played forgettably by Rafe Spall. I was wondering why Ang Lee felt the need to leave this spectacular story of mythic proportions about a shipwrecked boy, played very strongly by Suraj Sharma, surviving with a Bengali Tiger to this retelling motif as if the story needed to be validated by the American writer, to be worthy of the telling? This is a film I would love to reedit and can the whole present day part of the film, and stay with the journey of Pi... which is really beautiful. As it's an adaption of the book by Spanish writer Yann Martel, it would have been much better as a film loosely based on the novel, with a different ending and different approach to the story telling all together, in my humble opinion. I'm left wondering when the big Hollywood Studios like 20th Century Fox will have some courage that audiences have enough emotional intelligence to have a visceral connection with protagonists that are of a different race, different age, different language, different culture... think about how black folks love Kung Fu theater movies, Jamaicans loved westerns for years, and white American males have always been the largest consumers of Black Gangster Rap, and Hip Hop in general when it comes to buying the albums. So Hollywood, go ahead, get some courage to tell stories that maintain integrity to the cultures they take place in... folks will still come out and consume the product, and you won't leave so many disgruntled folks who gag on your outsider point of entry characters who do nothing to enhance the telling of the stories! Be Brave!!!!!!!

I don't know why folks keep asking me what I think about "Beasts of the Southern Wild,"by Ben Zeitlin. I guess it's because I'm Black, and I watch a lot of movies... I'm a projectionist. Well, first off, let me say that there wouldn't have been a movie without Quvenzhané Wallis. Quvenzhané plays "Hushpuppy," and she made it for me. I'm definitely looking forward to more greatness from her. But the film... in the first five minutes, I turned to my lady and said, "This isn't a Black Director..." Bottom line, I shouldn't be tripping on what race the Director is, I should be enjoying the film. I found the film joyless. The lens was one of objectifying the other, in this case the noble savage scenario. Listen, plenty of folks really dug the film, from President Obama to Oprah... For me, I'm just not crazy about the novelty of poverty, for the enjoyment of an audience. Watching a cast completely covered in filth, a community bound by their devotion to living off the grid, scavenging. A father feeds his daughter dog food., calls her a man, a boy, a beast. It's crazy. There's a conspiratorial feeling of taking part in the abuse of Hushpuppy. Somehow, I'm sitting there endorsing these toxins entering the subconsciousness of Quvenzhané, the audience, the President, Oprah... Maybe because I myself endured some trauma being poor, growing up. For this reason, I may be sensitive to the representation of poverty in film. How is the audience reaction's reaction? Oftentimes exploitation of class, culture, race is about feeling superior... "Oh how quaint..."

I had read about "Let's Stay Together," in News One for Black America where staff writer Casey Gane-McCalla called it one of the 10 Black films to see in 2012. The trailer was cool. So me and the lady made a point to see it on a cold Friday evening. WOW! The festival is about New Voices and this is a new voice with a lot of potential and a bright future to come. First of all, it's Brooklyn all day. Coming from the Bronx, I don't really go to Brooklyn that much, but the social fabric of this film represents the artistic movement that is vital and coming out of BK all day. I'm also usually not crazy about independent films where the director is all up in it acting, as Alafia chooses to do. I find it distracting, like the director is holding my hand. I told Alafia he must love Woody Allen, and he said he grew up watching him, so yeah... In the Q n A after wards, he explained he had no budget, so I guess he thought it would save costs. Well, he pulled it off, not a bad actor, but Albert Lamont as "Freddy," had the theater rolling with laughter, playing a self hating biracial character who insists that his Filipino girlfriend can't embrace her African roots. Alafia doses out a lot of hard to swallow delusions with his characters, but somehow they make sense with this strange logic that he weaves throughout the piece. Alafia's character "Parker" is a filmmaker who believes Al Green's new album will make broken Black Families come back together. He interviews the young talent, Jonan Everett, not growing up with a father, and we see Everett's character try to navigate teen pregnancy. I had seen Jonan Everett in a film called "Angel Rodriguez" by Jim McKay and was happy to see him do his thing in Let's Stay Together, I think he's great! Parker has a complicated relationship with an ex girlfriend named "Nzinga," played beautifully by Sharaka and each story supports the thesis that relationships have a fracturing by our own traumas of being in this society and fears of coming into ourselves. Jaleel Bunton of the band TV on the Radio is featured first as comic relief then gives a really beautiful scene as he tries to tie up the loose ends in his life around family. If it sounds like I'm being vague, yes I am, I want you to see this remarkable film!