I feel inclined to inform anyone who takes the time to read this post the process of its conception. I originally planned to entitle this article “Why I Won’t See the New Harriet Movie,” but I feared to execute a superficial discourse on a topic so prevalent to the black collective. Seeing the film actualized…
Category: Movie Reviews
A womanist analysis of mainstream and indie films.
Luce, A Black Female Perspective
An expository essay sits at the core of Julius Onah and JC Lee’s drama Luce. The title character Luce, a high school senior, lauded as a scholar, athlete, and debator, tackles a new path when he writes a paper in the voice of black revolutionary Frantz Fanon. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon asserts…
Assaulting the Archive: The Cultural Damage of The Black Biopic and “Historical” Film
The eighties were a turbulent period. The crack era personified a violent wrath that intentionally tore apart black families. The multi-talented Jackie Wilson, a trailblazer in black entertainment, lay robbed, abused, and neglected in a nursing home. Tawana Brawley, a fifteen-year-old black teen from Upstate New York, was raped and systemically lynched, and five young…
How The Lion King Shows Us Who’s Still King
Claims that reference Disney’s The Lion King as visually and thematically violent, will prompt many to see King Mufasa hanging off a cliff before falling to his death as his young son Simba watches in a youthful confusion. However, to assign the film’s violence to one fictional scene would be a grave oversight. The Lion…
The Last Black Man in San Francisco, A Review
San Francisco native Jimmie Fails is the force behind The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a film about his experience in the gentrified Fillmore District. The film follows Jimmie Fails, a character Fails’s names and molds after himself. Literally equipped with only the clothes on his back, Fails is a young black man seeking…
Ma, Revenge of the Mammy: A Black Female Perspective
Ma, presents a nuanced mammy figure in leading lady Octavia Spencer, who uses complacency as a means of entry to implement her retaliation. Sue Ann Ellington (Octavia Spencer) is a psychologically scarred girl inside a middle-aged woman’s body. Sue Ann, in love with a popular white male, believes she is to perform oral sex on…
The Master’s House: The Intruder, A Review
The Intruder marks the latest edition in the predictable suspense genre perpetuated by attractive non-white actors. The film casts Meagan Good as Annie, a leading yet color blind role alongside a similarly colorless Michael Ealy who plays her husband, Scott. They play a young couple seeking to start a new chapter of their lives and…
It’s Not ‘Us’ it’s Them: Jordan Peele’s Us and the Social Reproduction of the Invisible Man (Spoilers)
In its contemporary context, blackness assumes a violent coupling. Filmaker Jordan Peele (Get Out) tackles this coupling in both a literal and figerative sense with his latest release Us. Peele depicts humans as “coupled” by a being who mirrors their exteriority. In challenging the presumed singularity of identity, the coupled being obscures reality, simultanously inciting…
The Third Killing of Sam Cooke: Thoughts on Netflix Documentary Remastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke
There are some things in life that are simply once in a lifetime experiences. Sam Cooke the singer is a once in a lifetime experience for anyone who loves music. Sam Cooke the activist and black nationalist is a black treasure lost in the media mutilation of his body and legacy. The Netflix Documentary Remastered:…
If Beale Street Could Talk, A Review
I always desired to see a black love story on screen. Not a rom-com, or later-in-life love (though this would be nice too), but an authentic love story with young, black lovers. I know this could never be The Notebook, that though there would be a happily ever after, it would not be conventional because…
