...on whatever crosses my mind

Tweeting about Joss Whedon's Avengers, or a Lazy Review of a Great Film

I had planned to write a long-form review of Joss Whedon's Avengers like everyone else. But the truth is that the joy of the film for me was in the beauty of the writing, the sheer affection and love that Joss Whedon has for each and every character (even Maria Hill, played by Cobie Smulders in a performance dismissed by most critics), and the brilliant, detailed performances by a gifted cast (Joss conducts the actors like a symphony, in a way.)

But I had so much fun letting the film wash over me in pieces on Twitter last night, that I thought I'd preserve these largely disparate tweets in a post here. I may still write something after I see the film a few more times, but this post captures my experience with the first viewing of what I consider the best film I've seen since The Dark Knight.

Note - These are largely spoiler free, because I wasn't so much interested in the plot or the particulars of the story, so much as the way it all comes together so beautifully and little character moments that I thought were a perfect marriage of acting and writing. That said, if you want to see the film pure, bookmark my shit and come back after seeing the film.

Tweets after the jump.

Russell Simmons and His Delusions of a Post-Racial World

Via Alyssa Rosenberg, hip-hop legend Russell Simmons in The Hollywood Reporter drinking the "post-racial" Kool-Aid:

Post-racial America is coming. Sure, it's true that many executives who live in Beverly Hills don't live in one -- yet. But many aspire to it and thirst for it in the programming they consume. Hollywood has good intentions but no sensitivity. It clearly have no real understanding of how America is evolving.

Someone needs to take the pin out of the Hollywood bubble, just as they have done within the music industry and the advertising world.

This is utter fucking nonsense.

Reacting to the Debate between Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer & Tavis Smiley

Viola Davis is remarkably eloquent on the complexities of the issues surrounding The Help:

 

Watch Actresses Viola Davis & Octavia Spencer on PBS. See more from Tavis Smiley.

 

That final point she makes about the psychic damage in black folks that is keeping us from doing our own shit and, if we do, causes us to create images that reinscribe racist beliefs about who we are is just beautiful stuff.

I also appreciate that Davis acknowledges that there really wasn't much to Aibileen after the book became a screenplay and that she will accept a critique of that. I think for an actress with so few options, that's incredibly generous. She would have every right to be as unconcerned with criticism as Octavia Spencer seems to be, but it's clear from this conversation that she's looked at this film, and the role she was asked to play, very deeply and from a variety of perspectives. 

And it's likely why her performance is so good.

The Amazing Spider-Man Trailer

I thought it was too soon to reboot the franchise, but if the movie is as dope as this trailer, I was clearly wrong:

 

 

It's giving me shades of Tim Burton's Batman though.

Casting Actors of Color, ctd.

 

I love how Viola answers Michael Fassbender's question: "I think that African Americans represent 12.5 percent of the population and that is not the demographic that we are targeting in the movie and television industry."

I mean, it's just about the nicest way in the world to say that Hollywood just doesn't give a fuck about black people without actually saying that Hollywood just doesn't give a fuck about black people.

But, seriously, I'm so bored of this conversation centering around when white people are going to be less racist and notice that we are here. It is clear from this roundtable, The Hollywood Reporter's roundtable with director Steve McQueen, the conversation and debates around Red Tails and Pariah, and, shit, the entire history of Hollywood that Black people need to figure out how to make, market and distribute our own films. For us.

How do we get our movies made and into theaters in our own neighborhoods? I can't imagine that if you made a good movie for about $10-50 million and put it in theaters in every black neighborhood in America, that it wouldn't turn a profit. Not everything would, but not every white film turns a profit.

And I'm not talking about getting our own studios and then doing the same thing Hollywood does by targeting white men and hoping black folks will come out of solidarity. I'm talking about what Tyler Perry is doing in targeting black people first, everyone else second, but with a broader slate of films.

I wish someone would start thinking about doing this.

Casting Actors of Color

 

The fact that Jason Reitman, a son of privilege (his father is Ivan Reitman), makes the lone comment, "I'm not stepping into that," after Steve McQueen embarrases the fuck out of six white directors with his challenge to explain why directors like them rarely cast Black and Latino actors is just...

In just three minutes, this video perfectly shows how racism operates.

I Spent the Week at Alyssa Rosenberg's Crib on ThinkProgress

My friend, Alyssa Rosenberg, asked me to guest post on her blog on ThinkProgress this week.  I accepted and it was a really effin good time.  Her commenters are awesome and spending time at her crib really forced me to step my game up. I think I did ok.  

• Will ‘The Best Man’ Sequel Treat Its Women Characters Better?
• ‘Reed Between The Lines’ Is No ‘Cosby Show,’ Thankfully
• How Do You Create A Bisexual Film Character?
• How Can We Get Majority Audiences Consuming Culture About Minority Experiences? ctd.

What do y'all think?

Getting the 'Invisible Life' Movies Right

The deal that E. Lynn Harris and Tracey Edmonds struck to make a series of feature films based on Harris' Invisible Life is historic. This is not just one feature film about gay and bisexual black gay men and black women. It's a series of films about gay and bisexual black men and black women.

It might sound hyperbolic, but there is actually no way to understate just how important these films are going to be. Gay and bisexual black men have almost always and only been portrayed in films as stereotypes and they have too infrequently appeared as the center of a film narrative (with Noah's Arc: Jumping The Broom the most prominent and most problematic, as a result). So these films represent a real opportunity to portray gay and bisexual black men and black women as the complicated, messy, three-dimensional human beings that they are.

If Edmonds and Co. are smart though they will treat the films exactly the way that Warner Bros. treated the Harry Potter films* - with a keen understanding that a world must be built and sustained over the life of the films, a world that most Americans have never seen before and will have to (at the very least) believe and appreciate, if not outright love.

Because there is real danger in these films, real danger in reinscribing harmful, narrow, representations of gay and bisexual black men, black women, and black culture. Harris was unafraid to introduce characters in melodramatic, and sometimes stereotypical, ways and then graft tremendous dimension on them in later books. As a writer juggling multiple perspectives, he understood how to balance the essential humanity of his character and the way that characters were perceived by other characters.

The filmmakers must do the same, and they have to do it earlier in the books in order for the films to work as a series**. Raymond has to be more than just self-loathing, Kyle has to be more than the life of the party, Nicole has to be more than a BAP, and, critically, Yancey and Basil have to be understood as deeply damaged people first, monsters second. The filmmakers have to resist the urge to oversimplify. The early films must be set in the 80s and the later films must reduce the bourgie name-dropping that infected the later books.

And the films have to stay true to the fact that some of the characters do horrible things to one another but for reasons that make sense to them. For instance, they have to keep in mind that John Basil Henderson emerges as the single most complex character in all of Harris' work and, perhaps, the single most fascinating and complicated portraits of a modern black male in contemporary African-American fiction.

And perhaps most importantly, the first film, Invisible Life, has to be Raymond Tyler's story, not Nicole's. Ever since Oprah inflicted JL King on America, we've been inundated with the trope of the DL black man as demon, hellbent on destroying the black community and killing black women***. That cannot happen here. The film will not succeed unless we emphathize with Raymond's inability to choose between Nicole and Quinn and understand why it is so hard for him to do so.

Anything less will be a failure and an insult to Harris, the books, and the audience.

 

*And like Warner Bros, the filmmakers should cast unknowns in all the principal roles. Though I could see an actress like Irma P. Hall readily as Mama Cee.

**When it comes to Basil and Yancey, the filmmakers should really study the way David Benioff fleshed out Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones so she felt like a real person instead of a cartoon villain as she is portrayed in the books.  In fact, the filmmakers should study everything Benioff did with GOT.

***The one exception is the cancelled-far-too-soon The DL Chronicles, in which creators Quincy LeNear and Deondray Gossett did a magnificent job exploring the many ways that sexuality is manifest in black communities.

'Jumping the Broom': A Review

*Spoiler alert*

There are little things about Jumping the Broom that make you smile. 

How detailed Paula Patton's work creating a spoiled rich young woman whose optimism is really just a infantile belief that she can always have her way is. How awesome Julie Bowen's marvelously physical performance is. How Mike Epps somehow brings surprising nuance to a character that is broad on the page but becomes warm and real as he plays him. That Salim Akil manages to find work for not one, not two, but three grand dames of acting - Loretta Devine, Angela Bassett, and Valarie Pettiford. And, crucially, how Loretta Devine with just a look or reaction conveys so much about Pam Taylor that the script doesn't give you till the end.

That last point is really important because that failing of the script is what makes Jumping the Broom, enjoyable though it may be, the latest example of how class divisions within the black community are sometimes disingenuously portrayed in popular culture as just about working class and poor Black people hating on, and being resentful of, the success of upper middle class Black people. In life, we know that those class tensions work both ways.

While the film shows a little of Sabrina's family looking down on the Taylors, the film overplays Pam Taylor as, essentially, the antagonist of the film. It is clear that the script is unwilling to risk making Sabrina and Claudine unlikeable even as it somewhat revels in making Pam look quite monstrous. The Watsons' bougie qualities are nearly always conveyed in passing as if they are just quirks, but the Taylors are all written broadly for comic relief and are always shown to be alternately envious and contemptuous of the Watsons' wealth.

In other words, on the page the Watsons feel a little more like real people than the Taylors do.*

The script establishes rather well the relationship between Patton's Sabrina and Bassett's Claudine, which is critical in order for us to care that they turn out to not be mother and daughter. But the script spends no time establishing the relationship between Alonzo's Jason and Devine's Pam, I guess, assuming that we don't need to know why Pam so thoroughly dislikes Sabrina or why Jason would keep Sabrina away from Pam until the end. 

The film just relies on assumptions about the "overbearing single Black mother" to color in Jason and Pam's relationship and to give the audience something to assume is motivating Pam's behavior. It is not till after Pam nearly ruins the wedding that we find out why Jason has kept Sabrina away, that we find out how lonely Pam is, that we get any real indication of just how unhealthy their relationship might really have been before Sabrina came into the picture.  

That scene where Jason tells Pam off is powerful stuff, but it simply comes much much too late and, as such, it punishes Pam in a way that doesn't allow for us to consider her humanity. Which is sad because there really is dramatic potential in the strange, powerful, and sometimes unhealthy, relationships between Black men and their mothers.

 

*In fairness, this is a romantic comedy so no character is terribly well-drawn, but the fact that we don't ever even find out what Jason does for a living (other than that he was "promoted to vice president") is just one example of how the Taylors are underwritten.

On the Narnia Films

I suppose we should just be happy that they are even thinking of making another Narnia movie.

”We are currently discussing with both Fox and the C.S. Lewis Estate whether we will make another Narnia film,” a rep for Walden Media tells EW. Although the rep stresses “nothing is official yet,” should a new Narnia film get the greenlight, the rep says “it will be Magician’s Nephew.”

While I'm not upset about this decision - The Magician's Nephew will give us a lot of Tilda Swinton, after all - I do think it sort of confirms that Walden and Fox just aren't interested in the challenge of making Narnia work.

Five Great Black Woman Performances

Total Film's list of the 100 Greatest Female Performances includes some great performances, but is mostly just complete and total bullshit. It manages to include more than a few cartoon characters - Jessie from Toy Story, Jessica Rabbit, Lady from Lady and the Tramp, to name a few - but only two black female characters.

Certainly in the entire history of film there are black female characters that could have rated as high as Ursa from Superman II, which is more a series of grunts and grimaces than a character. But really, the list's oversight just gives me an opportunity to show some love to five of my favorite black female characters.

The Dark Side

Jason Priestley was very effective at playing Brandon Walsh, a character almost comically perfect and pure. He never shied away from Brandon's pompous nature and committed to playing a character that could be insufferably virtuous. As a result, he was easily the best thing about Beverly Hills 90210, particularly in those college years after Shannen Doherty left. 

So it has been really fascinating over the last 15 years to watch Priestley flip that Walsh persona to so effectively explore dark characters. 

Innocence Lost

At this point, I'm convinced that Hollywood doesn't actually care about making good movies for children.

 

 

Why do the Smurfs have to come into the "real world"?  Why do they have to be voiced by recognizable stars*? And why do they have to make the same crude, slightly sexual jokes (thus predictably and annoyingly turning Smurfette** into nothing but a sexual object) that ruin nearly all children's movies not made by Pixar?

In other words, what was wrong with the original Smurfs premise? 

Black Hollywood, ctd.

 

Mackie is right that it would help if we essentially see Hollywood as less what is and more what could be. This is where Tyler Perry can actually be an important and useful figure - he just did it himself.

But unfortunately Will Smith is the goal. Everyone waiting around to get the big movie that makes them millionaires so they too can make movies that have absolutely nothing to do with us.

Black Hollywood

Anthony Mackie droppin obvious at -1:17:

 

Truer words have never been spoken.

...and You Missed One

So I was shocked that Brent Hartinger did a list of "Ten of the Most Romantic Gay Moments in Entertainment" over at AfterElton and didn't include the kiss from Trick.

 

 

Trick is, for me, the most romantic gay film ever made*. Ostensibly, it's about two men who spend the night trying to find a place to fuck, but it turns into so very much more.

The film does a superb job of building both characters - played magnificently by John Paul Pitoc and Christian Campbell - so fully that you get heavily invested in their carnal desire, and later, in their burgeoning romance. There is nothing cloying, or manipulative, or insincere about Trick. And that only makes the kiss - their first - more erotically charged and romantic than perhaps any other gay kiss in film.

And it slays me every single time I watch it..

 

*Rivaled only by Beautiful Thing, which made Hartinger's list.

Imitating Life

I think Antoine Fuqua is right to cast his Tupac biopic with unknowns.

I actually don't understand Hollywood's penchant for casting movie stars as real people in biopics. The hardest job of a film actor is to make you forget that you've seen them in other things. That is even harder for movie stars - assuming they care that deeply, which I don't think most actually do - because they have cultivated a persona that threatens to supercede everything else in the performance.

When you add to that playing a real person who may or may not have notoriety or with whom an audience will have some familiarity, casting movie stars just seems unwise. I mean, did anyone really see anything other than Leo in The Aviator or Reese Witherspoon in Walk The Line?

The Tupac biopic will likely be a standard biopic. It's unlikely that it will tell us anything new or interesting or revelatory about Tupac, especially given the fact that his mother is executive producing.

But in spite of that, Tupac himself could be the role of a lifetime for some young actor who can capture his great humanity without playing him as some weird contradiction the way he was characterized for so much of his career.

And the right performance can make even a bad film at least watchable.

 

Lame

Like Green Lantern, I just think Captain America is going to suck.

 

 

I mean...right?

Erasure

Alyssa's post on the remakes of A Star is Born and Annie with Beyonce and Willow Smith, respectively, is eloquent:

It seems almost fitting that the progression of these eternal American stories would eventually expand to include black women. We live in a world where African American women have only won acting Academy Awards for playing a prisoner's wife, a slave, a con-artist medium, a woman who becomes a star only after she has to take a fall into single motherhood, and a hideously abusive mother. Annie and A Star Is Born are much less complex stories than either of those roles. But maybe equality means not having to struggle against the burdens of history on-screen, just to embody a straight trajectory towards victory on the virtue of good nature that knows no color.

On the 'Black Panther' Movie

Y'all will probably call me a pessimist but I am not convinced that Hollywood could make a good Black Panther film. He's black and almost totally political in a way that we just haven't gotten into in comic book films. He'd be the kind of black character that I would argue we've never seen in film before on this scale - a completely self-determining Black man with power.

Not saying I wouldn't want to see it, but I just don't think the film that the character deserves is the kind of film that would make Hollywood any money. Which means they won't make it or (more likely) they will make it but they'll destroy all that is great about the character. And if they do make it, we black folks will do the dance of "it's not great but at least we got our own" like we do with everything*, and the whole ordeal will ensure that we'll never get the Spawn movie we need.

That said, y'all know I have the perfect actor for the part right?  After the jump, kids.