Movies aren’t miracles
I have long believed that film has the ability to change the world. I wrote in my 2002 and 2004 applications to graduate schools in film and dramatic writing that I wrote scripts “with the intent to provoke a time of serious comtemplation in the life of everyone who heard [my words].” I believed that [...]
Paying respect to The Help
I’ve grown up attending wakes and funerals for people of my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations. At these sad memorials marketed as visitations, going-home celebrations and extemporaneous family reunions, I often saw white people who were somewhere around the age of my mother and her siblings. I wondered who they were and why they were [...]
In Defense of The Help
Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis in The Help Since the movie’s release on Aug. 10, there has been an abundance of criticism about The Help. The first outcry of historical and cultural inaccuracy I read came from The Association of Black Women Historians. They saw the maids as “a resurrection of Mammy,” and [...]
No more celebrity stories
“Is Marriage ‘In’ Again?” Since I just started reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage,” yesterday, the above question jumped out at me as I scrolled through my Twitter feed. Clutch magazine posed the question in relation to the recent nuptials of Toya Carter and Memphitz, and those of several other [...]
Defining Oprah
The Oprah Winfrey Show episode that serves as a defining moment for me is one I didn’t see, and the memory of this moment isn’t exactly a good one. It happened some time between 2004 and 2007. I assume the subject of the show had to do with either sex or interracial dating [...]
Why black men should see Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
If you’ve ever gone to a Tyler Perry play or movie and returned home feeling like you paid to see black men receive a collective slap in the face, this play is your answer. There’s no light-skinned, and/or blue-collar hero saving the abused woman from the evil dark-skinned and/or professional man. No choir will sing. There will be no weddings and no one will come to Jesus at the end.
Lady in Redbone Afropuff’s changes to “For Colored Girls”
Seven drastic changes that would make the film, “For Colored Girls,” (ahem) better. Yeah, I said it.
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