
Dear Ms. Rhimes: Most of the time, I love you and you make me regret not sticking it…

On this last day of 2012, I’m sharing the moments from throughout the year that are most memorable to me…

As a writer, I love subtext, and Shonda Rhimes does it brilliantly. The genius behind “Grey’s Anatomy†and “Scandal 

I haven’t seen the new film, “Lincoln,†yet (and with what may be a pinched nerve making it hard to…

“to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation…

I was saddened to learn of writer Nora Ephron’s death just a few hours after I claimed her as one…
My first post on Ebony.com went live there on April 25. It starts: The recent class action lawsuit against ABC…
I have long believed that film has the ability to change the world. Â I wrote in my 2002 and 2004…

I’ve grown up attending wakes and funerals for people of my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations. At these sad memorials…
UPDATE 8/29/2011: I’ve seen the movie—with my grandmother and other women of her generation who were ‘The Help’—and after a…
“Is Marriage ‘In’ Again?” Since I just started reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage,” yesterday,…

The Oprah Winfrey Show episode that serves as a defining moment for me is one I didn’t see, and…
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.
Seven drastic changes that would make the film, “For Colored Girls,†(ahem) better. Yeah, I said it.
Is “For Colored Girls” offensive? Divisive? Poorly written? All of the above? Depends on the context. However, critiquing the film in the context of traditional film school storytelling rules explains why the movie generates such polarizing reactions.
A warning to anyone considering a degree in filmmaking, directing, cinematography, screenwriting, playwriting, theater performance, or even film studies: Once you take these classes, you will never be able to look at film or theatre the same way again.

I want to see Tyler Perry’s, For Colored Girls. I want to see a Tyler Perry movie, and it makes me feel all weird on my snooty intellectual insides. I’ve never hated Perry for reaching out to a neglected audience. I’ve simply been annoyed that work so flawed received such popular acclaim.
