Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Rosa Parks: 1913-2005

Rosa Parks stood by sitting. And by sitting, she demanded that her humanity be respected, that Jim Crow take a back seat.
Myth has sometimes obscured Rosa Parks, making her into an icon when she was simply a woman who made a choice that she would not abide being treated as less than an American citizen.
But she also was not simple, being that she was a black woman active in the NAACP, who agitated against segregation at a time when doing so was dangerous.
She looked fragile but contained within her a strength and integrity that helped inspire black people to fight against injustice.
I was born in 1972, years after she took her sitting stand on Dec. 1, 1955. By the time I took my first steps, Jim Crow had long been killed and buried, though remnants of racism still existed.
Even now, as a 33-year-old black man, I cannot quite grasp what it meant to be black in 1955, how dangerous it was then to just live. That to demand equal treatment could mean death for you and your family.
So Rosa Parks' singular act takes on greater meaning today. For the charged atmosphere of Jim Crow in which she lived no longer exists for me. Jim Crow is a moment in history, a memory vivid only to my parents and grandparents.
Her choice was not easy. It involved pain. It involved sacrifice. But she and others knew what they were doing was bigger than themselves. The right to have their humanity recognized and respected was important. And it remains important today.
My journey through life is made easier because of Rosa Parks and other black people who determined that the status quo was not and never would be good enough, who forced America to face the ugly truth of segregation.
For that, honor is due. May Rosa Parks' soul find eternal peace.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

The Gospel

After the success of The Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Hollywood saw the dollar signs and we now have The Gospel.
For a movie produced and directed by the people who gave us the direct-to-video Trois, The Gospel is decent.
Mind you, I said decent, with lots of soul-stirring gospel music.
Whether this is a particularly well-made movie is another question, and the people I saw the movie with yesterday weren't impressed.
Boris Kodjoe, well-known for his role in Soul Food, plays David Taylor, a PK (preacher's kid, for those who don't know) who leaves the church after his mother's death and becomes a PG-rated version of R. Kelly. His father's illness brings him back home where he predictably becomes reconnected to his church. Idris Elba plays Charles Frank (though people keep calling him Frank), who has a wife who won't sleep with him and is posed to take over the church.
Taylor and Frank butt heads over the church's direction, and Taylor falls in love with a single mother played by cute American Idol loser Tamyra Gray, who many agreed did not look that cute in this movie.
Nona Gaye, Marvin Gaye's fine daughter, plays Frank's wife. She has one nice scene but for the most part she's a one-note player in this film. And the reason she won't sleep with her husband -- she can't have a baby -- just doesn't hold much holy water here.
The holes here are pretty big but they weren't big enough for me not to be entertained.
Omar Gooding, Cuba Gooding's younger brother, plays Taylor's manager and Gooding, by far, has the funniest lines. And seeing gospel artists such as Yolanda Adams and Fred Hammond was a special treat.
Still, one has to wonder about Hollywood. If the studios think folks are going to see any ole Christian movie, they're wrong.
Just slapping Gospel on the title of a movie doesn't make that movie immune from being crappy.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Batman Begins

I was lucky enough to rent a copy of Batman Begins from the local Blockbuster. And once again, the movie stands up, this after I have seen it multiple times at the movie theater.
I have an affection for Tim Burton's version but Christopher Nolan has done a masterful work in reimagining the Batman legend.
Bruce Wayne is the heart of this movie, and Nolan embraces all the dark, creepy mess of the Batman myth.
After all, anyone who dresses up as a bat clearly has issues. And Wayne has plenty of them, primarily being scared of bats and being angry over his parents' brutal death.
Batman, appropriately, is a good guy but scary as well.
The movie cuts too much during the fight scenes but incorporating the concept of the League of Shadows adds a bit of originality to a typical superhero movie.
Batman has gone a long way from the days of Adam West.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

The Color Purple

As a child, I would watch the faces of my mother, aunt, cousin and grandmother become wet with tears watching The Color Purple. Certain parts always guaranteed eye-welling.
When Celie and Nettie are forced apart by Mister. When Shug returns to church singing and finally finds love from her long-estranged father. When Celie and Nettie, after decades apart, are finally brought together and Celie is reunited with her children.
Watching the movie recently, I'll admit I had a couple of gulps. After 20 years, the film adaptation of Alice Walker's most famous work is still a classic.
You see Whoopi Goldberg in her best dramatic performance, her transformation from a shy and abused girl into a strong, determined woman as affecting as ever.
Back in the 1980s, some criticized the movie for its depiction of black men. As a black man, I can see the critics' point.
But I also see a film that shows the strength of black women, their spirit triumphing over seemingly insurmountable odds, their ability to lean upon one another in hard times. And it also exposes the ugliness of sexism, how men brutalized women without regard.
Danny Glover's performance is remarkable not only in how mean he is shown to be but also in how graceful and moving his redemption is at the end.
More important than anything is how black people are the center of this movie, an achievement even more meaningful being that white director Steven Spielberg helmed the film.
Too often movies about black people end up being more about white people. Check Cry Freedom or Mississippi Burning. The Color Purple took place in a black world full of joy and pain, laughter and tears.
I still marvel, 20 years later, how good of a movie it is.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Domino

Domino is a head-scratching, eye-titillating, mind-numbing bitch-slap of a movie. But what else would one expect from Tony Scott?
Still, this may be one of Tony Scott's riskiest movies, one in which he slams images together and runs ripshod over narrative structure.
The movie is a beautifully realized mess of a movie, a homage to Domino Harvey's balls-to-the-wall mess of a life.
No fear, no regrets. Tony Scott seems to have plastered that message throughout the film, mixing raucous humor with almost gratuitous violence. And in the midst of all this craziness we find Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Smith from Beverly Hills 90210 playing themselves and Christopher Walken bringing his creepy brilliant persona to his role as a reality TV producer.
Somehow, it works. Not that the movie always makes sense. Not that you would for one minute believe that the events in the movie truly took place.
But Tony Scott isn't trying to make an biography of Domino Harvey's life. He's trying to embody her spirit. So that by the end, you feel as if you know Domino even if the movie fictionalizes her life.
Keira Knightley brings a tough girl charm to the title role, and Mickey Rourke shows that he has mastered his gritty shtick to near perfection as Domino's boss, Ed Mosbey.
This is a movie in which you just have to enjoy the rollercoaster, even if it might make you a little sick.

Saturday, October 15, 2005

In Her Shoes

I saw this Cameron Diaz vehicle last night with a friend. Yes, it's typical chick flick schtick and yes, the emotional manipulation gets a bit much. Still, the movie works.
Toni Collette and Diaz have a wonderful chemistry as sisters. And Shirley MacLaine works her usual charm in a remarkably restrained performance as their grandmother, who the sisters had long thought had died but is actually living well in Florida.
The movie bounces easily from sad to funny, and Diaz gives a nice dramatic performance. And not every movie uses a poem from e.e. cummings as the obligatory tear-jerker moment.
But enough of the romance. The next movie on my list is Domino, the new critically-panned movie from Tony Scott. What else do you need but cool explosions and Keira Knightley, who has come a long way from her breaththrough role in Bend It Like Beckham.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

America's Next Thin Model

Thin is always in on America's Next Top Model. Diane, the thin-skinned thick sista on the show, found herself cut tonight.
The judges deemed her not bubbly enough for the show, though I think her wide thighs and bountiful chest had more to do with her losing this cut-throat competition.
After all, what makes this reality show, with all the fake drama, fascinating and disturbing is its inside look at a barely skin-deep modeling industry.
I can always improve my writing, but these women are judged on their looks, scrutinized on their muscle tone, their foreheads, their ears, their butts, their breasts, everything.
Some are said to be too thick in some places but never too thin, for being thin is somehow beautiful.
I have never understood that. Why is looking like some starving child in a third-world country considered a standard of beauty?
Too much of modeling, as this show exemplifies, is empty, only surface, for it is about presenting a facade that entices but never illumines. There's no meat, literally, and when you see Kate Moss snorting cocaine, you see that modeling can be soul-draining since how you look becomes more important than who you are. It's all about the right makeup, the right image, the right clothes, and never is it about the right you.
No doubt, Tyra Banks is fine and she has had enough sense to move beyond modeling to do other things, like host her own show. But what about the mostly pale faces young girls see in magazines that are supposed to be examples of beauty? Or those faces really beautiful or are they hiding something ugly and toxic underneath?

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

50 Cent: The Thespian

50 Cent can act, yall. He really can, according to Terrence Howard.
Nothing in the trailers for 50's new movie, Get Rich or Die Tryin' indicate any of that awesome acting Howard is effusive about.
For every Tupac or Mos Def, there's a Snoop Dogg who is only good at playing himself. Will 50 be credible? Sure. He's an ex-crack dealer turned rapper playing an ex-crack dealer turned rapper.
I doubt he would be credible playing a cop or a doctor or an alien, as Mos Def has done. But at least the soundtrack will be bumpin'.

Monday, October 10, 2005

Alias: Kicking Ass and Breast Feeding

Being a guy, I watch Alias for one reason and one reason only: Jennifer Garner is hot and she looks hot when she's kicking some bad guy booty. And she has a nice booty herself.
Now she has an ever-expanding belly, but the show's producers don't run away from that fact. They embrace it.

Reality TV facing Reality

Reality TV may have run its course. Surprised? Shocked, are you? Please. Not that I hate reality TV.
Ever since MTV's Real World premiered in the early 1990s, I've been a fan. What a cool experimentation, cool until people inevitably saw the dollar figures and decided to replicate the reality television formula. The Real World has now become a tired, tired soap opera with bad acting with pretty, dumb drunk people.
Worse, celebrities think their lives are worth a reality show. Danny Bonaduce suffers a nervous breakdown on his show. Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston get too real (please, some things we ought not know) on Being Bobby Brown, a not-too-subtle attempt by Brown to resurrect his long-dead career.
And even Lil' Kim, the jailed sexpot rapper, had contemplated doing a reality show.
But all these shows have a sad sameness to them, all manufactured for your entertainment. On Survivor, The Apprentice and other shows, you have manufactured competition, with people embarrassing themselves as if they actually have something at stake. Yeah, I really want a job with The Donald. Would you really do anything for 15 minutes of fame? Reality television proves you would.
Television heads, of course, love these shows because they're easy to make, have cheap production values, and need fewer writers.
And as television heads are apt to do, they put out too much of a good thing, and there's a glut in the market now. How many times can you see variations of the same thing, all the way down to that annoying music and quick edits just before someone is cut from competition? I am partial, though, to Donald Trump's simple, "You're fired," phrase as opposed to Martha Stewart's anemic, "Goodbye."
I would much prefer good writing, good acting, good stories, but maybe I'm just too optimistic.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Pop The Culture

This is my first foray into blogging. No frontin'. This is scary but not quite as scary as Katie Holmes becoming Tom Cruise's baby mama. Or Paris Hilton having a serious thought in her head. I figure life is about taking plunges (not out of planes because I ain't about to ever do that) but you get my meaning.
What this blog is about is my obsession on all things pop culture. I read Entertainment Weekly weekly and about every weekend has me sitting in a movie theater either mesmerized by a film's brilliance or horrified that anyone had the audacity to proudly come out with something so pathetic.
Sunday, for example, I watched A History of Violence, my second time doing so. From the first shot to the last, I was fascinated by this twisty tale that bounced between hilarity and pathos, a rare action film that forced one to consider what happens after blood is spilled (in often gruesome ways, I might add) and the hero is not quite as heroic and noble as we were led to believe. Life is complex and the movies that move me are the ones that recognize that singular fact, that every once and a while smack the audience with the unexpected instead of the easy and predictable.
So it was with A History of Violence and wasn't with Animal, a wasted opportunity for Ving Rhames and Terrence Howard, the recent star of the critically acclaimed Hustle & Flow.
Rhames is Animal, who has built a menancing reputation on the lives he has taken. Sent to prison, he finds redemption with the help of a jailed revolutionary played by Jim Brown.
Newly reformed, he leaves prison to find that his son, played by Howard, has fallen into the same patterns that have defined his life and it is up to him to steer his son onto the right course.
Good premise but poor execution. Rhames' transformation comes too quickly, and though Rhames and Howard manage to infuse their scenes with a hard-to-ignore energy, their efforts are not enough to salvage a rudimentary plot and stilted dialogue.
All in all, a disappointment. Howard is way too good for this, and by the end of the movie, you're begging and pleading Ving to find better roles, any role than this.