King Kong

King Kong is just a big, cuddly gorilla who might rip apart a dinosaur or two if you mess with his lady. Plus, he likes to slide around on ice and watch a sunset with his blonde-haired beauty.
At least that's the impression you get from watching Peter Jackson's three-hour epic.
The movie starts slow, but Jackson picks up speed once we get to the jungle and the dinosaurs and the big-footed hairy star of the show.
Jack Black, Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody all manage to shine in a movie that's much more concerned about a gorilla roaring and smashing and swinging his way around the jungle and later tossing cars and climing the Empire State Building in Manhattan.
For the most part, it's your all-too-typical Hollywood blockbuster with eye-popping special effects.
But as my English professor friend, who accompanied me, pointed out, there's more beneath the surface, and what you find is not pretty.
The 1933 version was chock-full of racial stereotyping, and though much has improved in this 2005 update, you can still find plenty to object to.
Let's start with the depiction of the natives. Eyes wide, chanting, dancing wildly, bearing misshapen teeth, they almost seem like apes, and for dark-skinned people, that's never a good thing.
That was the top of the list for my friend. It probably wasn't Jackson's intention but nevertheless my friend and I came away from that offended.
My friend also reminded me of the other racial implication when I asked her quite pointedly "Why the brotha have to die?" She wondered whether I meant the big brotha or the little brotha.
Yep, King Kong, when he first came out, was the black man-as-beast savaging the pure white woman. Jackson, thankfully, moves away from that and tries to imbue Kong with some complexity. So we have the scenes of him saving Ann Darrow, played here by Naomi Watts, numerous times and then of Darrow doing pratfalls and juggling balls in front of Kong, who sits there pounding his chest. And then we have scenes of him throwing violent temper tantrums. You wouldn't like Kong when he's angry. He might just chomp your head off.
And we have one character who's always seen reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, an interesting choice for such a movie given that book's own controversy over what some call its racist depiction of Africa.
Still, we end up caring about the big guy. We're sad when we see him chained up on Broadway, and we're happy when he breaks free.
But we all know how the story ends. He's atop the Empire State Building, swiping at planes as they pump bullets into him. And then he falls to his death as tears stream from Darrow's eyes. He sure did love that white girl.

Richard Pryor

Richard Pryor, who died Saturday, was profane. But he was profound, an artist who bared his life in all of its pain and found it rich with material.
He lived without apology, no matter that he freebased on cocaine and, in the process, set himself on fire, no matter he went through six wives, no matter that the latter part of his career bore little resemblance to his earlier genius.
The beauty of his comedy came not from his endless obscenities. Anybody can curse. What distinguished Pryor, what has influenced almost every person who considers himself or herself a comedian now, is that he surrounded those profanities with textured stories of his experiences, revealing a deeply flawed yet ultimately humane man, a black man struggling with a racist society, a man who from the very beginning had a problematic relationship with women.
These experiences all made Richard Pryor who he was. They informed his comedy, and Pryor's greatness came from his ability to translate his life into art and his unwillingness to compromise his voice.
To see that voice quietly silenced by the ravages of multiple sclerosis was hard; it seemed unfair.
But a legion of comedians such as Eddie Murphy, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock was birthed into being by Pryor. His legacy lies in them.
And though Pryor has slipped into a more peaceful existence, his comedy remains, just as rich now as it was then.
Richard Pryor, your life is calling.

The Source: The Death of a Hip-Hop Bible

Used to be The Source was the source. Used to be you couldn't say you knew what was going on in hip-hop culture without peeking into its pages.
Used to be The Source broadened the scope of what hip-hop was, daring to speak about the political and cultural issues that hip-hop heads dealt with, daring to look at the international impact of a movement many thought would last just a few years, daring, in a sense, to keep it real.
Today, all there is to The Source is "used to be."
This Village Voice story lays out the sordid drama. And here are all the sickening details of sexual harrassment.
Sad and shameful are the words that come to mind. They describe a magazine that once had a mission to explain and exlore hip-hop, to dig deep into the culture to find where it is now and where it would be going in the future.
But now, the magazine wallows in score-settling beefs amid severe financial miscues, its mission lost in egos and machismo.