What Does Tyler Perry Really Want?

I enjoy his plays and movies but I’ve always felt the same as Nichole here about his portrayal of women, which is not all that great:

There is little to dispute that [Tyler Perry’s] target audience is Black women, so let’s look at the message we’ve received so far from the play. A beautiful, ambitious driven woman is a promiscuous, shrill bitch and a danger to the home. A good woman doesn’t turn heads with her beauty, is soft-spoken, religious, and will wait- sexually and emotionally- for the right man to come along. We see this play out as well in the movie version of Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?

Black Actors and Cinema

Macon D. blogs on a small movie called “Fireproof”:

And what are these black folks talking so straight about with the two white protagonists? Love, baby, nothin’ but love, and especially, how to fix it. Which is, again, what makes them “Magical Negroes.” Black folks, you see, are supposedly closer to their emotions, and even to the spirit world. So when white folks in movies need help in those areas, they often reach out to conveniently located black folks for help.

…

This white American fantasy about convenient dark friends has actually been going on for a long, long time. The history of stock, stereotypical non-white characters that conjure up and appeal to white American emotions is long and varied, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom and his many Stepin Fetchit descendants; the blackface minstrelsy tradition; comforting imagery on food products; ridiculous and offensive sports mascots; and assorted loyal sidekicks, like James Fenimore Cooper’s Chingachgook, Herman Melville’s Queequeg, and the Lone Ranger’s Tonto (who, by the way, is about to be exhumed by . . . Johnny Depp?!).

Reconsidering Brokeback

Marisol Lebron, over at the blog post pomo nuyorican homo, blogs about Brokeback Moutain (in retrospect of Heith Ledger and the latest Batman film):

I confessed that I actually owned the film on DVD and enjoyed it quite a bit when I first saw it. I still think that the film has some of the most breathtaking cinematography I have seen in a long time. What I hated about Brokeback was the hyped up mainstream celebration of the film and the lack of critical race and sexuality analysis. For me, seeing the film in a theater packed with gay white men in Chelsea, I noticed the film became a collective moment for the predominantly Anglo audience to share their despair at the fact that there was no happy ending for the two white male protagonists.

“Hmmmmm…Needs More White Folks.”

Alvin blogs on Hyphen Blog about the controversy surrounding the movie “21” in where a mainly white cast plays the roles of real life Asian Americans who won big in Las Vegas:

While there have not been too many complaints in mainstream media over these developments, one cannot help but wonder what the backlash would have been like if, for example, Hollywood had made the movie ‘Coach Carter’, with a Caucasian actor replacing Sam Jackon’s role, which was based on a real-life story. In terms of marketing or box office numbers, it is also puzzling why they would cast Sturgess (a relative unknown) as the lead student instead of Aaron Yoo (also in the film as a minor role), when the movie already had cast such big-name stars as Kevin Spacey and Laurence Fishburne.

Proving Manhood

DesiGirl blogs about the movie Varalalu in where the main actor Ajith “proves his manhood” by raping a woman:

The cherry on top of this sick icing happens a few scenes later, when the girl’s mum pleads his case to her now pregnant daughter, with the standard “He is a good man, sweetheart” line. Of course he is, if you discount the fact the raped you to prove his manhood. He is so the man!It is movies like this that make me want to gag. Here we have organisations trying to fight crimes against women and then we have movies like this tosh, that make a whole mahatma out of the sod who commits this heinous crime. Even more gaggable fact is that, the adoring public turned up in droves to see this load of crap, shelling out their hard earned money hand over fist to make it a hit. A hit! This &%$#* of a film!

Authentic Mystical Experiences

The Stumbling Mystic blogs about the documentary Jesus Camp, a movie on a camp that indoctrinates children into a hard-ling arch conservative Christian message:

Authentic spiritual experiences erase the “us versus them” mentality. They blur the boundaries between self and other. Emotional and vitalistic experiences like the ones portrayed in Jesus Camp by their very nature reinforce the shadow rather than transmuting it and therefore deepen the fault lines within humanity. Some of the children in the movie report feeling “disgusting” inside when they meet a non-Christian. What a terrible tragedy that such nonsense is being peddled in the name of Jesus of Nazareth!

Blog first viewed at BlogBharti.

I Now Pronounce You Racist

Jenn from Reappropiate blogs about the recent movie I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and it’s use of yellow face:

A lesser publicized but equally weighty concern over this film, however, is its prominent use of yellowface for Rob Schneider’s (surprisingly) uncredited role as the minister who weds Chuck and Larry. Schneider’s scenes are within a few seconds of the trailer embedded above.

Bearing a stereotypical muschroom cut, bucked teeth, jaundiced skin, and glasses reminscent of Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Schneider plays up the ‘r/l’ slurs and stilted “Chingrish” typically used to mock recent Asian immigrants.

A Call to Leftist Movie Goers

AradhanaD, of the blog “Leftist” Looney Lunchbox, calls for movie review submissions:

I started “Leftist” movie reviews back in January, I would really like for it to be an aggregate of the best movie reviews in the blogosphere. The more contemporary the better!

I get a lot of hits here at LLL with the search terms “leftist movies”, so I figure there are enough people interested in this.

If you have blogged about a movie and would like to see it cross-posted at LMR, please email me…

Killer of Sheep

Mark Anthony Neal posts a movie review by Esther Ivereem on the 30th anniversary of “Killer of Sheep:”

For its 30th anniversary, Charles Burnett’s acclaimed masterpiece, “Killer of Sheep,” an unsentimental and quirky portrait of the Los Angeles Black working-class, has been restored and upgraded to a 35-mm print for the proper theatrical release that it never had in 1977. As it makes its way to dozens of cities in the coming weeks, film lovers may recognize it as an important missing link between the Blaxploitation era of movies of the 1970s and the “New Wave” of Black filmmakers that began with Spike Lee’s debut in 1986.