The third day of Lollapalooza 2023 highlighted the big presence of several South Korean acts this year, including Tomorrow x Together headlining for the first time on Saturday (they performed earlier in the day in 2022) and the fest also featured its first-ever K-pop girl group NewJeans on Thursday, marking the group’s first-ever U.S. performance. It also featured great hip-hop sets, including headliner Pusha T.
The day also featured a steady course of rain, which muddied the fields and likely contributed to it feeling not as crowded throughout the day as Thursday and Friday.
The day also featured a steady course of rain, which muddied the fields and likely contributed to it feeling not as crowded throughout the day as Thursday and Friday.
- 8/6/2023
- by Nina Corcoran and Althea Legaspi
- Rollingstone.com
Chicago – Sam Pollard has established himself as a top director of documentaries, to add to his stellar career as a film editor … including for Spike Lee. His latest doc is a deep dive into the 20th Century curiosity of the Negro League. With interviews, archival photos/footage and comprehensive storytelling, the doc is entitled “The League.”
The Negro Leagues were born because of Major League Baseball’s segregation in the first half of the 20th Century, as the owners colluded to keep blacks off their teams. It took black entrepreneur Rube Foster to organize the rag-tag “negro” teams of the era into a collective in 1920. At the League’s peak they forged their own top players, introduced a more modern speed-oriented game and produced many future stars … including Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. Barely surviving the Depression, the barnstorming league changed teams and areas of the country with impunity,...
The Negro Leagues were born because of Major League Baseball’s segregation in the first half of the 20th Century, as the owners colluded to keep blacks off their teams. It took black entrepreneur Rube Foster to organize the rag-tag “negro” teams of the era into a collective in 1920. At the League’s peak they forged their own top players, introduced a more modern speed-oriented game and produced many future stars … including Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. Barely surviving the Depression, the barnstorming league changed teams and areas of the country with impunity,...
- 7/15/2023
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
When basketball fans gather to discuss the Greatest of All Time, the debates tend to be comparative. Russell vs. Wilt. Magic vs. Bird. The search for The Next Jordan or The Next Kobe or The Next LeBron.
The Current LeBron is still active in his own portion of the Goat conversation, presumably by virtue of his status as producer on Starz’s Survivor’s Remorse. But the newest TV series from James’ SpringHill company is more likely to evoke comparisons than any direct declarations of greatness. My notes on Disney+’s eight-episode The Crossover are scattered with references to other shows that the family basketball drama brought to mind.
It doesn’t quite achieve the lyrical poeticism of OWN’s David Makes Man or the earnest adolescent sincerity of Freevee’s High School or the proficiently executed basketball rush of Apple TV+’s Swagger or the enticing time-jumping mystery of The WB’s Jack & Bobby.
The Current LeBron is still active in his own portion of the Goat conversation, presumably by virtue of his status as producer on Starz’s Survivor’s Remorse. But the newest TV series from James’ SpringHill company is more likely to evoke comparisons than any direct declarations of greatness. My notes on Disney+’s eight-episode The Crossover are scattered with references to other shows that the family basketball drama brought to mind.
It doesn’t quite achieve the lyrical poeticism of OWN’s David Makes Man or the earnest adolescent sincerity of Freevee’s High School or the proficiently executed basketball rush of Apple TV+’s Swagger or the enticing time-jumping mystery of The WB’s Jack & Bobby.
- 4/4/2023
- by Daniel Fienberg
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
It’s Academy Awards weekend, that time of year when the film industry obsesses over who will win what, and why.
But there’s more going on than just the Oscars. The Independent has compiled a guide to the best cultural activities and events taking place over the next few days, for our weekly Arts Agenda. Critics and editors recommend a diverse range of options from the worlds of art, literature, film, music, stage and TV.
Arts editor Jessie Thompson heralds an exciting new project from feminist publisher Virago, and discusses the divisive Bake Off musical currently storming the West End. Features editor Adam White has good things to say about the new Scream film, which features Wednesday star Jenna Ortega. Chief art critic Mark Hudson urges everyone to go and check out the Cézanne exhibition while there’s still a chance, and features writer Annabel Nugent walks us through...
But there’s more going on than just the Oscars. The Independent has compiled a guide to the best cultural activities and events taking place over the next few days, for our weekly Arts Agenda. Critics and editors recommend a diverse range of options from the worlds of art, literature, film, music, stage and TV.
Arts editor Jessie Thompson heralds an exciting new project from feminist publisher Virago, and discusses the divisive Bake Off musical currently storming the West End. Features editor Adam White has good things to say about the new Scream film, which features Wednesday star Jenna Ortega. Chief art critic Mark Hudson urges everyone to go and check out the Cézanne exhibition while there’s still a chance, and features writer Annabel Nugent walks us through...
- 3/10/2023
- by Culture Staff
- The Independent - TV
Benjamin Caron’s Sharper, Apple TV+’s sleek but unsatisfying new thriller, needed to be a little smarter to work. It’s more plain than titillating, more predictable than mysterious. But its opening stretch is pleasurably deceptive. Sandra (Briana Middleton) is a grad student at NYU who walks into a humble indie bookstore on the hunt for a copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Tom (Justice Smith), who owns the store, is a depressive bookworm who isn’t looking for love only because he seems...
- 2/17/2023
- by K. Austin Collins
- Rollingstone.com
The double and triple-crosses pile up to preposterous heights in “Sharper,” a drama about con artists and the people they’re playing that takes the hoary adage “nothing is as it seems” to contrived extremes. A deep ensemble cast is game for this ambitiously overwrought material, but no amount of committed acting can overcome the movie’s manipulative artifice.
Things begin simply, with a title card introducing the first of the ensemble’s characters, “Tom.” Played by the likable Justice Smith (“Jurassic World: Dominion”), Tom owns a small bookshop in lower Manhattan, where Sandra (Briana Middleton), a graduate college student working on her thesis, comes looking for a copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
The couple hit it off and go out on a date, which soon leads to an intimate relationship. They bond over their mutual love of Fellini and their shared fluency in Italian.
Things begin simply, with a title card introducing the first of the ensemble’s characters, “Tom.” Played by the likable Justice Smith (“Jurassic World: Dominion”), Tom owns a small bookshop in lower Manhattan, where Sandra (Briana Middleton), a graduate college student working on her thesis, comes looking for a copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
The couple hit it off and go out on a date, which soon leads to an intimate relationship. They bond over their mutual love of Fellini and their shared fluency in Italian.
- 2/8/2023
- by Rene Rodriguez
- Variety Film + TV
Sharper, an A24 and Apple TV+ psychological thriller starring Julianne Moore and Sebastian Stan, opens with a love story. A graduate student named Sandra (Briana Middleton) walks into a used bookstore in New York searching for a first edition copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The man working the counter, Tom (Justice Smith), is immediately smitten. He clumsily asks her on a date. She rejects him. Later that evening, Sandra returns to the store and timidly announces she’s changed her mind.
They fall into an easy romance: Mornings at the bookstore in Soho, afternoon walks in Washington Square Park, evenings spent cooking in Sandra’s apartment somewhere downtown. Tom and Sandra are a perfect match — a couple whose story would make for a great season of HBO’s Love Life. When Sandra vanishes, both Tom and the viewer are left to ask: What went wrong?...
They fall into an easy romance: Mornings at the bookstore in Soho, afternoon walks in Washington Square Park, evenings spent cooking in Sandra’s apartment somewhere downtown. Tom and Sandra are a perfect match — a couple whose story would make for a great season of HBO’s Love Life. When Sandra vanishes, both Tom and the viewer are left to ask: What went wrong?...
- 2/7/2023
- by Lovia Gyarkye
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
With Florida governor and expected Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis making headlines for rejecting an Advanced Placement course on African American Studies, Hulu’s six-part docuseries “The 1619 Project” couldn’t be better timed. What started as an initiative from The New York Times reassessing slavery’s lingering impact on our nation even in the 21st century sparked a conservative backlash, making top journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones both a star and a target in the process. In some ways, that backlash has only fueled “The 1619 Project’s” momentum, which already includes a bestselling book and now this Oprah Winfrey-produced docuseries on Hulu.
Taking a departure from the initial project, which leans more heavily on the past (which has been a contentious point even with some historians), this docuseries, steered by Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams (“Music By Prudence”), producer Shoshanna Guy, and Hannah-Jones (a MacArthur genius who is also...
Taking a departure from the initial project, which leans more heavily on the past (which has been a contentious point even with some historians), this docuseries, steered by Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams (“Music By Prudence”), producer Shoshanna Guy, and Hannah-Jones (a MacArthur genius who is also...
- 1/26/2023
- by Ronda Racha Penrice
- The Wrap
This history of Blaxploitation cinema, dispatches from the front lines of war, adventurous volcanologists, portraits of legendary artists, and a group of jackasses that repeatedly hit each other in the balls—just a few of the subjects and stories this year’s documentaries brought us. With 2022 wrapping up, we’ve selected the features that left us most impressed. If you’re looking for where to stream them, check out our handy guide here.
All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen)
Move over, Sandra Bullock—there’s a new Bird Box in town. The only film to have collected prizes at both Sundance and Cannes, Shaunak Sen’s taut, tender documentary has a healing power that’s sourced straight from its subjects: two brothers in Delhi who have devoted their lives to saving the Black Kite—a majestic, medium-sized, hypercarnivorous raptor of the air—from going extinct in Delhi’s fatally-polluted skies. Set...
All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen)
Move over, Sandra Bullock—there’s a new Bird Box in town. The only film to have collected prizes at both Sundance and Cannes, Shaunak Sen’s taut, tender documentary has a healing power that’s sourced straight from its subjects: two brothers in Delhi who have devoted their lives to saving the Black Kite—a majestic, medium-sized, hypercarnivorous raptor of the air—from going extinct in Delhi’s fatally-polluted skies. Set...
- 12/9/2022
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
In her 2008 documentary “The Order of Myths,” director Margaret Brown explores segregated Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, Alabama. In the process, she also deals with the last slave ship, the Clotilda, which was sunk in the Mobile Bay over 160 years ago. She never expected to return to that story — and then “Descendent” happened.
After “The Order of Myths,” Brown was drawn like a magnet to the unfolding search for the Clotilda, along with her “The Order of Myths” consultant, African American studies professor and folklorist Kern Jackson, who became the co-writer and co-producer of “Descendant.” “We never stopped talking,” Brown said.
In early 2018, in Africatown, they found the wrong ship, the Notilde, but the news went global. One morning in Los Angeles, SXSW impresario and film producer Lewis Black told Brown: “Margaret, are you crazy? You need to go back!”
He wrote her a check at breakfast and she was...
After “The Order of Myths,” Brown was drawn like a magnet to the unfolding search for the Clotilda, along with her “The Order of Myths” consultant, African American studies professor and folklorist Kern Jackson, who became the co-writer and co-producer of “Descendant.” “We never stopped talking,” Brown said.
In early 2018, in Africatown, they found the wrong ship, the Notilde, but the news went global. One morning in Los Angeles, SXSW impresario and film producer Lewis Black told Brown: “Margaret, are you crazy? You need to go back!”
He wrote her a check at breakfast and she was...
- 11/21/2022
- by Anne Thompson
- Indiewire
One of the finest moments in Margaret Brown’s Descendant, which is now streaming on Netflix, arrives by way of a drone shot that unexpectedly alerts us to where we really are. The shot begins at ground level, on a quiet street in Mobile, Alabama, and expands upward and outward to a perch high above the treeline. The view is ominous. Smoke stacks and a highway dominate this newly unfamiliar place that we thought we’d begun to know. Surroundings that the movie had somehow obscured to this point suddenly become very visible — menacingly so.
- 10/28/2022
- by K. Austin Collins
- Rollingstone.com
On its surface, Margaret Brown’s “Descendant” is about the rediscovery of the wreck of the last slave ship to (illegally) arrive in the United States in July of 1860, less than a year before the start of the American Civil War. As documentary subject and writer of the film Kern Jackson puts it, “The boat’s waiting to get raised up. It’s been there the entire time.” But the mystery of where the ship was sunk and the process of how it was found again aren’t nearly as interesting to Brown’s film as the tension of who will get to benefit from the slave ship Clotilda’s recovery.
“Descendant” is a single tense title, but it follows the community of Africatown, which is part of the greater Mobile, Alabama area (although it certainly isn’t zoned like a suburb), and the many descendants of the Clotilda who still live there.
“Descendant” is a single tense title, but it follows the community of Africatown, which is part of the greater Mobile, Alabama area (although it certainly isn’t zoned like a suburb), and the many descendants of the Clotilda who still live there.
- 10/25/2022
- by Sarah Shachat
- Indiewire
In 1808, the Unites States banned the importation of slaves, effectively putting an end to the transatlantic slave trade. Or so the history books have it, although the residents of Mobile, Ala.’s Africatown neighborhood know otherwise: Human trafficking continued for decades more. More than half a century later, in 1860, many of their ancestors were smuggled into the port city aboard a ship called the Clotilda by white men who’d wagered they could get away with it — and did, destroying the evidence. With no ship and no manifest, federal investigators dropped their case against the culprits, Timothy Meaher and Capt. William Foster, even though the proof was there all along, told and retold by the survivors and their families.
Director Margaret Brown honors those voices in her stunning Sundance-winning documentary “Descendant,” distinguishing between what passes for history (the version written by those in power) and the painful reality eyewitnesses have...
Director Margaret Brown honors those voices in her stunning Sundance-winning documentary “Descendant,” distinguishing between what passes for history (the version written by those in power) and the painful reality eyewitnesses have...
- 10/21/2022
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
Seated among plaques of Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Lil Wayne at Noble Studios in Harlem, the Charlotte-raised rapper Mavi tells me about how a chance encounter with Zora Neale Hurston’s You Don’t Know Us Negroes helped change the direction of his life. Earlier this year, he read her essay about High John de Conquerer, often depicted in folklore as a prince turned enslaved person with a glass-half-full sense of humor on his plantation. “He was the personification of laughter on the plantation and amusement at the expense of the slave master,...
- 10/21/2022
- by Andre Gee
- Rollingstone.com
Margaret Brown’s dense and moving documentary “Descendant” is a feat of cinematic nonfiction storytelling, about the importance of storytelling itself. Training her cameras on Mobile, Alabama, specifically the community of Africatown, Brown draws out a tale of America itself, and all of the complicated, violent histories that continue to inform America’s present.
“Descendant,” which earned a Special Jury Prize for Creative Vision at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, is a fascinatingly multilayered film: it is an elegy wrapped around a true-crime story; an observational social-justice movie intertwined with an historical retelling that finds the universal in the specific. In braiding these strands together, Brown crafts a film that isn’t one thing or the other but instead dares to contain multitudes.
What is a descendant if not living history, their existence in the world a gift of their ancestors? Brown explores this connection as something spiritual, tangible and empowering.
“Descendant,” which earned a Special Jury Prize for Creative Vision at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, is a fascinatingly multilayered film: it is an elegy wrapped around a true-crime story; an observational social-justice movie intertwined with an historical retelling that finds the universal in the specific. In braiding these strands together, Brown crafts a film that isn’t one thing or the other but instead dares to contain multitudes.
What is a descendant if not living history, their existence in the world a gift of their ancestors? Brown explores this connection as something spiritual, tangible and empowering.
- 10/21/2022
- by Katie Walsh
- The Wrap
African American history often gets buried in the bowels of the past. I am always embarrassed when I learn about moments from Black history that I feel I should already know. The subject of Margaret Brown’s documentary Descendant is the slave ship Clotilda, found off the coast of Plateau, Alabama (labeled Africatown). Having premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, then screened at SXSW, it is the first film to open the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival. Descendant is also produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground.
The documentary follows the living descendants of the enslaved on the ship that landed in Alabama, who are looking for validation and reparations. These people were tired of waiting around for someone to give them the answers, and shows how these individuals fought to bring this journey full circle.
The Clotilda slave ship arrived off the coast of Alabama...
The documentary follows the living descendants of the enslaved on the ship that landed in Alabama, who are looking for validation and reparations. These people were tired of waiting around for someone to give them the answers, and shows how these individuals fought to bring this journey full circle.
The Clotilda slave ship arrived off the coast of Alabama...
- 8/9/2022
- by Valerie Complex
- Deadline Film + TV
The animated series “Xavier Riddle and The Secret Museum” shares the misadventures of Xavier Riddle and his two best friends. The PBS Kids’ show follows the trio as they tackle the everyday problems that children tend to face by traveling back in time to learn from real-life icons and inspirational people.
The show, which is based on the “Ordinary People Change the World” book series by author Brad Meltzer, has been popular among children five to eight years old since it first aired in 2019.
This story will walk you through everything you need to know about the show and its key characters.
Who Are the Main Characters of “Xavier Riddle and The Secret Museum?”
Let’s meet the show’s main characters:
Xavier Riddle:
Voiced by Aidan Vissers, Xavier is the show’s namesake and the leader of his friend group, which includes his younger sister, Yadina, and their friend Brad.
The show, which is based on the “Ordinary People Change the World” book series by author Brad Meltzer, has been popular among children five to eight years old since it first aired in 2019.
This story will walk you through everything you need to know about the show and its key characters.
Who Are the Main Characters of “Xavier Riddle and The Secret Museum?”
Let’s meet the show’s main characters:
Xavier Riddle:
Voiced by Aidan Vissers, Xavier is the show’s namesake and the leader of his friend group, which includes his younger sister, Yadina, and their friend Brad.
- 8/2/2022
- by Buddy TV
- buddytv.com
PBS’ “American Masters” series will chronicle the life and work of Dr. Anthony Fauci in the documentary “Tony – A Year in the Life of Dr. Anthony Fauci,” PBS president/CEO Paula Kerger announced on Wednesday. The doc, which the public broadcaster revealed during its portion of the Television Critics Assn. press tour, will air in spring 2023.
According to PBS, the doc followed Fauci for 14 months, starting with Inauguration Day 2021 — nearly a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, gaining access “in his office and in the corridors of power as he battles the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the political onslaught that upends his life and calls into question his 50-year career as the United States of America’s leading advocate for public health.”
“Tony – A Year in the Life of Dr. Anthony Fauci” will air on PBS after a planned theatrical release.
That was one of several announcements made on a virtual TCA panel by Kerger,...
According to PBS, the doc followed Fauci for 14 months, starting with Inauguration Day 2021 — nearly a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, gaining access “in his office and in the corridors of power as he battles the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the political onslaught that upends his life and calls into question his 50-year career as the United States of America’s leading advocate for public health.”
“Tony – A Year in the Life of Dr. Anthony Fauci” will air on PBS after a planned theatrical release.
That was one of several announcements made on a virtual TCA panel by Kerger,...
- 7/27/2022
- by Michael Schneider
- Variety Film + TV
PBS on Wednesday revealed its programming plans for the coming year, including a second season of Native America and the premiere of the American Masters documentary about Anthony Fauci.
Native America is returning for four new episodes in 2023. Having first premiered in 2018, Season 2 presents stories of Native Americans who are carrying forward Indigenous values to transform the world.
PBS will launch a new documentary series next summer called Southern Storytellers, which celebrates creatives from across the south. It’s from filmmaker Craig Renaud.
The Bigger Picture, a new series from the Wnet Group, will bow August 9 on the PBS YouTube Channel. It’s hosted by Harvard University Historian Dr. Vincent Brown.
Tony – A Year in the Life of Dr. Anthony Fauci will premiere in spring 2023 on PBS. It follows Fauci for a year and offers a behind-the-scenes look at his career, his struggles and successes during the Covid pandemic
American...
Native America is returning for four new episodes in 2023. Having first premiered in 2018, Season 2 presents stories of Native Americans who are carrying forward Indigenous values to transform the world.
PBS will launch a new documentary series next summer called Southern Storytellers, which celebrates creatives from across the south. It’s from filmmaker Craig Renaud.
The Bigger Picture, a new series from the Wnet Group, will bow August 9 on the PBS YouTube Channel. It’s hosted by Harvard University Historian Dr. Vincent Brown.
Tony – A Year in the Life of Dr. Anthony Fauci will premiere in spring 2023 on PBS. It follows Fauci for a year and offers a behind-the-scenes look at his career, his struggles and successes during the Covid pandemic
American...
- 7/27/2022
- by Lynette Rice
- Deadline Film + TV
Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. Cargo Film and Releasing releases the film in select theaters on Friday, June 2.
On the land and in the water, the whispers of a people, their descendants, and their hereafter echoes, from the first words spoken when enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of America to their continued cries throughout the Civil War. And when, on the eve of January 12, 1865, twenty Black ministers met with General William Tecumseh Sherman in Savannah, Georgia to plot out the reconstructive future of newly freed Black folks, the promise of forty acres and a mule seemed to guarantee prosperity, and perhaps some sort of answer.
And yet, the tragedy of that night is a dream that was deferred. The formerly enslaved would ultimately gain land: parcels not given to them, but purchased in the decades following the Civil War. Amid the arched mossy trees,...
On the land and in the water, the whispers of a people, their descendants, and their hereafter echoes, from the first words spoken when enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of America to their continued cries throughout the Civil War. And when, on the eve of January 12, 1865, twenty Black ministers met with General William Tecumseh Sherman in Savannah, Georgia to plot out the reconstructive future of newly freed Black folks, the promise of forty acres and a mule seemed to guarantee prosperity, and perhaps some sort of answer.
And yet, the tragedy of that night is a dream that was deferred. The formerly enslaved would ultimately gain land: parcels not given to them, but purchased in the decades following the Civil War. Amid the arched mossy trees,...
- 6/14/2022
- by Robert Daniels
- Indiewire
Allow Usher, the central – only? – character of Michael R. Jackson’s scathingly funny and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop, to introduce himself.
He is, he tells us, “a young overweight-to-obese homosexual and/or gay and/or queer, cisgender male, able-bodied university-and-graduate-school educated, musical theater writing, Disney ushering, broke-ass middle-class politically homeless normie leftist Black American descendant of slaves who thinks he’s probably a vers bottom but not totally certain of that obsessing over the latest draft of his self-referential musical A Strange Loop! And surrounded by his extremely obnoxious Thoughts!”
Portrayed by Broadway newcomer Jaquel Spivey in a performance so comfortably inhabited you’d be forgiven for assuming he wrote it, Strange Loop‘s Usher takes his name from the stop-gap Lion King job that pays (barely) his bills while he writes the autobiographical musical of his dreams. He is, in short (and in his words), “a Black,...
He is, he tells us, “a young overweight-to-obese homosexual and/or gay and/or queer, cisgender male, able-bodied university-and-graduate-school educated, musical theater writing, Disney ushering, broke-ass middle-class politically homeless normie leftist Black American descendant of slaves who thinks he’s probably a vers bottom but not totally certain of that obsessing over the latest draft of his self-referential musical A Strange Loop! And surrounded by his extremely obnoxious Thoughts!”
Portrayed by Broadway newcomer Jaquel Spivey in a performance so comfortably inhabited you’d be forgiven for assuming he wrote it, Strange Loop‘s Usher takes his name from the stop-gap Lion King job that pays (barely) his bills while he writes the autobiographical musical of his dreams. He is, in short (and in his words), “a Black,...
- 4/27/2022
- by Greg Evans
- Deadline Film + TV
Leave it to a fiery soul legend to make a low-key Tmi anthem. Before tell-all memoirs by Cybill Shepherd or Karrine Stefans, Betty Davis, who died in February at 77, put no less an eminence than Miles Davis on front street with her 1974 deep cut, “He Was a Big Freak.”
“She opens this song with a line screaming, ‘He was a big freak,’” says author Dawnie Walton, who found inspiration in the songstress’s brazen, zero-fucks-given ethos. “And it’s like, ‘I used to beat him with a turquoise chain.’ Like what?...
“She opens this song with a line screaming, ‘He was a big freak,’” says author Dawnie Walton, who found inspiration in the songstress’s brazen, zero-fucks-given ethos. “And it’s like, ‘I used to beat him with a turquoise chain.’ Like what?...
- 4/14/2022
- by Will Dukes
- Rollingstone.com
A Letter to My Daughters
Dear Exquisites:
So an errant fake lash led me to a Google search. This search led me to the L’Oreal Beauty Blog. Always looking for makeup wisdom, I glanced over their other articles and saw a piece called “How to Make Your Lips Smaller.” The artwork for the piece featured a Black woman who looked like me. Lips like mine. Skin like mine. Body like mine. I looked at this woman — my own reflection. I questioned my sight. I looked for the date thinking surely this article was a fossil from a more unenlightened time. Circa 1950. No. It was written and posted in 2021. Months ago. I sent the image to other Black women friends who were equally stunned. According to this article, my lips — replete, ancestral, a remnant of my majestic mother — were a thing to be made “small.”
Now, right now! Black women’s bodies,...
Dear Exquisites:
So an errant fake lash led me to a Google search. This search led me to the L’Oreal Beauty Blog. Always looking for makeup wisdom, I glanced over their other articles and saw a piece called “How to Make Your Lips Smaller.” The artwork for the piece featured a Black woman who looked like me. Lips like mine. Skin like mine. Body like mine. I looked at this woman — my own reflection. I questioned my sight. I looked for the date thinking surely this article was a fossil from a more unenlightened time. Circa 1950. No. It was written and posted in 2021. Months ago. I sent the image to other Black women friends who were equally stunned. According to this article, my lips — replete, ancestral, a remnant of my majestic mother — were a thing to be made “small.”
Now, right now! Black women’s bodies,...
- 2/28/2022
- by Aunjanue Ellis
- Variety Film + TV
Samuel E. Wright, best known for voicing Sebastian in “The Little Mermaid,” has died at 74. Although portraying the singing lobster in the beloved 1989 Disney film was Wright’s biggest claim to fame, he also appeared in numerous television shows and theatrical productions.
Wright’s hometown of Montgomery, New York shared the sad news in a Facebook post Tuesday, highlighting the actor’s impact on the community through both his performing arts conservatory and his own jubilant personality.
“Sam and his family have impacted countless Hudson Valley youth always inspiring them to reach higher and dig deeper to become the best version of themselves,” the post said, “On top of his passion for the arts and his love for his family, Sam was most known for walking into a room and simply providing Pure Joy to those he interacted with. He loved to entertain, he loved to make people smile and...
Wright’s hometown of Montgomery, New York shared the sad news in a Facebook post Tuesday, highlighting the actor’s impact on the community through both his performing arts conservatory and his own jubilant personality.
“Sam and his family have impacted countless Hudson Valley youth always inspiring them to reach higher and dig deeper to become the best version of themselves,” the post said, “On top of his passion for the arts and his love for his family, Sam was most known for walking into a room and simply providing Pure Joy to those he interacted with. He loved to entertain, he loved to make people smile and...
- 5/25/2021
- by Alex Noble
- The Wrap
Samuel E. Wright, whose vocal portrayal of Sebastian the crab in Disney’s The Little Mermaid included the Oscar-winning “Under the Sea,” died yesterday. He was 74.
His death was announced on the Facebook page of the town of Montgomery, New York, where Wright lived. A cause of death was not specified.
“Sam was an inspiration to us all and along with his family established the Hudson Valley Conservatory,” the tribute states. “Sam and his family have impacted countless Hudson Valley youth always inspiring them to reach higher and dig deeper to become the best version of themselves. On top of his passion for the arts and his love for his family, Sam was most known for walking into a room and simply providing Pure Joy to those he interacted with. He loved to entertain, he loved to make people smile and laugh and he loved to love.”
Though known to...
His death was announced on the Facebook page of the town of Montgomery, New York, where Wright lived. A cause of death was not specified.
“Sam was an inspiration to us all and along with his family established the Hudson Valley Conservatory,” the tribute states. “Sam and his family have impacted countless Hudson Valley youth always inspiring them to reach higher and dig deeper to become the best version of themselves. On top of his passion for the arts and his love for his family, Sam was most known for walking into a room and simply providing Pure Joy to those he interacted with. He loved to entertain, he loved to make people smile and laugh and he loved to love.”
Though known to...
- 5/25/2021
- by Greg Evans
- Deadline Film + TV
An invaluable addition to our still-developing understanding of an artist whose fame raises thorny questions, Jeffrey Wolf’s Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts introduces a man whose distinctive drawings depict life during the final years of slavery and the decades that followed. Drawing heavily on works from various fields — from Zora Neale Hurston’s writing to music and theater — Wolf succeeds in finding a wealth of meaning in Traylor’s deceptively simple pictures, even if he can’t answer all our questions about the man’s life. Some of Wolf’s smartest choices, though, will be invisible to viewers unfamiliar with Traylor’s complicated, posthumous rise to ...
- 4/15/2021
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
An invaluable addition to our still-developing understanding of an artist whose fame raises thorny questions, Jeffrey Wolf’s Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts introduces a man whose distinctive drawings depict life during the final years of slavery and the decades that followed. Drawing heavily on works from various fields — from Zora Neale Hurston’s writing to music and theater — Wolf succeeds in finding a wealth of meaning in Traylor’s deceptively simple pictures, even if he can’t answer all our questions about the man’s life. Some of Wolf’s smartest choices, though, will be invisible to viewers unfamiliar with Traylor’s complicated, posthumous rise to ...
- 4/15/2021
- The Hollywood Reporter - Film + TV
Broadway’s Roundabout Theatre Company, with a planned 2021-22 season opener of Black playwright Alice Childress’ rarely produced 1955 play Trouble in Mind, announced today the launch of a weekly online play reading series and resource library to bring attention to historically marginalized Black and Latinx voices of the theater.
The first series of what the Roundabout is calling its Refocus Project begins April 23 and will spotlight 20th Century plays by Black playwrights Childress, Angelina Weld Grimké, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston and Samm-Art Williams. The series will be presented in association with Black Theatre United.
The second year of The Refocus Project will feature Latinx playwrights.
According to Roundabout, The Refocus Project will be “an annual program dedicated to elevating rarely produced and formerly marginalized theatrical voices from communities underrepresented or historically overlooked in the American theatre.”
In addition to the weekly online play readings, the Refocus Project...
The first series of what the Roundabout is calling its Refocus Project begins April 23 and will spotlight 20th Century plays by Black playwrights Childress, Angelina Weld Grimké, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston and Samm-Art Williams. The series will be presented in association with Black Theatre United.
The second year of The Refocus Project will feature Latinx playwrights.
According to Roundabout, The Refocus Project will be “an annual program dedicated to elevating rarely produced and formerly marginalized theatrical voices from communities underrepresented or historically overlooked in the American theatre.”
In addition to the weekly online play readings, the Refocus Project...
- 3/17/2021
- by Greg Evans
- Deadline Film + TV
It takes a genius to know one. So, it only makes sense that the creators behind Nat Geo’s Genius series would tap Suzan-Lori Parks to showrun, executive-produce and write Season 3, Genius: Aretha.
One of the most heralded playwrights of our time, Parks was the first African American woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize in Drama, which she earned for her 2001 play Topdog/Underdog. Parks is also a Tony Award winner and a MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient. But it’s the time she spent as a student of author, activist and playwright James Baldwin at Hampshire College that she holds most dear.
One of the most heralded playwrights of our time, Parks was the first African American woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize in Drama, which she earned for her 2001 play Topdog/Underdog. Parks is also a Tony Award winner and a MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient. But it’s the time she spent as a student of author, activist and playwright James Baldwin at Hampshire College that she holds most dear.
- 2/19/2021
- by Mekeisha Madden Toby
- TVLine.com
In the mid-1920s, budding writer Nella Larsen set her eyes on joining the ranks of the rising “New Negro” writers spilling out of the Harlem Renaissance like Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and their leader and mentor Alain Locke. The Chicago native even relocated from New Jersey to Harlem to better place herself — and her husband, trailblazing physicist Elmer Imes — in the heart of the cultural action. While Larsen has not yet enjoyed the full recognition of her contemporaries, she produced two remarkable novels that continue to enthrall readers. The best known of the pair is “Passing,” a complex examination of race and sexuality set against the backdrop of the same ’20s-era Harlem that Larsen was so keen to be part of.
The book, like its predecessor “Quicksand,” is run through with details culled from Larsen’s own life, including her experiences as a mixed-race woman in...
The book, like its predecessor “Quicksand,” is run through with details culled from Larsen’s own life, including her experiences as a mixed-race woman in...
- 1/31/2021
- by Kate Erbland
- Indiewire
Chicago – Sam Pollard has been a behind-the-scenes film editor/producer for most of his career, best known for his work with Spike Lee. But recently, after sporadic director assignments over the years, he has broken out with two major profile documentaries, one on Sammy Davis Jr. in 2017, and his most recent “MLK/FBI.”
MLK is of course, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the FBI is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The story is of government overreach in the surveillance of Dr. King, revealing some very human foibles that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover hoped to use against the civil rights icon and the movement that he led. As in his previous work that included King, “Eyes on the Prize,” Sam Pollard has structured a meticulous history lesson, one of truth and morality.
Director Sam Pollard of ‘MLK/FBI’
Photo credit: IFC Films
Pollard has had a long and varied career in the film industry,...
MLK is of course, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the FBI is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The story is of government overreach in the surveillance of Dr. King, revealing some very human foibles that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover hoped to use against the civil rights icon and the movement that he led. As in his previous work that included King, “Eyes on the Prize,” Sam Pollard has structured a meticulous history lesson, one of truth and morality.
Director Sam Pollard of ‘MLK/FBI’
Photo credit: IFC Films
Pollard has had a long and varied career in the film industry,...
- 1/14/2021
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
7 random things that happened on this day, January 7th, in showbiz history
1891 Best-selling author Zora Neale Hurston is born in Alabama. Where's her biopic? Hell, where are the movies based on her books and plentiful short stories? The only movie length adaptation has been the TV movie Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005).
1971 Today is the big "5-0" for Jeremy Renner, twice Oscar nominated, but whose promising gifts were completely swallowed up by a desire to become a franchise star which was both successful in a supporting sense (9 years and counting as Hawkeye in the McU) and not in the headliner sense...
1891 Best-selling author Zora Neale Hurston is born in Alabama. Where's her biopic? Hell, where are the movies based on her books and plentiful short stories? The only movie length adaptation has been the TV movie Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005).
1971 Today is the big "5-0" for Jeremy Renner, twice Oscar nominated, but whose promising gifts were completely swallowed up by a desire to become a franchise star which was both successful in a supporting sense (9 years and counting as Hawkeye in the McU) and not in the headliner sense...
- 1/7/2021
- by NATHANIEL R
- FilmExperience
Another Halloween treat for horror fans this weekend is Spell, a new horror film that is now available on premium VOD and for digital purchase. I recently had a chance to talk with director Mark Tonderai, who told me about his interest and connection to this film and its themes, working with Omari Hardwick and Loretta Devine, and the films that inspired his take on Spell.
Can you talk about how you got involved with Spell and what was the creative process of getting from what you had in your head to the finished film?
Mark Tonderai: I've been doing a lot TV for a while now and I've really enjoyed working with some of the most amazing crews kind of in the business. But the real trick for TV is that you can't really sort of claim ownership of it creatively. You can to a certain extent, as a TV director,...
Can you talk about how you got involved with Spell and what was the creative process of getting from what you had in your head to the finished film?
Mark Tonderai: I've been doing a lot TV for a while now and I've really enjoyed working with some of the most amazing crews kind of in the business. But the real trick for TV is that you can't really sort of claim ownership of it creatively. You can to a certain extent, as a TV director,...
- 10/30/2020
- by Jonathan James
- DailyDead
“Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the other way.”—Robert Bresson, Notes on the CinematographThe work of experimental filmmaker and visual artist Christopher Harris generates bounties from the historical and cultural vestiges of the African-American experience. Consider his 2004 short film, Reckless Eyeballing, an amalgam of black and white images and footage chopped and screwed to the sound of ominous, Hitchcockian violin crescendos. Glimpses of Pam Grier and Angela Davis and scenes from D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation collide, evoking a pop culture iconography that draws Black women as illicit, dangerous objects of desire, while the title makes reference to Jim Crow-era vernacular of Black men looking at white women with presumably lusty intent. Halimuhfack (2016), one of Harris’ most recent shorts, similarly achieves a provocative density of signification in its critique of anthropological documentation. A performer who assumes the posture of an interview...
- 3/26/2020
- MUBI
Given the industry’s dedication to sequels, Hollywood would do well to capitalize on this one: The 2020s seem on track to become a buoyant sequel to the 1920s, in all its frenzies and foibles – think the Roarin’ Twenties, Part II. But with the same ominous third act?
Consider the century-spanning parallels: The stock market was boiling in the 1920s, and so, as now, were the culture wars. The new media was eviscerating the old (remember radio?). Newly enfranchised women (even flappers) were pushing aside their inert bosses. Voters were applauding fiercely anti-immigrant legislation. In fact, the politicians’ rhetoric was veering relentlessly to the right with William Randolph Hearst playing the role of Rupert Murdoch, propping up President Warren Harding (he was Donald Trump without makeup).
Hollywood was enjoying this spectacle because the typical American was going to the movies once a week to capture the magic of Charlie Chaplin,...
Consider the century-spanning parallels: The stock market was boiling in the 1920s, and so, as now, were the culture wars. The new media was eviscerating the old (remember radio?). Newly enfranchised women (even flappers) were pushing aside their inert bosses. Voters were applauding fiercely anti-immigrant legislation. In fact, the politicians’ rhetoric was veering relentlessly to the right with William Randolph Hearst playing the role of Rupert Murdoch, propping up President Warren Harding (he was Donald Trump without makeup).
Hollywood was enjoying this spectacle because the typical American was going to the movies once a week to capture the magic of Charlie Chaplin,...
- 1/2/2020
- by Peter Bart
- Deadline Film + TV
Ten years after starring as Princess Tiana in Disney’s Oscar-nominated animated feature “The Princess and the Frog,” Anika Noni Rose reflected on her trailblazing role and the film’s lasting legacy.
“Being the first black Disney princess, that was such a first and it really has changed the way young brown children are looked at in school and fantasy when they are playing,” Rose told Variety at the Academy’s anniversary screening Thursday night at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. “It’s no longer ‘You can’t be the princess.’ It’s expected and normal.”
“And I see children of all different ethnicities wearing their Tiana gear so what it says is that she speaks to people on so many different levels,” Rose continued. “Babies aren’t looking at her for her skin color. When they see her and they look like them, they aren’t old...
“Being the first black Disney princess, that was such a first and it really has changed the way young brown children are looked at in school and fantasy when they are playing,” Rose told Variety at the Academy’s anniversary screening Thursday night at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. “It’s no longer ‘You can’t be the princess.’ It’s expected and normal.”
“And I see children of all different ethnicities wearing their Tiana gear so what it says is that she speaks to people on so many different levels,” Rose continued. “Babies aren’t looking at her for her skin color. When they see her and they look like them, they aren’t old...
- 9/6/2019
- by Ashley Hume
- Variety Film + TV
Since Albert and Allen Hughes — known professionally as the Hughes brothers — split up around 2004 to direct solo projects, individual output has been uneven in terms of volume, acclaim and box office. Allen’s highlight was the 2017 HBO documentary series “The Defiant Ones,” about music producers Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. While Albert directed his first solo feature film in 2018, the historical adventure “Alpha.” While the former’s follow-up remains a mystery, the latter will make his first major foray into television, signing up to direct and executive produce Showtime’s limited series based on author James McBride’s 2013 book, “The Good Lord Bird,” replacing Anthony Hemingway.
A winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, the first person narrative follows Henry Shackleford, a mid-19th century slave in Kansas who accidentally encounters abolitionist John Brown and joins his movement. Ethan Hawke, who is also co-writing and executive producing the series,...
A winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, the first person narrative follows Henry Shackleford, a mid-19th century slave in Kansas who accidentally encounters abolitionist John Brown and joins his movement. Ethan Hawke, who is also co-writing and executive producing the series,...
- 5/22/2019
- by Tambay Obenson
- Indiewire
Find the most intelligent three-year-old you know. It doesn’t have to be a genius-level prodigy, just the smartest toddler in the room. Now, explain quantum physics to him or her.
And then, when you’re done with that, find an adult. It’s a nebulous term, we agree. But aim for someone over the age of, say, 35. Probably college-educated. Possibly employed. This person doesn’t need to know how to get a great mortgage refinancing rate, but for the sake of parameters, they should be able to tell you...
And then, when you’re done with that, find an adult. It’s a nebulous term, we agree. But aim for someone over the age of, say, 35. Probably college-educated. Possibly employed. This person doesn’t need to know how to get a great mortgage refinancing rate, but for the sake of parameters, they should be able to tell you...
- 5/7/2019
- by David Fear
- Rollingstone.com
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAgnès Varda, 1921—2019.Agnès Varda, vital initiator of the French New Wave, prolific auteur, nimble innovator, and constant inspiration as an artist and a person, has left us at the age of 90. "'In all women there is something in revolt which is not expressed,' Varda once said of her protagonist in Vagabond. Her films express exactly that sense of revolt, in both form and content." That's Christina Newland writing on Varda's cinema and its expression of the female experience for the New Statesman.Though it was first premiered at Venice in 2014, Abel Ferrara's Pasolini will finally have its North American release on May 10. The premiere coincides with “Abel Ferrara Unrated,” an upcoming retrospective of Ferrara's works at the Museum of Modern Art. Following a recent screening of High Life, Claire Denis stated that...
- 4/3/2019
- MUBI
In January of 1973 — after years of delays, arguments and questioning from an all-male Supreme Court — the world changed for women. Up until then, women didn’t have the right or freedom to control their bodies, lives or future. Up until then, a woman’s ability to access a safe abortion depended on how much money she had, who she was and where she lived. And for some women, it still hasn’t changed. But the fact remains: the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade was a resounding victory: for women,...
- 1/22/2019
- by Leana S. Wen, M.D. M.Sc.
- Rollingstone.com
Lionsgate and Common’s Freedom Road Productions have acquired the rights to Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’, the critically praised, recently discovered book by 20th century writer Zora Neale Hurston, to develop as a limited television event series.
Barracoon centers on 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis, the last known survivor of the Middle Passage who was brought to America in 1927. The book, which was unpublished until earlier this year, chronicles Cudjo’s time of slavery and the profound complexities of reconstruction and freedom after the Atlantic slave trade was abolished.
This is the second project coming out of Lionsgate and Freedom Road’s TV deal. Lionsgate and Freedom Road are already developing the Saturday Night Knife and Gun Club TV adaptation starring and produced by Common.
Hurston also is the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Barracoon centers on 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis, the last known survivor of the Middle Passage who was brought to America in 1927. The book, which was unpublished until earlier this year, chronicles Cudjo’s time of slavery and the profound complexities of reconstruction and freedom after the Atlantic slave trade was abolished.
This is the second project coming out of Lionsgate and Freedom Road’s TV deal. Lionsgate and Freedom Road are already developing the Saturday Night Knife and Gun Club TV adaptation starring and produced by Common.
Hurston also is the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God.
- 11/27/2018
- by Denise Petski
- Deadline Film + TV
Rapper/actor Common's overall deal with Lionsgate TV is bearing more fruit in the form of an adaptation of a recently discovered Zora Neale Hurston book.
The studio and Common's Freedom Road Productions have acquired rights to Barracoon, a posthumous, previously unpublished work by Hurston, the renowned anthropologist and author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Barracoon will be developed as a limited series.
The nonfiction book tells the story of Cudjo Lewis (born Oluale Kossola), the last known survivor of the Middle Passage who was brought to the United States in 1860, half a century after the transatlantic slave trade was ...
The studio and Common's Freedom Road Productions have acquired rights to Barracoon, a posthumous, previously unpublished work by Hurston, the renowned anthropologist and author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Barracoon will be developed as a limited series.
The nonfiction book tells the story of Cudjo Lewis (born Oluale Kossola), the last known survivor of the Middle Passage who was brought to the United States in 1860, half a century after the transatlantic slave trade was ...
- 11/27/2018
- The Hollywood Reporter - Film + TV
As Vanity Fair’s cover profile, Michael B. Jordan provoked a storm of criticism with one line: “We don’t have any mythology, black mythology, or folklore. …Creating our own mythology is very important because … You help people dream.” Jordan likely knows that black folkore has a very long, rich history. It’s quite possible he had a more specific point in mind — frustrations over the lack of film and TV content that exploits black folklore — but the interviewer doesn’t make it explicitly clear with a follow-up question, leaving many to assume that the “Creed II” star meant exactly what he said.
The actor has yet to make a public statement responding to the criticism, and he declined to comment for this story. However, rather than pillory Jordan over what he may or may not have meant, here’s a brief overview of black folklore to serve as introduction for the uninitiated.
The actor has yet to make a public statement responding to the criticism, and he declined to comment for this story. However, rather than pillory Jordan over what he may or may not have meant, here’s a brief overview of black folklore to serve as introduction for the uninitiated.
- 10/8/2018
- by Tambay Obenson
- Indiewire
Valar morghulis. All men must die. Might as well read some excellent books before then.
This summer, George R.R. Martin and a slew of other authors and celebrities will lend their voices and passion to “The Great American Read,” an eight-part PBS television competition that celebrates books. PBS made the announcement at the Television Critics Association press tour on Tuesday.
Much like Martin’s “Game of Thrones” series, ultimately there can only be one victor, and the series will conclude when the public selects “America’s Best-Loved Book” based on votes.
Read More:‘Game of Thrones’ Prequels Won’t Premiere Until At Least 2020, HBO Boss Confirms
Although Martin may seem to have a leg up on the competition, there’s no guarantee that any of his “Game of Thrones” books will even make it to the 100 best-loved novels list for consideration. While his novels may have inspired one of today’s most popular TV series,...
This summer, George R.R. Martin and a slew of other authors and celebrities will lend their voices and passion to “The Great American Read,” an eight-part PBS television competition that celebrates books. PBS made the announcement at the Television Critics Association press tour on Tuesday.
Much like Martin’s “Game of Thrones” series, ultimately there can only be one victor, and the series will conclude when the public selects “America’s Best-Loved Book” based on votes.
Read More:‘Game of Thrones’ Prequels Won’t Premiere Until At Least 2020, HBO Boss Confirms
Although Martin may seem to have a leg up on the competition, there’s no guarantee that any of his “Game of Thrones” books will even make it to the 100 best-loved novels list for consideration. While his novels may have inspired one of today’s most popular TV series,...
- 1/16/2018
- by Hanh Nguyen
- Indiewire
In the opening frames of the “Marshall” trailer, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice gets a setup worthy of a superhero: In the trailer’s opening frames, 32-year old NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall (Chadwick Boseman) sips whiskey at a bar; a group of threatening racists gather around him. “You gentlemen are making a mistake,” says Marshall, in the tone of a calm badass as he steadies himself for the inevitable physical confrontation.
Boseman said a cocksure portrayal is the only logical interpretation. “His job was to be the lone attorney running around for the NAACP, dealing with cases in towns where there was racial prejudice and there was inequality,” he said. “Who has the arrogance to walk into those places and actually believe that they either will win, or they can set up the case in such a way that it can go to a higher level, and then you can win on that level,...
Boseman said a cocksure portrayal is the only logical interpretation. “His job was to be the lone attorney running around for the NAACP, dealing with cases in towns where there was racial prejudice and there was inequality,” he said. “Who has the arrogance to walk into those places and actually believe that they either will win, or they can set up the case in such a way that it can go to a higher level, and then you can win on that level,...
- 10/16/2017
- by Chris O'Falt
- Indiewire
There are two very different explanations for why “Marshall” — ostensibly a biopic about Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Justice of the United States — isn’t really about Thurgood Marshall so much as it’s about a shaky Jewish lawyer who Marshall once coached through a case. The first (and more generous) of the explanations is that the world could use an inspiring film about different kinds of discriminated against Americans joining forces to fight the prejudice that betrays the promise of the nation they share. The second (and more sincere) of the explanations is that Hollywood still believes that white audiences need an entry point to stories about people who don’t look like them, a Virgil to take them by the hand and guide them — safely and without implication — down through an inferno of intolerance and then out the other side.
The two rationales behind telling this...
The two rationales behind telling this...
- 10/12/2017
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
New York’s Anthology Film Archives has announced the lineup for its ambitious Woman With a Movie Camera: Female Film Directors Before 1950,” which runs September 15 — 28. Among the spotlighted filmmakers are Gene Gauntier, Lois Weber and Alice Guy-Blaché, though many more will be featured during the two-week series as well. Full lineup below.
“The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg” (Sidney Olcott & Gene Gauntier)
“Further Adventures of the Girl Spy” (Sidney Olcott)
“The Colleen Bawn” (Sidney Olcott & Gene Gauntier)
“Broadway Love” (Ida May Park)
“The Adventures of Prince Achmed” (Lotte Reiniger)
Read More: The Rock Named World’s Highest-Paid Actor, Earning Nearly $20 Million More Than Highest-Paid Actress, Jennifer Lawrence
“The Rosary” and “Suspense” (Lois Weber & Phillips Smalley)
“Shoes” (Lois Weber)
“The Holy Night” (Elvira Notari)
“Humankind” (Elvira Giallanella)
“The Drunken Mattress” (Alice Guy-Blaché)
“The Strike” (Alice Guy-Blaché)
“The New Love and the Old” (Alice Guy-Blaché)
“The Roads That Lead Home” (Alice Guy-Blaché)
“The...
“The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg” (Sidney Olcott & Gene Gauntier)
“Further Adventures of the Girl Spy” (Sidney Olcott)
“The Colleen Bawn” (Sidney Olcott & Gene Gauntier)
“Broadway Love” (Ida May Park)
“The Adventures of Prince Achmed” (Lotte Reiniger)
Read More: The Rock Named World’s Highest-Paid Actor, Earning Nearly $20 Million More Than Highest-Paid Actress, Jennifer Lawrence
“The Rosary” and “Suspense” (Lois Weber & Phillips Smalley)
“Shoes” (Lois Weber)
“The Holy Night” (Elvira Notari)
“Humankind” (Elvira Giallanella)
“The Drunken Mattress” (Alice Guy-Blaché)
“The Strike” (Alice Guy-Blaché)
“The New Love and the Old” (Alice Guy-Blaché)
“The Roads That Lead Home” (Alice Guy-Blaché)
“The...
- 8/25/2016
- by Michael Nordine
- Indiewire
It's arrived -- thanks in part to a successful Kickstarter campaign, this nearly comprehensive compendium of American 'Race Films' is here in a deluxe Blu-ray presentation. Pioneers of African-American Cinema Blu-ray Kino Classics 1915-1946 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 952 min. / Street Date July 26, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 99.95 Directed by Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, Spencer Williams and Oscar Micheaux
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Black Cinema History? We didn't hear a peep about any such thing back in film school. Sometime in the 1980s PBS would broadcast a barely watchable (see sample just below) copy of a creaky silent 'race movie' about a 'backsliding' black man in trouble with the law, the Lord and his wife in that order. The cultural segregation has been almost complete. It wasn't until even later that I read articles about a long-extinct nationwide circuit of movie theaters catering to black audiences, wherever the populations were big enough to support the trade.
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Black Cinema History? We didn't hear a peep about any such thing back in film school. Sometime in the 1980s PBS would broadcast a barely watchable (see sample just below) copy of a creaky silent 'race movie' about a 'backsliding' black man in trouble with the law, the Lord and his wife in that order. The cultural segregation has been almost complete. It wasn't until even later that I read articles about a long-extinct nationwide circuit of movie theaters catering to black audiences, wherever the populations were big enough to support the trade.
- 8/6/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Gilded Six Bits” is a short story that was published in 1933, when she was a relative newcomer on the literary scene. The story goes that a well-known publisher named Bertram Lippincott read the "The Gilded Six Bits" and was so impressed by it that it led to Hurston getting a book deal, and her first novel, "Jonah’s Gourd Vine." Of course it was the publication of her second novel, "Their Eyes Were Watching God," in 1937, that brought her great success and a lasting legacy. Though it was pivotal to her career, “The Gilded Six Bits” was not reprinted until renewed scholarly interest in Hurston led to the publication of a...
- 3/25/2016
- by Tambay A. Obenson
- ShadowAndAct
You'll recall just about a year ago when we alerted you to a fundraising campaign to support an ambitious restoration of early works of black cinema in the USA called "Pioneers of African American Cinema" - an effort that would showcase the works of such influential figures as Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, James and Eloyce Gist, and others, in a digitally-restored package of films that includes 8 feature films, several shorts, fragments of "lost" films, and rare documentary footage. Context would be provided by videotaped interviews with film historians, performing artists, archivists, and filmmakers, who will discuss the...
- 2/5/2016
- by Tambay A. Obenson
- ShadowAndAct
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