I just HAVE to get this off of my chest...... Black filmmakers out there - PLEASE up your game! Spike Lee set a very excellent precedent that many seemed to have veered away from! I can remember when I was in college and there was this time, circa 1991, when an unprecedented amount of films written and directed by African-American screenwriters. That was all good, as films like New Jack City and Boyz n the Hood portrayed the hard-bitten lives of those living in crime-ridden circumstances. By the time Menace II Society came out, I was seriously sick of the whole drive-by shooting aesthetic and wanted something different - more avant-garde. The best thing I got in a number of years was Eves Bayou, which I heartily enjoyed, but seemed to be largely ignored and passed on by black viewers. It begs the question..... Do we hold such inherently myopic views of ourselves as hoodlums and such? This story needed to be told, yes, but dont beat it to death in the public consciousness! On the other end of the spectrum is the ardently, and often ABSURDLY, religious. Tyler Perry - whose films are, at best, DECENT (and thats part of the time), has painted a curiously retrograde picture of the black matriarch, one that harkens ever-so closely to (and this is my opinion), the mammy of yore! Also - beating people over the head with moralist and deeply personal religious convictions (his own) can get really old. I am African-American, was raised largely in part by the black church, and I had so much church crammed down my throat it could be sickening. Perrys films paint an even MORE myopic extreme of black like - one wherein black men ALWAYS cheat, always crave any woman BUT a black one - and one wherein black females are always LOVE-STARVED! Whats worse about black filmmakers is that they often embrace anecdotes and stereotypes even more than their white counterparts.... Seriously - every time I see black gay men on screen, theyre always flaming, fabulous, loud and insanely campy! There IS more than just this one glaring demographic of black gay men, people! Can we move past some of this redundant nonsense?! I will say that 12 Years a Slave was superb. However, Im seriously wanting black filmmakers to do some contemporary stuff that is more all-encompassing, realistic, and - most importantly - not-so beholden to cliches!
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 01:05:23 +0000
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