Armond White Abuses “Precious.”
"I am not a contrarian; everyone else is a conformist."
There’s one in every crowd of film critics. The one critic who doesn’t simply march to the beat of a different drummer; he has his own original soundtrack. That’s Armond White, film critic for a website you don’t read named the New York Press. White has carefully crafted a reputation as the skunk at the garden parties. If the vast majority is going one way on a film, he tacks in an opposite direction and when he goes after a particular movie that irks his sensibilities he doesn’t stop pummeling it until he’s licking the blood off his knuckles.
The do-it-yourself aspects of the Internet made anyone with a laptop a critic whether they had the knack for it or not. That really annoyed the professional critics who found themselves suddenly increasingly irrelevant. So if being smart isn’t working anymore, how about just being incredibly nasty in temperament? This is White’s house special.
The vast majority of critics have practically guaranteed Precious as a stone cold lock for Oscar nominations, White disagrees mightily. In his review White guts the film saying, “Not since The Birth of A Nation” has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious.”
That’s not simply a pan, but White was equally unsparing of director Lee Daniels and executive producers Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry.
Shame on Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey for signing on as air-quote executive producers of Precious. After this post-hip-hop freak show wowed Sundance last January, it now slouches toward Oscar ratification thanks to its powerful friends.Winfrey and Perry had no hand in the actual production of Precious, yet the movie must have touched some sore spot in their demagogue psyches. They’ve piggybacked their reps as black success stories hoping to camouflage Precious’ con job—even though it’s more scandalous than their own upliftment trade.
Winfrey, Perry and Daniels make an unholy triumvirate.They come together at some intersection of race exploitation and opportunism. These two media titans—plus one shrewd pathology pimp—use Precious to rework Booker T. Washington’s early 20th-century manifesto Up From Slavery into extreme drama for the new millennium.
"Norbit" cost Eddie an Oscar, but Armond White thinks it rocks!
I used to believe it was easy to write a negative review until I had to actually sit through bad movies when I was a stringer for Columbus Dispatch film critic Frank Gabrenya. That’s when I realized the time wasted on bad movies, bad books or bad music makes them not much fun to trash.
Armond White is the sort of haughty, pompous and self-important critic the Internet has made pretty much irrelevant. Of course he’s entitled to slam any film he thinks is a waste of time and celluloid, but his Precious review is nothing more than a full-blown rant against African-American celebrities he finds annoying. The movie itself is irrelevant. It’s just the punching bag White pastes pictures of Oprah and Tyler on to swing at.
How seriously can anyone take White when no sooner has he compared Precious unfavorably to The Birth of A Nation, D.W. Griffith’s notoriously racist Valentine card to the Ku Klux Klan and Black politicans lording it over White citizens (Griffith would have been the guest of honor at tax day tea parties rallies against Barack Obama) than he follows it up with this jaw-dropping paragraph.
The hype for Precious indicates a culture-wide willingness to accept particular ethnic stereotypes as a way of maintaining status quo film values. Excellent recent films with black themes—Next Day Air, Cadillac Records, Meet Dave, Norbit, Little Man, Akeelah and the Bee, First Sunday, The Ladykillers, Marci X, Palindromes, Mr. 3000, even back to the great Beloved (also produced by Oprah)—have been ignored by the mainstream media and serious film culture while this carnival of black degradation gets celebrated. It’s a strange combination of liberal guilt and condescension.
That’s right, folks. White is saying when it comes to making a contribution to cinema and uplifting the race, Precious can’t hold Meet Dave, Little Man and Norbit’s collective jock straps.
I haven’t seen Precious yet, so I can’t offer an opinion whether it deserves the hammering White gives it or it’s a bona fide masterpiece. However, the ugly way White goes about eviscerating it only makes me more sympathetic, not less, to this unconventional underdog of a movie.
There’s a line between coherent criticism of a failed film and just ripping into as so to draw attention to your review. White waits until the last paragraph to cross it where he drop kicks lead actress Gabourey Sidibe dubbing her a “hippopotamus.” That goes beyond harsh. That is just cruel.
It’s possible White is really drinking the haterade and truly finds Precious to be a totally repugnant movie. But it’s hard to take seriously his disgust when he hails a piece of excrement like Norbit as an “excellent film.” How is Eddie Murphy swaddled in layers of latex as an grossly offensive and vulgar bastardization of Black women less offensive than comparing an overweight teenager unfavorably to the third-largest land mammal?
I mean, Norbit? Seriously? How can White write a sentence like that with a straight face?
There’s something vaguely admirable about holding a contrary opinion in the face of nearly unanimous praise. Precious may prove not to live up to its hype. Great. White will have the satisfaction of saying he was right when everybody else was wrong. But his sledgehammer rhetoric and praise for trash come off as a grab for attention.
Armond White is playing a hustle to get some attention for a review that would otherwise go largely unnoticed. I regret to the extent that I have assisted him in this endeavor. On the other hand, I’m providing a public service by exposing White’s tirade as the mean-spirited mugging it is.
Can you find the "hippopotamus" in this picture?
Getting Away With Murder.
"I didn't think he was that sick."
Anthony Sowell, 50, apparently murdered at least 11 women. Maybe more. We really won’t know until they stop digging bodies out of the ground of his Cleveland, Ohio home.
Over 14 women have disappeared in Cleveland’s 4th District. Authorities say the corpses may have been in the house or yard of Sewell’s home since 2005, which is around the time he was released from prison after serving a 15-year term for attempted rape.
Then there’s this interesting little nugget:
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Thirty-seven days passed between the time a woman told police Anthony Sowell choked and raped her in his house and when police went to Imperial Avenue to arrest him.
That time gap has raised the question — among the crowds of neighbors gathered outside Sowell’s home, victims’ advocates and at least one city councilman — if more could have been done to track Sowell, whom police charged Tuesday with five counts of aggravated murder for some of the people found dead at his home.
“I’m not going to point fingers but at the end of the day, someone clearly dropped the ball,” Councilman Zack Reed said Tuesday.
Reed wants to hold hearings about how so many warning signs about Sowell — from the foul odor coming from his house to calls to police about him — weren’t acted upon fast enough.
Police said they did all they could to bring Sowell to justice for the Sept. 22 attack, but were hampered by a victim who was difficult to track down and hesitant to meet with detectives.
Mayor Frank Jackson defended the work of the police.
How did Anthony Sowell get away with it for so long?
Maybe it’s because he picked the right type of victim.
Sowell murdered Black women on the margins of society. Hunt them, rape them, kill them. Who cares about them?
This is the house where nobody lives.
A crowd of around 100 people milled about and chatted near the home Tuesday evening. A short while later, around 50 people joined hands and put their arms around one another in the middle of the street and prayed aloud.
One of those in the crowd, Antoinnette Dudley, 29, lives a few houses away. She said she could smell a terrible odor like something was dead all summer. She said she saw Sowell only a few times, mainly drinking beer while he sat on his porch.
“I didn’t think he was that sick,” she said.
As a registered sex offender, Sowell was required to check in regularly at the sheriff’s office. Officers didn’t have the right to enter his house, but they would stop by to make sure he was there. Their most recent visit was Sept. 22, just hours before the woman reported being raped.
For the past few years, Sowell’s neighbors thought the foul smell enveloping their street corner had been coming from a brick building where workers churned out sausage and head cheese. It got so bad that the owners of Ray’s Sausage replaced their sewer line and grease traps.
Oh, I’m not bashing the cops, though taking 37 days to investigate after a naked woman falls or jumps out of a known rapist’s house should have set off a few bells. Cops only handle the messy details and tidy up a bit after murders. They don’t prevent a committed serial killer/rapist, so forget all that CSI crap. I’m even going to cut a little slack to the officials who visited Sewell’s home because he was a convicted sex offender.
I’ll throw some of the weight on the neighbors. If both a man and the house he lives in smells like an abattoir, I’m going to call the police, mayor’s office, the EPA, and everybody except the dog catcher as much as I have to until someone gets off their ass and does something.
If we haven’t learned anything from this prick and the Phillip Garrido case it’s that you can’t unleash these dogs upon society and not expect them to bite.
The system has failed.
It comes down to the unpleasant truth that some don’t lives matter as much than others. Kill the right kind of victim and you can get away with murder for a long time.
No Grace Under Pressure
Jaime Lee Jones says she was raped by Haliburton contractors. 30 Republican senators don't think that's a problem.
You may not be familair with the controversy over The Franken Amendement. Sen. Franken’s amendment to the 2009 Defense Appropriations Bill would close a legal loophole where defense contractors such as Haliburton can force employees to sign contracts waiving their right to a civil trial against other employees that rape or sexually assault them.
Sen. Franken’s amendment stems from the case of Jaime Leigh Jones, who as a 19-year-old contractor working for KBR in Iraq, a subsidiary of Haliburton, alleges she was drugged, gang raped and locked in a storage container by several other contractors. Her Wikipedia listing details the assault:
According to Jones, on July 28, 2005, several of her fellow KBR employees offered her a drink containing a date rape drug, of which she took two sips. The men then allegedly engaged in unprotected anal and vaginal gang rape upon her while she was unconscious. She was able to name one of her attackers based on his confession to her, but was unable to identify the others due to her unconsciousness. Further, the lawsuit filed by Jones’ attorneys cites the following: “When she awoke the next morning still affected by the drug, she found her body naked and severely bruised, with lacerations to her vagina and anus, blood running down her leg, her breast implants ruptured, and her pectoral muscles torn – which would later require reconstructive surgery. Upon walking to the rest room, she passed out again.” Jones’ account was confirmed by U.S. Army physician Jodi Schultz. Schultz gave the rape kit she used to gather evidence from Jones to KBR/Haliburton security forces, after which the rape kit disappeared. It was recovered two years later, but missing crucial photographs and notes.
When Jones returned home she learned the contract she had signed with KBR waived her right to file civil charges against her assailants.
30 Republican Senators–all male–opposed Franken’s amendment.
One of them, Sen David Vitter (R-La), a guy who enjoyed getting his freak on with hookers while he wore diapers, had an encounter at a town meeting with a woman who says she was raped.
Decide for yourself if the Senator handled the moment with grace under pressure:
Sen. Vitter claims both The White House and Pentagon also opposed The Franken Amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill.
“We support the intent of the amendment, and we’re working with the conferees to make sure that it is enforceable,” a White House spokesperson said.
Has porn made rape a spectator sport?
Gang rape is not fashionable.
Whenever Halloween comes around its a stock news story to come up with favorite horror movies. Not everyone enjoys a good scare, but those who do usually cite films like Psycho, The Exorcist, A Nightmare On Elm Street and of course, Halloween.
Worthy candidates one and all, but I find real life far scarier than anything Hollywood cranks out.
The story coming out of Richmond, California of the gang rape of a 15-year-old-girl outside of a high school homecoming dance is far more terrifying than Freddy, Jason or Michael Meyers. The sexual assault itself is disturbing enough. What blasts this case into the stratosphere is the shocking additional detail that as many as 20 people were involved in or witnessed the rape without calling 911 or making any attempt to stop it.
Rather than join the reative hand-wringing about what happened to our morality and making comparisons to the Kitty Genovese case, I think it might be approrpriate to look in another direction. Maybe it’s men who need to look at ourselves and what our insatiable appetite for pornography does in contributing to a culture where rape becomes a spectator sport.
Porn was never innocent, but it’s become increasingly hardened and jaded.
Taking a stroll through the adult DVD section of my friendly, neighborhood video store and there is an abundance of “gang bang” videos where multiple men double team, triple team and more one woman. Virtually every orifice is penetrated and without fail the woman is portrayed as loving it as the men use her as a two-legged wank rag.
It got so ridiculous that the gangbang genre began to go for “world records”. There’s nothing “regular” about sex with 300 men at a time.
There's gonzo and there's porn. Then there's gonzo porn.
How much porn depicts women dressed up as schoolgirls, cheerleaders and otherwise younger than they are? What’s that about? Well, actually we know what it’s about. It’s sweet young things vs. dirty old men, but the odd are tilted in the favor of the dirty old man.
Porn is great for guys when they want to see other people doing what they’d like to be doing, but it’s important to remember ALL pornography is an illusion and there’s an awful lot of people damaged by it and no one gets damaged more than many of the women involved in it. Author Chris Hedges looked in hs book From Empire of Illuion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle pulled back the curtain of mainstream acceptance pornography has enjoyed to find its ugly downside and the toil it takes on women to be lurking just out of sight:
The porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what amounts to a personality.
The one emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy men, especially if that desire involves the women’s physical and emotional degradation. The lighting in the films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is shaved off to give the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn, which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The acts onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd. The manicured and groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting, oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the sculpted bodies are unreal. Makeup and production mask blemishes. There are no beads of sweat, no wrinkle lines, no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow spectrum of sterilized dimensions. It does not include the dank smell of human bodies, the thump of a pulse, taste, breath — or tenderness. Those in the films are puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotions, are devoid of authentic human beauty and resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.
I’m not blaming pornography for what happened to this poor girl. That would be too easy and simplistic an answer without knowing more and porn is a easy whipping boy to blame. But young people are expolsed to sexual stimuli at younger and younger ages and it’s not always in a healthy, wholesome or realistic way. Nobody admits to liking it, but millions do. Within limits, that’s fine, but some people have problems with setting limits. They lose sight of what porn does to them and have no clue as to what it does to the participants.
Feminist writer Robin Morgan said in 1980, “Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice.” My wife and I would view porn movies when we were dating in the Eighties. Even then, there were genres of porn we gave a wide berth to because they were a little too rough and not remotely romantic or a turn on to us. Our porn flick days are long over, but if she were to suggest I pick up a hot DVD to watch after the kids were safely in bed, I’d be hard pressed to find anything that wasn’t the kind of crap we avoided back in the day.
Former porn actress Shelley Lubben now leads others out of it.
Shelley Lubben, who is prominently mentioned in Hedges’ essa, is a former porn starlet who quit the biz, got religion and now helps other porn stars get out of the business through her Pink Cross Foundation. Lubben isn’t remotely sentimential about her experiences in pornography.
Lubben describes the scene of a hardcore porn film as devoid of intimacy, and describes it as “all mechanical and beastly”. She further writes that “women are vomiting off the set, and most of the actors are doing drugs and alcohol.”She has experienced and testifies to the fact that the sex acts that girls “have to do” on the porn sets are physically harmful (including anal and uterus hemorrhaging) and psychologically traumatizing.
Nothing says “romance” like having to clean off the stinking body fluids of total strangers with a half-empty box of baby wipes or a crusty old towel.
When women aren’t viewed as fully human it’s easy to consider them as sport. They become objects to be possessed, enjoyed for a time, discarded and occasionally destroyed, when they can no longer provide gratification. Porn desensitizes both its participants and consumers over time. The crime in Richmond was the act of violence directed toward this girl who simply wanted to have a good time at a high school dance. The shame lies with those poor excuses for humanity who laughed, cheered or stood by meek, stupid and useless.
Most of us can only shake our heads in total disbelief and disgust over how young men can degrade a woman in such a way and how other people can stand around like cows grazing in a field and not do anything. I’m afraid we’ve made it easy. Rape, whether it’s used by thugs on a street in America or the Jangaweed in Darfur, is the ultimate weapon men use to degrade, demean and destroy women.
I was always uncomfortable reading the writings of self-described radical feminists such as the late Andrea Dworkin because she was unsparing and withering in her critiques of how pornography and rape are two sides of the same coin. I would suspect were Ms. Dworkin still alive she would not be at all surprised by this incident. If anything she would only be surprised anyone is surprised.
…pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity–the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he’s got her.
The vermin who raped and assaulted the woman in Richmond are not monsters from another planet. They’re just ordinary males who may have grown up exposed to a lifetime of junk food movies where women are trussed up like turkeys and slaughtered such as Hostel II where a screaming, crying girl is stripped naked, bound and suspended from the ceiling while she is sliced open with a blade as a woman bathes in her blood or the excrescense that are the endless Saw films.
Film depictions of torture and death don't cause rape, but do they make rape more acceptable?
Rape has nothing to do with sex except that the penis is wielded as the blunt instrument of assault. Men have always taken women by means of violence. Sexually explicit material, torture porn films, and misogynistic music videos only aid in the general numbing of human souls. They don’t cause rape, but do they make raping a woman less of a horror than it is?
It’s a question that won’t be answered by trials and convictions in the Richmond rape trials to come. It still bears being asked.
CNN’s Campbell Brown: No Bias? That’s Bull!
THIS is supposed to be objective journalism?
Prime-time viewing for the cable news networks begins at 8:00 p.m. The competition is high and the differences stark between Campbell Brown (CNN), Keith Olbermann (MSNBC), Bill O’Reilly (Fox News) and Nancy Grace (HLN).
Campbell Brown thinks she’s the only real journalist working during that hour and she doesn’t mind telling anybody that will listen.
“Some of us, like my colleagues here at CNN, are still trying to do journalism….I’m not critical of what my friends at Fox News and MSNBC do, but it is apples and oranges when compared to what we at CNN do,” Brown said.
Brown apparently doesn’t watch Lou Dobbs and his rants against illegal immigrants and cheerleading for Birther idiots such as Orly Taitz. If she did she might not be so smug about the quality of “journalism” at CNN these days.
During her show Wednesday, Brown interviewed White House adviser Valarie Jarrett and quizzed her on the Obama Administration’s cold shouldering of Fox News.
BROWN: Officials have been very public about their feelings about FOX News and what they believe FOX News is and represents. And they made a point of coming out and saying it.
JARRETT: What we’re saying is, is that we want the public to understand what’s going on.
When we saw the kind of distortions this summer, particularly directed at seniors, over health care reform, it was really outrageous. And I think what the president said in his message before Congress is, we’re going to speak directly to the American people and make sure that they understand the truth.
And so, certainly, if we see somebody distorting the truth, we’re going to call them on the carpet for that. But we don’t want to take our focus away from the core issues that are so important to the American people. Now, when there’s all that chatter and distortion and false information, we have to disseminate – we have to distinguish between truth and fiction.
BROWN: So do you think FOX News is biased?
JARRETT: Well, of course they’re biased. Of course they are.
BROWN: OK. Then do you also think that MSNBC is biased?
JARRETT: Well, you know what? This is the thing. I don’t want to – actually, I don’t want to just generalize all FOX is biased or that another station is biased.
I think what we want to do is look at it on a case-by-case basis. And when we see a pattern of distortion, we’re going to be honest about that pattern of distortion.
BROWN: But you only see that at FOX News? That’s all that – you have spoken out about FOX News.
JARRETT: That’s actually not true.
I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power. When we saw all of the distortions in the course of the summer, when people were coming down to town hall meetings and putting up signs that were scaring seniors to death, when we have seen commercials go up on television that are distorting the truth, we’re actually calling everybody out.
So, this isn’t something that’s simply directed at FOX. We really just want the American people to have a clear understanding. There’s so much at stake right now. We really don’t have a lot of time for nonsense and distortions.
The American people are also smarter than that. Let them reach their own judgments based on the facts. Let’s just take health care, for example. Reasonable people could differ about the right approach. So, let’s have a conversation about that. Let’s not scare people by telling them that things are going to happen that are actually not even on the table. Let’s just talk about the facts.
Ms. Brown’s comment in her “No Bias, No Bull” segment was:
Jarrett seems loath to admit that MSNBC has a bias. And that is where I think the White House loses all credibility on this issue. Just as Fox News leans to the right with their opinionated hosts in prime time, MSNBC leans left. I don’t think anyone at Fox or MSNBC would disagree. In fact both Fox News and MSNBC are doing quite well in the prime time ratings by doing partisan opinion.
Brown seems to be suggesting there’s MSNBC on the Left and Fox News on the right, and by process of elimination, that leaves CNN squarely in the middle of the political mainstream.
And I suppose Lou Dobbs is the second coming of Walter Cronkite?
Another problem is even if CNN is the middle of the road news network it’s a far cry from the CNN Ted Turner created. They aren’t the new kids on the block any more and their attempts to touch up the grey haven’t helped all that much.
Second, most folks aren’t watching Brown or CNN. CNN sunk to fourth place behind Fox, MSNBC and sister network HLN (Headline News). Brown’s program (648,000 viewers) at 8:00 p.m. lags behind both Keith Olbermann (1.02 million) and Bill O’ Reilly (3.39 million).
Nancy Grace has something Campbell Brown wants: better ratings
Lately, the only thing that CNN has been the “go to” network for has been non-stop saturation coverage of Michael Jackson’s death. Otherwise, all they’re doing is making themselves irrelevant as even the septuagenarian Larry King is getting stomped by the unlikely duo of Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow.
If Brown isn’t careful, she might find her “real journalism” replaced by the “infortainment” of the repulsive Nancy Grace, a woman so vile she even sickens Stephen King. Brown might want to spend less time sniping at her more successful competitors and spend more on trying to improve her own crappy ratings before she finds out she’s only keeping the seat warm for Nancy Grace.
Spiked! Mars is mad at Madea.
When Madea throws down with Mars who will survive?
Tyler Perry has had enough of taking flak from his fellow director Spike Lee. On 60 Minutes, Perry fired a few salvos back at Mr. Lee.
Lee had laid the smack down on Perry at the 14th annual Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference last May.
“We’ve had this discussion back and forth. When John Singleton [made Boyz in the Hood], people came out to see it. But when he did Rosewood, nobody showed up. So a lot of this is on us!” Lee said. “You vote with your pocketbook, your wallet. You vote with your time sitting in front of the idiot box, and [Tyler Perry] has a huge audience. We shouldn’t think that Tyler Perry is going to make the same film that I am going to make, or that John Singleton or my cousin Malcolm Lee [would make]. As African-Americans, we’re not one monolithic group, so there is room for all of that. But at the same time, for me, the imaging is troubling and it harkens back to ‘Amos n’ Andy.’ “
Oh snap. But wait. It gets better.
“Each artist should be allowed to pursue their artistic endeavors, but I still think there is a lot of stuff out today that is coonery and buffoonery. I know it’s making a lot of money and breaking records, but we can do better. I am a huge basketball fan, and when I watch the games on TNT, I see these two ads for these two shows (Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns and House of Payne), and I am scratching my head. We got a Black President, and we going back to Mantan Moreland and Sleep ‘n’ Eat?”
In a interview with Byron Pitts, Perry finally slapped back at Lee.
“I would love to read that to my fan base,” Perry said. “Let me tell you what Madea, Brown, all these characters are are bait. Disarming, charming, make-you-laugh bait, so I can slap Madea in something and talk about God, love, faith, forgiveness, family, any of those things, you know. So yes, I think, you know, that pisses me off. It really does.”
“It’s so insulting,” Perry added. “It’s attitudes like that that make Hollywood think that these people do not exist. And that’s why there’s no material speaking to them, speaking to us.”
I like Spike and I wouldn’t watch a Tyler Perry flick if I were dying of a disease and watching it was the cure. However, Spike really ought to focus on making his own pictures better (“She Hate Me” anyone?) instead of ripping on another Black man trying to get over. I can’t understand why the director of Do the Right Thing, 4 Little Girls, Malcolm X, When the Levees Broke and Clockers feels he has to talk trash about someone’s who’s greatest accomplishment so far is to dress up in drag and wave a gun around? Maybe Spike’s got a bad case of Little Man Syndrome or something but he really needs to dial it down a notch.
What's more embarrassing? A 6'5" drag queen...
I have no use for Madea, but I do respect the fact that Perry is employing African-Americans both in front and behind the camera. At least he was. The roots of Lee’s beef with Perry may be tied to a letter he sent Perry in October 2008 blasting him for firing writers in who attempted to form a union. Lee wrote:
Tyler,
Come on, man. Being a writer yourself you should know how important it is to be a union member and support union wages and benefits for those who you employ on your writing staff.
Look at the temperature of the country now with corporate greed and with the very few profiting off of the very many. Don’t fall into that trap.
“Do the Right Thing.”
– Spike
Who gets to decide which movies uplift the race and which ones drag it though the mud? Is there going to be a board that meets to review Spike’s next joint?
Go back and look at She’s Gotta Have It. There are parts of that movie where the acting, direction and the whole nine are so amateurish and bad it hurts. If Madea puts Black people in a bad light, what’s Mars Blackmon? The second coming of Malcolm X?
Spike thrives on controversy. When Miracle at St. Anna dropped, Spike ginned up some headlines by picking a pointless fight with Clint Eastwood. Spike complained Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers was historically inaccurate for not including Black Marines. Eastwood slapped back saying the film depicted the Marines who raised the American flag on Mt. Suribachi at Iwo Jima and added Spike should “shut his mouth.” Spike shot back that Eastwood was acting like “an angry old man.”
The result was Lee’s $45 million dollar epic grossed a measly $9 million and Miracle At St. Anna died a quick death at the box office. Meanwhile, Perry’s I Can Do Bad All by Myself cost $13 million to make and grossed $45 million. Advantage: Mr. Perry!
Is the answer for Spike Lee to dog out Tyler Perry because he doesn’t like his films? I don’t like ‘Lil Wayne, but rather than call him a “coon” I just don’t buy his music. Spike needs to clean up his own backyard first. He’s made some brilliant movies that are classics and he’s made absolute garbage. Tyler … Read MorePerry is still a work in progress. I HOPE he will make something I decide worth watching. But I don’t need Spike telling me to watch “Miracle At St. Ana” but not “I Can Do Bad All By Myself.” I’ll make my own calls.
Spike has every right to say Perry makes crappy movies. I agree and prefer Lee’s films to Perry’s. But John Singleton’s brilliant Boyz n’ the Hood was made almost 20 years ago. Since then Singleton has hacked up hairballs such as the cruddy Shaft remake and 2 Fast 2 Furious, a movie so lousy even Vin Diesel had enough sense to stay out of. Why hasn’t Spike called The Wayans Brothers on the carpet for crimes against cinema such as White Chicks or Little Man?
...or a 5'6" motormouth?
It comes down to who gets to decide what’s good for Black folks and what’s bad? That’s a job way above Lee’s pay grade and I never got a ballot to vote on who should get to choose.
I like Spike and I wouldn’t watch a Tyler Perry flick if I were dying of a disease and watching it was the cure. But Spike really ought to focus on making his own pictures better Anyone with She Hate Me on their resume should think twice before ripping into another director’s films.
What Spike seems to have forgotten until Ron Howard dropped out and he stepped in to direct Inside Man, he had started the new century with a losing streak of films that had flopped including, The 25th Hour, She Hate Me, Bamboozled before Howard’s producing partner Brian Gratzer threw him a lifeline. By contrast Perry has directed eight films, all of which have made money and grossed over $400 million worldwide.
Next up Perry is directing the first film he didn’t write, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide (When the Rainbow Is Enuf). Perry has said he plans to stay behind the camera which means there will be no Madea appearances here. The film begins shooting in November but already some have begun sniping at Perry wondering aloud how the guy who brought us Madea Goes to Jail can do justice to Shange’s fiercely proud feminist play.
That’s a complaint Spike should well understand. He faced the same scrutiny when he was making Malcom X. Who decided it was a good idea to let Mars Blackmon/Mookie direct a biography of a Black icon?
Let’s see what Perry does with “For Colored Girls…” before damning him as a hopeless hack. If snap judgments had been made about Lee after the amateur night that even Lee admits was She’s Gotta Have It he never would have stepped up his game to Do the Right Thing.
There’s no reason for Spike and Tyler to be knocking each other in public. First, it’s unseemly for two Black men to be ripping each other this way. It only makes Lee look petty and jealous and Perry appear as if he can’t take negative appraisal of his work. Perry never screen his movies for film critics so apparently he thinks he doesn’t need them, but as long as he’s charging for his movies, they are subject to be judged.
I’ve not convinced the audience for a Miracle at St. Anna is the same as I Can Do Bad All by Myself. What I am sure is in a nation of 30 million Black folks there’s enough of them to go around and appreciate both Lee and Perry’s films. Move over, Spike. There’s plenty of room for another Black filmmaker even if it’s one you don’t like.
Now that we’ve settled that, where’s Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas? These brothers need to kiss and make up. Oh wait, they already did that…
"Oh Magic, it can never be like it was."
The “Saw” franchise finds pleasure (and profit) in pain.
Please don't make me watch another SAW sequel."
This is not a review of the sixth Saw film. I have never seen any Saw film and have no intention of doing so. With the exceptions of a few minutes of the first one when it played on the SciFi channel several months ago. Even in a severely edited version I got a sense of what these flicks are about: bad actors acting badly playing unlikable characters who die painful deaths at the hands of the calculating serial killer named Jigsaw and his sadistic traps and torture devices.
Maybe if I were Dick Cheney I could find something to admire in 90 minutes of screaming, dismemberment and gore. As it is, my way of looking at is I haven’t seen all the good movies made by Spielberg, Scorcese, Lee and The Coen Brothers, so why do I want to waste precious minutes of my life watching shitty splatter flicks?
I do confess to a certain morbid fascination that for six years in a row, Lions Gate has turned this thin gruel of torture porn into a lucrative franchise. Nobody’s ever cranked out crap like this with such a flagrant disregard for both logic and human life. But hey, people like to watch other people meeting miserable ends. I guess there’s something cathartic in seeing someone have to saw off their own foot or dig out their eye in order to retrieve a key hidden behind it .
Or perhaps the intention is to simply provoke a “Wow, that’s really fucked up,” response. That’s as good a reason as any, I suppose.
When serial killers shop at Home Depot
The Saw filmsare invulnerable to the disdain and hostitlity of movie critics and other disapproving adults. They run on the restless need of teenage boys for ever-increasing dosages of carnage. The five films have grossed nearly $700 million worldwide. Thats nothing to sneeze at when you consider the original Saw was made for a measley $1 million and grossed a eye-gouging $100 million.
Saw jump-started the horror genre after Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers and all the other dead-teenager-on-a-stick killers had fallen on lean times. Even Friday the 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street and the Halloween sequels had a small degree of sick humor in their mean little hearts. That’s all gone with today’s torture porn flicks where pain and lots of it is the selling point.
I never got the bad taste out of my mouth from one sleepless night spent watching a ugly piece of vomit named Wolf Creek which featured an outback killer by the name of Mick who took great delight in sadistically taunting, hunting down and murdering two women. The worst moment was when he stabs one victim in the back, cuts off her fingers and severs her spine. Before she dies from blood loss Mick says she is now a “head on a stick.”
As Wolf Creekwas loosely based on several real murders this bit of anti-life/anti-entertainment was all the more repulsive for the relentless cruelty and the way it reveled and lingered on the suffering of the women. That’s the kind of misogyny that puts the pornography in “torture porn.” Roll all the Saw crapfests into one big bloody ball and they don’t begin to reach that kind of hatred toward women.
Horror films fall into one of two categories. The few that want to scare and truly disturb you and all the others that only want to gross you out. After watching some clips on You Tube and reading the synopsis of the six films, I’m confident in proclaiming Saw movies live in the “gross you out” category. I’m not above the occasional gross-out, but I like them much better when there’s at least a thread of intelligence behind it.
"Audition" Real horror is in your head.
Real horror doesn’t just stimulate the gag reflex. What makes an Audition, The Exorcist, Psycho or Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer linger in the mind isn’t simply because they’re terrifying, but because it takes genuine talent to scare the hell out of grown men and women and that has nothing to do with tricked out knife chairs or reverse bear traps.
By the way, here’s a Saw VI SPOILER: the sista in the first photo is trapped in a head harness that will drill screws into her head within 60 seconds unless she and a male victim free themselves. The way out of the trap is whichever removes the most body weight first will live and the other one dies. The male victim, who is overweight, cuts off fat from his stomach, but the woman cuts off her arm, tipping the scale saving herself and killing him.
Sorry if that diminished your hopes that homegirl was this closet to undergoing brain surgery without benefit of scalpel or anesthesia. Try to enjoy the slaughter anyway.
Hasta La Vista, Vista!
Every picture tells a story don't it?
Life is hard. It’s a lot harder when you’re ugly and nobody loves you.
That’s what it’s like to run a computer with Windows Vista on it. Nobody loves Vista. If you want to make Bill Gates cry, ask him about Vista. If he doesn’t slap you upside the head first that is.
When my old computer from Krazy Kenny’s Warehouse running Windows XP had slowed to a crawl and downloads could be timed with a sundial despite the high-speed internet connection, I put a bullet in the box (actually, I pawned it off to my younger brother where it lasted about a year before he gave up on it) and moved up to a bright and shiny Dell which was bigger, faster, stronger, better than what I had been suffering with and pre-loaded with the Vista operating system.
Not that I wanted Vista, mind you. It was more of a situation where it was already installed on almost every computer at Micro Center. It was a “take-it-or-leave-it” deal and I wasn’t in a position where leaving it was an option. I sighed deeply and pulled out the plastic. I was assured if I really hated Vista, it would still be possible to install its far more popular predecessor, Windows XP.
Windows XP was the American Idol of operating systems. It still is the most widely used operating system in the world. Released in 2001, XP has sold over 400 million copies and its market share peaked at 85.3 in December 2006. Most households and businesses are still running XP. Microsoft stopped selling XP in retail stores in 2008, but the system is still chugging along.
It ain't looking good for you, Fido.
Vista on the other hand started off with high expectations which soon went unrealized because it wasn’t different enough from XP in ways that mattered and the ways it was different didn’t matter. CNET.com concluded in their review, “Windows Vista is essentially warmed-over Windows XP. If you’re currently happy with Windows XP SP2, we see no compelling reason to upgrade. On the other hand, if you need a new computer right now, Windows Vista is stable enough for everyday use.”
“Stable enough?” Control your enthusiasm, guys! Coming five years after XP, the expectation was Vista would fix all the nasty security problems that nagged XP among other things. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Vista was almost universially loathed upon its release. Microsoft had given birth to a baby that both stank and was ugly too.
I’ve grown accustomed to Vista. I don’t love it, but I don’t think it’s all that bad either. All things considered, I knew Vista was a red-haired stepchild when one of my co-workers just smiled sadly when I told him I had bought a computer with it installed and said, “The way you can tell if a operating system is any good is how many businesses install it on their computers.” When my employer decided to upgrade their systems from Windows 98, they chose XP over Vista. Ouch.
As it would turn out, Vista became the second most popular operating system, but Microsoft aims for global domination, not second best. The relative failure of Vista may not have hastened the impetus for 7, but it sure as hell became a priority to make it sexy and get it right.
Now that Windows 7 has been released and the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive (mostly because it’s not Vista), I’m wondering if I should upgrade. I’m not the kind of guy who feels inadequate if I’m not rocking the bleeding edge of technology. Hell, I still own a camera that uses film and work out with a Walkman.
What tempts me is my big brother—the quintessential techno geek—LOVES Windows 7. He’s the kind of guy who spends a weekend formatting his hard drive for the fun of it. He installed Vista several times on his own computers and uninstalled Vista several times. He got his hands on a Beta version of 7 and it was love at first boot up.
With a buttload of tricked-out new bells and whistles and rave reviews proclaiming 7 as, “the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced,” forgive for feeling like I’m stuck with the last six-pack of New Coke.
Maybe to go along with my wife’s laptop, I’ll get a copy of Windows 7 as well. At the end of the day, all any operating system does is maximize the computing experience. I’ll still get junk mail and I’ll still prefer Firefox’s browser over Internet Explorer. Windows 7 won’t make me thinner, taller or any sexier than I already am. It won’t even make me cooler. It might however make me stop looking at my present operating system like it morphed from Halle Berry into Whoopi Goldberg.
Do I sense a bit of hostility?
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