Out of all the cinematic staples, the so-called “magical negro” is the worst to define and discuss due to it being the mother of all loaded terms. A catch-all phrase used to describe how African-Americans in film tend to be superhuman physically, spiritually or both, it’s currently in the midst of the pop cultural zeitgeist thanks to a crappy song and New Year’s faux-pas.

Anytime someone sees a black character used as a story tool in a film — in the case of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) originally didn’t exist in Fitzgerald’s story — there is a mild cry of “There! There! I see a magical negro in the distance! Yes! There!” One should wonder why Eric Roth deemed it necessary to suddenly introduce the character as a framing device for guiding the CGI Man-Child about, but that’s up to anyone who can be assed to sit through that three hour bore.

So, we’ve taken it upon ourselves—and in full expectation of the eventual backlash that will come from one friend of ours, Odienator at Big Media Vandalism—to deconstruct the favorite crutch of Stephen King, the Wachowski Brothers and whoever else has a problem understanding just what makes the worst stereotype the worst stereotype.

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Every year some over-hyped award-laden independent film faces a critical backlash, dissenting writers who cry it ain’t all that. This year it’s Ballast. To quote Armond White, from the NY Press:

“Director-writer Lance Hammer shows a black Mississippi family torn apart by a double suicide attempt, drugs and alienation. But you have to see through these ludicrous black phantoms to the actual white middle-class fantasies at the film’s core.”

Maybe “backlash” is a strong term for a handful of disgruntled critics, but I detect a similar sense of unrest in the audience.

The second time I saw Ballast, I dragged a friend along to Manhattan’s Film Forum (where it recently closed after a brief run). I told her that this film was everything I had been arguing for in American cinema (mostly on internet message boards, in my drawers—sad, really): Its angelic patience, its reverence for faces, silences and subjective experience (with more watchful over-the-shoulder shots than a ‘Nam combat doc) could teach American audiences how to look and listen again. Second time around, I was able to appreciate these qualities even more, as the story became fairly transparent, cleverly delineated though it was. Second time around, it was all about the beauty.

I suspect it was the story that had some of the folks in the Film Forum audience sighing, whispering and even snickering uncontrollably. Story-wise, Ballast can be easily mistaken for an entry in the Why We Be Black genre—films which depict underclass African-Americans scratching and surviving and tearing each other apart. Such films are said to exist mainly for the delectation of white liberals who like to think of poor blacks as lovable to the degree that they are irrational, impulsive and self-destructive. Mighty Joe Young in a do-rag. The fallacy of placing Ballast in this genre is as tragic as the critical backlash against Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple adaptation, which reduced that film’s towering humanism to Song of the South T-N-T.

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Kyle Buchanan has a post at Defamer taking Jeff Wells and Anthony Lane to task for questioning the plausibility of race relations in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. His basic point is that critics who are old and white can’t hold back their “thinly veiled discomfort with the shocking idea that white people can marry black people in 2008 without someone giving a speech about it.” But this is actually a common complaint about the film, and it’s definitely not limited to those afflicted with either oldness or whiteness. I saw and sort of fell in love with the film at Toronto where a lot (a LOT) of critics were dismissing Rachel for its allegedly laughable multiculturalism. Not only does the white Rachel take a black husband without comment or incident, but the members of the wedding party wear saris, even though no one involved is visibly of sari-wearing ethnicity. Scandal!

At Toronto, I was still a little bit too in love with the film from first viewing to be able to come up with a finely calibrated, bullshit-free rationalization, but I knew that to make the argument that the film’s melting pot was somehow inauthentic, and/or tacked on by Demme to reflect his own sensibilities rather than those of his characters, was to fundamentally misunderstand the film. I think I thus may have said something stupid in defense of the film whilst under the influence of whiskey and petulant certitude. Whoops.

But a month later, I’ve calmed down and sobered up, and I’ve figured out exactly why Demme’s “cultural appropriation” is not just “obnoxious exoticism“, but is absolutely integral to the film’s story.

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The next four months are to be the most intensely self-conscious, galvanizing, awkward, crazed, humiliating, uplifting, maudlin and surreal period in American racial history. A black man will or will not be chosen as the next President of the United States. My fingers tremble as I type this. As a black-and-white racial spectacle, this is bigger than black Jack Johnson casually beating the living shit out of white Jim Jeffries before all of Anglo-America in 1910. This is bigger than Bigger Thomas. This is bigger than Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Paul Robeson, the Edmund Pettis Bridge, Emmet Till, the March on Washington, OJ, Rodney King, Willie Horton, Jeremiah Wright, the riots, the assassinations, the aggregate of four centuries of two races trading hostilities while building up this nation. This is it. A partial descendant of slaves* takes the helm of the American Empire. Or not: Maybe McCain plays into enough fears and received notions to convince his base and those volition-less swing voters that we can have morning in America once more.

Those geniuses at Criterion Collection have anticipated the moment andplan to give it something special. Their new high-definition restoration of Sam Fuller’s White Dog is due on DVD in December, just when all hell should be breaking loose. Fuller’s 1982 adaptation of the Romain Gary novel about a dog trained to attack and kill black people is a nightmare of the Reagan Era. Told with the broad earnestness of a sweeps week Diff’rent Strokes episode, White Dog is easy to dismiss as Public Service Announcement on hate crimes. Ennio Morricone’s somber score captures the heartbreak of racism but also emphasizes the movie’s cuddly, Benji-esque sentimentality. The presence of aging teen starlet Kristy McNichol as the dog’s unsuspecting Hollywood-liberal owner is also good for a snicker to anyone over 30.

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The new Claire Denis film is a Claire Denis film, and there are certain givens that this entails: nothing is spelled out, behavior is highlighted over action or incident, and we’re asked to spend a decent chunk of time getting to know the characters and observing their typical behavior before the status quo is changed just slightly and the film’s concerns start to come into focus.

But, rather shockingly, the new Claire Denis film is also a bittersweet family movie, and the work you put into it early on is paid back in surprisingly tender dividends.

For the first time, Denis is working here with a virtually all-black cast, and as my companion at the press screening noted, there’s a bit of irony that this film is making its North American debut alongside Medicine For Melancholy, a film about a tentative connection between two racially self-conscious young black people which was not only inspired by Denis’ Friday Night but concieved as a generational update. Though Denis’ characters don’t discuss race as compulsively as Jenkins’, it’s not a matter off their minds. Josephine (Mati Diop), the daughter of widowed train operator Lionel (Alex Descas), seems to be studying it at university.

Rhums takes place in and around the working-class apartment complex where Lionel and Josephine live in quasi-incestuous bliss, though from the start Denis conveys the sense that this arrangement can’t last for much longer. One neighbor, Gabrielle, clearly has a thing for the father, while another, Noe, cautiously courts the daughter. This is apparently how this ad hoc family has functioned for ages, but the film’s centerpiece scene sets a reconfiguration of this unit into motion. A night out that doesn’t go as planned leaves the foursome stranded in a cafe where they drink, flirt and dance to cheesy 70s soft rock. Rebelling against his perceived responsibilities to Josephine and Gabrielle’s need, Lionel leaves the other three watching as he hits on an attractive waitress, and waiting up at home for him to return from his walk of shame. Lionel’s disappearing act pushes father and daughter to reconcile their closeness and the tragedy responsible for it, leading to a surprisingly touching and uncynically romantic conclusion.

Much of the film plays like a mystery, as we slowly piece together the roots of each relationship and figure out along with the characters where they’re going and what kind of change they’ll have to endure to get there. Cinematographer and frequent Denis collaborator Agnes Godard paints urban Northern France in muted colors, a maze of highways and train tracks weaving around towering apartment buildings. These cool, geometric fling cabinets for wage workers are, for Noe and Lionel, imprisoning, but for Josephine and Gabrielle, the walls store memories and promise that can’t be easily discarded. This locus of loneliness and longing is also their only outlet for love.

Shopping With Filmmakers: Margaret Brown

Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths opens at the IFC Center in New York on Friday. This review is adapted from our coverage of the film at the SXSW Film Festival, where we also interviewed the director. Above: Brown shops and talks at Sundance.

Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths offers an immersion into the archaic miasma that is Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. It’s the world’s oldest celebration of its kind, and tradition mandates that the two weeks worth of parties and parades are mostly racially segregated. Using Mardi Gras season as a microcosm for a portrait of contemporary race relations in the city, Brown gets a filmmaker’s dream gift in the black and white Mardi Gras associations’ selection of their queens.

Queen Stephanie, a black schoolteacher, is a descendant of a group of slaves who were transported on the Clothilde, the last slave ship to enter the US. When the Clothilde came ashore, there was a fire and the passengers escaped into the woods, ultimately settling in an area that came to be known as Africatown. Queen Helen Meaher, whose family now owns most of the land in Africatown, is a descendant of the company that brought the Clothilde over. “My people was on her people’s ship,” Stephanie says, with a slow, matter-of-fact nod. That nod confirms the film’s thesis: racism isn’t an outrage or even a spoken issue Mobile––it’s casual, habitual, and historically excused.

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Corey Mburu Wainaina is 14 year old aspiring video game designer, honor student and one of the world’s greatest players of Super Smash Brothers. I could think of no better commentator with whom to discuss either the state of the nation or the state of summer movies. But, um, luckily we veered off on a far less boring Hancock tangent.

STEVEN BOONE: You have an interesting background. Your father is from Kenya and your mother is an American. Another African-American with heritage in Kenya is now famous around the world. What’s his name?

COREY WAINAINA: Barack Obama.

SB: What do you think about his candidacy?

CW: I think it’s nice, but (whispers) it doesn’t matter because it’s lies.

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I don’t know whether or not I’m Through with White Girls––a low-budget, semi-high-concept rom-com about a black comic book nerd who makes a conscious decision to stop dating girls who look like me in order to start dating girls who look more like him, but ends up falling for a girl who looks like Lisa Bonet in High Fidelity, except more so––has the power to ignite a real, widespread conversation about interracial dating and the contemporary politics of race+class+coolness (or lack thereof). But after last night’s packed-house screening at BAM, which was followed by a surprisingly feisty Q & A, I do know that White Girls has the power to make a Brooklyn blogger self-censor, and that’s a feat to which few films can lay claim.

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Nannette Burstein’s American Teen has become ubiquitous since its Sundance premiere, both on the festival circuit and, thanks to a poster carefully calibrated to target Gen X nostalgia, online. Its title suggests a wishful universality, but in fact, when looked at alongside two less-lauded films about American teens against which it screened here in Silver Spring, its document of five white high school seniors in a semi-rural suburb of Indiana seems as niche as it gets.

World premiering here on Friday before beginning a run on HBO Monday night, Hard Times at Douglas High is a fly-on-the-wall work of activism documenting a year in the life of an all-black Baltimore high school, as teachers, students and administrators struggle to comply with No Child Left Behind. Made by the directors of the seminal reality series An American Family, it makes visible the reverberations of blind bureaucracy on living and breathing institutions, making the home and personal lives of its students a spectre, but not a direct concern. Taking the inverse tactic, Going on 13’s intimate portrait of four girls passing through puberty (or, “puberey”, as one subject refers to it early on) over the course of four years in a barely middle-class Northern California community touches on the institutions that contain their lives only incidentally. Seen together in a single weekend, each of the three seem to say less about age than the variables of fate as played out through place and race.

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“Antoine’s the best. I couldn’t think of anybody better to direct this movie than Antoine Fuqua. He’s got a great sense of the characters. He’s not from New York, but he got out here and just wanted to be around everything Brooklyn, soak it up.”

That’s first-time screenwriter Michael Martin, in the midst of telling me his amazing Cinderella story, which begins with a tollbooth clerk from East New York writing an original screenplay called Brooklyn’s Finest and ends with the script being produced by Paramount with Mr. Fuqua (Training Day) directing.

I knew nothing of that story when I discovered the film shooting in my Brooklyn neighborhood last month. My first reaction to the sight of a huge Hollywood crew and thugged-out extras in gold chains was, another bigass Ho’wood King-Kong-ain’t-got-nuthin perp pageant. But, hanging out with the crew–the friendliest and most accessible I’ve ever observed– I wanted to believe that these nice people weren’t just here for pulp plunder.

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The most idiotic comment I’ve heard in reference to Sex and the City is, “Who wants to watch a bunch of old ladies having sex? Yuck.” (uttered by a 23 year old co-worker who looked like Wally Cleaver). The second most idiotic comment I’ve heard in reference to Sex and the City is, “That show’s just for rich white chicks.” What rot! There are armies of black women who adore the show and were doing cartwheels in anticipation of the movie. But there is some ambivalence, some trouble among the ranks…

Susan Lyerly (comedian, 36)
I’m very protective of the show because I was one of the first to really get into it. Most people got in on the second season. Back then, everybody was going for Ally McBeal. That was the hit at the time.

The show completely changed the way I dress. Best I’ve ever looked in my life. Rich white people knew about stuff like Manolo Blahniks but I didn’t know about it ’til Sex and the City. Inside I feel like that hot, skinny blonde chick. Inside I’m Carrie, but the world doesn’t see that.

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This Hollywood Reporter story says Tyler Perry––whose most recent film, Meet the Browns, opened with $20 million but failed to hit number one as so many of Perry’s films have, and dropped off sharply in its second week in release––is looking to attract a crossover (white, suburban) audience without alienating his working-class Black base.  And he’s got a foolproof plan: Perry’s next film, titled The Family That Preys, is set to star box office it girl Kathy Bates, who, of course, has proven time and time again to have a hypnotic lure on white audiences. I literally cannot hold on to a dollar bill if a Kathy Bates movie is playing in the vicinity.

In all honestly, this might be a smart move: if Perry’s broad comedy-spiked faith-and-family melodramas have a natural chance of crossing over to any white sub-demo, it’s older, middle-class women. But the makeup of the movies themselves is only half the battle. Even leaving race aside, if Lionsgate (for whom, as Carl DiOrio puts it in the THR story, “getting into the Tyler Perry business has been like acquiring a license to print money”) really wants to open up the appeal of these movies, they’ve got to make some changes in the way they’re marketed and released.

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Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths is an immersion into the archaic miasma that is Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. Mobile’s Mardi Gras is the oldest in the world, and in keeping with tradition, its two weeks worth of parties and parades are mostly segregated. Using Mardi Gras season as a microcosm for a portrait of contemporary race relations in the city, Brown gets a filmmaker’s dream gift in the black and white Mardi Gras associations’ selection of their queens. Queen Stephanie, a black schoolteacher, is a descendant of slaves who were transported on the Clothilde, the last slave ship to enter the US. When the Clothilde came ashore, there was a fire and the passengers escaped into the woods, ultimately settling in an area that came to be known as Africatown. Queen Helen Meaher, whose family now owns most of the land in Africatown, is a descendant of the company that brought the Clothilde over. “My people was on her people’s ship,” Stephanie says, with a slow, matter-of-fact nod. That nod confirms the film’s thesis: casual racism is not an outrage in Mobile, it’s an institution.

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Odienator at Big Media Vandalism is publishing one essay per day this month, in honor of “Black History Mumf,” in an attempt, as he puts it, to “explore the movies Black folks love, regardless of how I personally feel about them.” I’m loving this series, even though the fact that I haven’t seen many of the movies being written about makes me feel like whitest White girl in White City. Here are some of my favorite pullquotes from the nine chapters published so far. You can check out all of these essays and future editions to the series here.

• On Sidney Poitier and No Way Out: “No Way Out is the cynical shocker in [Joe] Mankiewicz’s canon, a film about racial hatred that dropped my jaw. I can’t imagine the reaction people had when they saw this picture in 1950, but it couldn’t have been good…Finally, in a movie, passing for White helps the entire community!”
• On Joel Schumacher’s early career as scripter of Sparkle, Car Wash and The Wiz: “Perhaps the guys who assumed Joel Schumacher was the foremost authority on Black culture were the same ones who left the blackface aspect of The Jazz Singer in the 1980 remake…I don’t even think Car Wash has a screenplay. Yet, I must point out that his characterizations aren’t offensive; he tries and for that I must give some credit.”
• On the arranged marriage scene in Coming to America: “Now, a note to the bougie Negroes and liberal White folks who thought this section of the film was some kind of offensive representation of African culture: SIT YO’ ASS DOWN. Find me another movie where this much glitz and glamour, on such a grand scale, has been afforded people of color.”