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.”

Do you ever wish that an actor would drop their own persona and just adopt the life/career plan of one of their fictional characters? That’s were I am right now with Tracy Morgan, who is SO good––and SO underrated––on 30 Rock, but who spends his time off from the show making films like First Sunday. There’s a clip from that slice of modern blaxploitation floating around; I like the way FilmDrunk sums it up:

The clip gives us a hilarious taste of what black church is like. It’s great, because I’ve often said that the differences between how white people do things and how black people do things too often goes unaddressed in comedy.

I totally understand that Morgan has a mortgage to pay and base audience that he wants to play to, but it just seems like the caricature of himself that he plays on TV is doing both with a little bit more style.

On 30 Rock, Morgan plays Tracy Jordan, a huge movie star known for films like Samurai I Am Awry and Honky Grandma Be Trippin’, in which he employs all manner of costuming and prosthetics in order to play multiple parts. Last season, Tracy took a DNA test which revealed that he was a distant descendant of Thomas Jefferson, and became inspired to make a Jefferson biopic, in which he would, of course, play every part. He took the idea to the president of NBC/Universal (which, on 30 Rock, is a subsidiary of the Sheinhardt Wig Corporation), who thought Tracy should make a movie version of The Jeffersons instead. Tracy then made the above trailer, in hopes that a visual aid would change the suit’s mind. It didn’t, but it’s hilarious.

Almost three years ago, after Diary of a Mad Black Woman opened to big box office but largely negative reviews (16% on Rotten Tomatoes, in spite of fairly sympathetic reviews from EW and the New York Times) Lionsgate gave up even screening Tyler Perry films for critics. This is not an unprecedented move for Lionsgate–the studio’s bread and butter is the kind of disposable horror film that opens and closes on the whims of teenage boys, who are generally not dedicated readers of film reviews. But it does seem unusual in terms of demographics: Tyler Perry is the only filmmaker I can think of who is making films for and about middle-class adults–people who do read newspapers, even if they don’t necessarily use them as a guide for cultural consumption–whose movies are routinely denied entrance into critical discourse.

Sure, the NYT will send a critic to a Friday matinee and publish a review in Saturday’s paper, but the very fact that they have to exercise effort on this almost guarantees that the review will be dismissive. Compare second-chair critic Stephen Holden’s review of Diary to Anita Gates’ review, in the same paper, of Perry’s next film, Madea’s Family Reunion. Holden acknowledges that Perry has a built-in (black, middle-class, female) audience that doesn’t include (white, middlebrow, middle-aged, male) him, and then procedes to take Diary seriously enough to consider the film on its own terms. Gates, meanwhile, finds Madea’s very premise suspect. “What is it about fat-lady drag that appeals to so many young black male comedians?” she asks, but doesn’t attempt to answer.

But could the tide be turning? It seems significant that mainstream critics are now going out of their way to defend Perry’s latest film.

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After explaining why Lionsgate declined to screen the film for critics, Armond White begins his review proper of Why Did I Get Married? on contrarian autopilot: “Most critics don’t ‘get’ Tyler Perry basically because most critics are whites who are not only clueless about Perry’s African-American culture, but unsympathetic to his particular expression.” Okay, probably. But isn’t that obvious? I started to wonder if old Armond wasn’t losing his touch.

Oh, but wait! Further down the page, he hits us Whiteys where it really hurts, by attacking sacred dude-com cow Judd Apatow. “Nothing in Knocked Up is as meaningful as Perry’s spectacle of men who must restrain their anger physically or his politically incorrect fashion show of women proudly, luxuriously wearing furs as signs of pleasure and achievement,” White sniffs. It gets better, when White insists that the derogatory terms most commonly used to describe Trapped in the Closet would be better applied to SuperBad. And I could go on. Just read it in full.

Note: Variety.com appears to be down as of this writing, so we’re introducing a new “trade” today: The Guardian.

• George Lucas says he’s finally begun work on his long-rumored live-action Star Wars TV series. Lucas is adamant that the series will go beyond the tortured Skywalker clan to focus on peripheral characters from the film series, which doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem with the fans: at 6:30 on my local news this morning, this story was punctuated with a shot of the sun triumphantly rising over Manhattan set, to Darth Vader’s theme song. Production assistants at WNBC will apparently take whatever Star Wars extension they can get.
• From the “Yes, The Hollywood Executive Actually Said That” File: Steven Zeitchik of The Hollywood Reporter says Tyler Perry’s box office victory last weekend (his third in three years, after 2005’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman and 2006’s Madea’s Family Reunion) has “heartened the growing number of studios looking to crack the market for black films.” He quotes Sony Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper:”There’s probably not one new story to tell that hasn’t been told about white people. But there are so many stories that haven’t been told yet about people with brown and black faces.”
• Warner Brothers will tack a seven-minute Batman short in front of IMAX prints of the Will Smith vampire film I Am Legend. The short will cover the origin story of the Joker, to be played in Christopher Nolan’s next Batman flick by Heath Ledger.