Yesterday’s list dealt with Tom Cruise’s performance in Tropic Thunder. Today, a response to Robert Downey Jr.’s role in the same film as a white actor portraying a black soldier in a war movie (seen in the above clip). Doesn’t it seem such an original and shocking idea? I guess not if you see it as an update on blackface. Fortunately, it’s different when it’s an actor playing a character who makes himself up to look black. It’s funny. But isn’t it typically more acceptable when the make-up isn’t quite as authentic-looking as Downey’s? He actually looks black. Specifically, he looks like Fred Williamson.
I’ve seen plenty of lists detailing the worst instances of one race or nationality playing characters of another race/nationality (John Wayne and Susan Hayward in The Conquerorcomes to mind as #1), but I can’t recall any lists involving actors playing characters disguised as or playing another race. So here’s one:
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.
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.
Paul interviews Kal Penn (Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, opening tonight), which inadvertently pushes Paul & Kevin on to a road trip–metaphoricaly speaking–from a Whites Only saloon in the old west to the ghettos of Canada where a mathematician is changing the world and a legendary filmmaker brings them to enlightenment.
Steve Conrad took two actors known for broad comedy, Sean William Scott and John C. Reilly, and cast them in something dark and fresh. The Promotionplays to their funniest qualities, but also allows for some darker moments of real middle-class anxiety and racial tension. I talked to writer/director Steve Conrad about some of his decisions for this unusual comedy and how it all began in a grocery store parking lot.
Interview with Christopher Smith director of Severance, a fall-down-funny-then-cover-your-eyes slasher flick opening in theaters tonight. The FilmCouch group reloads discussion on what makes a villain from FilmCouch 18, and somehow draws a connection between American Beauty and Star Wars. A 33 year old German film is more relevant today than ever–Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), by New German Cinema pioneer Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
The Trials of Darryl Hunt is on the short list for the Best Documentary Oscar. It’s far more than a courtroom drama, it’s the real story of an amazing man and the community around him refusing to play the roles society placed on them: Criminal, rapist, murderer. The accounts of Darryl Hunt’s various trials over twenty years are jaw dropping.
Allan King’s latest film, EMPz for Life, is a film long overdue. The common concept of racism is outdated and conjures images from the Civil Rights Movement. The racism we face today has been harder to attach an image to. EMPz for Life accomplishes just this as the camera crew follows–in King’s signature cinema verite style–half a dozen young men and their frustrated mentor through twelve weeks of their life in inner city Toronto.
Filmmakers Korey Green and Addison Henderson grew up in the impoverished ghetto of Buffalo, NY and they have one agenda: Show people the suffering of their friends and neighbors. As insiders from the neighborhood, they take their camera into places middle class America has never seen. Sometimes scattered, the film makes no thesis statement about poverty. But as I spoke with the filmmakers, it became clear the point is just to show the world the people of what they call, The Forgotten City.
Following the screening of Analog Days, director Mike Ott and producer Jenifer Shahin talked with me about how their film came into being, the challenges they faced in production, and how the film has played at festivals here in the U.S. and abroad.
