Archives for September 2015

The Perfect Guy: There Are Black People In It

September 23, 2015 by Rashid

I saw The Perfect Guy last week but it took me forever to write a review. Why?

I mean, the film had black people in it. I live for black films. And also, it was not a churchy movie or a Tyler Perry movie, so I really should have loved it. I love black films. I love black people.

It had Sanaa Lathan, Morris Chestnut, and Michael Ealy. I love them. I love them.

So why didn’t I love The Perfect Guy?

It was dry as hell! We are immediately dumped into this boring at best, vapid at worst couple’s relationship melodrama and we don’t have any sort of empathy for either of them. Sanaa is playing the role rather shrill and unsympathetic and Morris seems to come off as a cad. So it seems.

Michael does a bang-up job as the titular perfect guy, and we see more personality in him, but I mean you have to, because you know he has the biggest transition to make in the film. We have to believe he is a great dude and we also have to believe he is crazy.

My failure to connect with any of the characters has nothing to do with the actors, though. It was definitely the writing.

I must say, the scene where Sanaa takes Michael (see how I don’t even remember their names?!) back to her parents’ house was well done. That was good writing and good acting. But the majority of the rest of the film is utterly predictable. Just because all the characters are black doesn’t mean it’s not predictable. We have seen the stalker boyfriend movie before a million times over.

You know what else? This movie for damn sure was hampered by the PG-13 rating. The Perfect Guy is so restrained it practically begs for nudity and violence. Okay, maybe the film itself didn’t beg but I sure am! We want to hear the F-bomb! We want blood! And dammit, we want cheekaleeks! What’s the point of a psycho stalker boyfriend film without gratuitous violence? Without those things, I was left feeling as though I saw a really good Lifetime movie… but I don’t pay this MoviePass fee for Lifetime!

Finally, I do want to say a word on what makes a movie “black.” As you know, the purpose of my movie reviews is to answer the fundamental question whether there were black people in it. But I also want to have just plain good conversations about representation in general. So what does it mean that The Perfect Guy was the typical psycho stalker boyfriend film, but happens to have a black cast?

People have said that this film had “colorblind” casting. Uh, no the hell it didn’t. It was a very color-aware film. If it was colorblind, I dare say it would have been a more multi-ethnic cast. I believe that this film was made to make a point, or to test a theory, even though the point has been made and the theory has been proven time and again:

Yes, black films will perform well in the box office. Okay, we get it.

But as for me? I would have loved to have seen more blackness in the film, culturally speaking. I don’t mean Sanaa had to rock a natural hairstyle or fry chicken while wearing a kente apron. I mean, why not wear a Spelman sweatshirt? Or have an elephant collection in her living room? Or any number of other little touches that the average college educated black person might have. The Cosby Show was great at this, as well as Steve Harvey’s old sitcom, and that sitcom on Nickelodeon with the obnoxiously large Omega shield in the living room.

Now I did like the reggae club scene, but the more I think about it, the less I like that it was tied to the notion of being exotic and forbidden. Black spaces are not exotic. They’re not just where we want to go when we want to have illicit sex. They are just spaces.

The Perfect Guy was not a bad movie. It was just an unremarkable movie. Like mayonnaise. Black people can do better than mayonnaise.

Dark Water/Death In Heaven: There Are Black People In It

September 16, 2015 by Rashid

Last night I went to see Doctor Who in 3D at my local theater. We saw the Series 8 finale event, episodes Dark Water and Death in Heaven.

If you are not a Whovian, sorry champ, the rest of this review probably won’t make sense.

So my friend and I had already seen the episodes when they aired last year but we thought it would be worth it to see even just the opening credits in 3D. And I can assure you yes the fuck it was worth it. Imagine seeing this in 3D:

So basically the premise of this episode is that Danny Pink has died after a freak car accident and Clara wants him back. She tries to force the Doctor into changing time, but he refuses, instead offering to take Clara to a point in time and space where she and Danny’s timelines are intertwined.

I should mention at this point that Danny Pink is black. And very, very attractive.

So hell yeah Clara, you betta did that!

So their travels take them to the Nethersphere, which is initially posited as the afterlife, where Danny is. But it’s not really the afterlife, it’s a hard drive where dead people’s souls go because of a plot to take over the world that the Master (now Missy) has undertaken. The souls, or consciousness, or whatever the hell we’re talking about (It’s Doctor Who, so I think they make it up as they go along) are scheduled to be uploaded into Cybermen.

Michelle Gomez as Missy is absolutely brilliant, by the way. She was also worth the price of admission.

Danny Pink eventually is turned into a Cyberman but because he did not delete his emotions, he is not properly plugged into the hive mind of the Cybermen, so he is not obeying orders. He saves Clara, has one last bitch-fit with the Doctor, and ultimately saves the world.

I may have simplified things a bit and put more focus on the black man rather than the Doctor.

One of the reasons I like Doctor Who so much is that it seems, where possible, they cast black people in significant supporting roles. I don’t know so much how they fared in the original/classic series, but ever since the 9th Doctor in 2005, they have brought us some great companions and associates.

Mickey Smith, Rose’s boyfriend, is one of my favorites.

But let’s not forget Martha Jones!

And they later were shown to have gotten married and became some sort of government agents. Perhaps with U.N.I.T.

Now, I did observe somewhat of a dearth of blackness in the Matt Smith years and that really disappointed me. But with the coming of Peter Capaldi’s Doctor since the 50th anniversary, I have noticed an uptick in interesting supporting characters who happen to be black, Danny Pink notwithstanding. There was Saibra in Time Heist…

And Courtney Woods in Kill the Moon and a few other episodes.

These supporting characters, of course, don’t make up for the fact that there has never been a black Doctor Who (or a woman, but we are talking about black people right now). But as someone who has been knee-deep in science fiction and fantasy for most of my adult life, I do really appreciate the fact that modern Doctor Who doesn’t shy away from race-blind casting (which I personally think is race-aware, but no matter), or speaking to issues of race and class in its story lines. I seem to recall an episode where the Doctor schooled Martha on free blacks in London prior to the abolition of the slave trade. (Or did I make that up?)

For people interested in further discussion of Doctor Who and race, you should get the book Doctor Who and Race! I definitely plan to. Of the twenty or so fans in the audience at last night’s screening, maybe four of us were black and there were no other people of color. It’s nice to know that there is some scholarship going on about this issue and it’s not just being swept under the rug.

Which makes me also wonder… in light of this Matt Damon/Effie Brown thing, I wonder if any people of color have directed episodes of Doctor Who? Definitely need to get the book!

To Be Real: Black Girls Are Magic

September 7, 2015 by Rashid

In 2011, I had started a new job with nice national nonprofit organization after having been laid off from a small local nonprofit. For this new job, I was a program coordinator for a national writing “contest” for middle school students. It was nice to be able to link my background as a writer with nonprofit work.

In the first few months of this gig, I discovered that some guy who had attended my college had written a play about a gay guy who pledges a fraternity. My novel Lazarus, and its sequels, were about a gay guy who had pledged a fraternity. But this was no mere coincidence–not only had my novel been released while he was a student, but my novel was aggressively promoted on campus. There’s no way he didn’t know about Lazarus before he wrote his little skit.

My suspicion of his guilt was only reinforced. I reached out to ask to read his work so I could ensure that it was substantively different, and he refused.

Needless to say, I was upset, not just because a fellow Hoya had clearly been inspired by my novel, but wouldn’t cooperate just to try to prove me wrong.

At the end of the day, my mentor told me there wasn’t much I could do unless I could prove that he had lifted passages from the actual novel. And frankly, I wasn’t going to catch the Chinatown bus to New York just to see his rip-off Mad TV sketch version of Lazarus, so I let it go. If I felt he was poised to make any money off of this, I surely would have pursued further action.

My mentor intimated that the best thing I could do was ensure that the people knew whose work came first and whose work was superior.

And that, my friends, is how I relaunched my career.

***

Since that incident, and because of it, I have become more sensitive to moral issues of intellectual property. Not just the legal aspects, but the parts that deal with community, friendship, brotherhood, and the like.

I believe in putting others on. I believe in Usher mentoring Justin Bieber and Diana Ross “discovering” Michael Jackson, even though that’s more narrative than fact. I believe in sitting at the feet of elders, and mentoring, and writing groups, and all the things that build camaraderie among writers.

I believe in the class of 2005, those gay black writers who had their debut novels that year, including Dayne Avery, Fred Smith, Alphonso Morgan, and me.

I met E. Lynn Harris. We gave each other the Alpha handshake.

It’s levels to this.

Am I a great mentor to other writers? Not especially–I could be much better. But I believe in friendliness and cordiality. I am not going to hate on K. Murry Johnson’s Image of Emeralds and Chocolate because it was the first gay black vampire novel. I bought his novel. I support his career. The fact that Birth of a Dark Nation has black gay vampire main characters is a coincidence that Johnson and I are cool with.

Buy our books. You can’t get enough gay black vampires.

The point is that we have to know each other, communicate with each other, and be nice to each other. There is room at the table for everyone to be great in my business.

***

That’s why this #BlackGirlsAreMagic incident currently exploding on Twitter is so problematic for me. In a nutshell, writer Kenesha Williams has created a speculative fiction (!) literary magazine (!!) focusing on black women and girls as protagonists (!!!). I really liked the idea when I heard about it a few days ago and automatically presumed that it had the blessing of Auntie Peebz (@thepbg), who is the originator of the phrase #BlackGirlsAreMagic as a “thing.” She sells t-shirts and everything.

Sure, is it possible that somebody somewhere said “Black girls are magic!” at some point in their lives? Yes, it’s possible. But when you Google “Black girls are magic” literally every page that comes up points back to Auntie Peebz in some way, except for one: an article about Kenesha Williams’ literary magazine.

The logos are similar to me as well. Not identical, but reminiscent. So that says to me there may have been at least some kind of inspiration from one logo to the next.

Kenesha, sis. You have a great idea here and I do believe a speculative fiction literary magazine with women and girls as protagonists is necessary, amazing, powerful, and absolutely on time. And I know that literary magazines are not money-making ventures. They are labors of love that (God-willing) get your name out there as the arbiter of new fiction, and “put on” new authors who might not be featured anywhere else due to sexism and racism in mainstream genre publications.

But you have got to change the name.

This is not a trademark issue. This is an issue of sisterhood.

This isn’t about what you’re allowed to do. We’re legally allowed to do a lot of things. But this thing? his thing you shouldn’t do.

Please do the right thing and change the name. I want to be able to support this publication and all the wonderful emerging writers who will be featured. But I will not support your publication unless the name is changed.

PS: