Between Sundance starting and MLK weekend, it feels like the right time to take an Oscar break and talk about Spike’s last film. Red Hook Summer falls in line with most of Spike’s later work: there’s two interesting stories here, the main one is about a kid from Atlanta sent up to Red Hook (Brooklyn) […]
So what do you get when my personal favorite filmmaker (Spike Lee) does a documentary about my personal favorite artist of all time (Michael Jackson)? You get BAD25, an absolute must see for all die hard MJ fans, and a well spent 2 hours for those of you who were fans of Mike at […]
It’s funny how ‘timing’ plays out sometimes. Between Red Tails, the Help, and Sundance, there’s been a lot of public and private conversations already this year about the direction of where black cinema is going. Everyone has their own opinions, but the truth is none of us can look at the landscape and say, ‘This […]
The metrics I get back have made it clear that the signature piece of this blog in its lifetime has been ‘The 25 Most Important Black Films & TV Shows’ that I wrote a couple years back. When new people seek out either me or a project I talked about, the search engines will […]
I’ve talked a lot about what I am, and not much lately about what I do. I’ve been treated to some pleasant news which through sheer coincidence of timing came while I’ve been fasting. The last script that I wrote was a semi-autobiographical story about growing up as a Muslim in pre and post […]
Out now on video (and Netflix, where I got a hold of it) is one of the first films to give a perspective on being an (African-American) Muslim in the post 9/11 age. Mooz-lum stars Evan Ross as a young man going into his freshmen year of college, trying to find the right balance […]
Every Ramadan, I pick up my Qu’ran and read it from cover to cover. And every February, I pick up my original copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and read that from cover to cover. As I’ve noted before in this space, it’s the single book that has had the most profound effect […]
While we all have different ‘favorite’ films in black cinema, it is my argument, using the criteria I’ve established (relevance to black culture, the legacy or shelf life of the project after the initial release, the actual craftmanship of the filmmaking, the degree to which the film was noticed/recognized by the mainstream, and the Apollo […]
Spike Lee’s third film takes place on the hottest day of the summer in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York. I heard Spike say in an interview this week that while he didn’t know what he was doing on his first film, She’s Gotta Have It, and was finding his way with School Daze, with this […]
Boyz N The Hood was the debut film by writer/director John Singleton. The semi-autobiographical tale revolves around three young black men, Tre, Ricky, and Doughboy, and their daily lives growing up in South Central Los Angeles. On to the tale of the tape… Relevance: While the phrase ‘black film’ can take on many different meanings […]
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