Woo! I need to make up for not posting for so long, I guess.
Here are some more trailers for movies that I’m excited to see this year (and maybe a couple I’m not too excited about but you might love). It looks like this year is going to be a mix of cheesy fun (Godzilla X Kong) and deeply serious films (Dune 2), and I’m here for both these things, although I am still very much in my lighthearted phase of television viewing.
Argyle
I am not especially excited to see this movie, but it does look like a fun ride for someone. I’m sure some people are gonna have a good time watching this, although I am a lot more interested in the cat.
The Tiger’s Apprentice
This is the type of movie I’d enjoy watching with my nephew who loves martial arts movies. This looks like a fun afternoon at my sister’s house.
Spaceman
I have deeply mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, Adam Sandler is bringing it in his more serious roles, so I’m looking forward to his acting here, but the other character is a giant talking spider, and I don’t know that I want to subject myself to that for an entire movie.
Furiosa
This is very obviously a cash-grab, but I don’t care. I loved the 2015 Fury Road movie so much that I’m willing to sit through this to find out more about the lead character of that film, Furiosa. I hope it lives up to the hype of this trailer.
The Monkey Man
This is a movie that’s produced by Jordan Peele but it doesn’t look like a Horror movie. It looks more like one of his more comedic entries. I’m a huge fan of Dev Patel, and I really enjoy seeing him branch out into all of these rather odd roles, as he navigates his path through the Hollywood typecasting machine. I’m willing to pay money to see this team-up at the theater.
Road House
I liked Patrick Swayze’s silly original and this seems to capture at least some of that vibe, so I’m willing to check this out if its on a streaming service but not if its in the theater.
Godzilla X Kong: New Empire
I got nothing!
I don’t know what to think about this one except I’m sure it looks like great cheesy fun to someone.
Enjoy!
Abigail
This kind of reminds me heavily of the movie Megan only with vampires. I will probably end up watching this with my niece (the little sister of The Potato) who loves to see movies about little girls behaving very badly. I have to admit I’m not immune to that topic myself. Once again, it looks more than a little cheesy but it also looks like great fun.
Nosferatu
Well, I think the original film is deliciously scary, I’m a big fan of Robert Eggers, and I really loved the Last Voyage of the Demeter with Monster Dracula, so I’m looking forward to yet another serious take on the Dracula Mythos. I have not seen the 70s remake of the is film but I’m going to watch both the 1927 version and that remake before I see this one at the end of this year.
Avatar: The Last Airbender
I’m looking forward to this in the hopes that it will correct the mistakes of the movie version. So far, it looks pretty accurate to the cartoon, and I really like the visuals. My only drawback is that it still has the Netflix look that all their films have which has the unintended side effect of making all their live action anime remakes blend together.
Despicable Me 4
This looks like something my niece would enjoy. I might enjoy this too, since she forced me to watch a couple of the other Minions movies with her. I’m starting to trust her judgement a little bit more about what kinds of films are okay to watch. She definitely has an eye for the kind of stuff she likes and is willing to sit through, and seems to want to return the favor of me recommending movies to her since she was very little. There have been three or four movies that she strongly suggested I watch with her and so far she’s been right each time. I did enjoy all of them, even though a couple of them were just a little bit out of my usual comfort zone.
I was going to write one of my typically long intros, but you know what? Its Holiday season and ain’t nobody got time for that.
So here, in no particular order, (as usual), is my short list of highly (or sometimes just mildly) anticipated television and movie projects. I got a little bit of everything here, some kids stuff, some history, a little SciFi, some drama, Action, and some Comedy.
And I’ve already decided that one of my New Year’s resolutions is to watch more International Horror films, like Piggy, and When Evil Lurks, which are two of my favorite Horror movies this year. (Coming soon: My favorite watches of 2023!)
Dune - Trailer #2
I’m still mad about the date getting pushed back on this, because I was all set this week to watch this movie, and now I have to wait. Phooey! In the meantime, they keep teasing me with trailers which I simply cannot resist watching because,
like a toddler, I have low impulse control, and also I’m really excited to see this movie.
Handling the Undead
I read the book this was based on several years ago, and even though I found the premise very intriguing, I was not particularly impressed. Nevertheless, I will make an attempt to watch this series. All I can tell you is that, while it is a zombie film, it’s not a typical one. There’s no screaming and running and shooting happening in the story. It’s very moody and lowkey, and its strength lies more in the territory of placing people in untenable situations in a what would you do kind of way.
Since the passing of my Mom, this story (if it close to the book version) will probably hit very differently today and I’m curious to see what effect it will have on me. I’m not enthusiastic but I am intrigued.
Beverly Hills Cop 4: Axel F
This is a movie I’m very excited about, since Beverly Hills Cop II is one of my all-time favorite Eddie Murphy movies. As soon as I saw the opening shot I got hit in my 1980s feels, which frankly, is cheating. But damn!, it sure felt good to see these characters again.
The makers of this reboot absolutely understood what a nostalgia bomb this is, and should be duly ashamed of themselves for deploying it in such a fashion. None of us had any warning this was going to happen and we were not ready. They just dropped this surprise trailer on everybody this week!
Out of Darkness
I like the look of this film, and I like these ancient historical survival things so, while I probably wouldn’t watch this in a theater, I would definitely check this out on a streaming service. I also do not think I am ready to watch Horror movies in the theater yet. I’m pretty much only interested in Action and Comedy for that.
This movie heavily reminds me of Valhalla Rising, which starred Mads Mikkelson and had some elements of Horror, as well.
American Society of Magical Negroes
There are a lot of problems with this movie in both the premise and the title. Its as if someone heard about the concept of the Magical Negro by rough description, thought it was a funny idea, and just decided to make a movie about it with no awareness of what the term Magical Negro actually means in the real world.
I was initially interested but after giving it some thought, I decided this is probably not for me because I am definitely going to overthink this movie, and not in a good way. I won’t go into details about everything wrong with this trailer but I think The Book of Clarence is a much better bet than this.
IF
I’m not a huge Ryan Reynolds fan. I don’t hate the guy or anything, (in fact, he’s very likable), but I don’t go out of my way to watch the things he stars in, outside of the Deadpool movies. So I will be seeing the next Deadpool movie because I really enjoyed the last one, and I may or may not take my niece to see this movie, which looks really cute.
My niece greatly enjoyed Disney’s Elemental, and she kept pestering me to watch it, so I did, nd I rather enjoyed it. That movie was really cute and this trailer reminds me of it a lot. Plus, I like all the colorful little monsters. I can’t relate, because I did not have imaginary friends, but I’ve always been fascinated by the idea.
Echo
I remember Dave McKean’s gorgeous artwork for this character, from the comic books, but I have mixed feelings about this show, because the character was not especially compelling in the books. I remember her as a foil for the Daredevil character. She wasn’t (isn’t) exactly a villain. She mostly seemed misguided and it had nothing to do with her lack of hearing or her prosthetic leg. She just happened to have beef with Daredevil and a disability. On the other hand, I do like the disability representation in this character. There are a number of superheroes with disabilities in the Daredevil books and I hope to see both characters Hawkeye make an appearance though.
Deep Sea
This anime is from China and its just soooo friggin’ KYUTE!!!! China has slowly, quietly, stepping up its game in the animation department, and this cartoon is the fulfillment of all those many years of hard work and its absolutely gorgeous, and a clear rival to Ghibli’s Ponyo.
Jeanne Du Barry
I’m not enamored of Johnny Depp, as of late, but I cannot deny that he has always been a compelling actor. I also know something about the basic story behind Du Barry, so now I’m interested.
The Brothers Sun
All they need to do is show that Michelle Yeoh is in the movie and they got my attention! This is a comedy about a mobster style Taiwanese family. I love to see Michelle play semi-villainous characters, and I actually laughed at this trailer, so maybe I will laugh at the movie.
True Detective
I’ve been a fan of Jodie Foster since I was about twelve, and first saw her The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, so I will watch anything she stars in. I know there’s going to be some quality acting on her part. It is my understanding that the young lady seen with her in the trailer is some kind fighter or boxer. I’ve never seen her in anything, but she appears to be able to hold her own next to Foster, and I admire her already.
I liked the very first season of True Detective. I skipped season 2 and showed up in the middle of season three, which was pretty good. Hopefully this one is just as good as the first season.
I don’t have trailers for these next three projects but they sound interesting and I might check them out if I have time.
Alien Romulus – It is my understanding that this is a television series streaming on Hulu next year. There is a huge, rich, history of comic books, and novels about the Alien Universe, which I have never read, so I’m walking into this one with no knowledge beyond the handful of movies I watched.
The Crow (Reboot) – Not sure how I feel about this yet. I like the idea of a reboot of the movies and the TV series. Really, I’d forgotten all about the TV series, which starred a merely okay Mark Dacascos back inthe 90s, so yeah its time to introduce a new generation to this idea.
A Quiet Place: Day One – I liked the first two films, and I even like the concept behind this one, but I don’t think I will go to the theater to see this. There’s just to much anxiety in it for me. Now, I realize that is the point of a Horror movie, but I do not want to be trapped in a space where I can’t turn the movie off, and my only option is to waste my money by walking out.
I am of mixed emotions regarding this TV series. I love the John Wick movies because of their sheer levels of Ultra-violence, and I was looking forward to this, but this just doesn’t look as good, the lead actor seems rather bland, and it stars Mel Gibson, someone I’ve grown an aversion to since I found out waaay too much information about him.
The Pros: It looks pretty and atmospheric. It’s set in the 70s and someone remembered that Black women existed back then. The action scenes look okay. Its only 3 episodes, so it doesnt require a major investment of time and emotional energy from me.
The Cons: It stars Mel Gibson. The lead actor is incredibly boring and forgettable, and the plot is bog-standard heist movie stuff (but that’s okay sometimes).
Verdict: I will probably watch this while grimacing at Mel Gibson’s face.
The Book of Clarence
I am in love with LaKeith Stanfield and have been ever since I watched his crazy ass character in the TV series Atlanta. He has been in a a number of good quality productions like Sorry To Bother You and The Black Western, The Harder They Fall (one of my personal favorites). Here he is in a New Testament Parody film about an ancient con-artist who wants to be as famous as Jesus. I’m not sure if this is a condemnation of religion in general or Christianity or what (and I don’t care if it is), but I really like LaKeith, so I will probably watch this.
It’s being released in January, and I hope it does well. I especially want all those people who keep whining about how films aren’t being original anymore to go see this film. Its not a sequel, or a franchise, and doesn’t have any superheroes in it (unless you count Jesus, I guess).
The Cons: It stars Benedict Cummmerbund.
The Changeling
LaKeith is also starring in this little gem based on a Horror/Fantasy novel written by one of my favorite authors, Victor Lavalle about a man who discovers something bizarre about his life after his wife commits a horrible crime. I do not have Apple Tv but I will try to find a way to watch this because it seems intriguing. Perhaps if this series does well, I may get to see one of my favorite Lavalle stories, The Ballad of Black Tom, on the big screen one day.
You should probably check out these stories even if you have no intention of ever watching this series because Lavalle is a fantastic Horror writer.
Rebel Moon
I’m probably one of ten people that are really big fans of Zack Snyder, so I am really looking forward to this. I heard it was supposed to be a Star Wars movie but Disney rejected it and Netflix said they would take it and that he could do whatever he wanted, so Snyder fans have been hearing about this project for about two years now, its almost here, and all ten of us are very excited!
Pros: I also like the word building in Star Wars and this looks very Star Wars-y, with aliens and stuff. It looks like a fun adventure. I also do not need to go to a theater or spend extra money to see it.
Cons: There are no drawbacks to me watching this. I’m glad Mel Gibson isn’t in it.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians
I know nothing about the Percy Jackson books this movie is based on, but I bet my niece and nephew do. I mostly want to see it because of the usual loudmouthed bigots who were protesting the casting of the little Black girl in the movie ( and I like her face.) They raised such a stink that the author himself had to go online and chew them out about it, saying the decision was final, and he’s fine with it.
Pros: I always try to support those projects that remember that Black women exist and that we also like to have adventures, and its airing on Disney+.
Cons: I know nothing about the Percy Jackson book series other than the broad idea that it involves the children of the Greek gods of old.
I grew up watching a lot of SciFi on TV and I don’t think I’ve ever talked about my top favorite series cuz I got favorites y’all , and this time I’m actually going to rank them fromleast to most in the order I’m supposed to instead of just tossing them up in any kind of order like I normally do.
This isn’t a list of best and worst SciFi because I don’t normally think of the media I consume in terms of best and worst. What most matters to me is how I felt when I watched it, how long it sticks in my memory, and if the show had any personal relevance for me, not whether or not other people (who I decided are not me) liked it. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when people like the things I like, but that doesn’t often factor into whether or not I like it.
10. The Bionic Woman (1976)/Wonder Woman(1975)
And right off the bat, you can see where some of my little baby feminism is leading. I had to do a twofer on this one because I watched both of these shows around the same time. Like a lot of little girls I’ve known I wanted to see women and girls onscreen, having adventures, kicking booty, etc., and in the 70s and 80s, this is what I got! I count these two shows because I had the TV all to myself at the time of day these shows aired. I don’t know where my brothers were, but they never bothered me during these shows. I remember they used to air on Saturdays, usually around 11AM or Noon.
The Bionic Woman was a spinoff series from The Six Million Dollar Man and I thought of both them as superhero shows. I didn’t learn about The Bionic Woman until some time after The Six Million Dollar Man left the air in 1978. My brothers had Steve Austin (which I also watched) but I had Jamie Somers, and I have a very distinct memory of all of us doing that slow-motion running thing that the main characters did in the series. Yes, it was silly, but this was the 70s and we were like 7, 8 and 9 years old. The series was about a woman who had had various body parts, like her legs and arms replaced by machinery which gave her the ability to run really fast and super strength. Needless to say, this was not depicted very well on network TV, but it was good for what it was. There was a one-season remix of the idea in 2007, which had an engaging lead character and better special effects but couldn’t overcome the nostalgia factor of the original I guess, because It didn’t last long.
The Bionic Woman first aired in 1976, and Wonder Woman aired in 1975. I was five and six years old and I watched them in syndication around nine or ten. The lead character in WW was Lynda Carter who has had a bit of a resurgence in her popularity since the release of the WW movies. I’m sorry guys but Gal Godot is pretty and all but she is, at best, a whispy presence next to the truly Amazonian frame of Lynda Carter, who will always be my favorite Wonder Woman, with her sunny smile, twinkling eyes, and truly impressive bosoms. I also remember the themes songs from both series and yeah, and I and every other girl my age definitely did that twirling around shit that turned Lynda into Wonder Woman.
9. The Incredible Hulk(1977)
This was one of my favorite shows and I have the memory of watching it with my Mom. I’m often surprised by how laid back and relaxed a lot of the shows we watched were from that time period. I watched a retrospective of this series a few years back and I was struck by its wholesomeness, Bill Bixby’s gentleness, and intelligence, and the series’s complete lack of urgency, something of which was captured in Mark Ruffalo’s version in The Avengers, which is probably why I like him so much.
Another reason these shows are favorites is because of the theme songs. The song for The Incredible Hulk was a treacly piano number titled The Lonely Man and it just perfectly captured the tragic vibe of the series, where Bixby’s Banner had to keep moving on from place to place, getting involved in various adventures while dodging the authorities and a nosy news reporter who was determined to out him to the rest of the world.
The Incredible Hulk was one of the few SciFi shows introduced to me by my mom, even though she wasn’t into superheroes and didn’t watch many SciFi shows. I know she approved of Bill Bixby and knew that I liked him from shows like My Favorite Martian (which she did watch), and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. When The Avengers came out The Hulk was one of the few characters we could talk about, and I think it was because of her grounding in this series that she was able to smoothly glide into a discussion of superhero movies.
8. Space 1999(1975)
This is one of my favorite shows right now. I remember that a lot of my relatives thought the show was pretty boring because they didn’t think much happened on it, but I also have the distinct memory of watching this show in my grandmother’s living room, and my other relatives indulging my love of this show because it aired around the same time as Star Trek and Lost in Space. I think the reason they indulged me most of the time is because the theme song for the show just slapped, but there were times we would groove to the title song, and then turn the channel.
I was only a kid but I remember Martin Landau from other shows I watched, and I grew to like Barbara Bain, but my favorite character was the shapeshifting Maya, played by Catherine Schell, but she didn’t show up until about season two or three. I thought she was beautiful and exotic at the time but I saw this series before I watched Star Trek so I didn’t know she was a kind of Spock ripoff. Admittedly the show and the characters were slow-moving and very non-dramatic in their behavior, which prompted quite a few people to say the show was boring. It’s true that it was not an especially dynamic cast and the show was a lot more cerebral than most of my family was willing to sit through, but part of the reason I liked it was for its Horror elements. The show was genuinely scary in its first season.
The show was ind of built on a Horror premise about a group of scientists on Moonbase Alpha who get lost in space when the moon gets knocked out of Earth orbit. Yeah, the basic premise is silly, but I watched a retrospective of the show on Youtube a few months ago and the episodes not only still hold up, but fit right in today’s shows from a plot point of view, and involved things like portal aliens that swallowed people alive, a man who was turned into a vampire like creature and had to be stopped, and creatures that were like ghosts. Every episode had a mystery that needed to be solved, the outcome wasn’t always predictable, and people died in some fairly gruesome ways.
There were also a number of toys associated with this show and I remember I had a large replica of the spaceship from this show. I don’t remember if my Mom bought it or I stole it from one of my brothers but I cherished this toy and played with it with my Legos! I was not a Star Wars fan. I was a Space 1999 fan.
7. Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone(1959)
Watching this first iteration of the Twilight Zone is one of my earliest memories of watching TV shows with my Mom. She was a huge fan of Rod Serling, probably because of the social messages in his work. I remember having discussions with her about the meanings of some of the episodes we watched or just hearing her talk about some of her favorites.
One of our top favorite episodes was It’s a Good Life, with Billy Mumy from Lost in Space as a kid with reality-bending superpowers, which was genuinely terrifying to me at that age, and one of my Mom’s favorites was Nightmare at 20,000 Feet which starred William Shatner before I knew him as Captain Kirk. I thought that episode was a bit overdone but some of the scarier episodes for me were Time Enough At Last, about a man who manages to get time to read all he wants except for one little hiccup, the Living Doll episode which might have something to do with why I find inanimate objects that move so terrifying, and The Monsters are Due on Maple Street spoke to both of us. I think the saddest episode was Five Characters in Search of an Exit, about five characters trying to escape some kind of prison, but with a horrible twist.
The Twilight Zone aired after Primetime and was one of the few shows she would let me stay up late on a weeknight to watch, which was a big deal when I was ten, sitting in my Mom’s bed while I drank milk and she had soda, and my brothers were already asleep. She and I didn’t have a lot of favorite shows that we watched together (although she carefully monitored what I watched sometimes) but whenever the original series aired we’d be right there for it, so you can imagine there is a huge nostalgia factor for me here. I was very young and until my own tastes started to diverge I simply watched whatever she watched and she had some fairly wide-ranging tastes. I did however draw the line at soap operas. She absolutely loved her “Stories” while I found them uninteresting.
6. Aeon Flux(1991)
When I was in college MTV and the Syfy networks used to air a program called Liquid Television very late in the evening, and this was where I first saw Aeon Flux. I loved the animation style but otherwise was kind of puzzled. I didn’t know what to make of the plots or stories and I wasn’t sure if they were supposed to be funny or not. Later, I decided that only some of the episodes were meant to be funny. Aeon herself was something of a sad sack. She never accomplished her goals and almost always died either because she was simply unlucky, or just through her own clumsiness.
When the series began the episodes were just one-offs that were not entirely connected to one another, although some had recurring characters, like her arch-nemesis Trevor Goodchild, who was the leader of some kind of authoritarian state that Aeon was in opposition to. Later, the single shorts became an entire series which was every bit as bizarre and puzzling but at least Aeon lived to the end of the episodes, sometimes.
The very first episode I saw, I thought was pretty groundbreaking. In it, Aeon is fighting a running battle between two different hordes of soldiers, and all of the viewer’s focus is on her until she gets taken out about halfway through it. I wasn’t expecting that! There’s another one where she’s doing some spy stuff on a train with Goodchild and she accomplishes her goal but is unlucky enough to get strangled by her own rope as she escapes. In another episode she just gets shot in the head by her enemy before she can finish the job. As an artist (who studied animation in school), the animation style was very exciting to me and unlike any other style I’d seen on TV, although it looks kind of jerky today, and I still don’t get why everyone was wearing BDSM gear, which I thought was pretty funny.
5. Star Trek Discovery(2017)
Before the show aired, I’d been watching Sonequa Martin Green’s character on The Walking Dead. I was pretty upset that she was killed off that series but later found out that she asked to be written out of the show because of her newest project. And then I heard about this show, and I was very excited since I really liked her. When I heard that she was starring in the series as an Ensign I was a little put out by that because I was led to believe the entire series would be based around her and it couldn’t be that way if she wasn’t a Captain. See, up to this point, all the Star Trek shows revolved around Captains and their crews.
But the show had something a little more subtle in mind because it turned out to be a psychological study of the effects of trauma, and a chronicle of Michael Burnham’s fall, redemption, healing, and eventual rise to Captaincy. I saw this pattern by the second season, but I don’t think a lot of people understood what the show was trying to do. I also had to explain to several people that weren’t used to seeing this kind of thing that this Black woman was basically getting the Full Hero Treatment that is usually given to straight white dudes in these types of stories, and that in itself was groundbreaking for Star Trek!
I have to admit, I couldn’t contain my excitement for this angle of the series, and I had (and still today) no patience for other people’s criticism of this show. To Hell with all of them! This was what I wanted to see and I don’t give a damn if people call it pandering because I want to be pandered to as much as every other demographic! This was what I’d been asking for for years. This was the representation I always wanted to see of women who looked like me. I waited forty years of my life for this, and to have Star Trek do the thing was enormous to me, and celebrating this kind of story was the reason I started this blog. The top four genres of film and TV (Action, SciFi, Horror, and the Western) had almost entirely erased the existence of Black women. We showed up from time to time and said a few lines, or supported some other character’s journey, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but when that is the only type of character you infrequently get…
Michael wasn’t just a sidekick or a token. She is the hero. She is the star around which all the other characters and the plot orbited, just like what happened on shows with white lead characters. She is passionate, smart, brave, reckless, and foolish, and I watched this character grow and learn and become everything she is to today and I am here for it. And she wasn’t the only great character on this show. I grew to like all of the top characters, (Tilly, Saru, Stametz), the tech was unique, and there were also all my old friends, the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Terran Empire. And I am fortunate to have gotten four whole seasons of this series.
Don’t get me wrong. I liked the other Star Treks well enough (at least the ones I watched), and consider at least one of the spinoffs some of the finest hours of television ever made, but you can’t tell me nothing about Discovery. Straight white guys have had umpteen bajillion SciFi series where characters who look like them were the center of attention, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that but…
This one is mine!
4. The X Files(1993)
I’m not sure what I can say about this series. it was my first introduction to conspiracy TV via Chris Carter. I was initially attracted to the show because when it first began it used a monster of the week model, and it was the monsters that kept me addicted to it. Along the way, I got a heaping helping of alien conspiracy theories, and a will they/won’t they love affair between the two lead characters, Mulder and Scully, which I only halfheartedly rooted for. I have never cared too deeply for romance in the shows I liked.
I remember when the show first aired I kind of hated Mulder who I thought was like every mansplaining, arrogant, know-it-all nerdy white guy I’d met in college, but over the years I grew to like him and his better qualities (one of which is that he turned out to be more or less right in his theories.) I liked Scully right away, although later in the series watching her get damseled always irritated me, and eventually, her skepticism became rather annoying, but I never stopped liking the show, not even after both lead actors left, and I continued to watch it even when it was briefly rebooted a few years ago.
I don’t always know why I like certain shows and The X-Files falls into that category. I can’t exactly pinpoint why I loved it so much, which is something I can do for other shows like Buffy and Supernatural. The X-Files just happened to show up at the right time for me to like it, I guess.
3. Farscape(1999)
This is another show I don’t have a whole lot to say about other than it was one of my all-time favorite SCIFI series, back when the SYFY network was firing on all thrusters. I loved it purely for the aesthetics, and there has really never been anything like it since. I watched all five seasons multiple times. I just liked spending time with these characters, and it had puppets, and it was funny, and actually, it was a very sexy show without being too upfront about it, with lots of black leather and high heels.
Not pictured above is the actress Virginia Hey who played the elegant, blue-skinned, Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan. This was an actress I remember from The Road Warrior. My favorite character wasn’t Crichton though, it was Gigi Edgly’s Chiana, who was just weird, and I really liked the weird. The aesthetics for this show were just crazy. I can say it was one of the prettiest and most imaginative SciFi shows on TV. The fashion, the colors, the special effects, and no bumpy-headed humans. Since the show was created by the same company that created The Muppets, they had the ability to make aliens that really looked (and in many cases acted) truly alien.
Storywise, the show wasn’t a rival for Star Trek but it made up for that by being hella sexy, about an American astronaut who flies through a wormhole, ends up on a living ship with a bunch of galactic prisoners, and gets chased around this new universe by various baddies while trying to find his way back home. I’ve never seen that much black leather in another SciFi series. Yes, I had favorites, but all the characters were engaging, which made the stories terrifying, funny, or sad just because you cared about what happened to them. Speaking of which, I kinda miss these guys. It’s probably time for a re-watch.
2. Mork and Mindy (1978)
I don’t think there are enough words to express how much of an effect this show had on me in my formative years and just how much I miss Robin Williams. He was a strange guy and Mork was a weirdo and this series taught me that it was okay to be like that, no matter what anyone said. This show taught me to love and accept myself, and through that love, accept the eccentricities of others. I was a strange little girl. I didn’t get picked on too much or teased a lot when I was little but I did get raised eyebrows from a lot of my teachers and my family, and most kids my age were disinterested in me or just generally avoided me. My mother however never batted a single eyelash at her strange daughter, who dressed funny, had odd but very focused interests, read everything that wasn’t nailed down, was a picky eater, watched entirely too much TV and liked the weird shows, and talked like the books she read. My Mom just rolled with all of it, loving me no matter how weird I was, never asking why, and indulging every one of my odd artistic interests, like weaving!
I remember watching this show when it first aired because I was in the fourth grade. I remember this because I went to a school in my neighborhood and I remember wearing those exact suspenders to school every day. No one and I mean absolutely no one, recognized those suspenders, but I loved them and wore them with everything. I guess that was my eight-year-old version of cosplaying. Other little girls had tutus. I had Mork Suspenders. I memorized Mork’s catchphrases and hand gestures (the sideways split hand greeting) that I later recognized from Spock, sitting in chairs on his face, how each and every episode was Mork discovering some new thing to report back to his people. This show went a long way towards explaining other human beings to me and as Mork discovered these things, so did I.
I loved this show so much, and if that’s how I felt about Mork and Mindy, then you can imagine how I must have felt about Star Trek!
1. Star Trek: The Original Series(1963)
What can I say about how great this series is that hasn’t already been said:
From Forbes Magazine:
Star Trek stories are humanistic; they are founded in Gene Roddenberry’s belief in the perfectible human. They provide an optimistic vision of our future. Star Trek tells us that no matter how crazy the world may look today, it will get better. We will get better. There will be a time in which doing great things will be the norm.
Star Trek depicts a meritocracy. The characters were cool not because of looks, wealth, or social position, but because they were very good at their jobs. It is a rare television show that sends the message that it is cool to be smart.
Star Trek’s optimistic view of the future stands as a contrast to the bulk of science fiction. Most television and cinematic science fiction depicts varying dystopian futures. Dystopia provides writers with shortcuts to conflict; it’s easier. When just making it through the day provides conflict, writers don’t have to generate as many new ideas. Star Trek thrives on those new ideas.
Star Trek showed blacks, Asians, and women in roles of respect in a time when that was not the norm. Whoopi Goldberg has talked about freaking out when, as a child, she tuned into Star Trek and saw that black women were part of the future. Nichelle Nichols has told the story of how when she was contemplating leaving the show, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told her not to, because her character was a symbol of hope for equality.
Oh, and we not gonna talk about how I wanted to grow up to be Spock when I was a kid, or how I used to pretend I was visiting a new planet whenever we moved into a new house, or how eventually my goal in life became being as elegant and beautiful as Lt. Uhura. The ideology of the series became something to aspire to. It was okay to be smart in this universe. The focus was on solving problems, not infighting, or shooting things (although there was some of that too). The show was pretty imaginative for the sixties, and I liked the aesthetics, the uniforms, the bright colors, and the fashions.
Star Trek was the show to which I compared all the other shows, tbh.
Once again we have a bit of a mixed bag although there were really no “bad” episodes this season. Some of the episodes were, for lack of a better term, uninteresting as far as story, but at least had interesting characters or interesting animation styles.
This season has gone global and I think this makes it better than last season. The styles of story and animation are very different from the first season, and many of them are reflections of the cultures of their creators. The episodes are large;y aimed at children since children are either the focal points of the stories and many of the animation styles are sort of aimed at kids with either soft colors and/or rounded non-threatening forms. There were similar themes throughout with hopeful (or cynical) adults inspiring children to be their best, or having to let them grow away from them, or children finding the strength to save themselves or their loved ones. The Sith and Jedi don’t feature in all of them, which is sort of what I was expecting, although most of the episodes take place during the Imperial era. Not all of the episodes are Force related as Westerners understand the use of The Force.
My all-around favorite episode was the first one called Sith (1) by a Spanish animation studio, and while the story was kind of lackluster, just a tidbit of a story that echoes other episodes, the animation style was spectacular and reminded me heavily of the Spiderverse film. My second favorite was Screecher’s Reach (2) because it had a bit more story attached to it, and is by the same Studio that did WoldTalkers and Secret of the Kells. My third favorite was the very culturally specific The Bandits of Golak ( 7) which has a distinctive Indian flavor. Plus, there was a lightsaber-wielding grandmother that I absolutely adored. She’s one of the characters I’d love to see more of in the Star Wars universe because I sensed a helluva backstory there.
These were my top three favorites but as I said none of them are truly bad, only less interesting than the others. I mostly checked out of the Korean-inspired, Journey to the Dark Head (5), although it asked some interesting questions and compared the Jedi’s use of The Force with the basic tenets of Buddhism. The story was mildly intriguing but the animation style was mediocre, and then there was the infinitesimal storyline of the 9th episode called Aau’s Song, which I really wanted to like because the characters looked like animated Teddy Bears, but it simply didn’t capture me the way the earlier episodes did, or maybe I was just tired.
Children will probably love the other 3d animated episode called In the Stars (3), or the 2D Spydancer (5) episode, both of which I thought had some lovely animation, but the story in Spydancer was a little too much like the Sith episode. While I found the idea of nightclubs for Stormtroopers kind of ridiculous, I understood the parallel the writers were trying to make between pre-WW2 Germany and the New Republic. In the Stars came very close to being a top favorite but just missed it, coming in as a fourth-place favorite because it had some good action scenes and a rah-rah moment towards the end.
One of the middle episodes titled I Am Your Mother (a play on Darth Vader’s statement to Luke Skywalker) was drolly funny but involved drag racing scenes and my brain automatically checks out when it comes to that subject. I wanted to like it, since it was created by Aardman Studios, the makers of Wallace and Gromit but it just didn’t capture me. My least favorite was titled The Pit. I’m just not ever in the mood to watch slavery-adjacent stories.
I do have to admit that watching this season was a little more frustrating than the first because all these episodes serve to do is show these tiny snippets of what Star Wars could be, the kinds of characters we could be having, and I’m sure there are some really interesting backstories for some of these characters like the woman from Sith, who has left both the Sith and Jedi Orders to become a painter on some backwater world. I liked her, and speaking as a former painter the animation style was inspired.
It would have been hard for any other episode to top that one for me but Screecher’s Reach came the closest, not because of the animation style but because of the story, which is about a little girl discovering her Force abilities by going toe to toe with an old Sith villain in a cave. I do wish some of the episodes hadn’t focused so much on fight scenes but the ones that didn’t do that didn’t offer much else to fully grab the attention though.
Overall, I liked this season marginally better than the first one. There’s still just a bit too much sameness between the stories and I’d like the stories to branch out a bit more and not be so much about fighting but it was a satisfying watch.
And by America I pretty much just mean me! I want to watch these movies and shows because they look pretty interesting and/or fun. I’m all about sweetness, bright colors, and light, this Summer.
I’m looking for wholesome. I’m looking for people of color to do interesting things. I’m looking for some amount of novelty (but not too much). I’m looking for lovely and loving messages. Some of the darker stuff on this list isn’t released until August, which is when I start looking towards a more solemn Fall viewing list, in preparation for Halloween Month, of course.
But from May until then, “Don’t nobody bring me no bad news!” because Hot Girl Summer is out. Hot Movie Summer (all thirty minutes of it in the Midwest) is in!
Summertime (Whooo!!!)
Polite Society
Okay, this looks novel and deeply funny. I’ve never watched a Bollywood, martial arts movie, so I’m up for watching this. I will not be seeing this in any theaters though. This one is just for at-home viewing only. I’m here for Hindi Action Girls even though I have issues with watching dance routines breaking out in the middle of Action movies. This seems like the kind of movie where breaking into a dance simply makes sense though.
Queen Cleopatra
This actually turns out to be a kind of live-action documentary. It’s funny that this trailer showed up right after I read a mystery book that prominently featured the character, so I was somewhat informed about Cleopatra’s background before watching it. This is not a person that I’ve ever paid a whole lot of attention to really, so I don’t know much about her backstory, but this looks gorgeous, and hopefully, it will be informative and worth the watch.
I like that they cast a Black woman in this role although I kept hearing from historians that she was Greek and Iranian. I mean, that doesn’t rule out her being at least part Black nd here she looks like a woman of mixed ethnicity, but you know it’s just gonna bring out the racists and bigots who are sure to be mad about it, and while I do my best to ignore them (since their rantings have affected nothing in Popular entertainment), I’m still very tired of them.
Star Wars Visions Season 2
I have mixed feelings about the first season of this series. I liked maybe half of the animation in the first one. I hope that the ratio of good to bad cartoons is better this season, although the novelty has worn off. I hope it’s not all one style of animation. I like to see different types. I’m also hoping to see a lot more Old Republic-type stories, too. We got a little bit of that in the first season, but I hope to see more.
Ahsoka
I love to see Latinas in Sci-Fi and love seeing them get the full hero treatment. I’ve been a huge fan of Rosario Dawson since she starred in Men in Black twenty years ago. Ahsoka has been a favorite character of mine for a while and I’m always happy to see her whenever she makes a cameo (The Mandolorian) but here she’s got an entire series that’s all about her and I’m here for it. What kind of adventures is she having? Where has she been? I’m looking forward to finding out.
The Marvels
This looks really colorful and fun, and I’m looking forward to hunkering down in the theater with this movie, some popcorn, and an Icee! It definitely looks more appealing than the first movie, which I thought was okay, but not great. The addition of Kamala Khan is going to be great for the movie since I enjoyed the sensibilities of the series. I just liked how bubbly she was and the series felt happy in general.
I liked Kamala’s family a lot. I liked that they are from the Islamic faith and that they’re mostly onboard about Kamala’s superpowers. The Peter Parker days of keeping it all a secret mostly appear to be over. Nowadays the hero’s parents and friends all seem to know about their status as heroes, and that’s kind of refreshing since I was never into the idea of superheroes leading these kinds of double lives. Daredevil I can understand but a lot of others just seemed to be pointlessly having a secret. Also, I haven’t seen Monica since Wandavision and I really like her. I’m glad to see Photon, the original Captain Marvel, is making a comeback, and wonder what she’s been up to. I also like Brie Larson’s cocky little Carol Danvers who is so much like that in the comics. This is a character who has POWER, knows it, and carries herself like it, and I’m good with that.
Also, I love it when my favorite characters team up.
Secret Invasion
I have mixed feelings about this series. I was never a fan of the Secret Wars and Invasions series in the comic books so I have no particular urge to run to my TV to watch this. But it is novel in that it’s the first time I will get to watch Samuel L Jackson star in his own TV series. The action scenes look really cool and it’s got a lot of cameos, so that looks like fun. It does look like it might be confusing though and my fried-up brain doesn’t want to go near that. I don’t hate it but I’m not loving it either. We’ll see how I feel when we get close to the release date. I mean some shows seem okay but you just don’t know if you want to make that kind of long-term commitment. A two or even three-hour movie is a fling, but a six or eight-hour TV series is a love affair!
Autumn:
I’m really looking forward to at least a couple of these this August and September.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
I was feeling mixed about this when I first heard about it. I was wondering why it was being made, but I like this trailer, hope the movie lives up to it, and by August I’m probably going to be looking forward to some grim and dark movies for Fall anyway. The title sounds appropriately dreadful and it’s been a minute since I’ve watched some good Horror/History.
I will not be taking my niece and nephew to see this unless they specifically ask, because I think it looks too scary for them. On the other hand, my nephew did watch all of the Halloween movies, so we’ll see if I will be watching this in the theater alone.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
This looks like an interesting take on the Frankenstein’s Monster movies of my youth. It’s not every day we get to see Black girl mad scientists. I don’t know that I’m enthusiastic to watch this, but I’m putting it here because it’s just different enough from the other Horror movies that it bears mentioning. You can see that the lead character is reading a copy of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. I read that book when I was somewhere near that character’s age and I was unimpressed, although I did like the Kenneth Branagh version from the 90s.
True Detective Night Country
I’ve been a True Detective fan since the first season, (with season 2 being the weakest of the three) even though I don’t normally make Detective series a regular part of my viewing habits. Most of the time it’s because I don’t care for the sometimes obnoxious personalities involved, although the series Psych is an exception to that. I don’t think you can get any more opposite of the Psych style of TV series than True Detective though. It looks very dark (literally in this case) and gritty, and about as close to Horror as a show can get without actually being classified as Horror. I’m also partial to shows and series set in snowy environments (I blame the excellence of 1982s The Thing remake for my rather odd taste.)
The novelty is this will be my first time watching Jodie Foster star in her own series. The last time she was in a TV series was when she was a child in the 70s. I’ve been a big fan of hers since we were both kids and I wasn’t supposed to be up late watching her movies. I’m not “jazzed” about it, mostly because this doesn’t seem like the type of show one gets jazzed about, but I am looking forward to it. I don’t know who her co-tar is so I had to look her up. She is a boxer who is an Indigenous Rights activist and has won some award nominations for her acting debut in Catch the Fair One, which I have not seen (and not likely to see since I am not in the headspace to watch it right now. But it looks great and yall should check it out). I kinda like her already because of her “fuck around and find out” facial expression.
So far, there’s no release date for this, but I’m expecting it to show up in the middle of high Summer.
The Penguin
This series is not set to be released this year but I’m looking forward to it anyway. Apparently, that is indeed Colin Farrell, who I just don’t see in this character, no matter how many times I’m told that’s him. He is completely unrecognizable! (Although I think they’re doing the most on his makeup.) I did like the last Batman movie but I had a couple of misgivings about the villain. I liked the aesthetics and some of the messaging. I also liked the hyperrealistic gritty Gotham that was presented in the movie. This trailer sort of reminds me of a classic mob movie like The Godfather or The Untouchables, something that should be starring Robert DeNiro or Joe Pesci.
The Continental
This is a series a lot of people are eagerly anticipating. The world of John Wick is just a very intriguing sort of place and I’m interested to find out how it works, how it got that way, and how deep all of this goes. One of my friends pointed out to me that she couldn’t get into it because there is no law enforcement in this world, even though it looks very much like ours. I think I pointed out to her that there are quite a number of things that are NOT in the Wick-verse, (like McDonald’s and Soda) and that I liked it because it had some unique worldbuilding, which, in the best instances, is like getting a glimpse into an alternate universe where the police simply never evolved. These other organizations (the Assassins Guilds and the High Table) are the ones that keep order apparently.
Unfortunately, the addition of the racist and anti-Semitic Mel Gibson greatly reduces my enthusiasm for this series. I’m not boycotting the series or anything. I’m just saying that my enjoyment of it will be severely impacted by his presence, which I find deeply distasteful, and I really wish the creators had chosen another actor. I realize he’s got to work somewhere. I just wish he was starring in something I didn’t particularly care about, so I’m going to wait to see how much of him is in it before I commit to watching it.
Next up: Movies (and TV) I had no intention of watching but will probably end up looking at on some idle Saturday afternoon.
I know, I know! Normally I don’t pay any attention to the Oscars but this year I will because why not?
I’ve actually seen a number of the movies that were nominated and most of the movies are easily accessible for me to view them. There are only about three movies that are not readily viewable but I still hold tremendous respect for either the actors or the directors so have no objections to their nominations. This is not a list of nominees, btw. (I have a link to that below.) This is a list of movies I’d love to win in their respective categories and why I chose them, along with which movies should have been included in that category but weren’t.
Will I watch the Oscars this year? I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t watch last year’s much more spectacular episode, so it very much depends on how I feel or what I’m doing on the night in question. I hope there is not a repeat of what happened last year although Jimmy Kimmel is NOT a particularly funny man and I’m not looking forward to watching two or three hours of his horrible jokes. Don’t get me wrong, I like it when movies I like win awards, but I’m not that heavily invested and most years I just check to see who won after it’s all over.
Okay first up, the biggest snubs of last year:
Till – Neither the movie nor its Black female director was recognized by the Academy.
MEN – Should have been nominated in the Sound category. The movie sounds gorgeous and it’s also not too bad in the Original Score category.
The Woman King – Should have been nominated in the category of Best Picture and Gina Prince-Bythewood for Best Director (rather than the usual boys club we got for Director.)
Nope – Should have at least been nominated in the Sound, Editing, or Cinematography categories, or even for original Screenplay. Jordan Peele deserves some kind of recognition for this movie.
She Said – This should’ve been nominated for Best Screenplay and Maria Schrader should have gotten a nod in the Best Director category.
The Northman – This is another movie that could have been nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay or at least for its Cinematography.
Now, on to my favorites:
Best Picture
Everything Everywhere All At Once – I don’t think I can express just how meaningful this movie was for so many people and that needs to be recognized in some way. The cinematography was superb, the acting was phenomenal and the writing was incredible. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a movie that made me cry and laugh from one moment to the next and had some beautiful messages in it. I think this one will become one of those cult classics people talk about for decades.
Best Director
The Daniels for Everything Everywhere All At Once – They did an incredible job on this film. I love Spielberg, and he is who will probably win, but it is The Daniels who truly deserve to be recognized in some manner.
Best Actor
The Awards season has two major comeback actors, Brendan Fraser, and Ke Huy Quan. Ke is not nominated in this category but Fraser I feel deserves all the honors here. I am not as familiar with his action adventure and comedy work as I am with his dramatic works. I know him as an incredible dramatic actor who deserves recognition for his role in The Whale.
Best Actress
Michelle Yeoh – It’s not that the other actresses in this category don’t deserve this nomination but I’ve been following Michelle’s career since the early 90s when she starred in a movie with Maggie Cheung called The Heroic Trio. So yeah, I am a very long time fan of her work and I just want her to win this because it would be the culmination of a very very long journey for her.
Best Supporting Actor
Ke Huy Quan – Words cannot express how much everyone’s embrace and remembrance of this actor means to him, I think. I’m also surprised at the sheer outpouring of love and affection the world is showing for this actor. Also, I just want him to win because it would be an incredibly beautiful story of dreams fulfilled and I know his Oscar speech is gonna kill it!
Best Supporting Actress
Angela Bassett – I think she should win because Angela has been bringing her A-game since the beginning of her career and she deserves that recognition. Wakanda Forever is one of the first MCU films to be recognized in this category, and Basset just tore it up in her role as Queen Ramonda. That speech she gives at the beginning of the movie gave me chills.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Glass Onion – This is one of the most fun movies released last year. I was one of those people who was mad a Rian Johnson for what he did to the Star Wars franchise but I can forgive him for that after watching this movie. It’s just so much fun, filled with so many Easter eggs, messages, and layers, and yet it still manages to be light-hearted and not so deep it cannot be enjoyed in a superficial manner. This was just a well-written film.
Best Original Screenplay
The Banshees of Inisherin – This movie definitely got me in my feels. I know I said other movies should have been nominated in this category but this is what we go so this is what I’m picking. I suppose I’m going to have to talk about this movie at some point because it’s a lot deeper than it at first appears, and its message, about two friends who have a falling out because one of them simply doesn’t want to be friends anymore, may not be as pessimistic as it seems.
Best Animated Feature Film
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio – There’s nothing deep about my choice here. I haven’t even finished watching this movie. I just want Guillermo to win every award he gets nominated for because I love his work. This is an easy choice to make.
Best International Film
I haven’t watched any of the films in this category, so I have nothing to pick. I’ve only heard about a couple of them by rough description.
Best Documentary Feature
The only movie I heard of in this category was Fire of Love, which I have not seen, so I can’t actually pick anything. I would have preferred that the documentary, Use of Force, about police brutality in the US, be in the nominations, but I guess either no one saw it, it just didn’t get enough votes, or maybe it was just too damn depressing.
Best Film Editing
Everything Everywhere All At Once – Of course, I picked this film! And yes, it was very well edited.
Best Cinematography
I have such tremendous respect for all the movies in this category, I simply couldn’t pick just one of them. These are all beautiful-looking films that I have, unfortunately, only watched the trailers for. I hope to watch all of these before the Oscars air, and I want to see all of them, but the ones I’m most looking forward to right now are Bardo and Tar.
Best Costume Design
Ruth Carter – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – Ruth Carter has won for the first film so why not give her this one too? Surely her costuming skills have not degraded since the first film? Bassett’s wardrobe in this movie was giving me life. We also got to see some nifty new costumes for the Dora Milaje. and the costumes for the Namor’s people (most especially Namora) were stupefyingly gorgeous! Ruth Carter is a fashion genius.
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – Of course, Ruth Carter deserves this one too.
Best Music (Original Song)
Lift Me Up – Rihanna (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever)
Best Music (Original Score)
The Banshees of Inisherin – The music does a lot of work illuminating the mood of this film.
Best Sound
The Batman – This is one of my favorite scenes!
Best Visual Effects
This was another category where I couldn’t choose just one although I am leaning in the direction of either Avatar or Wakanda Forever, even though the other films they are up against are not slacking as far as imagination.
[There are a lot more categories than the ones I listed here, but wasn’t, because I wasn’t especially invested in the winner or didn’t know enough about the category to become invested.]
In 1998, Samuel R. Delaney, acclaimed Black Science Fiction writer, was asked at an awards convention about racism within the genre. Here he is referring to the writing community but I’ve observed that this can be equally applied to every industry, including movies and television:
As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force—until, say, black writers start to number thirteen, fifteen, twenty percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.
We are still a long way away from such statistics.
But we are certainly moving closer.
We need to be clear that what we’ve been experiencing very strongly for the last six or seven years is a white social media backlash against women and PoC representation in popular media. As marginalized people are seen more often in media projects what we’ve also been seeing is a white, straight, backlash against their slightly more positive/nuanced depictions.
What Delaney means is that more racism will be expressed by those white people who feel most threatened by Black progress in that industry, and I can say this because this has been noted in every industry in which it has occurred.
This is not new! It hasn’t been new in over a hundred years.
What we’re seeing today in the pushback against Black actors in visual media has happened multiple times and in every industry, from music, to literature, to politics, to movies, and television. Every time PoC have made inroads into any field of endeavor there has been a white backlash against it. The only thing that changes are the industries in question, and their arguments against that progress. Now we see it happening in visual entertainment.
In the 1920s, Jazz was seen as barbaric and immoral. It was considered the kind of music that lead white women astray and put them in environments where Black musicians had access to them. All manner of immorality was attributed to Jazz including drug use, violence, and hypersexuality. The exact same criticisms were made against Rock in the 50s, Disco in the 70s, and Rap music in the 90s, when those gained ascendances in popular culture. Rock music was a genre that championed drugs and sex, Disco encouraged homosexuality, and Rap music was considered too violent for white sensibilities.
The same backlash that we’ve been seeing for the last six or seven years against Black actors in the Fantasy genre is the same backlash we experienced when N. K. Jemison won back-to-back Hugo awards in 2016, 2017, and 2018 for her Fantasy trilogy The Obsidian Gate. As Delaney predicted, a select group of white male critics complained that women and PoC were getting too many awards, and so formed a contingent of fans and authors called “The Rabid Puppies” in an attempt to game the Hugo awards rules to win awards for themselves. In other words, they preferred to cheat, rather than accept that Science Fiction fans were a diverse group of men and women who had moved on from the type of Science Fiction they wrote, which centered on white European men as the heroes. Much of the hoopla in the industry has since calmed down, but that does not mean that parity has been reached for authors of color, and we have seen the exact same dynamic play out in other arenas where women and PoC have made any kind of inroads, including politics, where white men have decided that rather than share political power, they would prefer to game the system to keep it all of it for themselves.
In 2014, Candace Patton was cast as the Black love interest of Barry Allen in The Flash television series on the CW network. That same year, Disney released The Force Awakens, the first film in its latest Star Wars trilogy, and the lead character was a Black actor named John Boyega. They both experienced immediate backlash for daring to perform the fictional roles that they had been hired for. Candace Patton has received unending racist vitriol on social media for the last 10 years for playing the Black love interest of the lead white character solely because her character was a white woman in the comic books. And don’t make the mistake of thinking the only toxic fans are white men. White women established themselves firmly in the contingent for bigotry by weaponizing fandom against Candace and harassing and bullying John Boyega on social media.
In 2016, a new version of The Ghostbusters was released with an all-female cast and received immediate pushback from gatekeeping white male fans who believed they owned that franchise and argued that women couldn’t be fictional Ghostbusters. The movie starred three white actresses, but it is very telling that the onus of their hatred landed squarely on the only Black cast member in the group, Leslie Jones, who was driven from social media by the racist backlash against her original characters’ very existence. So we can see that even arguments that PoC and women make their own original characters rather than supplant characters who used to be white are simply a smokescreen for racist abuse. Original characters do exist and receive the same level of acting out and foolery that race and gender-swapped characters do, as we saw with the release of Black Panther.
In 2018, there was a massive backlash against the release of Disney’s tentpole superhero movie, The Black Panther, in which the same gatekeeping white male fans attempted to downvote the movie’s ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, causing Disney and RT to temporarily shut down the audience portion of the site to prevent the abuse. Thinkpieces were written denigrating the making of the film, and some fans engaged in violence callouts, falsely reporting that they had been harassed and/or beaten by racist Black Panther fans in order to sully the reputation of the film. Black fans had to be vigilant in protecting the actors from harassment on social media and debunking the claims of violence.
Every time Disney releases a film that isn’t centered on the heroic activities of straight white men there is a backlash from white men against those films, against the actors, and even against the fans who talk about them. Women and fans of color aren’t even safe in their own fan spaces as those will, at some point, be invaded by trolls and bigots spewing racist vitriol at them for daring to like a movie they were the audience for. We saw this with Captain Marvel in 2019, and Shang Chi and The Eternals in 2021, with each successive film being criticized as the worst film ever made in a franchise, how the MCU is failing, and the blogs, videos, and websites of fans of color being reported as abuse, and blocked on TikTok and Youtube for daring to discuss entertainment that is aimed at them as the audience.
This also happens with television shows. Since it is Disney that is leading the charge of diversity and inclusion in its many franchises, it is Disney’s fans and employees (the actors) who have borne the brunt of the backlash, during and after series like Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ms. Marvel, and the newest series, She-Hulk. Why? Because the stars of these series are women and PoC. It is notable that there was no backlash against series with white male leads like Loki, Hawkeye, and Moon Knight which were also released in the last year.
These shows are not alone in having a racist fan problem. Since John Boyega’s debut as one of the first Black Stormtroopers in Star Wars, there has been a racist and misogynist backlash against every single advance of a PoC, or woman, in that franchise, especially in any film in which a white male wasn’t the star, but even a few that were, as with the last TV release, Obi Wan Kenobi, which prominently starred a woman of color. The lead villain of the series, Reva Sevander, is played by Yale graduate Moses Ingram. She had to endure toxic fans who called her everything but a child of god, questioned her undeniable qualifications for playing her role, and was flatly told by some of them that she could not be a part of Star Wars.
In the past year, we have seen a racist backlash against casting PoC in any SciFi and Fantasy film or television series. The casting of Leah Jeffries as Annabeth Chase in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians TV series, the casting of Black Hobbits, Dwarves, and Elves in Amazon’s Rings of Power series, the casting of Halle Bailey in Disney’s live-action version of The Little Mermaid, and the casting of Black legacy characters in the Game of Thrones spinoff series, House of the Dragon, has racist/toxic fans pulling out all the stops to troll, harass, and make sure that Black fans, actors, and creators are aware that they don’t belong in genre films and series.
You also have those bad faith actors who try to hide their bigotries behind legitimate concerns, like questioning the credentials of the actors who were chosen, not understanding that when the only time you care about whether or not a character is qualified to perform the role they’ve been hired for is when they are a woman, or gay, or a person of color, that that too is performing a racism.
The Whiteness ofthe Past, the Present, and the Future
White people for the last hundred years of film and TV have crafted entire fictional universes with pasts, presents, and futures that were entirely centered around themselves, with not a single face of color to be seen. When I was a little girl, I was sitting in our kitchen watching some futuristic movie and turned to ask my mother why there were no Black people in the future. Really quick she said, “Maybe we left.” She’d noticed it too and seemed to have that answer ready for me, just in case.
White people who are making the arguments that we don’t belong are speaking from a long history of whitewashing, of never having seen Black and Brown faces in historical epics, present-day dramas, or futuristic landscapes unless we were playing happy slaves, silent victims, or menacing drug dealers. The industry was so whitewashed that when it eventually developed the use of color, Black and Brown people weren’t even a consideration, and color was only attuned to white skin tones. Movies and TV were so white that Black women didn’t have hair and makeup people of their own until a scant few years ago.
According to white people making the loudest noise, we don’t belong anywhere in their all-white fantasylands of the past or the future. Their entire understanding of historical events comes not from study, or reading, or actual knowledge, but from Hollywood movies in which our presence had been, downplayed, erased, or ignored, even in our own stories. Based on these deeply ignorant people’s understanding of history, the only stories in which Black people should be allowed to appear are the ones based on slavery, as if enslavement was our only contribution to the world. We’re not allowed to appear in movies set in the present unless we’re being killed or killing, and apparently, we don’t exist at all in the future, not just physically, but in any cultural or social contributions we made to the making of this country thast sre simply never referenced.
Candace Patton talked about how she didn’t have anyone to do her hair, and Black actresses called out Hollywood in 2020, for its lack of hairstylers for them. Many of them confessed to having to do their own makeup because white makeup professionals never bothered to learn how to do Black skin or hair. White hairstylists didn’t need to know that to have successful careers! There was such a complete lack of Black female stuntwomen that white stuntwomen wore blackface on the rare occasions that Black actresses needed stuntwork done! This was pretty rare indeed because up until about ten years ago we never got to be in Action movies often enough to need stunt doubles!
All of the white backlash against Black women (in particular) participation in genre media we are seeing today is just one part of the side effects of Hollywood’s insistence that there is only one demographic that needs to be pandered to, (therefore all the other demographics can be ignored), and the idea that movies with diverse and inclusive casts don’t make any money, (which results in the erasure of PoC in order for anything to be greenlit). Many films cannot receive funding to get made without a big enough named actor in the cast. Unfortunately, Hollywood not casting PoC in certain films and for certain roles results in actors of color (in particular Asian American actors) finding it nearly impossible to become big enough named actors to ever get projects funded. They can’t get to A-list status if they are never given the opportunity to do so.
Not being considered for roles in certain genres of film limits an actor’s career prospects, and when those roles are obtained (as with Candace Patton’s casting as Iris West in The Flash, Moses Ingram’s casting in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series, and Leslie Jones casting in Ghostbusters) they receive no protection from their employers from the harassment and pervasive racist vitriol on social media, which is one of the nastier side effects of Hollywood never having hired actors who look like them for these roles in the past. Part of their employment means they are subject to public emotional abuse while working in a role they were paid money to perform. These actors often receive little to no support from their white industry colleagues or white female fans either (something which has only begun to change just this year!) It has continually fallen on the fans, especially Black women, to be their support systems under trying and stressful circumstances.
Until this moment passes, and seeing PoC in these types of roles becomes normalized, and white fans fully begin to understand that this is not a situation that is going to change (because diversity and inclusion is proving to be a very lucrative deal for the corporations engaging in it), we will continue to see this kind of toxic behavior, and we all need to be ready for that. Much of this behavior can be laid at the feet, not just of the kinds of fans who are used to being the only demographic that was pandered to for over a hundred years, but Hollywood’s idea that PoC, neither the actors nor the audiences, were worthy of consideration.
It is long past time Hollywood realized we too are worthy of being pandered to and that representation always mattered, not just to us but to white people who are unused to seeing PoC as anything other than the stereotypes which Hollywood has always given them.
As I stated when I first started this blog:
Black women like to have adventures too.
It is a shame I’ve had to wait nearly my entire life for Hollywood to realize women like me exist.
I’ve observed that there’s a subset of films that certain kinds of white men insist on hating, and I have a theory about why. I am speaking outside of some of the bad-faith arguments and hot takes I’ve seen on social media, where some people simply write whatever critical nonsense will get them clicks. In the past ten years, we’ve seen more women-directed action films and other content, and while there isn’t enough content to establish a clear pattern for how women direct movies, I have noticed a couple of trends about where women directors’ priorities lie when creating stories. In much of the content created by women there are few, if any, male heroes for the audience to look to, and for some men, if the content isn’t about them feeling good and/or powerful, then it’s essentially worthless.
I’m apparently one of the only five people who think fondly of the 2016 version of Ghostbusters, which isn’t to say I hate the originals. I love the original films, even though parts of them have not aged well. I was a teenager when they were released, and I thought them very enjoyable, well-made, fun, and funny. I’m also one of only five people who thought the sequel was funnier, even though the Stay-Pufft Marshmallow Giant from the first film is iconic! But I enjoyed the new version too. I thought parts of it were deeply funny, and some parts were, just like in the first two movies, kind of cringe. I thought Patty, like Winston, the only Black Ghostbuster, was terribly used (I keep wanting to find things wrong with her character but Leslie Jones made the absolute best of what she was given) and I like that her “Uncle” turned out to be Winston (Ernie Hudson)! I also liked the other cameos from the original actors. There is one thing that a lot of men might have unconsciously clocked, in both this movie and the 2020 Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey movie, which starred one of my now favorite actresses, Margot Robbie.
In the 2016 Ghostbusters, all of the men in the movie are either angry schlubs like the villain, ridiculously incompetent, screaming cowards, bullies, or total morons like Kevin and the Mayor, and incerdibly, in the case of Abby’s former boss, all of the above! There’s not a man in this movie who comes off looking especially good, not even in the cameos. They may be funny, but none of the men are brave or heroic, making it is a lot harder for straight white men to project themselves onto these mediocre, everyday villains, who engage in typical run-of-the-mill misogyny, foolishness, and self-aggrandizement, because there’s no power fantasy element for them to latch onto. The narrative gives the audience no choice but to see the women as heroes, and some men simply aren’t capable of that.
No man wants to identify with those kinds of villains. The men of these movies are distinctly NOT likable, powerful, or cool, on any level, which can be the kind of movie you get when women are the ones calling the shots behind the camera, (although, it must be noted that Ghostbusters 2016 is directed by a man).
For the last hundred years of cinema, most movies have been made by, for, and about straight white men, the things that interest them, and make them feel and look good. This includes the way they think the world is, how they see others in relation to themselves, fantasies of how they’d like to be seen, and how men are supposed to behave to be considered masculine. Not that there haven’t been sniveling villains and toadies in movies, but they were always offset by the strong and powerful hero, or the tall and cool-headed-under-pressure white guy, who dresses well, drove the fast cars, used the best weapons, engaged in the best ultra-violence, and got the best women Sometimes even the villains were enviable. They were powerful men who wore black, got the best lines, had the hero on the ropes before being defeated, and in some cases were forgiven their trespasses before being redeemed.
Straight white men were the audience at which these movies were aimed and they were easily able to project themselves into the characters. For some men, seeing so much of who they wanted to be (or thought they were) onscreen, or sometimes just the consumption of these idealized images of masculinity, became an identity in and of itself.
“I am who I am because of the media I consume.”
What happens when a piece of media gets remade or updated and you’ve been excluded from it? What happens when the media that created your identity is no longer interested in you as the audience or doesn’t pander to what you want? What happens when those movies that used to give you sexy bodies, with lots of ass and boob shots, aren’t interested in showing you any of that? What happens when there’s no straight white man in the story to see yourself as? That you can latch onto? What’s the real message behind these men’s cries about their ruined childhoods?
The villain in Ghostbusters makes it clear why he is doing what he’s doing. He is an unlikeable bully who wants to destroy the world because, despite a wealth of media that teaches how wonderful utterly mediocre men like himself are, he doesn’t think humanity has been properly kissing his ass. He is a narcissist who thinks he’s the only person who has ever been disrespected by society, which is lightly addressed in one of his scenes with Abby, where he states that no one is as disrespected as he is, and Abby chimes in, that as women, they get disrespected all the time. In fact, the movie shows all the women being disregarded, talked over and/or down to, disagreed with, bullied, and blatantly disrespected multiple times by all the other men in the film. The villain gives what he thinks is a grand speech about how the world needs to be destroyed, but the entire speech can basically be boiled down to “everyone was mean to me, and that hurt, so I want to see everyone suffer”. It’s not some grand design, a pitch to solve one of the world’s problems or even an intent to rule. It’s just petty revenge against a world that hasn’t properly kissed him up. Contrast his decision against the mistreatment of the women, and their decsion to save the world instead.
If you were a straight white man who has spent his entire life having his sensibilities and power fantasies coddled by such films you wouldn’t think this movie was funny either. Many of the funniest jokes are at men’s expense and the humor must feel nasty when it strikes just a little too close to home. In films like Harley Quinn, Ghostbusters, Turning Red, Carrie, Jennifer’s Body, and The Eternals – all movies helmed by female directors, male audience members are not given a choice about who to identify with in the story.
In Harley Quinn, the two primary male villains of the movie are not romanticized villains. It would have been difficult for certain kinds of straight white men to project themselves onto Black Mask and Mr. Zsasz, not because of the homoerotic tension between them, (although that is a factor), but because the violence the two of them engaged in wasn’t choreographed to make them look powerful. For example, when Black Mask sexually assaults a woman at one of his nightclubs the scene isn’t romanticized or fun. it is not shot with the titillation of the male audience as its priority. It is filmed in such a way that makes it uncomfortable for men to want to see themselves in his character.
In Harley, the nightclub scene is shot in closeups to focus on the face and reaction of the victim, the horror and embarrassment of the people around her, and the scene is not lovingly shot with closeups of Black Mask’s glee. He is not positioned as powerful but standing on the floor, below the eye line of the character he is bullying so that he has to look up at her. He shows no joy at what he is doing, just petty anger and spite. In fact, throughout the entire movie, Roman is never shot from a position of power, where he is shown towering above adversaries, but almost always at head height, even with those who work for him. He is shown as a small, weak, petty, stupid, vain, and occasionally incompetent villain, and he is never depicted in any other way, even when he is being violent. His violence isn’t quietly enjoyable and doesn’t show his dominance over others as anything other than needy and insecure.
Contrast that scene with the one in the first Suicide Squad film when Joker shoots a man who was lusting after Harley. The focus is on Joker’s power as he protects a commodity (Harley) that belongs to him. The scene is shot with closeups of the Joker’s face as he stands over his clearly terrified victim, a Black man, (being shown standing above another character’s eye line is always a power position) and the focus is on his glee at killing this man. Joker, terrorizing, and killing this supposedly tough Black tatted-up gangbanger is a pure white male power fantasy. The male audience members at whom this movie was aimed were meant to identify with The Joker and his sense of dominance.
In Harley Quinn, Black Mask does enjoy the horrible things he does, but that is not what the camera focuses on. Instead, we see the harm to his victims and get closeups of his face as he states rather petty reasons for hurting them. He makes no lofty speeches for the violence he commits. Like the villain from Ghostbusters, he espouses no grand philosophy justifying his behavior, and the one time he tries, Harley, speaking for the audience, tells him to shut up. He spares the life of a child of one of his rivals only to change his mind and kill her moments later because she was crying and he thinks snot bubbles are icky. Cathy Yan, the director, shows him for exactly what he is, a vapid, none-too-bright, bully.
I’ve spoken before about my mistrust of white male reviewers when it comes to popular media that is aimed at marginalized audiences. That they often do not know how to critique media that is aimed at other audiences, and too much of the media they consume that is aimed at them involves straight white male power fantasies, which they don’t question. Much of my distrust comes from the many bad faith arguments I’ve encountered, that critique the source material by saying it panders to a marginalized audience, like the complaint that all lead female characters are Mary Sues. First, as if it’s a given that Mary Sues are a bad thing, and second, as if thousands of movies hadn’t also been made that centered white male power characters. What they really seem to be saying, as was stated by one of the critics at a website called CinemaBlend, regarding Pixar’s 2021 animated film Turning Red, “I can’t see myself in any of these characters, and it was exhausting to try, therefore, the movie is no good.” (That movie prominently features a second-generation immigrant Chinese-Canadian girl.)
This is also where unconscious bias comes in as well, where people don’t like something but have failed to examine why they might have antipathy towards it. Narratives aimed at marginalized audiences, (like PoC, the gay community, or white women) many times don’t feature white men in the center of the story. The story isn’t about them, and their points of view and sensibilities are not given priority. White men, if they are included at all, are side characters, and/or given negative qualities with which no man wants to identify. There is a type of white male fan that is used to men like him being shown as power fantasies who can harm whoever they please with impunity, or heroic characters that save lives, and I don’t actually have a problem with that. This isn’t a condemnation of such characters, as I’ve enjoyed plenty of movies with them, but I also enjoy movies where women and PoC get to have power fantasies (Black Panther), save the world (Ghostbusters), or sometimes just themselves (Captain Marvel). This particular contingent of men wants ALL of the stories to be about them because that’s the way it’s been since the inception of film.
I suspect that these men are not just unhappy to have a movie centered around female characters’ points of view, so much as that there are no male characters in the story that they would want to be like. Movies like The Batman have the kind of heroes and villains who are sympathetic, onto whom they can project their personal desires. Even in a movie like Wonder Woman, there is a least one heroic male character that is central to the plot, even though the movie is titled Wonder Woman or Mad Max Fury Road where all of the male characters are shown as powerful, but unattractive, narcissistic, and cruel except for the two who are redeemed by the end of the film by being shown as heroic.
These critics seem much more able to project themselves onto a villainous character if the villainy is justified, romanticized, or fun, especially in movies like Joker, The Dark Knight, and Avengers Endgame. In films where the violence engaged in by the villain isn’t romanticized, like Birds of Prey and the female-led Ghostbusters, it’s difficult for such viewers to empathize with them. After all, they’ve been watching movies and TV series on, what the Sci-fi author John Scalzi calls, The Lowest Difficulty Setting. Unlike the rest of us, who have had to do it our whole lives, they have never been challenged to see themselves in characters that don’t look like them.
Part of it was getting out of the content what we could, and the other half was not looking to the consumption of that content around which to form an identity. That’s what too many of these men did and look how they are behaving now that this type of content no longer caters exclusively to them. The type of media they consumed WAS their identity, and that is changing, so how do they know who they are now.
OF NOTE:
For every one of these types of critics, there are plenty of white men who can see themselves in different characters (like Miles Morales, Shuri from Black Panther, and Captain and Ms. Marvel). They seem to enjoy the experience, and I enjoy and appreciate many of their well-thought-out critiques of these properties.
Explanations of how representation matters falls on deaf ears for some critics, though, because the only representation they’re interested in is their own. They want things the way they want them and think they can troll creators, and terrorize actors on social media into getting what they want, but the corporations that produce these entertainments are businesses (as they kept telling the marginalized when we demanded representation), and they are not going back to the way things were before. They have discovered that appealing to our demands for adequate representation is much more lucrative than acceding to the loud demands of a small (and aging) population of straight white American men (after all, we kept telling them that if they make it, we will watch). Disney has already learned that if the representation shown is merely adequate they can make millions, but when it’s excellent and well thought out, they can make billions.
In fact, the idea that such movies were not internationally successful was debunked by Bob Iger and Kevin Feige at Marvel Studios, and all of this was well documented in the press:
Ghostbusters was released in 2016, and thanks to this loud minority there will never be a sequel to a movie that, while far from perfect, improved on the weaknesses in the original stories. A few years later the same tactics that were used to destroy the reputation of the Ghostbusters remake were attempted on the movies Black Panther and Captain Marvel and failed. Both movies made billions internationally. This has encouraged the Disney Corporation to continue with its Phase 4 and 5 plans in the MCU, almost all of which focus on women and characters of color.
After hearing about and watching the video footage of Will Smith’s slap-down of Chris Rock, I felt the need to stop what I am doing and write. I see a fair number of occultist and ministerial friends and associates, many of whom are white, talking about it, and decided I should weigh in as an African American man.
I am a Black man, and I come from a place, in upstate New York. I was from one of the projects there, and went to public school through part of middle school. I was and am not a natural fighter. It is an instinct I had to cultivate when I got into high school and became heavily invested in martial arts. Doing so toughened me right up!
But before all of that, I got regular ass-beatings at school. Usually by big gangs of other Black kids. Most times I was on the ground, getting the shit kicked out of me. I have a specific memory of a large group of about twelve kids chasing this white kid I didn’t know and myself. When we both realized we were running from the same people, we stopped running and stood back to back, fending off all those kids until teachers came over to stop the fight. I made a new friend that day. These endless cycles of violence came to a head when a young man many times my size slammed me on the gym floor. I ended up with blood in my urine. When the doc told my mom, I had to admit to her that I was being bullied. Not one of my finest days.
There was this one time, in grade school, however, where I did stand up to my bully. It was a boy around my age who kept hitting, slapping and poking me every chance he got. Teachers were around, but he always did it just out of their eyesight. If I protested too much, I got in trouble and he stood there with cheese grins looking blameless. He belonged to the same gang of kids as the guy who body slammed me.
As fate would have it, one day we were both waiting for our parents to pick us up after school. He kept slapping me in my head. When I was a kid, lunch boxes were still made of solid metal. The kind of metal that has cool cartoon characters on them. The kind of metal that did not easily bend. I balled my fist around the handle of it, and with a loud cry swung for his head as hard as my little body could muster. That kid levitated in the air, spun around and collapsed to the ground, holding his head.
The vice principal came outside and saw the whole thing. I thought I was fucked! But he looked at the kid, then me, and said “Good job, kid!” and walked back inside.
I was stunned. But I began to understand something. I began to see that people around us usually know what’s going on, but choose not to say or do anything. Sometimes they want to see what we will do. If we will come into our personal power. I had to learn about my own power my own way.
Now, some people are going to trip off the fact that I used violence to end repeated violence toward me. But let me be clear: I am not a pacifist. I do indeed believe there are times to catch hands. To put up your fists and fight. Especially if a home is invaded, a person is assaulted, or a bully is left unchecked. It has been my experience that a bully rarely stops from conversation and reasoning with them. They bully because no one stands up to them. They run on fear.
But when someone does stand up, they don’t know what to do. I continued to experience this. Even after I transferred to a local private school, where I was the only Black male most of my years there, the white kids continued to bully, intimidate and humiliate me.
Do you know when that all stopped? When I started taking karate. Not because I became violent (which I never did), but because the martial arts changed how I walked in the world. It changed how I dealt with problem people. A so-called white friend tried to sneak up on me when I was on one knee getting stuff out of my locker. He wanted to test me and try to hit me when he thought I wasn’t paying attention, to prove my karate training wasn’t shit. Imagine the look on his face when I spun around and threw a punch within less than an inch from his genitals. Then a good friend (who was also being bullied) and I started training together and did a karate demonstration at a show-and-tell night. We threw each other around and did other choreographed moves that made it very clear we knew what we were doing. Neither of us had a problem the rest of our high school tenure.
The nonsense even continued into my first year of college. A white kid, who was very drunk, threatened to beat me up. He made it known that he was a second-degree black belt. I told him I had a black belt too. He kept talking smack as he walked away from me. The next week, I was leading the karate class at school, as the head instructor. Who walks into the gym dojo but this guy. I bowed at him and invited him to join us, to show us his second-degree expertise. He went white as a sheet, did an about-face and walked out as fast as his legs could carry him. He never came back. I had to explain to the class what happened and why, because they saw the whole thing. That day many in the class came to understand the power of the martial arts.
I am not saying all of this to toot my own horn. I am showing a snippet of my early-life struggles with bullying and aggression/violence that swirled around me for a solid 18 years, and how I was able to cope with it and to a degree, rise above it. It took the threat of violence, and my posture toward bullies to make it clear that I could follow through against their aggression, for them to finally stop. Where I am from, most of the people I grew up with are dead, addicted beyond repair, or six feet in the grave. Almost all of them. Where I am from, threats, humiliation and violence are serious subjects and nothing to play with.
When I heard about Will Smith and Chris Rock’s debacle, it brought me back to these moments and the choices I made. I do not regret any of them. Most times I was able to stop the violence toward me before I had to raise my fists to end it. But a few times I did have to let someone catch hands (or, as the case were, a lunchbox!). I have understood from those young years that sometimes all people understand is a beat-down, a punch in the face, a kick in the groin.
What little I know of what occurred is that Rock has made it a pattern of shit-talking Jada. Some people are shocked at Will’s response from just Chris Rock’s words. But this is really a moment of cultural education. You see, Black people are big on respect. REALLY big. We grow up being constantly reminded to respect elders, and each other. That the predominantly-white, racist world is hostile enough to us as it is that we don’t need to be adding to it by turning on each other and cutting each other down. Of course, we still do turn on each other, as my own story shows. But we are supposed to strive for otherwise because it is for the good of the collective, the already-embattled African American community.
This is even more so when speaking of Black men’s relationships to Black women. Not only are we taught to respect women, but to also protect them. And no, it is not some sexist, toxic masculinity thing like I hear so many people knee-jerking about Will. It’s not about that. It’s about knowing that our women, our sisters, our mothers, our wives are also in this hostile world that continually denigrates their humanity in ways even worse than our own, ala American Slavery. It goes back at least that far. There are so many places to point to that, that I don’t know where to start. So I encourage everyone reading this who doesn’t know to do the research and learn.
I remember when I was in college, there were several months where white male students on campus thought it would be fun to harass Black women students. The school I went to had a strong party/drinking culture that was equally matched with a strong rape culture. The administration and campus safety’s response and concern was lackluster. We were determined as the Black and Brown community that the assault on Black women would not happen on our watch. The Black men immediately went into action on campus and formed a daily/nightly escort. We met the sisters wherever they were on campus and walked them home, for months.
So, the problem with Rock’s tasteless and baseless joke is that it is not just a joke. It is tapping into some deeper, historical shit that he should have known better than to do. And for anyone who wants to defend what he said as just a joke, I want to point out the fact that Rock actually did a docu-comedy called “Good Hair.” In that movie, Rock explored the phenomena and importance of Black women’s’ hair! He does indeed know better, from his own work. But he made a choice, and made it more than once. So that slap was a long time coming.
Now, I am not Pollyanna. I know that our society seems to have lost its sense of proportionality with violence and responding to violence. Stories abound of bullied kids finally snapping and bringing an assault rifle to school and offing everyone in sight. So something has definitely changed from my day when kids largely used their hands and feet to fight, put someone on the ground and the fight was over. There is a thing, now, about violence having to go to the extremes of ending life that speaks to something deeply broken in America.
I think what I am hoping for is a deeper conversation about being Black in a country that still responds violently to us every day, and then looks at us like there’s something wrong with us when we have enough and take matters into our own hands. I think I am hoping for more honest talk in and outside of the Black community about how we treat each other, and how sometimes, when we become upwardly mobile, we start to take on norms and strange freedoms alien to our culture, like humiliating and disrespecting a Black woman with a health condition for a “good” joke. Let me also be clear, in the Black culture I grew up in, it is not the least bit abnormal to get slapped or punched in the face for disrespecting a man’s woman/daughter/sister/wife/mother. Especially a person’s mother! It is understood that, if you say and do certain things against a sister, you will just catch hands.
I am aware that is not the norm in other cultures, especially Euro-American/European ones. I do not think nor do I believe everyone else in the world needs to adopt our ways. But I do think people need to gain better understanding of how we do what we do, before they judge it, no matter how famous or unknown the African-American who does the deed is. My two cents.
I just read this on Facebook and this resonated. What happened at the Oscars has larger repercussions in the Black community, amid discussions we’ve been having for decades, that white people do not know about, and this story sums it up very nicely. He touches on a lot of issues that a lot of people are missing in their enthusiasm to jump on the “let’s bash a black man” bandwagon, or their zeal to give advice on how Black men should conduct themselves in public.
There are things happening in our culture, things that white people see us do and don’t understand, but think they do, coming from their deep well of apathy, ignorance, delusion, and propaganda about Black culture. A lot of the things come out of a response to generational trauma, and what happened on that stage is the culmination of many decades of frustration for Will. I feel bad for him, but I’m not angry at him, because I understood it. I understood where that slap came from. And I think Chris did too.
If you’re white none of this concerns you, and none of us are looking to you for your opinion on how we behave with each other. Especially if you don’t know anything about how things work in certain Black communities, then anything you say about this is going to seem like self serving respectability politics, performative, and/or anti-black.
I know white people got opinions and feel some kind of way, but I’m asking y’all to be quiet and listen to what we are saying about this. The arguments about what happened are also going to play out publicly. You can watch it, and read it, but your contribution to our discussion has not been asked for, and is not needed.
I’ve been watching horror movies since I was a little girl ,who was supposed to be asleep at 11 o’clock at night. I went through a period, with my mother, where I think we tried to watch every horror movie that got made between 1980 and 1988, before I went off to college, so I have seen a helluva lot of movies, many of which have been forgotten, unless your’e a serious horror movie fan. I admit, not everything I watched was any good, but I found something interesting in these five movies, which have stayed in my memory even though I haven’t watched some of them in decades.
Don’t Look in the Basement(1973)
This move was made back in 1973 so I wouldnt go in expecting it t be enlightened about mental illness. I saw this movie when I was a teenager, and there was just something about it that I found deeply disturbing. Yes, the characters are disturbed, certainly, becasue this is an asylum, but that’s not the reason why this movie has haunted me for years. I suspect its some quality of mood, or lighting, or acting that I found mesmerizing back then.
A young nurse gets a job in a remote asylum for the mentally ill, and has a great deal of difficulty doing her work, as the director of the facility seems as deeply disturbed as her patients. You can probably guess what the twist is long before the plot spirals down into a hot mess of murder and mutilation.
A troupe of method actors and their despotic director head out to Coconut Grove, Florida where, as a prank, they exhume a corpse called Orville and are subsequently horrified when his similarly deceased friends emerge from their graves to play some deadly games of their own. Filmed as America experienced its post-60s comedown, director Bob Clark’s first horror feature began a truly terrifying trilogy that continued with the powerful anti-Vietnam war statement Dead Of Night and climaxed with the classic seasonal (and subsequently re-made) scarefest Black Christmas.
You can definitely tell this movie was filmed on the cheap, but this is also one of the first zombie movies I ever saw, long before ever watched Night of the Living Dead, and of course this is nearly forgotten, except by zombie movie enthusiasts like me. The acting isn’t great, and the special effects aren’t either, but the movie has such a distinctive feel, that I’ve never forgotten it, despite having not watched it in decades.
I haven’t seen this movie in decades but for some reason I still remember the haunted feeling I had watching this. The plot is a little fuzzy, but I think its about a woman who moves out into the country, with her boyfriend, to recover from a nervous breakdown, and encounters strange events, and possibly ghosts and vampires.
The movie is surprisingly well acted for a horror movie from the 70’s, and the cinematography looks gorgeous. The only drawback seems to be that the plot is a bit murky, but I do remember enjoying watching this on late night TV.
This is another movie I remember watching as a kid, late one night, when I was supposed to be asleep. I haven’t seen it in decades, but I still remember it pretty well, although it took me some time to find the title. I remember that I started off excited about the movie because, Hey! Zombie Bikers!, but by the end I recall a distinct feeling of melancholy for the bikers, and their inability to die, and at least part of that was due to this song.
I remember thinking something along the lines of how all these characters eventually became pretty jaded by the1974 lifestyle they thought was a form of true freedom, only to be trapped in a kind of hellish living afterlife.
This is another movie I watched late one night, without my mother’s permission, even though she was the one who told me about it! Its more of a mystery than a horror movie, but I’m going to put this here because it does have some onscreen kills. It stars a very young Jodi Foster, who was still riding on her fame from Taxi Driver, I think, which came out the same year.
It’s been awhile since I’ve seen this, but I think one of my mother’s objections to this movie, is the character is a serial killer ,who genuinely regrets killing people. My guess is that my Mom was opposed to kids killing adults in movies, which is understandable, but it might also have been the pedophilia from one of the characters, which she thought I was too young to be watching.
I wanted to see it because I was under the impression, at about nine years old, that Jodi seemed to be about my age, when she was, in fact, thirteen, at the time. I have observed that little girls often gravitate to movies about other little girls, and I was no different, except I gravitated to horror movies that starred little girls.
I cannot recall if she was alone because she killed her parents, but I do remember her making up various stories for the adults who investigated her situation, as to why she was alone, and killing the ones who got too nosy, as well as a man who was trying to get too cozy with her, if y’all know what I mean.
A couple of weeks ago saw the debut of the new HBO series, Lovecraft Country, based on the book of the same name by Matt Ruff. In the book, a young black man named Atticus goes on a road trip through the Jim Crow South, with his uncle, and childhood friend, to find his father, who has mysteriously gone missing up North. They stumble across racist cops, sundown towns, Lovecraftian monsters, and occultism, in their travels.
I watched the first two episodes of this series. Normally I would not have watched any show that’s based in the Jim Crow South because that’s just a particularly triggering time period, but the writers and producers are black, so I was willing to give it a chance. Its still a very nerve-wracking show, but in a kind of good way, because its also surprisingly cathartic, entertaining, and not wholly based on Black pain and suffering. The characters are very likable, and there are other, more personal issues they deal with besides racism.
I can honestly say I enjoyed this episode. I know that sounds weird, considering how I’ve complained about no longer being interested in shows that are based on black pain and suffering, in different eras, but this show, along with the Watchman series, was very entertaining. For one thing, the plot isn’t necessarily based in suffering. the Jim Crow era in which the story takes place is simply the backdrop, and the way the story is written, the racism of the white characters is just one of the primary obstacles that the protagonists have to navigate, occasionally in the form of harrowing car chases.
It doesn’t hurt that the three main characters, Atticus, the very fine looking lead character, his uncle George, played by the incredible Courtney B. Vance, and the gorgeous Leticia, Atticus childhood friend, played by Journee Smollet, who you may remember as Black Canary, from the Harley Quinn/Birds of Prey movie, released earlier this year, are all immensely likable, and reasonably smart.
Outside of the mystery itself, the series presents a lot of ideas about black people that don’t often get seen in popular culture, which are merely glimpses into the lives of regular black people, in the midst of horrific circumstances, because that too is as important to our representation, as seeing ourselves be heroic, hearing our own stories, or seeing ourselves existing as a culture in the future. We get loving black couples, black people who love books, clothes, and superheroes, ordinary disputes between family members and black people snatching little moments of joy, even in the darkest times.
The episode begins with Atticus on his way home from the Korean War. Its 1954, and that particular war (the one depicted in the MASH series) ended around 1953. He’s dreaming of a mashup of all the scifi he’s ever read, Cthulhu, John Carter of Mars, and an ass kicking cameo from #42 himself, Jackie Robinson.
When the bus he’s riding breaks down, he and the only other black passenger, rather than being allowed to hitch a ride with a local farmer, have to walk several miles to the next town. During their walk is when we get Atticus broad opinions on fantasy stories with racist characters, or written by racist writers, like Robert E. Howard, or Lovecraft himself. Genre fiction, whether movies, books, or TV, has always been problematic for black people. Most of it was not written with us in mind, and what was, often had negative connotations.
When Atticus gets home, he finds the neighborhood is preparing to have a block party. This is something that really resonated with me, because I remember attending quite a few of these, during my childhood. My family is/was huge, so most of the block party consisted of me, my little brothers, and a seemingly vast number of cousins, uncles, and aunties! Anyway Atticus finds out from his uncle George that his father has gone missing but left a note saying he could be found in a place called Ardham. That’s right, not Arkham, but Ardham House. He, and George are joined by Leticia, a young woman that Atticus knew when they were children, because Letty was the only girl in his Science fiction book club, but who is now a traveling photographer.
Uncle George offers to come along because he is the publisher of the Chicago based green book. His wife, Hippolyta, offers to come, but George says no, out of a sense of protection. He knows how dangerous it would be for her to do such a thing., considering that he once had both his knees broken, by some racists, while on a previous trip for his travel books.
The travel books, that George writes, (based on the real life Negro Motorist’s Green Book), aided black people in navigating through the Jim Crow South, listing problem areas, like eating and sleeping places that were safe, but most especially, listed all the Sundown Towns, in both the North and South. At that time, these were all white towns, in which black people would be either run out, or murdered, if they were found within the town limits, after sundown.
Welcome to the world’s only registry of sundown towns. A sundown town is not just a place where something racist happened. It is an entire community (or even county) that for decades was “all white” on purpose. “All white” is in quotes because some towns allowed one black family to remain when they drove out the rest. Also, institutionalized persons (in prisons, hospitals, colleges, etc.), live-in servants (in white households), and black or interracial children (in white households) do not violate the taboo.
“On purpose” does not require a formal ordinance. If, for example, if a black family tried to move in, encountered considerable hostility, and left, that would qualify the town as “sundown.” Note that some sundown towns kept out Chinese Americans, Jews, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, even Mormons.
One of the most hair raising, but exhilarating, chase sequences occurs when George mistakenly takes them to a cafe that does not serve black people, and the local firefighters chase them out of town. They are saved by Letty’s well honed survival instincts, her ability to drive like a maniac, and a little bit of hoodoo, from a mysterious benefactor.
This same benefactor comes to their aid at the end of the episode, after they get stopped in a sundown county by the local sheriff, who challenges them to get out of the county 8 minutes before sundown, but without speeding. This is very probably the slowest, most nerve wracking car chase in television history, and does a spectacular job of showing how frustrating, and enraging it was to live during the Jim Crow era, in which those who held authority, (yes, the police, but regular citizens were encouraged to get in on the fun), could terrorize black people on a whim, or simply for their own pleasure.
They do follow the cops rules and manage to barely make it out of town, only to be stopped by the police in the neighboring county, who were lying in wait for them. This is an especially relevant point, because it speaks to the arbitrary nature of the rules. It ultimately doesn’t mean anything that Atticus and the others followed the rules. They’ll be killed anyway, because a group of people determined that they should, and no amount of rule following would’ve saved them. However, the three of them are inadvertently saved by monsters.
*I want to point out some of the images used in the show, which is rich with detail. This particular image here was based off some famous photographs by Gordon Parks.
And here is another, which can also seen in the episode:
*There’s also a famous interview from James Baldwin, which is used in voiceover, before the trio’s second encounter with the police.
*Hippolyta (George’s wife) is also the name of Wonder Woman’s mother, and George has a daughter named Diana.
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The cops take the three of them into the woods to execute them. This is an especially chilling scene when you think about how many black people might have been murdered in this fashion, who were never missed, or whose bodies were never discovered. In fact there are a host of activities that black people don’t do today, not just because we were discouraged from participating in everyday American life, but because, even today, we are still recovering from the trauma of the constant terrorizing and policing of our actions, which lasted some sixty to seventy years. Activities like road trips, camping, swimming, walking on the sidewalks, or just out enjoying nature, could (and did) get us murdered.
Until the seventies, many state parks were off limits to black people and earlier this Summer a young black man posted videos where he was threatened with lynching, by a white mob that assaulted him in a park. The bottom line is that many of the nature activities that white people took for granted, were enduring traumas for PoC, but especially black people. So when you hear us joking about not going into the woods, or never going hiking, keep this in mind, as one of the factors.
“When I’m walking to work with park rangers or with other campers and hikers who treat me in some sort of way that make me feel unwelcome, that make me feel unsafe, that is startling,” Tariq said. “And that goes unchecked because there’s, there’s just no channel for us to be able to challenge that in such remote places.”
As much as white people claim to be afraid of black people because…..crime, or something, I don’t think many of them have ever thought about what it must be like to live one’s life in constant fear of stepping on white people’s toes, at work, or the store, in a park, or just out of doors. Always having to watch what you say, how you look, dress, act, and carefully structure one’s facial expressions, lest you set one of them off, as if they were unexploded ordinance.
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The police take them into the woods to execute them, but before that can happen, they are all attacked by what viewers are calling Shuggoths, but what the characters in the show are calling vampires. They are covered with eyes, shun the light, and can move extremely fast, so they manage to take out the five or six cops rather easily. Letty and Atticus escape to an abandoned cabin, along with two of the cops, one of whom had their arm bitten off. After George joins them in the cabin, they make a plan to get more light from the cars parked at the edge of the woods. Atticus wants to go, but is prevented from doing so by the cops who 1) don’t trust him, and on top of that 2) aren’t very bright, because why would he leave his friends behind just to spite the police? The cops nominate Letty to run to the vehicles.
Okay, I’m going to have to stop here for another aside. These are the same type of white men who will happily kill a black man for breathing too hard in a white woman’s direction but are perfectly happy to sacrificing a black woman to save their skins. In their minds, black women are not worth protecting. So even though they are armed and can take care of themselves, they insist that this black woman attempt to outrun the monsters, to save their skins. To calm everyone down, Letty does make a case that she is faster than Atticus, having run track as a girl, and off she goes.
And this is the way that people should be running in a Horror movie. Letty is seriously hauling ass! I wonder how many times Journee had to do that scene, because this is not a stunt double, and she is seriously working out! There’s none of that glancing behind, or tripping and falling shit in your typical generic horror movie. This is also probably the reason black people don’t get to star in too many of them, because they would be boringly short films.
Letty makes it to the car, and heads back to the cabin, where the two cops are so busy concentrating on holding those two scary black men in check, that they don’t notice that one of them is turning into a one of the creatures that attacked them, but that’s not what’s interesting . What’s fascinating is even though the cop next to him is turning into a nightmare that’s going to eat him, he is hesitant to shoot him, despite Attticus’ and George’s warnings, instead choosing to keep his weapon aimed at the two unarmed black men in front of him. See ,this is one of the reasons I don’t trust white people, (no, not even my white friends), with my safety. After decades of fear-mongering propaganda, the majority of them simply do not have good judgment when it comes to what’s actually dangerous, and what isn’t.
The cop turns into a monster and eats the other cop, which is a nice conflation of the idea that there are other types of monsters in the world, but the human ones are the scariest. Letty arrives with the car just as the monster turns its attention to Atticus and George, but they still need to hold the monsters off until daylight, or fight them, and that’s when the mysterious benefactor arrives and calls them off using, what else…a dog whistle!
We next see the three travelers arriving at Ardham house, exhausted, and covered in blood, where they are welcomed and expected by their happy blond host, and yes, I’m immediately suspicious.
So that’s my first impression of the show. I have, since the posting of this review, watched a couple more episodes, and the show manages to keep that same energy for each episode, which is more like a connected anthology than a serialistic show. The second episode finishes out the first story arc at Ardham House, and the third focuses on Leticia buying a haunted house. Both episodes continue with the same wealth of detail, racist white men, and historical asides, including references to the Garden of Eden, and a chilling cameo from Emmet Till!
There are so many layers to this show, but its also just entertaining, even if you don’t get, or see, all the socio-historical references. The show is fun to watch, with a lot of exciting moments, because its well written, and the characters and plot are compelling.
I was just looking over a list of of horror movies I made early on this blog, of some of my favorite monsters, and took note of how damn weird all the monsters on that list were. I remember deliberately leaving certain types of traditional monsters off the list, like vampires and werewolves.
I also noticed a trend, from decade to decade, too. Whatever social or economic concerns Americans were voicing in the media at that time, got appropriated by Hollywood to make these movies, although its not quite that simple, as Hollywood didn’t just reflect our fears, but reinforced them, as a lot of these films had a sort of dialogue with one another.
In the fifties, the big theme was nuclear generated monsters because people were still reeling from the use of atomic weaponry during the war. In the sixties, the theme was zombies, and other human related horrors, as people began to question American lifestyles, and there was a great deal of social and racial upheaval. In the seventies, it was environmental concerns, and in the eighties, Hollywood focused on human and supernatural related horrors, like zombies, and slashers.
Here is my top ten list of the weirdest horror movie monsters ever screened. There’s a lot more, these just happen to be my personal favorites.
Little Shop Of Horrors – Giant Venus Flytrap
This is certainly one of the strangest monsters ever seen in a movie, (especially considering the sheer numbers of strange monsters in movies), a giant flytrap that is actually from Venus, that talks and sings. It took me years to figure that that’s what Audrey II was, probably because I wasn’t paying attention to the dialogue as closely as I should have, and well…Audrey is certainly distracting. The 1986 movie stars the music of Alan Mencken, was directed by Frank Oz, of Muppet fame, while Audrey was voiced by Levi Stubbs of The Four Tops.
Food of the Gods – Giant Mice, Chickens, and Hornets
This 1978 movie was loosely based on the H.G.Wells novel of the same name about a strange substance that bubbles out of the ground near a farm, which gets fed to various animals. This causes the farm animals, and all the nearby woodland wildlife to grow to tremendous sizes. The audience gets treated to giant chickens, giant hornets, and of course, giant mice. Yes, the acting is terrible, and the special effects are laughable, but there are at least a couple of truly effective scenes, which makes this movie worth taking a look at.
Part of the reason for all these giant and killer animal movies, during the 70s, was America’s new awareness of ecological issues, which prompted Hollywood to try to cash in on these new environmentalist fears. Movies like Squirm, Slugs, Day of the Animals, Frogs, and the many Grizzly films gave vent to American’s fears of humans destroying the environment, which prompted the environment to take revenge on us.
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes – GiantTomatoes
In keeping with the theme of ecologically based monsters, this is an utterly ridiculous, 1978 satirical film, whose style is loosely based on the giant nuclear animal movies of the fifties, and The Blob. The tomatoes even have their own theme song, written by John Dibello. The acting is atrocious, which only contributes to the films very, very, broad humor.
Night of the Lepus – Giant Rabbits
This is a 1972 horror scifi movie about a town being overrun by giant rabbits. The special effects are incredibly laughable because the rabbits don’t look especially evil or angry. They just look like rabbits, which is entirely in keeping with the “nature is trying to kill us all” phase of horror that happened during the 70s.
Rubber – Killer Car Tire
This 2010 movie is about a rubber tire, named Robert, that somehow becomes sentient enough to psychically kill the people it encounters. It rolls around the desert, exploding the bodies of hapless animals and unsuspecting people. Directed by Quentin Depieux, and starring a cast of nobodies, this film is much more surreal, as it also has a chorus of bystanders, who view the events, while making commentary, and who eventually all contract food poisoning by eating some bad poultry they brought with them for a picnic. Quentin needs help!
Attack of the Killer Shrews – Giant Shrews
This 1959, black and white, giant animal movie revolves around a boat captain and his crew, who get stranded on a research island, with a mad scientist, his daughter, and the staff. The mad scientist believes shrinking human beings to the size of party snacks is a way to solve world hunger. He should have stuck with enlarging plants, because naturally, he gets to be one of the first people eaten by the shrews. Its also a monumentally stupid idea.
This movie has the distinction of being one of the few movies, on this list, that scared the living beejeezus out of me…when I ten years old, and watched it on some idle Saturday afternoon. its always those childhood fears that stick with you, because I saw this a couple years ago, and yeah, I laughed at it, but it was, lowkey, still effective.
From Hell It Came – A Tree Stump/Zombie?
In keeping with the theme of murderous, sentient, wildlife, this is a 1957 scifi horror movie, about what appears to be an angry, nuclear generated, tree stump, on yet another desert island. This movie has the rather unique plot of having a witch doctor and human sacrifice involved, as well. As usual, there is the demonization of some sort of African pagan religion, which I’ll be speaking on later.
Black Sheep – Sheep
Black Sheep is a 2006 movie from New Zealand, about a brother who accidentally zombifies a flock of sheep, by performing genetic experiments on his father’s sheep farm. Just one bite from one of these fat, and perfectly normal looking sheep, is enough to transform a man into a horrific man-sheep monstrosity. The humor is that all of this is played completely straight and the actors really sell it.
The Crawling Eye – Giant Loose Eyeball
Originally called the Trollenberg Terror, this is a 1958 British, black and whit,e film. This one of the few films where the monster’s origins are not a result of nuclear something or other. The location is isolated, scientists are involved, and the monsters seemingly have a form of mind controlled.
Squirm – Worms
This is another movie I remember watching as a kid where I wasn’t so much terrified, as disgusted. This movie, released in 1976, was one of the worst of the ecologically based horror movies, if only for the acting, but I still found it intriguing, because…worms. During a thunderstorm, a farm full of worms get struck with electricity from downed power lines, and decide they like the taste of people. There’s some greatly ridiculous scenes of screaming worms, and houses being swarmed by regular sized, bloodthirsty, worms.
Honorable Mentions
The Swarm – Killer Bees
This was apart of the great Swarm! of killer bee movies that we all got inundated with in the 70s, thanks to the media horror stories about the Africanized honey bee, the most hostile and aggressive bees on the planet because…Africa! taking over America.
Frogs – Frogs
This movie released in 1972, is a rather slow moving thing that doesn’t contain monsters so much as deeply stupid people. A wealthy family has a reunion on their private island, so they can fight among themselves in private, but are inundated by swarms of frogs, and other wildlife, that apparently hate them. The frogs and other animals, aren’t grown to large sizes, or are even especially malevolent. They pretty much just act like snakes, birds, and lizards, while the family members act like accident prone ninnies.
So hey everybody, have a happy weekend, and watch out for the trees!
[These last reviews of the Red Dragon arc were originally published after the end of the series in 2015. I’ve edited these reviews to reflect new thoughts and information.]
The last episode I reviewed was about the different character’s perceptions, as has been the theme for most of the series., but this episode is about Agency, how each of the characters have it, take it, and/or employ it. Agency is the ability to affect change over the environment by one’s actions. One can affect change oneself or use proxies to do so.
We pick up the narrative where we left off in the last episode.
Graham is outlining the situation for Crawford. Crawford is incredulous that Dollarhyde ate a painting. Graham surmises that Hannibal knows who Dollarhyde is, and that he was once a patient. He’s only half wrong. Dollarhyde is Hannibal’s current patient through secret phone calls, after Dollarhyde masquerades as Hannibal’s lawyer. We flashback (not really) to Hannibal telling Dollarhyde to save himself by attacking Will and his family. This is about Dollarhyde taking and using agency, regarding his relationship with Hannibal, the Red Dragon, and Reba, but he is also Hannibal’s proxy.
Hannibal is using Dollarhyde to get back at Will for rejecting him. Lecter does, as Bedelia states later, have agency in the world, even though he is locked away. The difference is that she attributes this agency to the wrong person. She thinks the person executing Hannibal’s agency is Will Graham, when its really Dollarhyde. This is Hannibal, once again, playing his old game of I love you/I want to hurt you! Will may be tired of it, but Hannibal always finds this game amusing (except when Will enacts this particular game against him.)
Oh yeah, the flashbacks aren’t actually flashbacks. They’re conversations that Lecter had/is having, with Dollarhyde, over the phone, but are imagined from Lecter’s point of view, and usually from inside what he calls his mind vault. Being given Lecter’s POV is often done without any warning for the audience, an effect with which I’m not entirely comfortable, as nobody really wants to be in Lecter’s head, and is probably equally disconcerting for people who are “first watchers” of this series.
As the next full moon approaches, Reba and Dee (as she calls him), spend some quality time together. I don’t see a whole lot of chemistry in their relationship, (that’s just my inability to see romance between characters, in general), but these are both very good actors, who convince me that they’re in the beginning stages of a relationship. Dollarhyde wants to, but can’t let the Red Dragon go, not even for Reba’s sake, not even as he fears for her. While she cuddles with him on the sofa, he watches home movies of his next possible target, Molly and Wally.
Will’s wife is at the vet because the dogs are sick. She doesn’t understand that the Red Dragon always kills the pets first. I know this from reading the books, but she believes she poisoned the dogs with some food from China, because that was a thing going around in the news at the time this show was written, and Fuller, who absolutely loves dogs, was so incensed by that, that he put it in the script.
Graham goes to Lecter to beg for the identity of the Red Dragon, but Lecter would rather tease him. This is one of the quietest, and most sinister arguments, I’ve ever heard, conducted almost entirely in sharp whispers. This may also be the reason I can’t understand what the hell is going on. I managed to get around this by remembering to turn on the captions.
Dollarhyde tries to murder Will’s family, hunting them through their house, and injuring Molly. Both she and Wally survive, but Will, naturally, feels incredibly guilty about what happened. He has a conversation with Wally, about the killer’s mental illness, which forces him to divulge the time he spent in a psychiatric hospital. The conversation does not go well. Incidentally, we don’t see or hear from either of these characters again, and no end is written for Molly, as Will seemingly forgets all about her. Make of that what you will because the fans certainly did.
Will, incensed, confronts Lecter, who readily admits to giving Dollarhyde Will’s home address. Crawford, and Alana threaten Lecter into cooperating with Crawford’s scheme to capture Dollarhyde using drop boxes.
Because he failed to kill Will’s family, Dollarhyde imagines himself getting beaten by the Red Dragon. Reba walks in on him just after this event, and there’s a very tense moment where he is probably contemplating killing her, as he has not quite come back to himself, and the Red Dragon, having been deprived of the other kill, wants to be satisfied.
This scares Francis because he genuinely cares about Reba, and in an effort to be proactive, to save her from himself, shows up at Reba’s job and breaks up with her, saying that he’s afraid he might hurt her. Reba, not knowing or even suspecting any of this, (she is a true innocent), is understandably angry, and tells him to get out. It looks bad no matter what he does. From her point of view, they slept together a few times, and now he suddenly doesn’t want to be with her, having given no indication that he’s no longer interested.
These are both fine actors, who really sell this scene. I am touched by their conversation, (even though I hate romance movies). I suddenly realize that Francis isn’t as much afraid of hurting her, as he is also afraid of being in love, and being loved. In the flashback sequence with Lecter, he talks about how she makes him feel, and believes himself to be completely unworthy of the level of happiness he feels with her, or her desire for him. Love can be terrifying, especially for someone unused to giving or receiving it, and who has some deep self esteem issues due to child abuse.
I would also like to commend the show for showing an inter-racial relationship as if its no big deal. I like it that the show treats the characters, especially the women, like people, and doesn’t feel the need to change the dialogue to reflect the character’s race or gender. The same dialogue spoken by a White man in the movie, is the exact same dialogue that’s spoken by a Black man or a White woman on the show. In fact the only major recurring characters to remain unchanged are Graham, Lecter and Dollarhyde.
Dollarhyde calls Lecter, not knowing that their conversation is being overheard. Lecter gives him a quick warning, because that’s the kind of shit he does, and afterwards is duly punished. Alana keeps her word to him, by having all of his amenities taken away, including his toilet seat. He also gets restraints and the famous Lecter mask, first seen in Silence of the Lambs, (but was also seen on Will Graham in the second season).
Will talks to Molly at the hospital and she nominally forgives him for what happened to her. She’s not really blaming him, but yeah, she’s still pretty pissed that the man Will was hunting, tried to kill her, and her son. Will then goes to see Lecter in his new accommodationless accommodations. The story is not over. Normally, after the attack on Will’s family, the films end with the restoration of the status quo, and Dollarhyde dead, but Fuller has a lot more story to tell.
This is one of television’s strengths. It has the ability to tell complicated, interwoven, long form stories that cannot be done in a two hour movie. It has the ability to flesh out characters and plot in a way that’s more difficult on the big screen, (unless the movie is totally dedicated to a specific person or subject.)
On TV, the writers can create a tapestry of a story, using multiple threads, and deeper characterization, and I think this is where TV has really gained momentum as a storytelling medium, especially in the last ten years. TV didn’t always take full advantage of its serial nature. In fact it always tried to do what movies did, but in less time, as it would try to wrap up it’s mini- stories in the space of 45 or 50 minutes. Fortunately, its starting to break away from this model somewhat, and watching a series requires a certain level of dedication, if a viewer wants to understand the entire story.
None of that however, is going to help the casual viewer to understand whats going on in this show. I love this show, but this level of complexity, always just slightly out of grasp, may be the reason this is the show’s last season. You know there’s more depth to the show then you understand, but its ten o’clock in the evening, your mind is gone, and there’s a lot of urgent whispering that requires you to turn on the captions, so you can find out just what the Hell is being said.
“ And behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth. ” Revelations 12:3-4
I was a teenager the first time I read the Book of Revelations, so naturally, I found it pretty terrifying. Mostly because of some incredibly lurid imagery, I just wasn’t expecting the Bible to have. Reading it when I got older, I was less afraid, and struck instead, by the incredible beauty and poetry of those chapters.
Most people don’t know this, (Hell, I didn’t know it and I went to art school), but the painting featured in the movie version, but which I’ve not seen in the show, is one of a series of paintings by Willliam Blake, about the Book of Revelations, and his interpretation of the Rise of the Antichrist. The one featured in the Red Dragon movie is the painting titled The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed IN the Sun.
The second painting in the series, and that of the first episode of The Red Dragon arc of this series, is titled …And the Woman Clothed WITH the Sun. There are two other paintings in the series, which are also the titles of the next two episodes.
Hannibal and The Tooth Fairy are clandestinely discussing Francis’ transformation into the Red Dragon. This episode is sort ofabout how characters perceive themselves, vs, how others perceive them, and each character discusses who they are, which is contrasted to the reality. For the first time, we hear Francis declare himself to be the Dragon. This is how he perceives himself, but what we see in Hannibal’s imagination is the two of them sitting in a room together, while Hannibal looks at an ordinary man, but Hannibal responds with a line from Blake’s poem, The Tyger, in expression of the awe that Francis craves.
Bedelia, Lecter’s psychiatrist, is giving a public speech about the nature of her relationship with Hannibal the Cannibal, and how she managed to escape him. She is trying to create the public perception that she was one of Hannibal’s victims. Will Graham is there, and calls her out on her bullshit. Will’s perception of her is very different.
The two of them have a long meeting, and I have come to the conclusion that not only is Bedelia batshit-insane, she is also pretty terrifying. Not violent, so much as completely disassociated from what makes a person human, and while I want to think Lecter is responsible for that, this is most likely all her, and may be the reason he liked her so much.
Now contrast Will’s scene with Bedelia, with my favorite scene, which is when Francis takes Reba to meet the tiger. This entire scene is about perception. Francis views himself as the beast. It’s not quite obvious, but Reba has kind of caught on to that, and seems to know what he’s thinking. Apparently Reba can frame “thy fearful symmetry” just fine, of both the tiger, and Francis. I think this perception of what Francis may be thinking is what informs her actions towards him, later. Even Fuller states that this is a deeply sensuous moment between the two of them.
Francis describes the tiger’s color. Is that helpful to her? Depending on when and how she lost her sight (as we are never told), does she remember colors? In the book, Reba lost her sight as a child, and jokes to him about what animals she remembers. I can’t imagine this Reba knows what he’s talking about, if she’s been blind since birth. This scene is shot to perfection, as we see Reba’s skin tone against that of the glowing yellow fur of the tiger. She listens to its heart, while Francis stands there, barely able to contain his depth of feeling.
Francis takes Reba to his home. She is impressed by his home, and his thoughtfulness in arranging the thing with the tiger. They drink wine, listen to music, and Reba makes the first move. This is a woman who doesn’t believe in letting an opportunity to enjoy herself slip away. (Rutina Wesley appears to have these huge man-hands, which is deeply disturbing, and distracting. Her hands are as huge as Francis’ head.)
Their love scene gets the slo-mo treatment, interspersed with shots of Frank’s dragon tattoo. Francis envisions Reba, as the Woman spoken of in Blake’s painting, floating and goddess-like, in liquid gold, the same color as the tiger. Its almost like he’s worshiping her, but without the context that in the Book of Revelations, the Woman clothed with the Sun, is the Dragon’s downfall.
Later, while Reba is sleeping, he uses her hand to touch his face, but it’s not sexy, at all. It’s deeply sad, that he’s so lonely, so removed from normal people, and so starved for affection, and all of it self imposed, as he has deep self esteem issues, because of his disability. Reba is probably the only woman to ever touch him, in a very long time, with any form of love, especially his face, as he’s very self conscious about his cleft palate.
The next morning, he is summoned to the attic by the dragon’s voice, where he and his alter ego argue about what to do with Reba. The outcome of the fight is …uncertain, but I think Dollarhyde wins this round. He then takes Reba home.
Hannibal manages to get Graham’s address and home number. This does not look good.
Will and Bedelia are still talking. Will tells her she deserves to be eaten by Lecter. I’m as disgusted with her as he is, and I see why he’s so pissy with her. She was wholly complicit in Hannibal’s crimes, but claims it was curiosity that kept her with him. She’s as much a sociopath as Lecter, but couches it in a veneer of professionalism.
Zachary Quinto is guest starring in this episode. That man is everywhere. (Fortunately, I’m in love with him, so I can watch him anywhere.) Lecter used to be his counselor, and he claimed he got worst under his care. This scene switches back and forth between Graham and Bedelia, and her session with Quinto’s outraged patient. He starts having a seizure. Something that was subliminally planted by Hannibal.
To her credit, Bedelia does try to help him, but she botches the job by reaching too far into his mouth, in an attempt to reach his tongue, which she believes he is swallowing. This was apparently before she became inured to death. Now, she could probably watch him choke, with all the compassion of an insect. This is the event that gave Hannibal leverage over her, to coerce her to travel to Italy with him.
The elephant in the room is this deeply intimate relationship between Graham and Hannibal. It’s no secret that fans are shipping the Hell out of these two, and Fuller is well aware of this, and likes to play it up. Will asks Bedelia if Hannibal is in love with him and she tells him her perception of their relationship. From the beginning of the series the primary theme has always been about perception. How Will perceives the world around him, how Hannibal looks at the world ,and how the supporting characters view the two of them.
Will approaches Lecter with the Red Dragon symbol he found at the Leeds’ home, and Lecter informs him of its meaning, mentioning that the full moon is in eleven days, so Will better get a move on, before the next family dies.
At the Brooklyn Museum, Francis goes to see the the main Blake painting, and just as in the book and film, he eats it. This is probably his attempt to stop killing by ingesting the painting’s power, or so Will guesses. When Graham shows up, they finally meet face to face, which doesn’t work out too well for Graham, and Francis tosses him through the air like a kitten. Its easy to forget how large the actor is who plays Dollarhyde, next to the rather diminutive Graham. In a prodigious show of strength, Francis picks him up and throws him across the room, before making his escape.
Since the show hews so closely to the filmed version, (which is not unlike the book), this really plays off the difference between television and film. In every respect, this particular part of the series is just like the film, only with a depth of detail that movies simply don’t have time for, in the space of two hours. It’s really like watching an alternate universe version of the same story.
This is also one of the reasons that television is in the midst of a kind of renaissance of storytelling, right now. The creators of these shows, informed by social media and digital streaming, can take full advantage of the medium, take serial storytelling to its ultimate conclusion, and respond to fandom critiques of their shows, almost in real time. As a result, movies are just a very different medium of storytelling, and simply can’t do what a series does, in providing the depth of character detail that fans crave.
This leads to one of the differences I noted between Transformative fandom vs Curatorial fandom. Curatorial fandom is most often concerned with the minutiae and plot detail provided in movies, which have characters and relationships as less of a priority. It’s not that movies don’t have either of those things, its that its more difficult to get deep into such issues, in a two hour genre movie, that has more pressing concerns, like advancing the plot. However, you can get more in depth character development, and relationships in a ten or twenty hour series. In fact, the success of a series depends on how invested the audience can get into the characters.
Geeking Out about It 