MOVIE REVIEW AND REFLECT

The Movies Are Getting Better

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I’m writing this in response to Rebecca Stevens A. ‘S article about how there is no such thing as Black Privilege.

Rebecca is right. From India, as a person who watches America through the movies, I’m going to talk about a few movies. I am not a movie buff, but I do have a subscription to an English Movie Pack and I watch part of an English movie everyday during my lunch-hour.

1. Pretty Woman

I recently re-watched this. Back in 1990 when I was 14, I watched this movie with a friend and both our moms. Our moms would clap their hands over our eyes in many scenes, so naturally being able to watch all of it was good fun in itself.

Pretty Woman has one black person in it. Darryl, the limousine driver. There isn’t a single black person in the upper class party here.

So as a movie, promoting human equality, I’d say it was a #fail.

Don’t worry, Hollywood will fix everything! Here come, movie no.2 and 3.

2. The Mighty Ducks

Coach is white, while the rag-tag team he teaches is almost all-white. Like in Quidditch, however, this game is gender-neutral, with one girl player.

There is one black player on the team, but his dad is always on the white coach’s case, along with a white mom of another player.

In this movie, I’d give Disney credit for trying, but not so hard that it looked artificial. The focus is on the Coach’s drinking and driving, and his desire to win even if he’s cheating, unlike the kids who are honest.

3. Hardball

Hard Ball too deals with a white coach down on his luck who’s forced to coach a kids’ baseball team. I’m amazed they liked the format enough to make the movie twice.

The thing is: in the older movie, The Mighty Ducks, 1992, most of the ice hockey team is white. There is one black kid on the team, that is all.

In the newer one, 2001, Coach is white, while the kids are all black. This movie isn’t as great as The Mighty Ducks because the Ducks’ coach works harder than the Kekambas’, the game play is better thought out.

I liked the way the Ducks’ ice hockey coach has them have to use eggs for pucks without breaking them.

Keanu Reeve’s character doesn’t do much in the “this way and that’s how” of baseball.

4. A Time To Kill

Next up are two courtroom dramas. One is a dramatization of the novel, A Time to Kill, by John Grisham. Here, the lawyer is white, while the defendant is black.

The defendant, played by Samuel L. Jackson, deliberately picks a white lawyer to offset his all-white jury. I wouldn’t call this a racist movie, but it is a bit like a low-calorie, fat-free, health drink. It reminds you of all the things you’re trying to avoid.

5. Marshall

The other courtroom drama is Marshall. This movie also has a black defendant, but here, the lawyer is black, too. He’s from the N-double-A-C-P. I deliberately didn’t say NAACP because they never said it that way in the movie, it was always N-double-A-C-P.

This movie, Marshall, is so great it makes your skin prickle. I wish such movies were released in the theaters in India, and all we get in the movie halls are the superhero movies.

Marshall is played by the late Chadwick Boseman. Not having watched the Avengers movie, it took me a while to place the good looking black man ordering Josh Gad around.

I thought that was progress, specially since John Grisham’s novel-movie, 1996 was fiction, while Marshall, 2017, was the real life story of Thurgood Marshall. A black lawyer saving a black defendant seemed way more balanced than a white lawyer “swooping down and endangering his wife and kids” to save the life of a black defendant.

Even so, these movies don’t move away from the topic of racism itself. To them, I preferred a sci-fi movie I saw just yesterday, in a single sitting – it was so good.

6. Fast Color

Fast Color deals with a world without water.

Three generations of black women get together to make rain. The movie is entirely devoid of any reference to their colour, and the baby in the movie, is bewitchingly cute.

She stole my heart with her soft tiny hands clutching at her mother’s face. The mother is played by Gugu M’batha Raw.

This is the kind of movie America needs to send out – people having discussions about water, with happiness enough to help you to see fast moving colours.

There is no competition between “whites win if” and “blacks win if” in this movie.

Enough already! Let’s have more movies where there isn’t any wasting of the story-line on all the depressing history.

Note: Of the movies I have discussed here, The Mighty Ducks and Hard ball aren’t masterpieces. The other four movies, Marshall, Fast Color, A Time To Kill and Pretty Woman, are worth many watches for many reasons. Each decade that you grow older, these movies will reveal new layers to you.