Antiracist Accountability: How to Ally When Everyone Has an Opinion, or The Slap Heard Round the World

Hey team,

By now, you are likely familiar with the incident involving Chris Rock, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith at the Academy Awards last night.  

After witnessing such an emotional moment, either contemporaneously or after the fact, you almost certainly have had a visceral reaction, and you may have a resultant opinion you want to express.  God knows everybody else seems to.

If you are a white person and especially if you consider yourself a white ally, this is an excellent opportunity to thoughtfully consider what your role is in this moment of heated public discourse.

If you're open to my opinion, I suggest taking the following steps:

1) Watch this video.

TikTok: @ladyspeechsankofa

Facebook: @ladyspeech

CW: Completely understandable cursing

2) Check in with yourself and the motivations that inform your opinion.  

If the strength of your urge to police a Black man's behavior is greater than the urge you feel to dismantle the systemic violence that oppresses and murders Black people EVERY DAY, then you are doing racism.  That is an example of what racism looks like.  It looks like being preoccupied with exercising your sense of power and ownership over a Black man's behavior.  It looks like being more uncomfortable with a Black man making his own decisions, which you may or may not understand or agree with, than the harm done by systems that empower and privilege you while harming all Black people.  It looks like minding Black people's business before you mind our own immense amount of business.

Please focus more on your internalized racism than whatever the hell Will Smith did yesterday.

3) Educate yourself.  

Many people are asserting that Chris Rock didn't know about Jada Pinkett Smith's health history, which is the cause of the aspect of her appearance he felt free to ridicule yesterday.

Whether you actually believe that or not is pretty irrelevant, given that the joke is blatantly problematic in several ways (beyond being bizarrely untimely given its reference to a movie from 1997).  His joke was a great (and by that I mean awful) example of punching down, which is a deeply problematic way to use humor.

Let's take stock of the specific ways in which Rock's joke punched down, shall we?  A possibly inexhaustive list:

• It expresses misogynoir: It mocks and objectifies a Black woman.
• It expresses misogynoir specifically about a Black woman's hair: This, in an era in which no one can claim ignorance about the discrimination Black people experience because of their hair.
• It is ableist: It mocks a person for experiencing a chronic medical condition.

Take this opportunity to find at least three people who are directly impacted by misogynoir and/or ableism and have commented on yesterday's events and listen to their opinions with an open and curious heart.

NOTE: I am NOT suggesting that you track down a Black person or a person with a chronic medical condition to ask them to educate you about their lived experience.  In fact, I am stridently discouraging you from doing that.  DO NOT DO THAT.

Instead, there are many people who have already shared their opinions on this subject on various forms of social media and news outlets.  Look there.  And don't only look for opinions that confirm your own.

Consider starting with @ladyspeechsankofa's multiple videos on this subject, as they are excellent.

4) Keep your opinion to yourself.

Our sense of entitlement to share our opinions, even on issues that we can't possibly fully understand and that don't directly impact us and even when those opinions can be deeply harmful, is a glaring example of white privilege.  To choose not to exercise that privilege is a practice that we all need more reps in.  Your work is to educate yourself through listening to others.  And also, finally, to:

5) Encourage other white people to follow steps 1 - 5.

{Heart}

We Should All Feel Free to Watch "Free Guy"

Hi team,

I really wanted to write a post this weekend, so given that I've waited until 11:52 pm to start, I'll have to make it quick.  Which is good, and resolutions consistent!

Let's talk about "Free Guy" (2021)!

I had overall low expectations of this movie, accompanied by fragile hopes that it would be genuinely enjoyable and sincere fears that it would be a boring action-fest.  

To cut right to the chase: I loved it!  

In tone and story, "Free Guy" is essentially a live action version of "The Lego Movie" (2014), which of course contributed significantly to my grateful enjoyment.  I am pretty much constantly on the verge of just rewatching "Lego Movie" lately as I am definitely still in a comfort-watching-my-favorite-reruns-as-coping frame of mind, so having another version of that movie means I have a welcome resource to possibly return to at some later date.

To run down the major highlights:

--Ryan Reynolds is great.  His humor is imbued with self-deprecating charm, and he delivers a Jim Carrey in "Truman Show" (1998)-esque plucky yet doe-eyed performance that makes his titular Guy super endearing.

--Absolutely delightful, silly, inventive humor with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.

--Lil Rel Howery delivers a little homage his save-the-day "Get Out" (2017) moment!

--CHANNING TATUM CAMEO.  You know I love that!!  He is such a goddamn delight.

--Far from being boring, because of the integration of video game-y laws of physics, the action sequences have a fun, cartoony energy that also help reveal the rules of this particular virtual world.

--To that point: As with "Lego Movie", I really enjoyed the world-building of the in-game Free City in "Free Guy".  Something about being introduced to the rules of the road in a low-stakes fantasy environment makes my combined creative and checkbox-checking brains very happy.

In conclusion, "Free Guy" is exactly the sweet, fun, high tech escapist carnival ride I needed and wanted it to be.  With all that and more delivered in this freaking delight of a movie, it is perhaps unsurprising that I gave it a 5.

{Heart}

"Spencer": The Royal Horror Movie You Didn't Know You Needed

Hi everyone,

I watched "Spencer" (2021) and I'm excited to write about it.

Going in, I didn't have very clear expectations for this film.  I was intrigued to see Kristen Stewart's transformation into Princess Diana and the trailer looked moody and beautiful, and because I'm all out of episodes of "The Crown" and my favorite fact-checking podcast on maligned women, I was very much game to check out this movie.  To my delight and surprise, it quickly became very clear that the film borrowed extensively aesthetically, thematically, and structurally from Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980).  

The aesthetic similarities struck me first: gauzy lighting and drab pastel palette, occasionally and jarringly disturbed by lurid splashes of red in the plaid of a jacket or the berry gelée topping a set of unnaturally perfect desserts in a massive walk-in refrigerator and inevitably evoking bloodshed and harkening back to The Overlook’s elevators, not to mention the legacy of a colonizing monarchy.  

Looking back, the structural similarities are also impossible to miss.  The film opens, like “The Shining”, on the ominous and lengthy trek into the distant location that hosts the majority of its action.  Also similar to “The Shining”, “Spencer” is set primarily in a remote, cavernous, unnecessarily and purposefully cold, expensive yet austere, and almost certainly haunted estate—groaning under centuries of weighty, sometimes terrifying, history—with grounds so vast they could swallow you whole yet not vast enough that you aren’t always, always being watched, either by ill-intentioned spying royal staff or by the place itself.  

Throw in the thematic elements of a main character’s escalating hallucinatory insanity as a direct consequence of brutal, violent, and all-encompassing isolation from the outside world, and you’ve got yourself quite the homage to a giant of horror films.

All of this is to deeply satisfying effect for those of us who love the old horror classic.  It is a mashup I didn’t expect or know I wanted, and yet it is very easily half the reason I like “Spencer”.

A stark counterpoint to the terror constantly nipping at Diana’s heels and the other half of the reason I liked this film is Diana’s moments with her sons.  Here, you see her grounded even as she’s unmoored.  She is playful, creative, vulnerable yet brave, and in deep, fierce maternal love with her boys.  They are her only true oasis in the vast desert of deprivation and cruelty that is her life as a member of the House of Windsor.

It is this love that brings the film to its conclusion, where just like in “The Shining”, the besieged mother faces down the monsters that would destroy her and flees to the safety of reality with her sons.  

And here is a place where “Spencer” crucially breaks with the horror film it references: when Diana interrupts the royal family’s bird hunt in a bid to spare her children from taking part in the bloodshed, instead of seeking to trap Diana and the boys there on the royal estate with him forevermore Charles sends the boys to their mother’s side.  This moment is heartbreaking as it is also exhilarating, as we see in Charles’s granting permission for the boys to go with Diana that he is granting his wife the right to protect her children that his own mother never exercised for his sake and the freedom to flee that he has been denied.  

While the villain of “Spencer” isn’t as honest or blunt as to wield an axe or risk freezing to death pursuing her, the royal family Diana leaves behind is nevertheless frozen in time, doomed to emptily repeat meaningless rituals like well-dressed automatons and eternally kept apart from the real world.  And unlike in “The Shining”, where the mother and child survive, we know that Diana was ultimately not so lucky.  But at least for a blissful moment of fantasy, we see her soothed by the everyday banality of fast food fried chicken and a tourist’s view of London.

While the film isn't perfect, it really is great--especially for fans of unexpected and component allusions to horror classics.  I gave this movie a 4.

{Heart}

Antiracist Accountability Post: Comedy x Olympics Mashup

Happy Sunday friends!

Recent events have created a happy opportunity for a transaction between past antiracist accountability posts, leading to today's mashup!

One of the comics I highlighted in last month's accountability post, Erin Jackson, has a great bit on her album "Grudgery" (2018) about googling her own name to ensure that she is in good standing among the Erin Jacksons of the world.  She has historically been reassured that other newsworthy Erin Jacksons are no threat to her comparative success, until a rival Erin Jackson apparently discovered she was good at speed skating.

The bit is super entertaining, as Jackson's album-titling grudginess is in full effect.  You can listen to it here:

And here's where last month's post transacts with last year's post about the Olympics, putting this sporting event at least for a moment in a more positive light than the subject of my previous post: 

Perhaps to Ms. Jackson's chagrin, the latter Ms. Jackson had a pretty busy day at the Olympics a few days ago, becoming the first Black woman to win an individual gold medal at the Winter Olympics, as well as the first American woman to win a gold medal in speed skating since 1994.

Yay!

For all her typical saltiness, the former Ms. Jackson appears to be taking it well.

A hearty congratulations to both Erin Jacksons, the one for an extremely impressive accomplishment on the world stage, and the other for a whole bunch of new content to turn into comedy gold.

{Heart}

2021 Movie Round-Up!!

Hi team,

It's that glorious time of the year (which sometimes occurs in February) where we look back on the previous year of films!  I'm looking forward to reflecting on the movies I watched last year.

Without further ado, I present:

The PsychoCinematic Year in Movies
2021 Edition

1. Safety Not Guaranteed (4)

2. Drinking Buddies (1)

3. The Gentlemen (4)

4. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (4.5)

5. Booksmart (5)***

6. The Big Short (5)***

7. Emma. (2)

8. Stranger than Fiction (4)***

9. Framing Britney Spears (4)

10. The Two Killings of Sam Cooke (4)

11. Black Art: In the Absence of Light (4)

12. Roman Holiday (4)

13. I Care A Lot (1)

14. Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (4)

15. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (5)

16. The Vast of Night (3.5)

17. Class Action Park (2)

18. Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal (4)

19. The Last Blockbuster (4)

20. Wework or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn (2)

21. She’s Gotta Have It (5)

22. Betting On Zero (3)

23. The Lovebirds (3)

24. Being Canadian (2)

25. 21 Jump Street (4)***

26. 22 Jump Street (4.5)***

27. Meet the Parents (3)***

28. Four Weddings and a Funeral (3.5)

29. Hamlet 2 (2)

30. Knocked Up (2.5)***

31. The Forty-Year-Old Version (4)

32. Meet the Fockers (3)***

33. Wolf of Wall Street (3)***

34. Rounders (2)

35. The People vs Larry Flynt (3)

36. The Hangover (4)***

37. Breathless (4)***

38. Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed (3)**

39. Black Narcissus (3.5)

40. Cars (2)

41. The Nun (1)

42. Badlands (2)

43. Annabelle: Creation (2)

44. Winchester (4)

45. Annabelle (1)

46. The Addams Family (3)

47. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (5)***

48. The Eyes of Tammy Faye (4)

49. Dune (4.5)

50. Love Hard (3)

51. Office Christmas Party (3.5)

52. Deck the Halls (2)

53. Klaus (5)

54. Matrix Resurrections (2)

A quick reminder of the meaning behind the various annotations used throughout the list:

* = got nauseated

** = fell asleep

*** = rewatch

Thankfully, I didn't watch any movies last year that required the notation resulting from making me queasy.  I definitely took ample advantage of my accommodation from recent years that allows me to count movies I've seen before.

As you can see, as a stark contrast to last year's list that came within a hair's breadth of being 100 movies long, I only ever so slightly exceeded my annual 52 movies goal in 2021.  While I don't love that I cut it so close last year, on the other hand I was overall pretty consistent in watching about a movie a week throughout the year, which seems like evidence of a fairly bankable, consistent approach to doing something I enjoy.

Another thing that strikes me is the relatively slim pickings for favorite movie of the year, which bums me out and confuses me, especially when the list of highly rated movies last year was exceptionally long.  I'm not sure what led to so many middling ratings on last year's list.  It could be that my overall dulled emotional state suppressed my otherwise at times generous ratings.  It's possible, for similar reasons, that I simply wasn't up for the kinds of movies I tend to rate highly because those movies often earn their 5/5 at least in part by being emotionally evocative, and I tended instead to watch movies that would be fine but not terribly emotionally stimulating--a thing I have a history of doing.  It's possible that last year was just a weird year for movies, and that the bait I took from various streaming service algorithms wasn't that great.  

The fact that several of the highest rated movies are films I'd watched before only adds to my concern.  Was I letting myself lapse into a movie "safe zone" in which most of the good movies I watched were known quantities because I didn't feel like I could tolerate anything new and potentially emotionally challenging?  I don't like that possibility at all.

Thankfully, watching "The French Dispatch" (2021) at the beginning of this year may have been a corrective example to this possible trend, hopefully setting the precedent that my viewing selections this year are braver and more illustrative of my resilience (and that resilience actually exists, largely because I consistently work to maintain it).

With all that in mind, let's transition into the first major consideration of this retrospective: my least favorite film of last year.

For being included in a list of great comedies but being in actuality not even remotely funny, being packed with pretty irredeemable AND boring people, and for woefully underutilizing Olivia Wilde:

Drinking Buddies (2013)

For portraying workers in elder care as evil early/mid-pandemic and then getting incomprehensibly confused about whether its main character was a villain or a hero:

I Care A Lot (2020)

For having no business being as boring and silly as it was given the rich opportunities 

afforded by its premise:

The Nun (2018)

For being deeply unpleasant and tedious, and also for by its very existence insisting that there need to be multiple movies about a creepy doll in one scary movie franchise when, in fact, no there do not:

Annabelle (2014)

It's interesting to note that, like the highly rated movies of 2021, last year's field of truly awful movies is also somewhat smaller than usual.  I guess there was an overall narrowing of my ratings at the extremes, and that's not all bad.

Honestly, I have just about equivalent feelings of hatred for each of these movies despite the fact that the reasons for my displeasure differ.  However, one does rise to the top (or rather, sink to the bottom) because it is not only bad--with a messy and illogical plot and an incredibly unsatisfying ending--it is also harmful in its messaging.

My least favorite movie from 2021 was therefore:

I Care A Lot (2020)

Yeah that movie was just terrible.

And now, moving on to the good stuff!

The highest rated movies I watched last year were:

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

Booksmart (2019)***

The Big Short (2015)***

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)

She’s Gotta Have It (1986)

22 Jump Street (2014)***

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019)***

Dune (2021)

Klaus (2019)

While I really appreciate the films I rewatched and re-liked this year, it doesn't seem fair to put them in a positive double jeopardy situation when they've already been up for Favorite Movie of the Year contention in previous years.  Therefore, while I continue to love "Booksmart" (2015), "The Big Short" (2015), "22 Jump Street" (2014), and "The Inventor" (2019), I am ruling them out of contention for this year.

That leaves us with another surprisingly narrow field of only five contenders.

While I think "The Trial of the Chicago 7" (2020) was a generally compelling retelling of an important chapter in American activist history, its 4.5 rating highlights that it had its imperfections, including unconscionably  downgrading the abuses to which Bobby Seale was subjected by Judge Julius Hoffman and making some weirdly emotionally discordant soundtrack choices at its opening.

I thought "Dune" (2021) was excellent in most ways, including its gorgeous imagery, brooding soundtrack, and strong performances, but again its 4.5 rating means that it just barely misses the mark for consideration.

"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" (2020) is a wonderful performance of August Wilson's play, featuring most memorably Chadwick Boseman in his final performance before his death but also a formidably transformed Viola Davis as the titular Ma Rainey.  Boseman's final monologue as Levee Green overflows with the aching anguish of Boseman's impending death, imbuing Green's anticipation of a different kind of inevitable, crushing doom with ever more fragility and gutwrenching heartbreak.  Despite the eternal risks inherent in translating a play to the screen, "Ma Rainey's" pulls off the transition gracefully.  Frankly, during an era in which it's harder to access live theater, the fleeting moments that do feel stagey actually feel like a balm--what a gift to imagine being in the audience while these actors say Wilson's words.

2019's "Klaus" took me very pleasantly by surprise this past holiday season, to the point that it has prompted me to hopefully start writing a medley of holiday movies similar to my annual Halloween showcase.  It is a beautiful, whimsical, poignant, and sincerely funny secular (though still appropriately magical as becoming the season) telling of the origins of Santa Claus.

And then we have "She's Gotta Have It" (1986).  We already know I'm a sucker for Spike Lee movies, and this one readily falls into that trend.  I am grateful to have watched this film this year.  Its clear standing in the history of film excited the film studies part of my brain on top of being absolutely beautifully shot and packed with wonderful performances.  To this day, the film strikes a pretty astonishing number of chords emotionally and intellectually: it was funny and sweet, but also challenging and troubling, all while exploring evergreen themes of women's sexuality, sexual empowerment, and hopes for lasting, empowering love.  I spent a lot of time thinking about this film and appreciate the opportunity it gave me for in-the-moment enjoyment as well as after-the-fact reflection.

I hate to be somewhat predictable, but I think I've got to hand it to Mr. Lee again: My favorite film of 2021 was:

She's Gotta Have It (1986)

{Heart}