Category: Black Cinema

Black Cinema, Black Films, cinema, Entertainment, Trending Right Now

Blindspotting Official Trailer #1 (2018) Daveed Diggs Drama Movie HD

 

  • Collin (Daveed Diggs) must make it through his final three days of probation for a chance at a new beginning. He and his troublemaking childhood best friend, Miles (Rafael Casal), work as movers and are forced to watch their old neighborhood become a trendy spot in the rapidly gentrifying Bay Area. When a life-altering event causes Collin to miss his mandatory curfew, the two men struggle to maintain their friendship as the changing social landscape exposes their differences. Lifelong friends Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal co-wrote and star in this timely and wildly entertaining story about friendship and the intersection of race and class set against the backdrop of Oakland. Bursting with energy, style and humor, Blindspotting, boldly directed by Carlos López Estrada in his feature film debut, is a provocative hometown love letter that glistens with humanity.
  • West Oakland. Collin Hopkins, a black man who works for the Commander Moving Company as a mover, is a convicted felon on the last three days of his one year parole. Among the many restrictions contained within his parole are living in a halfway house which has its own additional rules, having curfew, not being allowed outside of Alameda County, and no possession of firearms, contravention of any of these items which could extend the length of his parole or worse send him back to prison. Collin, whose felony was largely a matter of unexpected circumstance, wants to do the right thing and lead a straight life. And despite having made it through the first three hundred sixty-two days of his parole, it isn’t a guarantee that he will make it to the end clear, let alone make to the end at all due to the environment in which he lives, which includes people like him of a lower socioeconomic standing having to adjust to the gentrification happening within the community. One of the larger threats is his association with Miles Jones, his married best friend since they were kids and his moving partner. Miles, a Caucasian, feels like he has something to prove being white and living in West Oakland, something that Collin inherently doesn’t have to prove being black. But what could be the biggest threat to Collin is being haunted in witnessing a white police officer shoot a fleeing black man to death in the back late in the evening of the third to last day of his parole, being shot for no reason by the police something that black people like Collin face every day. Through it all, Collin tries to negotiate his relationship with Val, his girlfriend before his incarceration and the dispatcher at Commander, she who is taking more outward steps to improve her life to match that gentrification which may not include associating personally with someone like Collin, especially in light of having seen the aftermath of what sent him to prison.

 

Black Cinema, Entertainment, Film Projects

‘Tyrel’: Trailer Released For “Get Out-‘Esque Race Drama Starring Jason Mitchell

After bowing at Sundance and later picked up by Magnolia Pictures, we’ve got the first trailer for Tyrel. 

The film, starring Jason Mitchell, bowed at Sundance this year.

The official description: Tyrel follows Tyler, who joins his friend on a trip to the Catskills for a weekend birthday party with several people he doesn’t know. As soon as they get there, it’s clear that (1) he’s the only black guy, and (2) it’s going to be a weekend of heavy drinking. Although Tyler is welcomed, he can’t help but feel uneasy in “Whitesville.” The combination of all the testosterone and alcohol starts to get out of hand, and Tyler’s precarious situation starts to feel like a nightmare.
The film also stars Christopher Abbott, Michael Cera, Caleb Landry Jones, Michael Zegan, Philip Ettinger, Ann Dowd and  Reg E. Cathey also star.

Watch the trailer below and read our conversation with Mitchell at Sundance earlier this year about the film.

Black Cinema, Entertainment, Film Projects

Regina Hall Is Magnetic, Warm and Devastating In ‘Support The Girls’

Women, black women especially, have often been left to sweep up the things that everyone else in society leaves behind. The same can be said for Lisa, (portrayed by an astounding Regina Hall) in Andrew Bujalski’s brutally honest but warm dramedy Support the Girls. Lisa is the general manager of a Hooters-like sports bar, crudely named Double Whammies, in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. She spends her days keeping the local joint running smoothly and mothering the slew of scantily clad 20-something waitresses who report to her. Going well above and beyond her job description, Lisa manages all of the drama and angst that come with being a young woman trying to scrape together a life for yourself while wearing a cleavage-bearing belly shirt and cut-off booty shorts.

Black Cinema, Culture, Entertainment, Film Projects

Dissecting ‘BlacKkKlansman’ and Its Startling Conclusion

Spike Lee uses real-life detective Ron Stallworth’s story as a cracked mirror to examine Trump’s America in 2018.

The following is part of a monthly conversation series between The Hollywood Reporter contributors Simon Abrams and Steven Boone. This month, they tackled BlacKkKlansman, director Spike Lee’s fictionalized account of African-American undercover cop Ron Stallworth’s investigation of the Ku Klux Klan. In the film, Stallworth (John David Washington) infiltrates the Klan with the help of Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), a Caucasian Jewish-American police officer, and Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), a student activist that Stallworth meets while attending a Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture lecture. There are spoilers ahead. 

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Simon Abrams, Getting Off the Bus: BlacKkKlansman has been praised as one of co-writer/director Spike Lee’s best films. It received the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, and has been hailed by friends and colleagues as his best in years. Our friend Odie Henderson, over at RogerEbert.com, gave the film four stars and said that it is “not only one of the year’s best films but one of Lee’s best as well.” Rembert Browne, writing for Time Magazine, echoes that sentiment by saying that BlacKkKlansman is “Lee’s most critically heralded and accessible effort in over a decade.” Search your review aggregator of choice — Twitter, for me — and you’ll soon see that some variation of this sentiments is fairly popular.

BlacKkKlansman feels like, among other things, Lee’s way of rejecting institutionally revered, but fundamentally (and apparently) racist American movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind. He pointedly opens his film with footage from the latter movie, and quotes the former pic soon in two key scenes, one of which is a comically delivered but deadly serious address from Alec Baldwin as a sock puppet white supremacist named Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard. Documentary footage washes over Baldwin’s face as he speaks and erases his skin color; he is, in other words, white enough to become part of the screen. It’s a visually powerful shot across the bow, one that speaks to Lee’s skill as both a social commentator and an image-maker.

That said, I have mixed feelings about the film, as you and I discussed once our screening ended. My reservations mostly have to do with Lee and his co-writers’ fuzzy articulation of a theme that Henderson eloquently gave voice to in his review, namely how Adam Driver’s character Flip Zimmerman suggests (in one scene, through a Sam Fuller-worthy bit of declamatory dialogue) that like Ron Stallworth, he — a secular Jewish-American — must also pass among WASPy Caucasians. In that sense, my hesitations about Zimmerman have a lot to do with how I see BlacKkKlansman as the work of both Spike Lee the showman and Spike Lee the social commentator (I’d say “provocateur,” but that’s a loaded term, especially when applied to a black filmmaker). So, to start: How well does this film work as a fictional representation of history that’s a political statement, a feel-good entertainment and an effective piece of agitprop?