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Saw it over the weekend, audience was I'd guess about 2/3 black to white. It was pretty good! It wasn't groundbreaking and didn't cut deeply to the heart of race in America in the 21st century or anything, but it was fairly entertaining and everybody seemed to enjoy their time. It felt pretty clearly like the directors first film (because it is) in terms of plot pacing at times and the tightness of the editing. Slightly more amateur feel. That's not really a detraction, however, and I'd certainly be interested to see what the guy goes on to make next. If you were looking for a seminal work on race relations I don't think you'll be satisfied. To be honest, I felt like even the movie Crash did a better job of showing just how hosed up our society is, but Dear White People still holds up a mirror to white privilege and that is always welcome.
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Oct 21, 2014 00:57
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K. Waste posted:I think he just means he was expecting a Black person to get beat up/shot/sexually assaulted or something. He wants to see how "hosed up" our society is. I know exactly how hosed up our society is, thank you very much. It seems its people like you who would benefit from seeing it, considering how glibly you labeled me as some kind of fetishist who wants to see black people beaten. I didn't have any expectations going into the movie because I'd never heard of it, much less seen a trailer, until an hour before we left for the cinema. I'm not saying that Dear White People is worse than Crash or vise versa, just that, to me, it didn't have the same 'oomph' and didn't cause the same level of introspection. Maybe that's because I was like 18 years old when I saw Crash versus late 20s now and I'm older and wiser and know just how much more lovely our society is, maybe an 18 year old kid will see Dear White People and have the same reaction I did years ago, but I'm guessing not. In the end Dear White People does boil down to a film about four black students at an elite Ivy League school dealing with what I imagine are some of the very lightest and least invasive and/or damaging symptoms of our society's pervasive racism. The film doesn't exactly go into how one in three American Black men born in the 21st century are expected to do prison time or systemic black poverty, disproportionate and racist police scrutiny, not to mention how Stand Your Ground laws and their like basically allow White men to murder Black men and women with relative impunity. White society needs a drat mirror held to its face all drat day every drat day. Anyway, gently caress you for projecting onto me the idea that I just wanted to see black people beat up and raped. e: anybody who gets miffed with the idea that a movie might want to "shame" them is 100% of the time the kind of person who is most in need of that shaming. How are u fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 02:16
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K. Waste posted:You know what? I apologize for snidely implying that you were a fetishist for oppression. You're justified in being angry, and that's on me. Thank you! quote:for many white liberal critics, the film didn't hit home for exactly the kinds of reasons you're talking about : It was not a film about overt or explicit or obvious racial violence, but a love story concerning a Black soldier dealing with what they imagined to be some of the lightest and least invasive and/or damaging symptoms of our society's pervasive racism and, thus, implied that it was not as worthy of notation. For Van Peebles, this was a tacit admission by these very critics that they preferred narratives of Black victimization which they justified on the pretense of realism, while eschewing the complexity of racial relations. You know what that is very fair and I can see how it must be extremely frustrating for black film makers and artists in general to have white people often examine their work with an eye for the stark conflict and drama of extreme race relations and ignore the points and messages they were trying to convey. That's on me! quote:But my point still stands that this isn't just about what white people 'need to see,' but what Black artists should be judged fairly for creating. Even in a film explicitly about racism, to say that Dear White People is lacking in regards to Crash for not depicting "hosed up" things, at worst, feels like a misdirection. I feel like it's inherently condescending towards the attempts of Black filmmakers to depict narratives of racism that aren't exclusively about Black victimization. Since you apparently liked the film, there's not much more I can say on that other than that specific criticism would make more sense to me if you were calling out the privilege of those students more explicitly like you did above, rather than the mere implication that something needs to be "hosed up" in order to be appreciated among the seminal works about racism. There are good ways to be hosed up, but there are also wholly pandering and facetious ways to do this. Let's not pretend shame is enough. This is also fair criticism and I can only say that my own perspectives colored the way I received the film. As a left-leaning white guy who desires social justice but is ridiculously frustrated by a (white) society that seems to have happily decided that Racism Is Over (thank you Chief Justice Roberts~), I realize that I am going to approach any film that deals with race relations with an eye toward how strongly it conveys to white audiences that racism is still a god drat thing and that they are culpable in it. So perhaps I am the real racist  This is probably why I write about politics instead of movies.Anyway, movie was still good and worth seeing and I have confronted my own biases. Good Talk.
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Oct 22, 2014 03:26
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