Category: race

No But I Read the Comic
Black Panther a film by Ryan Congler. With Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira. **** I hate comic book movies, and almost never go to them. I don’t like movies with super heroes, and people with spectacular special powers. I don’t enjoy the special effects of modern movies, and get tired of preview ...
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Bitch on Wheels Careens out of Control
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a film by Martin McDonagh. With Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Lucas Hedges. ****1/2 If I could sue a trailer for false advertising, I would sue the one I saw for Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri, which seems to promise a hilarious comedy in which Frances McDormand releases her ...
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They Couldn’t Just Run Off in Her Prius?
Victoria and Abdul a film by Stephen Frears. With Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Tim Pigott-Smith, Eddie Izzard. *** I found this movie captivating. The story of an unlikely friendship between an aging Queen Victoria (Judy Dench) and an Indian servant named Abdul (Ali Fayal), it shows the lonely old woman—who has let herself go to the ...
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Bake a Motherfucking Cake as Fast as You Can
Patti Cake$ a film by Geremy Jasper. With Danielle Macdonald, Bridgette Everett, Cathy Moriarity, Siddharth Dhanajay, Mamoudou Athie. **** I should admit up front that I’m not a rap fan. I’ve tried—my nephew once made me a tape of rap’s greatest hits—but I couldn’t get into it. I like the rhythm at first, and the whole ...
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Servants of Life
In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman. Picador. 497 pp. $17.00 ****1/2 This is the last book—the last of many—that my friend Levi recommended to me. He always recommended books as if to say: Go buy this and start reading it tonight (though I never did that). He went on and on ...
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Living Deliberately
Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls. University of Chicago Press. 615 pp. $35.00. This is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. Right at the moment I can’t think of a better one. And it comes at an ideal moment for me. The official occasion is the bicentennial of Thoreau’s birth, in 1817. ...
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Going Dutch
Fifty-Two Pickup, Swag from Four Novels of the 1970’s by Elmore Leonard. Library of America. 808 pp. $37.50 Elmore Leonard wrote great—I would almost say groundbreaking—dialogue, but the rest of his writing was ordinary, even pedestrian. Let’s the opening of Fifty-Two Pickup. “He could not get used to going to the girl’s apartment. He would be tense, ...
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Doc, Ya Gotta Level Wit Me
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2017 My Lineup: Whose Streets? / Still Tomorrow / The Good Postman / Abacus / Zaatari Djinn / Tribal Justice / Strong Island / Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities / Quest / The Force / May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers At ...
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Old Corn-Drinking Mellifluous
Absalom, Absalom! By William Faulkner. 315 pp. $15.95 I’m obsessed with the subject of telling stories. I’ve spoken before about how all stories are false, or all stories true; they are, in any case, human fabrications, which may have little to do with what actually happened. We love them nevertheless. Human beings tell each other stories, ...
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Stories Short and Long
Autumn by Ali Smith. Pantheon. 264 pp. $24.95 Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley. Washington Square Press. 208 pp. $14.00 There are short stories that seem to have enough material for novels. Alice Munro’s late work was like that, any number of mid-length stories, forty or fifty pages, which encompassed an entire life. Frank O’Connor said ...
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James Baldwin Has a Question
I Am Not Your Negro a film by Raoul Peck. With James Baldwin, Samuel L. Jackson, Dick Cavett. ****1/2 In a way I wish the title of this film had gone further. The speech in the movie that it most closely reflects it is one by James Baldwin on a television interview: “What white people have ...
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Distinctly Praise the Years
Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany. Wesleyan/New England. 212 pp. Every now and then I reread something by Samuel R. Delany because all of his work is intelligent, beautifully written, and unfailingly deep. The fact that I’ve read it before doesn’t in the least diminish it. I love spending time in the presence of such ...
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This Movie Is About You (Put Away Your Phone)
Paterson A film by Jim Jarmusch. With Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Barry Shabaka Henley, Nellie. Every now and then people call something a Zen movie, and the candidate this year is Paterson, a film whose script Jim Jarmusch apparently wrote twenty years ago and in which almost nothing happens. A man (Adam Driver) awakens every morning ...
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The Poetry of Everyday Speech
Fences a film by Denzel Washington. Screenplay by August Wilson. With Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Jovan Adepo. When I was a young man growing up in Pittsburgh, I wanted to be the writer who put the city on the map. I read Theodore Dreiser’s Newspaper Days; he’d spent some time in the city, and ...
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Black Boys Looking Blue
South to a Very Old Place, Stomping the Blues, The Blue Devils of Nada, From the Briarpatch File from Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray. The Library of America. 1049 pp. $45.00. Moonlight, a film by Barry Jenkins, with Mahershala Ali, Duan Sanderson, Naomie Harris. ***** I haven’t finished the last few pieces from Collected Essays ...
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Gusto and a Sense of Elegance
The Omni-Americans from Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray. The Library of America. 1048 pp. $45.00 The Omni -Americans was at least partly prompted by the Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: The Case For National Action) from 1965, and author Albert Murray states his central thesis in the introduction, “Someone must at least begin to try ...
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Not Little Enough
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Anchor Books. 816 pp. $17.00. I began this book with great enthusiasm and sped through the first two hundred pages. Hanya Yanagihara is a wonderfully skilled novelist and pulled me right into the story. But by the last two hundred I was seriously tired of the book, almost dreaded reading. ...
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Train to Nowhere
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. 306 pp. $26.95 This is one of the most wrenching and difficult books I’ve ever read. It’s a work of art, and its sheer artistry gives pleasure. At the same time, I didn’t look forward to reading it every night. People will say the subject is slavery, or racism, but ...
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AIDS Comes Home
My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese. Vintage. 432 pp. $16.00. I’m full of admiration for this book, and there’s no single reason. It’s an AIDS memoir, told from the standpoint of the doctor who cared for the patients, and who just happened to be a gifted writer who would later write a bestselling ...
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Angry Men and Wild Women
12 Angry Men a film by Sydney Lumet. With Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam. ***** Ghostbusters a film by Paul Feig. With Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones. **** Last spring my wife and I saw By Sydney Lumet at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and set about watching the work of ...
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