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zVxTeflon posted:What a selling point. I just love movies that try to shame me. Maybe you should get over yourself a little bit? Isn't good art supposed to make you look at yourself?
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Oct 21, 2014 22:44
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It's just weird to me how defensive people get about this but I guess this movie wouldn't really exists if that weren't the case. I mean it's not just as simple as people unintentionally being dicks to people of color. It's even more about this attitude of "well I don't think of myself as racist and therefore anything I do that offends people is their problem". It' about a belief that racism is dead and then trying to shut down any conversation that says otherwise. It's about being able to say things aren't a big deal because they never happen to you. Also, as I said earlier though, it doesn't just focus on white people anyways. It's very much about black people trying to adjust their identity and beliefs as to find a place to fit in and not offend those around them.
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Oct 21, 2014 22:52
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The title puts people on the defensive. Every review of this on more popular websites have at least one or more people going, "Well people would be offended if someone made 'Dear Black People' so anybody who's okay with this title is the real racist."  Unfortunately, none of the movie theaters near here are showing it at the moment, so I haven't seen much of it beyond the trailers around the place. At least it seems to have done fairly well in the first box office weekend. 
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Oct 21, 2014 23:00
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kurona_bright posted:The title puts people on the defensive. Every review of this on more popular websites have at least one or more people going, "Well people would be offended if someone made 'Dear Black People' so anybody who's okay with this title is the real racist." The funny thing is that "would you be okay with a Dear Black People?" line is in the movie itself. And the movie only opened in four cities. It's getting a wider release on Friday.
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Oct 21, 2014 23:08
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Dear Pacific Islanders. I've had it up to here with your Spam eating.
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Oct 22, 2014 00:02
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If you've never had Spam musubi you're missing out.
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Oct 22, 2014 00:04
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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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How are u posted: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. 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. That being said, there's no correlation between criticizing the perspective that "a seminal work on race relations" is necessarily something that's "hosed up," and thinking that peopled shouldn't be "shamed" when they go to see movies. This is pertinent because fetishistic violence with a loose moral rationalization is actually pretty commonplace in entertainment. There is no difference when the subject is racial violence. 'Shaming' is just as easily an ideological safety valve to passively enjoy convenient narratives of power and victimization. I'll recommend the documentary How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Enjoy It) about director Melvin Van Peebles. At one point in the film, Van Peebles is discussing the critical reception of his first film, La Permission or The Story of a Three Day Pass. Van Peebles notes that 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'll have to forgive me if your juxtaposition of Dear White People and Crash echoed this for me. Furthermore, your breakdown of the strengths/weaknesses of Crash and Dear White People here is much more understandable than you previously gave evidence. 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.
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Oct 22, 2014 02:38
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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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That was honestly refreshing
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Oct 22, 2014 03:29
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Yeah, how the Hell did that happen? Cheers, boys.
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Oct 22, 2014 03:40
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kurona_bright posted:The title puts people on the defensive. Every review of this on more popular websites have at least one or more people going, "Well people would be offended if someone made 'Dear Black People' so anybody who's okay with this title is the real racist." Which, ironically, highlights the reason a movie like this needs to exist.
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Oct 22, 2014 15:00
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How are u posted: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. I don't want to say you were watching the movie "the wrong way" or anything, but I don't think that is the purpose of this movie; it seems like you were looking for some kind of documentary of the macro stuff, while (from what I understand, I haven't seen it yet) this movie focuses more on the micro level. Like you said, it seems like it focuses on the insidious stuff that stems from privilege, like people who think just because black people aren't being sprayed with hoses or lynched in the streets for winking at a white girl and that we have a black president, that somehow "racism is over" (and I personally know a few people that think this way), and their response to any legitimate modern racial issues is that you should "just get over it" because "they're so tired of hearing about it." Some black people will manage to get through life without doing prison time or being racially profiled or being shot at by a crazy white person. I think this movie wanted to focus on the little stuff that nobody gets to avoid. Also, they put this Youtube video out a couple days ago to promote the movie that seems to support that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeukZ6RcUd8 quote:White society needs a drat mirror held to its face all drat day every drat day. This is definitely something we can agree on though. raditts fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 15:08
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rakovsky maybe posted:Nah, it's a redefinition by sociology majors of a very commonly understood word in order to more easily vilify their opponents. Nah it's actually the working definition for history majors too. I wasn't aware this was a point of contention except among people who are really defensive about their own priv-...ohhhhhh.
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Oct 23, 2014 02:09
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I really want to see this but I'm leaving the country when it comes out and it probably won't get a wide release but it seems to me these are the kind of black films we need. I don't care if it creates a big backlash the more backlash the better honestly. We need to push the envelope when it comes to films about racial relations as far as we can possibly go and piss off as many dumb white people as possible.
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Oct 23, 2014 09:20
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I'm sure a film called "Dear Black People" could be good, why do people insist on making the laziest argument possible by just replacing "white" with "black" (eg, "White Entertainment Television")?
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Oct 23, 2014 10:29
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precision posted:I'm sure a film called "Dear Black People" could be good, why do people insist on making the laziest argument possible by just replacing "white" with "black" (eg, "White Entertainment Television")? Because they're racists, and therefore idiots.
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Oct 23, 2014 13:30
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Lurdiak posted:Because they're racists, and therefore idiots. Specifically, idiots that don't understand the difference in tone and subject matter that would be in a "Dear Black People" movie, don't understand that "White Entertainment Television" is "99.9% of the programming on TV," and haven't stopped to consider that this movie could maybe, possibly, be critical of itself as well as others.
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Oct 23, 2014 14:12
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England Sucks posted:I really want to see this but I'm leaving the country when it comes out and it probably won't get a wide release but it seems to me these are the kind of black films we need. I don't care if it creates a big backlash the more backlash the better honestly. We need to push the envelope when it comes to films about racial relations as far as we can possibly go and piss off as many dumb white people as possible. Regardless of whether the film is good or not, we certainly need movies like this that challenge the audience when it comes to the subject of racism. I saw two other predominant black movies this year by black writers/directors, School Dance and A Haunted House 2. Both of them were packed with racial stereotype jokes which mutates the characters into cartoon caricatures. All black people are gangsters doing drugs, all Mexicans are overcrowded families and all white people are in corrupt positions of power where they look down on white people as animals. These films do not just refuse to say anything interesting on the subject, but actually set our culture back if this is acceptable comedy for viewing different races. That is why I'm very anxious to see this film, hoping it'll ask better questions and not go for the easy or convenient answers that others retreat to for safety.
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Oct 23, 2014 14:57
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raditts posted:"tired of hearing about it." Well, I'm tired of living it!
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Oct 23, 2014 22:08
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Man, I wanna watch some WET.
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Oct 24, 2014 03:37
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Saw this tonight at the Alamo in Austin, with surprise (to me at least) QA with the director afterwards. The movie itself is great. It's well-written and well-acted all around, and although it kinda goes the way you'd expect as far as the main protagonist learning life lessons, it still manages to be insightful, funny, and realistic. I found myself wincing or chuckling quite a few times at scenes that reminded me of instances of microaggressions or straight up discrimination and I'm pretty sure if that folks who don't have that reaction will be doing some awkward fidgeting in their seats. It's not a movie that pulls punches. The ending ties things up nicely while also leaving it very apparent that (on a macro level) nothing has been solved. Which is the point. Justin Simien was a very cool dude, spoke about how he drew inspiration from obvious sources like Do the Right Thing, but also heavily from satire like Network and other films. Didn't shy away from the fact that he would like to continue telling these kinds of stories, not just about race, but also about gender, sexuality, etc and how they intersect, the struggles that people who identify multiply across boundaries face. Looking forward to what he does in the future for sure. Sorry this is so short, there's really a lot to unpack in the movie and my brain is kind of fried right now.
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Oct 24, 2014 05:57
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I can't shake the feeling that this is another one of those movies that exists almost entirely so that white liberals can go see it and pat themselves on the back for how Not Racist they are without actually doing a drat thing other than giving $10 to a black guy (which it certainly loving has over Crash, I'll give it that much). I really hope I'm wrong.
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Oct 24, 2014 06:05
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SALT CURES HAM posted:I can't shake the feeling that this is another one of those movies that exists almost entirely so that white liberals can go see it and pat themselves on the back for how Not Racist they are without actually doing a drat thing other than giving $10 to a black guy (which it certainly loving has over Crash, I'll give it that much). This has weighed heavily on me as well. I'm really, really worried that this is going to be another one of those things, like Do the Right Thing or Chappelle's Show or Good Hair, that nice, well meaning folks trot out to prove how "down with the cause" they are and then go on with their lives with no further introspection or thought about race or racism. I hope I'm wrong, but the crowd I saw it with tonight was pretty evenly split between PoC and that sort of crowd.
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Oct 24, 2014 06:29
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Typical smug white liberals are gonna pat themselves on the back no matter what, might as well be helping this film succeed while they do it. It beats them just sitting at home reposting articles on Facebook.
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Oct 24, 2014 06:49
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Yeah, angsting over the kind of secondary audience a film might attract seems kind of stupid. Nobody can do anything about it and it doesn't necessarily have a drat thing to do with the quality of the film anyway so it seems a hugely irrelevant thing to be  about.Anyway, any film like this is going to make the people who even just barely clear the hurdle of whatever kind of oppressive behavior the film is criticizing feel smug. That's sort of the nature of it.
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Oct 24, 2014 13:05
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SALT CURES HAM posted:I can't shake the feeling that this is another one of those movies that exists almost entirely so that white liberals can go see it and pat themselves on the back for how Not Racist they are without actually doing a drat thing other than giving $10 to a black guy (which it certainly loving has over Crash, I'll give it that much). They get extra liberal points because he's a gay black guy! I can't really respond to the rest of it because I can't really judge a potential audience (nor do I think that part really matters) but all I can really counter with is black people seemed to really like it to
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Oct 24, 2014 14:32
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It just sort of rubs me the wrong way that this is laser-focused on the more mildly annoying aspects of racism when, y'know, people are getting loving gunned down in the street just for being poor and not white. Titanic, deck chairs, etc.
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Oct 24, 2014 23:16
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Not every movie needs to be about the big stuff  I mean there's more to the black experience than being shot by police men. There are other aspects that are worth talking about. Not every movie that deals with an issue needs to focus on the most pressing and horrific aspect of that issue. Just because some people have it worse does not mean everyone else doesn't have a right to complain. It's just sort of a senseless argument.
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Oct 25, 2014 00:10
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Also when you make a movie about the worst possible kind of racism, most of the audience will just sort of nod and say "Yes, the KKK is bad, good thing this is not an issue anymore." and learn nothing. Addressing the pervasive smaller racism that feeds into the larger problems is crucial.
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Oct 25, 2014 00:16
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It also kind of oversimplifies and excludes from the equation the entire issue of class and education as intersecting with race. Dear White People can be about the privileged position of those Black characters. The one-way accusatory street is just willful ignorance. School Daze deals with this extremely well, where Dap and his friends consider themselves so much more 'authentic' than the Gamma Phi Gamma 'wannabes,' but then, in a Kentucky Fried Chicken of all places, they end up getting poo poo-talked by a group of older Black men for their perceived pomposity. Lee's early films are really good because they deal largely with so-called 'microaggression,' treating systemic violence (what basically amounts to a date-rape and slut-shaming in School Daze, the murder of Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing) as the epitomization of social conflict that can't be resolved with smart talk. The only hope for change is a radical instigation of a new form of consciousness, the call by Dap and DJ Senior Love Daddy to 'Wake Up!' But a film doesn't actually need to address systemic violence to do this, nor does it need to resist critical dialog, as Lee's films clearly don't. The subject of the film appears to be the correlation between personal and political experience, the extent to which one's individual development and self-conception are the product of a hostile environment, or their own neuroses/apathy. These are aspects of the 'Black experience' which warrant as much inspection as and are not incidental/secondary to systemic violence.
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Oct 25, 2014 00:53
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SALT CURES HAM posted:It just sort of rubs me the wrong way that this is laser-focused on the more mildly annoying aspects of racism when, y'know, people are getting loving gunned down in the street just for being poor and not white. Titanic, deck chairs, etc. People have made plenty of movies about black people getting gunned down in the street. Good ones even. Literally no one gives a gently caress. This movie has had more interest than probably all those films combined. You have to combat Racism on every fronts. Especially the ones where you can be effective. A movie about a innocent black man being shot down and killed isn't going to change anything. You know why? Because it won't piss off white people. The only way to change anything is to shake the boat. Movies about police violence aren't going to shake the boat because that is something so ingrained in our culture white people just don't loving care. To create any kind of change you must create conflict that actually effects white people. Trayvon Martin doesn't effect white people. Michael Brown doesn't effect white people. Those are events that occur within a black community. How the gently caress could White people ever identify or be touched by that? You have to show something happening in THEIR turf. In THEIR society. This film takes place in white culture's de jure homeland. Ivy League college. It involves a bunch of what these fuckers will see as a bunch "uppity blacks" pushing the fold and not being afraid to do so. That's what scares white people. Well educated African Americans who aren't afraid to speak the way they feel and challenge white institutions.
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Oct 25, 2014 02:55
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I suppose that's fair. It's not as if Fruitvale Station made very many more people care about that incident.
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Oct 25, 2014 02:58
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SALT CURES HAM posted:I suppose that's fair. It's not as if Fruitvale Station made very many more people care about that incident. That's because Fruitvale Station was a really good movie that deliberately enticed the idea that its subject was murdered only to contextualize it as a really horrible accident at the climax, while still not sugar-coating the effects of systemic violence and structural discrimination. Coogler portrayed Grant as an irresponsible, aggressive young man with no prospects except for that time he literally helped Joseph and the Virgin Mary to take a piss. The movie is good because, not unlike The 400 Blows or Scum, it portrays the inevitable outcomes of systemic violence as tragic regardless of whether or not the person in question fits the convenient mold of a productive young citizen who could have lived the American Dream if not for the Man. I just bristle at the idea of films about racism - especially films by Black directors - having this weighted expectation that they're supposed to radically change people's minds. I expect filmmakers to make good art/entertainment, not to fashion proper propaganda. I also have to be honest that I'm weirded out by the (admittedly minor) talk about white liberals patting themselves on the back for their racial consciousness, which can apparently be contrasted with people of color audiences even though they don't seem to get any more galvanized by going to the movies. This is the thing, I only disagreed with Ham because I didn't see the correlation between criticizing the supposed privileged point-of-view of the movie and, like, the absence of systemic violence in the film. Like, that's a legitimate class-based criticism of yet another movie that predicates its themes of identity and exclusion within the privileged domain of the educated middle-class. Those privileges don't suddenly go away because you happen to be saddled with the additional dual consciousness of race, and I'm legitimately curious if the film will address that. (Although I've heard from friends who've seen it that it does considerably.)
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Oct 25, 2014 04:01
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I haven't seen the film yet, so I can't really speak on it, but I think it's good to make a film about microaggressions and the kinds of things people who don't think they're racist do, which is the majority of people. It's all the little things that add up, which relates to my favorite definition of privilege, which is to be in a position where you don't have to ever think about it, whatever "it" is. The ongoing ground war in Ferguson and the microaggressions addressed (presumably) in Dear White People are both part of the same gigantic pile of poo poo that we all live in and contribute to.
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Oct 25, 2014 04:18
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England Sucks posted:People have made plenty of movies about black people getting gunned down in the street. Good ones even. Are you serious?
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Oct 25, 2014 05:12
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zVxTeflon posted:Are you serious? Serious or not, he has a point. Most of the "gun downed black man" films focus solely on the problems black people face while living in the black community. Even films like "Do the Right Thing" focus on whites living near blacks. This film focuses on the typical (well not completely as they are rich but still) white community.
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Oct 25, 2014 06:01
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Armond White weighs in with a pretty good Out review: http://www.out.com/entertainment/armond-white/2014/10/17/dear-white-people-campus-identity-crisis-funny-frustrating One thing interesting he opens with, which puts a spin on some folks' concerns that this movie is only significant to liberal whites patting themselves on the back, is the quite simple observation that the movie is called Dear White People.
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Oct 25, 2014 06:28
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K. Waste posted:Armond White weighs in with a pretty good Out review: http://www.out.com/entertainment/armond-white/2014/10/17/dear-white-people-campus-identity-crisis-funny-frustrating Are you seriously quoting Armond White as a reviewer we should have some kind of interest in reading?
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Oct 25, 2014 07:54
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England Sucks posted:Are you seriously quoting Armond White as a reviewer we should have some kind of interest in reading? I dunno man the dude that screamed "You're an embarrassing doorman and garbage man. gently caress you. Kiss my rear end." at steve mcqueen has a point!
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Oct 25, 2014 09:20
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