Some of my earliest memories, ever in life, weren’t just moments with grandmother before she died when I was six, nor me carrying a monkey at my dad’s company picnic, but they were knowing that along with Martin Luther King there were men named Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. I attended the New Concept Development […]
Read more "What if Black America Were Its Own Country? Wakanda, a Nation on a Hill"Let me tell you how much this black guy loves horror as a genre: As I was preparing to write this entry, I simply googled famed horror writer Stephen King to make sure I had a list of his books and movies at the ready reference. And the first hit came back that he and […]
Read more "Why This Black Guy is Looking Forward to the Movie ‘Get Out’"If you’re black and want to go to an HBCU, go watch “School Daze,” if you want to go to a PWI, go see “Dear White People.” If you’re white and have no idea what I’m talking about, go watch both movies. Justin Simien’s directoral debut “Dear White People” was and is a refreshing look […]
Read more "Dear White People: Simple Comedic Satire or Complex Real-Life Drama"Let me be honest, I rather liked “Lee Daniel’s The Butler.” I’m hoping for Academy Award nominations for the portrayals of Cecil Gaines and Gloria which were the based off of the real life story of the black butler who served across eight U.S. presidents by the names of Eugene and his wife Helene Allen. […]
Read more "From “The Help” to “The Butler”: The Troubling Politics of Hollywood"Maybe I’m more churchy than I thought, but the christological references in the blockbuster “Man of Steel” was so overwhelming is pushed the movie from epic to cheesy. This was not “The Dark Knight” which in my opinion still outranks this latest genre of Hollywood revisiting the comic classics for the sake of getting me […]
Read more "Superman and the Need for an American Savior"I know it has been some time since “The Great Gatsby (2013)” has debuted and was panned by a few critics, but I certainly would like to offer some discourse to the movie from my perspective. I remember reading The Great Gatsby, the novel my sophomore year of high school, and I actually did pull the […]
Read more "The American Blackness of The Great Gatsby"I remember seeing the trailer for Quentin’s Tarantino “Django’s Unchained” a few months back and I groaned with the rest of the black members of the audience. Honestly, it wasn’t at the casting choice of Jamie Foxx, or even seeing Leonardo DiCaprio as a slave owner, but really it was the issue of slavery. We, […]
Read more "Django’s Unchained Melody"I had had a long day, a very long and tiring day at work. I felt like Mr. Clark in “Lean On Me” when he decided to go to the parent meeting after his first day at Eastside High. I didn’t get home until about 10:15 that night after being at work for about 10 hours […]
Read more "Red Tails: Another Tuskegee Experiment Gone Bad"I frequent the movies often enough so I had probably seen trailers for the Justin Timberlake movie “In Time” before most people and the concept that time itself was a commodity had certainly piqued my interest. It aroused my senses because being descendants of African slaves here in this country, time as we know it, is […]
Read more "Hollywood Social Commentary is just ‘In Time’"I was able to see “The Help” back in July for a pre-screen and even after sitting on the front row and watching the grossly distorted images courtesy of looking up vertical to a 30 foot screen, I walked away surprised at what I saw. I was happy to watch a movie that told the […]
Read more "The Romanticized Victimhood of Black Women and “The Help”"
Joshua Lawrence Lazard 