Eye Candy's Blog Posts Tagged 'Cinema' (3)

Restless City has been much buzzed about since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival last year. Watching this movie is like some sort of visual massage - Nigerian director Andrew Dosunmu uses the landscape of New York City to frame the story of an African immigrant who finds himself mixed up in a world of trouble when he falls for a beautiful callgirl under the thumb of a vindictive gangster. Everything about this movie oozes style and a sort of film noir quality reminiscent…

If there’s one role that every struggling black actress has had to rely on at some point in her career, it’s the Sassy Black Friend. You know the one. She’s the character who seems to perpetually exist outside of the plot, a sort of one woman Chorus whose main purpose is to cast her eyes to the heavens in the most exaggerated of eye rolls, click her tongue, and make smarmy comments about what’s going on – while never actually being allowed to take part in what’s going on. There…

Every time a new Tyler Perry film is released, I find myself thinking back to a now infamous 2009 interview in which director Spike Lee, when asked about the state of black cinema, said: “A lot of stuff that’s on today is coonery and buffoonery, and I know it’s making a lot of money and breaking records, but we can do better.” This was, of course, a thinly veiled attack on Tyler Perry, who for the past decade has been churning out his own special brand of comedy-melodrama…