I love going to the movies, its my favorite obsession and the theatre to me might as well be a big pause button. Life seems to stand still for 2 hours and everyone is on mute. As soon as the lights go dim, my phone's off and all I see is this huge bright screen that I'm about to immerse myself in and tune into their reality like its mine too. Nothing else matters but the story in front of me and most of my friends could tell you, I'm hypnotized...I fall into some sort of trance that not even the snapping of fingers can take me out of. Nope, only the ending credits can do that.
So you can imagine when my friend and I decided on taking a trip to the movies I was excited because its been a minute. I'm either working or sleeping so I thought this would be a niicccce escape...or....a poor mans getaway. Hey, if I could hop over to Africa or China I would, without a moments hesitation but when you dig in your pockets and all you seem to pull out is a 10 dollar bill and some lint...its looking like your odds are probably going to be the movies. It is what it is but I'm not mad, its better than nothing. But side note, the movies are beginning to loose it with prices themselves...charging 14 dollas...yes dollas for 3D movies that you don't even care to see in 3D but because the only showings they offer at the moment are in 3D, you gotta go for broke to watch there little funky attempt to throw some weak 3 dimensional scenes in a mostly 2 dimensional movie. I fear in the future finding places that will do people right will be so scarce, your more likely to see George Bush at your local Harolds Chicken Shack hanging out with the guys on the corner, making jokes and having a good time.
The first movie we sat through was Super 8...one of those desperately anticipated movies because the trailers are 2.5 seconds long and all they show is someone with there mouth open gasping or some major accident thats got the town all stirred up and crazy. Its set in 1979 in a small town in Ohio and its centered around 4 small young boys trying to make a super 8 film. A truck derails a train, people are missing, suspicions arise, blah blah blah and overall it was pretty good. A little too cheesy for me as far as dialogue but I appreciated its modern take on classic innocence from films you saw back in the day like ET. Movies are so saturated in sex and gore that it was refreshing. Now saying all that, it had its smdh *shaking my damn head* moments for obvious reasons but we'll get to that.
We went straight into another movie after that. I truly have some ride or die movie going friends. R and G are always up for back to back movie watching and I love that. One time, the three of us saw three movies back to back. Thats 6 hours of straight movie watching, we came in at 8:30pm and didn't get out until 2:30 in the AM. We R Ridiculous lol! Anyway, the next movie was X-Men; the first class....something like that. I heard this was good so I was more so looking forward to this one because its bit more action based annnnnnnnd it was, I really enjoyed it. I've never been into the whole comic book marvel thing so I never really understood the depth to these stories but I felt like they did a great job of showing X-Men's beginnings and the unfolding of some characters and how they came to be, how some relationships unfolded from friendships to enemies, how alliances formed, how some characters came to be good and others evil. It was interesting because I was talking out loud understanding where the plot line was going. You know I would say...Ah, thats how he was paralyzed and I found myself wording the script like I wrote it. But as much as I enjoyed it, I found myself yet again shaking my damn head.
You know I'm not the type of person to be incredibly deep about the stereotypes in movies because we'll always have stereotypes in movies but I blame it on seeing two movies in one setting that both did the black man so wrong. I was just DAMN!... can ya'll just let the black man finish to the end of the movie. Can ya'll just let the black man live! I mean c'mon....in Super 8, the black man was killed almost immediately and its centered in a small town of majority white people. So you mean to tell me, in a movie with all these white people, with some to spare, you gonna kill this only black man. C'MON MAN!!! Outta all these white extras, you can't spare one...not one???? Ok so I let it pass because I was like, they're gonna put in another one, they have to. And behold, another black man appeared and before I could settle comfortably back in my chair....dude was evil...yep, he was on the bad side. SMDH. But what made it worst is that, the main bad guy(who was white) didn't even kill the good black guy...oh no, he had his black second in command do it. So the only two black people and one of them killed the other. I was like oh heeeeeelllll naw! Why couldn't the actual main bad guy do it. It just trip me out a bit I wanted to brush it off and go into the next movie.
So I'm watching x-men right and they have two black people in the first class and its all good right. One scene happened and changed the whole game around just like that. BAM! Black guy dies....damn! And the black girl decides to be on the evil side....double damn! So now, I've just watched two movies in a row with just two black characters where one dies and the other is evil....kinda getting pissed off at this point. There was a whole bunch a white people in this movie too....so tell me why the black man has to die again???? At this point I'm just not understanding the cognitive thinking of the writers and directors of the movie because you know they have to be specific. I can just imagine the writers and directors..."Alright, now we have to find the black man we're gonna kill off in the first five minutes of the movie....oh yea and don't forget about the ones we're gonna turn evil...we don't want not one standing by the end of this movie you hear me...NOT ONE!" "I can't afford to spare the white extras you see for a split second, there just two darn valuable!"
Its funny because even the alien in Super 8 survived, here is this alien who is being kept captive and experimented on...he escapes, undergoes massive shooting and bombing but lives and finds his way back home YET the black man gets hit by a train...survives....ONLY to be killed by another black man??? Crazy! X-men indulges in all this talk about having pride, love who you are as a mutant, fight for your race while there killing all the black people off...so the mutants are inhuman can live but this brotha can't lol. Crazy!
I'm sorry if this offends you but I promise you when you see this all the time in big blockbuster films...it tends to get upsetting and if it was the other way around, trust me...it would bother you too. And yes, you could argue *its just a movie, who cares* but these visual messages go alot deeper than you think. I just watched a video not too long ago where little black girls would rather play with white barbie dolls because they they thought that was beautiful opposed to barbies with their own skin color, which they believed were ugly. They believed they were ugly themselves and that lighter means prettier, smarter, and better. Where do these children get this internal hate from? Theu're everywhere. In the media, music, movies....it is all corrupted with messages and words to help contribute to the negativity people feel about themselves, to hate themselves, and feel poorly about themselves. At the end of the day, I was just disappointed that Hollywood is still this ridiculously bad at there interpretation of a black man. That he is either a dead man or a evil man. SAD.
