trailer break: ‘Lottery Ticket’

I know that there are some people who applaud a film with no white people in it, on the basis that a balance needs to be reset from all those films with no black people in them. I am not one of these people; I think that any monoethnic film made now is essentially divisive.

(I suppose it's faintly encouraging to learn that Hollywood doesn't think the "urban market" is any more stupid than the white-folks market.)

I think a "monoethnic" movie like this at least has an excuse within the story as to why it's majority black: its inner-city setting. On the other hand, you have movies like He's Just Not That into You where it's a majority-white cast set in Baltimore, which is just stupid, no matter how you look at it.

I've escaped from two moronic threads on IMDb where the OPs were seriously trying to argue that the movie Boomerang is racist because it's majority-black and bad things happen to white people like a white lady gets laid off and Grace Jones whips her white handlers around like slaves..

..Seriously!

So, I'm a little wary of the "all mono-racial movies are bad" argument, unless it's argued well and not from obvious idiocy like the "Boomerang" one was. Boomerang obviously had an agenda behind it: Eddie Murphy said it was based on a real black corporation (yeah, not fictional), and he just wanted to make a comedy based around something like that.

Other than that, I'm black and I watch Big Love, a series about a polygamist Mormon family and their corrupt relatives set in Sandy, Utah, where I don't expect a lot of black people, period, so I'm not exactly offended by never seeing a black regular character on that show. It's Utah!

In principle, it's probably best to always have a diverse cast, for the betterment of society, but I respect mono-racial presentations of things where there's a realistic explanation of such. What I'm tired of is never seeing Asians in anything, hardly seeing black actresses other than Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson in anything mainstream, and seeing white actors who were in a few indie films get blockbuster roles where they're playing non-white characters, among a billion other things. I mean, the Last Airbender, anyone, but specifically, I'm picking on Jake Gyllenhaal in The Prince of Persia...

YEAH, it's a video game movie, so YEAH, it's not exactly high art, but, really? His character is PERSIAN. Jake is Jewish, and apparently not Persian Jewish. I mean, really? If it weren't for Donnie Darko and Brokeback Mountain, never mind the other movies he's been in which weren't really beyond indie, most of us wouldn't even know who he is. We get some British guy who was in Across The Universe (who even remembers that movie?) playing one white character with another white character who rips off Las Vegas casinos based on the Asian-American students who did it... because, apparently, Asians can't open movies...

But, yeah. Meanwhile, I see shows like Glee where the minorities there are just tokens who don't do anything (from what I've heard, anyways), and shows like Friends where they added a black woman at the last minute, only to get rid of her again, and I feel like, "well, if you can't be bothered to write a three-dimensional person of color (not my most favorite term in the world -- efficient, but cheesy), then don't try."

Pheh.