Skip to main content

Have Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time got black feminism all wrong?

The trope of ‘black girl magic’ has gained box-office clout with recent films. But despite its progressive message, some fear it will become a marketing tool

Related: Hidden figures: the history of Nasa’s black female scientists

Hollywood is having a black girl moment. That’s right, coloniser! Melanin has been dripping off the big screen for little over a year, creating new stars, new social media challenges – and women have very much been at the centre of it all, both in front and behind the camera. Hidden Figures, which came out in the US in December 2016, told the true story of the three African-American mathematicians who played a pivotal role in getting US spacecraft into orbit. It made more than $200m globally. Then in the summer of 2017 came the brilliantly bawdy comedy Girls Trip. Grossing more than $140m, the film introduced global audiences to the actor Tiffany Haddish, and provided an invaluable education in the many uses of a grapefruit.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2pT9TCt
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more