Miracle at St. Anna by Spike Lee and other links…
Blog-aroundharlem.com: “The film is about four black soldiers who are trapped behind enemy lines in Tuscany, Italy. It stars Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Matteo Sciabordi, John Leguizamo, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Valenti Cervi and Piefrancesco Favino. The film is set to be released September 26th.” I’m tentatively respecting the solemn seriousness that Spike Lee is handling this project. I assume that he both maintaining scholarly historical accuracy and appealing street entertainment. Rock the hard jams. Treat it like a seminar. Reach the bourgeois and rock the boulevard! I can only hope the hope of the captive that work like this will set a trend and shame Black filmmakers (who really do have the funds) to get serious, mature work on the silver screen.
“The racial politics of the Obama marriage.”
When Spike Lee fails to set new trends—a rebirth of the cool—in Black film, then we have scenes from the real lives of the Obamas (that came to me from LiberatorMagazine.com) to sow in the public imagination. Here is a scene that rhymes with an experience my father told me about his youth:
By college, Obama was still not sure where he belonged. At Columbia, he dated a white girl for a long time. One night, after seeing a provocative play by a black writer in New York, she asked him why black people were so angry all the time. “We had a big fight,” he writes. “When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself.” The gulf between them was too deep. They split up quickly.
I am unable to think of a film made in the United States that does not deform a scene like this into a few fleeting seconds or a cartoon.
Wikipedia.org Moment: Margarethe von Trotta
“Margarethe von Trotta (born 21 February 1942, Berlin) is a German film director and a member of the New German Cinema movement.” Of her body of work, I have seen and am pleased with these films: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum and Sisters Or the Balance of Happiness.