Each actor played his or her role with passion and zeal. You won’t get any complaints on that end, especially, Kimberly Elise and Thandie Newton, two actresses I love no matter what. Tyler Perry gets kudos for his efforts, even if I couldn’t figure out why Kimberly Elise couldn’t have just reprinted the missing page from Janet’s report, instead of having to go all the way back home to retrieve her copy. I mean seriously, the movie was set in current times, right? But I digress.

So what is my issue? Simply put, as a colored, black, African-American, (woman) I am so over seeing us depicted in these negative, depressing roles and movies. It has been made perfectly clear to the world that awful things have and do happen in our communities, but they also happen in other communities, yet we are the only ones who seem to want to hold on to the misery. Rape, incest, molestation, and abuse are all horrible acts and I cannot begin to understand what it must feel like to live with those experiences, so I am by no means downplaying what many women (and men) have gone through. I just don?t see how these movies help.

People have said, If you read the book or seen the stage play, you would have known what to expect. I disagree, as a teenager, reading the book for the first time in the late 70s, I felt the poems were liberating, and showed women as strong and resilient. In my late 30s, watching the young girls of the Pinellas Youth Arts Corp. perform the poems on stage, I was proud that our kids were being exposed to great literature. But as a woman in my 40s, I am over the oppressed black woman syndrome. We are so much more than movies like this portray us to be. I am tired of black women being seen as victims, whores and co-dependent upon men who do nothing but use them as sex objects and/or punching bags.

A status post on Facebook asked the question, Which character was the most powerful? Powerful, there was that word again. There is no power in staying in an abusive relationship or trying to reason with insanity–an insanity that leads to the death of your children. Power, surely isn’t in being a nosey busybody, eavesdropping into the lives of your neighbors through paper thin walls. Being a doormat for a man who takes more than he gives is actually giving your power away. Sorry ladies, they don’t steal our stuff, we hand it to them freely, price-tag still attached in case, after trying it out he decides he wants to exchange it for something else. Powerless describes what it must feel like to be raped or molested, but to allow that act to dim your light, gives the aggressor your power. Maybe success to some makes a woman powerful; however, if she has everything on the outside but on the inside she’s cold and lonely, just can’t see the power in that either.

Amazing, okay, on second thought, maybe there was something amazing about the movie. It was amazing that every male character in the movie, with the exception of one, was depicted as a detriment to the woman in his life. We had the abuser turned murderer, the rapist, the whoremonger, and the down-low brother, you know, your everyday stereotype of the black man. Even the dead black man had his role as the incestuous child molester. Thank God for Hill Harper, who played the sensitive, caring, husband, who loved his wife so much that when she shared how she got the STD that would prevent them from having children, he didn’t even flinch, just took her into his arms and let her know everything would be okay. Some women probably missed that because we aren’t supposed to be loved, and what black woman could appreciate this type of man anyway. Hey, I’m just following the black woman’s script.

Today I watched Love & Basketball for the umpteenth time. I love this movie and movies like it. Love Jones, The Best Man, and Brown Sugar, to name a few. Movies that demonstrate black men loving them some black women. Is it too much to ask for? Is it true that no one wants to go to the movies and watch black people being happy, being successful and happy, and celebrating each other, in love with each other? Is it not possible for a black woman to be received as Katherine Heigl and Jennifer Aniston, in all those silly, boy meets girl, movies? Can we not be taken as serious as Angelina Jolie in action movies? I simply refuse to believe that our only real value to Hollywood is as the downtrodden, used and abused, whoa is me, just another sad story, black woman. Or maybe, just maybe, being colored is a metaphysical dilemma that we simply cannot conquer.

Much Love,

Tracy

Tracy L. Darity is the author of two novels, He Loves Me He Loves Me Not! and Love… Like Snow In Florida On A Hot Summer Day.  For more information visit www.TracyLDarity.com

Citing increased competition and the explosion of new media, the House Finance and Tax Council on Thursday approved a series of tax incentives backers say are necessary to lure lucrative contracts to the state.

If not, the state will find itself on the cutting room floor as other states push ahead with aggressive campaigns to land not only feature films, TV and commercials, but a host of new media from digital games to special effects that can be created anywhere.

“We need to do this now,” said House sponsor Rep. Stephen Precourt, R-Orlando. “Our neighbors are having to go to other states to find work.”

Toward that end, the panel unanimously approved HB 697, which would allow the state to issue up to $75 million in corporate income and sales tax credits to qualified entertainment enterprises. The credits could be used to offset costs of production and materials.

The bill would distribute available funds among a handful of general areas including commercial and music videos and independent productions.  The credits would be transferable.

In a nod to the state’s tough financial picture, the measure converts current cash incentives to transferable tax credits that won’t be redeemable until 2011. Precourt cautioned that foot dragging on the part of the Legislature would have immediate consequences in what has become an increasingly aggressive competition among states to land entertainment industry business.

“The new media clusters are beginning to form,” Precourt told the committee. “We need to make a conscious decision to stay in the business or not.”

Testimony from Paul Sirmons, a line producer for the upcoming faith-based feature film “Letter to God,” said the filmmaker, Possibility Productions Pictures, appeared to bear that out.

Six months after spending $3 million in the Orlando area during a 28-day shoot, Sirmons said the company has plans and the financing on hand to produce two more filims. Where the company chooses to do that will depend on what lawmakers do in the next several weeks.

” We hope to make those pictures in Florida,” Sirmons said. “There are too many other states that have incentives. It would be too much of savings for us to turn it down.”

A similar bill, SB 1430, was approved by the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday. Film incentive are also included in SB 1752, a comprehensive job creation package sponsored by Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville. That measure passed the Senate 38-0 earlier Thursday.

The Nigerian film industry has overtaken Hollywood and closed the gap on India, the global leader in the number of movies produced each year, according to a new United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report released today.

According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) survey, Bollywood – as the Mumbai-based film industry is known – produced 1,091 feature-length films in 2006. In comparison, Nigeria’s moviemakers, commonly known as Nollywood, came out with 872 productions – all in video format – while the United States produced 485 major films.

“Film and video production are shining examples of how cultural industries, as vehicles of identity, values and meanings, can open the door to dialogue and understanding between peoples, but also to economic growth and development,” said UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura.

“This new data on film and video production provides yet more proof of the need to rethink the place of culture on the international political agenda,” he added.

The three cinema heavyweights were followed by eight countries that produced more than 100 films: Japan (417), China (330), France (203), Germany (174), Spain (150), Italy (116), South Korea (110) and the United Kingdom (104).

Key to Nollywood’s explosive success is Nigerian filmmakers’ reliance on video instead of film, reducing production costs, and, as the survey points out, the West African country has virtually no formal cinemas, with about 99 per cent of screenings in informal settings, such as home theatres.

The survey also revealed that about 56 per cent of Nollywood films are made in local languages, while English remains a prominent language, accounting for 44 per cent, which may contribute to Nigeria’s success in exporting its films.

According to the study, US movies continue to dominate cinema admissions around the world, and all of the top ten films seen in Australia, Bulgaria Canada, Costa Rica, Namibia, Romania, and Slovenia were US made.

Nigeria surpasses Hollywood as world’s second largest film producer – UN

The 45-year-old Brit has been in critical condition at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York since Tuesday. She was flown there from Montreal, Canada after suffering a skiing accident on Monday.

Family members, including her husband Liam Neeson and mother Vanessa Redgrave, have maintained a vigil by her bedside, as various news reports surfaced, suggesting the actress was “brain dead,” and being kept alive by a machine.

No official statement has been released, but respected writer Smith, who has close ties to the movie and theater industries, is reporting Richardson’s death on her new blog Wowowow.com.

The 86 year old writes, “Word is in at 1:30 PM WEDNESDAY they have taken Natasha off of life support. This is not unexpected.

Reports: Natasha Richardson Taken Off Life Support

The anxious millions were watching the multi-star Oscar awards ceremony at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. Their patience was rewarded, and their prayers were answered. “Slumdog Millionaire,” a film about Mumbai and ordeals more familiar than terrorist strikes to the less-fortunate citizens of the country’s financial capital, made a spectacular sweep, winning eight awards, including two for iconic music composer A. R. Rahman.

The collective sigh of relief over the repeated honor for the film – which had earlier won the Golden Globe and British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards – was more than audible over the media. But that did not avert a controversy on the message and meaning of the film and the awards.

Whether it is an Indian film or not is not the most important question to be raised. British director Danny Boyle made it, but it was made in India and with an Indian cast about an Indian subject. A more serious debate has raged over the way the film projects India to the outside world.

The saga of the slum kid, who wins a fortune in fairytale style in a television quiz program and wins back his love too in the bargain, has been described as a salute to Mumbai’s spirit and decried as a slap on India’s face as well. Both sides have adopted unconsciously ironical stances in the bitter exchanges on the subject.

People who have had no problem whatsoever with India’s strategic partnership with the George Bush administration, for example, have espied a deep and diabolical imperialist conspiracy in “Slumdog.” Conversely, sections of the media which endorsed the right-wing poll slogan of a “shining India” in the past have evinced the same enthusiasm about selling the film with the slum as its soul.

The contradictions are easy to crack. Behind the great importance both sides attach to the film is its impact on India’s place in globalization as they perceive it. Adversaries of “Slumdog” see it as an attempt at denigrating India and denying its status as an emerging “superpower” and all associated goodies, including multinational investments and military alliances of a matching kind. Media supporters of “Slumdog,” on the other hand, see the film and the Oscars as adding further glitter to its globalized image.

Bollywood (as the Bombay cinema industry is known) has produced other films based on the Mumbai slum and its children. The most unforgettable, perhaps, is “Boot Polish” (1954), about the city’s shoe shining boys. “Slumdog,” however, presents starker images of poverty and squalor. It does indulge in exaggerations, but few can deny the facts of deprivation and exploitation that the director is dealing with.

Trying to defend the film in terms acceptable even to its trenchant critics, Rahman has said that it is “all about the power of hope in life.” But there are hopes and hopes.

In the beautiful lines of a song in “Boot Polish,” an avuncular friend of child workers asks them: “Hum se na chhupao bachho humein bhi batao,/ Aane wali duniya kaise hogi samjhao. (Don’t hide it from me, kids; tell me, too, what the coming world will be like.)” And, in a rousing chorus, they reply: “Aane wali duniya mein sab ke sar pe taaj hoga, …./badlega zamanaa ye sitaron mein likha hai (In the coming world, every head will wear a crown, …./ The times will change, this is written in the stars.)”

Contrast these lines with the crucial ones of “Jai Ho,” the climactic song in “Slumdog Millionaire.” As translated evocatively by unnamed authors in a blog called Inkspillz, the lines say: “Iota by iota, I have lost my life, in faith,/ I’ve passed this night dancing on coals,/ I blew away the sleep that was in my eyes,/ I counted the stars till my finger burned, …./ Taste it, taste it, this night is honey,/ Taste it, and keep it,/ It’s the heart, the heart is the final limit…./ Come, come my Life, under the canopy,/ Come under the blue brocade sky!”

There is a difference between a hope for the children of Indian slums and the hope for some fortunate individuals of the fraternity. There is all the difference, of course, between revolutionary hope from social change and the rags-to-riches hope of a fairytale romance.

But isn’t there hope, too, that the latter can lead back to the kind of hope left behind? The Oscar winner can perhaps serve to prompt, in however small a way, revival of socio-political concern over the rights of the urban poor.

“Slumdog,” after all, has hit the screen at a time when pre-emptive wars and unchecked profiteering have revived ideas of presumed obsolescence in a “post-ideology” period. It is not only in developing countries that ghettos deserve a place in the globalization debate.