Meh. bell hooks once pointed out in a book that someday, black subject matter as a whole will be trite. So, it kind of doesn't ultimately matter if this film or that film is of this or that category.

I like to watch Teyonah Parris.

Thanks for the heads up.

@trq7845436 said:

Meh. bell hooks once pointed out in a book that someday, black subject matter as a whole will be trite.

Well yeah, because the topics covered in black entertainment tend to fit inside a very small box. I could say the same about gay subject matter where it's all about being gay instead of a great story with a character who just happens to be gay but doesn't have a huge impact on the story.

At least in the case of They Cloned Tyrone I can say I haven't seen another movie quite like this. It's almost like if Spike Jonze made a black movie; kinda weird, doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but fun.

Ask Me Anything: the book I referred to may be considered old (it was published at least 10 years ago), but, and this is just speculation, I think Ms. hooks was referring to a time in the quite distant future, after black movies like mine and the ones you write have become, well, commonplace. I guess she and I both saw the black "box" that you mention as getting bigger, with the potential for there being different, "fresh" ideas in it getting smaller--if not disappearing completely!

@Damienracer said:

😂What kind of black movies have you been watching.

I grew up in the 90s where "hood" movies were very popular, many of which were parodied in Don't Be A Menace, with a slew of romance films I never cared for (Best Man, Deliver Us from Eva, Love and Basketball, etc). Then in the 2000s the Tyler Perry movies started that were essentially "dark black men bad, light skinned/Hispanic men good, black women victims" movies and the "adultery" movies that were all about black couples cheating on each other or the black guy turning out to be evil or gay (movies like For Colored Girls, Trois, Temptation, Addicted, etc).

And then in the 2010s we got a slew of slavery movies, the one good one I'd say is Django Unchained (though it shouldn't really count), but we got 12 Years a Slave, Book of Negros, Birth of a Nation, Harriet, Selma etc. And now we've transitioned into more horror or off-beat fantasy black films largely thanks to Get Out, but most of them have not been very good (Bad Hair, Antebellum, Us, See You Yesterday, Alice [2022], Synchronic). Almost all of these feature or touch on slavery/racism, as if you can't greenlight a movie about black people unless it's about that.

It's impossible for Hollywood to make a movie or show with black casts or black main characters without bringing up racism or slavery at some point. Like, imagine a movie like Memento with a black main character and race is never brought up. That's the future I want to see. Or at the very least seeing movies with black couples who are married with children and love each other. I'm tired of single black mother and absentee father characters in movies and TV shows.