Growing up in the US as an Iraqi Kurdish/West Asian Muslim kid in the ‘90s here in the US, pre-heroes like Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel), Zari Tarazi of DC’s Legend of Tomorrow, Khalid Nassour (Dr. Fate), and Green Lantern Simon Baz coming up in the 2000s and 2010s, you rarely, if ever, saw heroes on screen you could identify with.
Continue reading “How Supergirl Inspired this Brown Immigrant Child”
There’s no fucking way they’re gonna be able to land this, I thought to myself.
I’m in a movie theater seeing Everything Everywhere All at Once for the first time. I had heard about it long ago, and was cautiously optimistic.
Continue reading “When Something is Nearly ‘Everything’”
There’s a running joke that we will never run out of superhero sequels; I, myself an Xennial elder, have lived through nine Spider-Man movie releases thus far. I’ve watched almost all nine in theaters, not even counting Spider-Man’s appearances in the Avengers films and am happily surprised to find Spider-Man treading new ground.
Continue reading “‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ Rejects Rugged Individualism in the Face of Mass Catastrophe “
by Barry Jenkins | Originally published on Vimeo
In my years of doing interviews and roundtables and Q&A’s for the various films we’ve made, there is one question that recurs. No matter the length of the piece or the tone of the room, eventually, inevitably, I am asked about the white gaze. It wasn’t until a very particular interview regarding The Underground Railroad that the blindspot inherent in that questioning became clear to me: never, in all my years of working or questioning, had I been set upon about the Black gaze; or the gaze distilled.
Continue reading “A ‘Gaze’ into the Soul of ‘The Underground Railroad’”