I’ve been customizing the presentation jellyfin library, and this caused me to notice that the only brown faces visible on any of the thumbnails is on Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon. I probably should be more cultured than this. What movies about non-white characters do y’all think I should add to my collection?
BTW, if you haven’t watched The Last Dragon, go watch it right now. It’s like if Kung Fu Panda took place in Harlem; sure, our protagonist Leeroy “Bruce Leeroy” Green starts the movie at a level of kung-fu mastery that Po doesnt achieve until Kung Fu Panda 3, but the plotline is pretty similar to the 1st movie in that Leeroy is sent on a quest to find a wise master known as Sum Dum Guy so he can reach the final level. Leeroy also is a fucking weeb and never stops being a socially inept dorky loser to the end of the film. I will warn you, though, that the martial arts is very Shaolin from the start and only gets crazier from there, in case that’s a dealbreaker for you. Either way it’s my favorite movie.
Sinners is such a good movie. Not just for the music and overall quality, but because it tackles the topic of whiteness and who counts in the in-group. It’s a very successful film about race.
For similar reasons is why I’m not 100% on The Woman King, which is an interesting parallel to Sinners in a way. Sinners is a work of fiction that isn’t meant to depict real events, but feels like it is coming from a real place. The Woman King is an ostensibly historical story, but it performs a good bit of revisionism to the nation of Dahomey, which was a key participant in the transatlantic slave trade. The story of the film is one which would be nice to believe, but doesn’t feel genuine and leaves a bit of a bad aftertaste when held against real events.
That’s a fair commentary, though a vast number of movies based vaguely on reality suffer from the same issue … from my list above RRR would be a good example, too, for instance. Or just about any American film about a real war.