Reviews of "Soul Plane," The Day After Tomorrow," "Something the Lord Made,"
"Bubba Ho-tep" and "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban."

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

Talk about these movies and Black film issues! Click here.

"Soul Plane"

Seriously now. How many different ways can a film call me a nig?
Will we ever learn the difference between a film laughing with us, rather than laughing at us?

"Soul Plane," which we pray is not a hit, calls us stupid, drug addicted, not to be trusted, skank and stank. It makes a point to mostly laugh at Black folks in every which way that you can think of, and to use every stereotype that you can think of.

Believe me, I'm not hating on comedy. These days, living in Mordar, I need a laugh as well as anybody. But at what cost? Director and producer Jessy Terrero, as well as writers Bo Zenga and Chuck Wilson, obviously have very little clue about the fine line that Black comedy walks. And the must-be-desperate actors, actresses and comedians who star here must not have a clue either.

The story here, reportedly born when BET's Robert Johnson made an unsuccessful bid to launch the first Black-owned airline, is that Nashawn Wade (Kevin Hart) receives a ridiculously large award from a jury after an airplane accident kills his beloved dog. With his cash proceeds, Nashawn decides to launch NWA Airlines, the first Black-owned airline. This airline flies from "X Terminal" (they had the nerved to drag Malcom X's name into this!), which includes businesses such as Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles and a Footlocker store for athletic gear. Seating is divided between first class, business class and "low class," the latter of which features coin-operated overhead bins and boxes of Popeye's Chicken passed from person-to-person.

Some of these details are mildly amusing and place "Soul Plane" in the tradition of the "Airplane" movies of the 1980's that lampooned air travel to a much finer degree. But far more gags here are just straight unfunny, like the racism directed toward Arabs and Africans, the totally nasty bathroom humor, and the oh-so-tired caricatures of White people as corny and uptight "hunkies."

The most disturbing and offensive aspect of this film's comedy is that fact that it creates caricatures out of what are already caricatures. It builds upon distorted media images of the Black community that are skewed, misrepresentative and very, very ghetto. Do Black women really dress like the hoochie flight attendants of NWA Airlines, with skirts up to their crotches and with plunging necklines? Or is this a music video image of us? Is a pilot smoking weed in the cockpit supposed to be a funny version of our real behavior? How many people aside from rappers actually get blunted? (a show of hands please…). Choosing as a pilot for this plane the likes of Snoop Dogg, (that media impressario who would like promote equal opportunity sluttery for Black women with his own line of "Girls Gone Wild" videos) is like the cherry on top of this "comedy" that laughs at what is already a laugh.

Too bad. The term "soul" as I embraced it as a child, used to embody what was special and quality about Black people—soul food, soul brother, soul sister…. "Soul Plane" could have been funny if it had, while being funny, showed just one iota of knowledge of and respect for those special and quality things about Black people that it plasters on the big screen. (First published May 28, 2004)

The Big Freeze: 'The Day After Tomorrow'

As we putter along in our Hummers, Suburbans and other gas guzzling behemoths, we'd better hope that global warming doesn't happen as fast as a flash in the pan. That's how fast the impact is in "The Day After Tomorrow," an early entry into the summer action flick sweepstakes that transforms nature's fury into the ultimate boogeyman.

Rather than seeing the impact of melting polar caps over years or decades, this cinematic environmental warning offers an impact seen in days, as the earth faces a quick ocean imbalance of fresh water versus salt water that sets off the next ice age. Hurricane-like storms form over land and, instead of bringing driving rain and wind, bring super sub-freezing air that transforms everything and everyone into a Popsicle.

This scenario of sudden catastrophic climate change will seem most plausible to those who are following real environmental developments. The film's extraordinary scenes of killer hail the size of baseballs, or a tidal wave engulfing Manhattan, will work for those who believe that humans are creating an altered world where anything is possible, and where extreme environmental possibilities may be beyond our understanding and computer models. For the unconvinced, there are fierce scenes of polar ice caps splitting in half, or tremendous scenes of rescue, over and over, as pitiful humans try to save themselves.

These awesome scenes, employing tremendous computer graphics, are spliced together with a fairly milquetoast script featuring the perfectly nondescript Dennis Quaid as the one scientist with the answers to the crisis. He is a busy professional estranged from his wife Lucy (Sela Ward) and son Jake (Jake Gyllenhaal). In the midst of a killer storm, he defies his own advice and travels from the warmer zone of Washington, DC to the freezing zone of New York City to rescue his stranded son.

The best part of this miserable human story are the merciless jokes heaped upon the clueless and arrogant officials in the U.S. government, most especially a Dick Cheney lookalike who is consulted by his seemingly more clueless president. There are also priceless references to a world turned upside down, with the wealthy Northern Hemisphere suddenly frozen and at the mercy of what had been called "the Third World" in the warmer Southern Hemisphere.

The worst part of the human drama is the fact that it is so sappy and void of the emotional impact of the action scenes, and void of any emotional sense that half of the world has either been frozen to death or saved. The cast or "world" here is diverse but all the main players in this crisis are White. Black folks make appearances as a nerd friend to Jake, a scientist in Europe married to a White woman, a nurse and a homeless man in New York City. Director Roland Emmerich ("Independence Day," "The Patriot") has done a decent job but global calamity is, literally, too big a story to wrap within the familiar and mediocre confines of traditional action narratives.

Ultimately, however, at least "The Day After Tomorrow" attempts to be ABOUT something, and to tell a story ABOUT something. It is not as silly as "Van Helsing" or as irrelevant as "Troy." In the now world of so many militaristic films that promote, glorify or sanitize war, I can't get too mad over a film that does not perfectly capture a silent, real war that could kill us all. (First Published May 28, 2004)

Something the Lord Made

There is a boldness and subtlety to "Something the Lord Made" (premiering on HBO, Sunday, May 30, 9 p.m.) that makes it one of the finest TV movies to come along in some time.

It's boldness comes in its telling of the little-known story of Vivien Thomas, a Black man who, though he never attended medical school, was a pioneer in the field of heart surgery. Its subtlety is born of exceptional production, fine direction by Joseph Sargeant ("A Lesson Before Dying") and a performance by Mos Def that is most definitely excellent.

Thomas was trained as a carpenter and, when he lost his job during the Great Depression, he was hired as an assistant to a surgeon, Alfred Blalock (Alan Rickman), at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Working together, the two made many breakthroughs in surgery and relocated together to John Hopkins University in Baltimore. It was at Johns Hopkins that Thomas was instrumental in developing both the surgical procedure and instruments to save the lives of "blue babies," infants born with a congenital heart defect that delivers insufficient oxygen to their bodies and turns them blue.

The hospital laboratory work and interactions between the two men takes place within the segregated south, both in Nashville and Baltimore. This film depicts the racism of the times and the particular oppression of Baltimore's Black population, while at the same time establishing a mutual respect between the two men that feels genuine. Thomas has a pride and confidence that allows him to walk as a man among those who consider him less than one; Blalock is ambitious, relatively progressive, and not plagued with the deep-seated racism that would have prevented similarly situated White men from working with a Black man. Writer Peter Silverman speaks volumes about the times of Thomas by painting characters that are fully dimensional and with dialogue that gives the story many layers of depth.

"Something the Lord Made" turns out to be about the intricacies of work, family and opportunity (or the lack of it) at a pivotal period in African American history, from the 1930's to the 1960's, when there were national struggles for equality and justice. Thomas's brother, who works as a teacher in the film, fights for equal pay, saying, "If I don't do something now, I'll be dead before I get paid like the White teachers do." He winds up as a plaintiff in the historic Brown v. Board of Education case.

Mos Def, with his angular facial features and earnest eyes fits the part perfectly of not only a humble, confident man, but also a man of this time period. He effortlessly fills fedoras, caps and wool overcoats. He totes a pipe. He also wears well his white lab coat, which it seems no one at Johns Hopkins—Black or White—had even seen a Black man wear before. These finer points of Thomas's experience and the Black experience depicted make "Something the Lord Made" a cut above the rest. (First published May 28, 2004)

In Brief: "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban"

Harry Potter and his sidekicks, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, are getting older and bolder with the wizard's wand. The trio's weed-like pubescence is, for this parent, the most striking aspect of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," the third film based on the wildly popular series of children's books authored by J.K. Rowling. Perhaps when you are a young wizard-in-training, a creeping boldness should be expected. So perhaps it is par for the course that young Harry now performs some of his most amazing (and amusing) feats of wizardy, or that Hermione not only puts her wand in the face of that bad boy Draco Malfoy but actually punches him in the face. Yes, the little magic kids are growing up! These Harry Potter films have always been remarkable for both their inclusion and exclusion of a diverse cast. There are none of us colored people among the lead roles and this really doesn't bother me, partly because there are also none of us out there to be miscast, stereotyped or made into the personification of dark evil. On the other hand, there are plenty of us in the background, as part of the larger diverse population at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, so our children don't have to feel excluded from the big screen. The action and special effects remain awesome, though this installment was not as scary, not to me anyway, as the first two movies that had some ghastly XXXL beasts behind doors and in secret chambers. (First Published June 4, 2002 )

Bubba All the Way

A film intriguingly titled "Bubba Ho-tep" and marketed as a hip independent offering promises perhaps a story to pique the interest of us post-civil rights babies. We appreciate cross-cultural humor and have the capacity to laugh at both a "bubba," meaning a Southern redneck, and also a "ho-tep," a name sometimes given to a type of Black nationalist who knows more about ancient Egypt than he does about his own backyard. The idea that the two might come together in one human being could possibly produce new, hilarious cinematic race satire such as "Hollywood Shuffle," "Brother from Another Planet" or "Undercover Brother."

But, sorry to say, this film by Dan Coscarellli offers no such sensibility or humor for us. This is clearly coming from a different vantage point and set of references. To be sure, there is plenty of bubba here. The entire film focuses on Sebastian Haff, a pitiable former Elvis impersonator who is consigned to the Mud Creek Shady Rest Convalescence Home in Texas. Haff still has the swoopy hairdo, eyeglass frames as big and boxy as two television sets, and a bad case of self-delusion. He actually believes he is Elvis and when nurses and friends want him to settle down, they play along with his delusion. He also suffers from some sort of infected growth on his private parts that is mentioned ad nauseum in order to add a bit a sick humor to the mix. Actress Ella Joyce, in the role of the home nurse, is an absolute gem.

There is no one even close to a ho-tep at the nursing home, not someone with delusions about being an ancient Egyptian king, or even about being one of these more contemporary kings wandering "the wilderness of North America." The only Black man here, and dangled for us enticingly in the promos, is actor Ossie Davis. He plays another resident of the convalescent home, Jack Kennedy, who believes he is another dead White man—John F. Kennedy. Kennedy prattles on about the conspiracy to assassinate him and states his belief that he has been dyed brown in order to keep his whereabouts a mystery.

Sometimes this sort of lunacy works. Sometimes, in some films, the jokes are so fine, and come so fast and furious, that we can't help but roll with it. But "Bubba Ho-tep" drags on with tepid laughs, and strange scenes featuring a giant Egyptian scarab. Eventually, a convoluted tale is presented about a supernatural creature, who looks a lot like Freddy Kruger and who has come to the convalescent home to suck out the souls of its dying residents. The creature, who is referred to in almost an off-hand way as a "Bubba-Hotep," finally comes face-to-face with both Elvis and JFK, who resolve to save the nursing home from Bubba-Hotep's ravages and summon the courage to do something based on action rather than delusion.

If you can tolerate Elvis impersonators, you might dig "Bubba Ho-tep." If you're a bubba, you might like it too. But if, like Chuck D, you place Elvis in the same category of Southern charm as good ole boys and the confederate flag, this film is definitely not for you.

The reviews of "Something the Lord Made" and "Bubba Ho-tep" first appeared on www.BET.com.

—June 14, 2004

© Copyright 2001-05 Seeing Black, Inc. All Rights Reserved.