Friday, August 7, 2009

Transformations....

I'm sitting here watching "Car Wash"...dang, that soundtrack was fiyah, for reals! It's so interesting to see folks as they were 30 years ago...Antonio Fargas played the sweetest gay flame to a tee, Bill Duke was the young rebel, and The Pointer Sisters were the joint. Did you know that Joel Shumacher (director of The Lost Boys, Batman Forever, etc.) of all people, wrote this movie? By himself. He also wrote "Sparkle" and the screenplay for "The Wiz". Who knew?

There are many transformations that happen in 30 years, some for the better...some well....ummm, you know, not so hot.

Black film has gone through both extremes--the "not so hot" downgrades from the 70's with the Ice Cube legacy (see the upcoming film "Lottery Ticket" with said Cube and Bow Wow, and any "Are We Whatever Yet" films), and the upgrades being the new class of thoughtful Black films, i.e. "Medicine For Melancholy".

Saw a couple of pictures in the past few days that are prime examples of the upgrades and downgrades from the 70's.

Remember Freddy "Boom Boom" Washington? Remember Cochise? He was so fiiiiiine in "Cooley High", sexy, sexy, sexzay. To be fair, Laurence Hilton Jacobs was severely compromised even in the 90's; he chased after my redbone girlfriend for the longest, and she never even gave him the time of day....there were many more traces of Joe Jackson (whom he played in the "Jacksons" mini-series) than Cochise by that time. Here he is today--call me mean, but I'm sorry, it's disturbing.


On the other end of the spectrum is super super-model Iman, who called Michelle Obama "not a great beauty" (btw, I disagree). Well, if being a "great beauty" means wearing blond plastic Barbie hair against your dark African skin, with a couple of (or more) surgical facial procedures, along with wearing foundation lighter than your natural skin tone, she may have a point. Either way, still much better than 1975, yes?




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ROBERT-TSANI