Nicole Symmonds: October 2007 Archives

Ah, the black love story. It is de rigueur for black actors and the bane of existence for black audiences with discriminating taste, but it has become the necessary evil for anyone that wants to see people of color portrayed in a positive light on the big screen. "Love Jones" is the first black love story that I can recall and unfortunately every movie since then has followed the same formula. Beautiful boy meets beautiful girl, but boy has trouble keeping the girl because of his philandering ways. Girl leaves boy and seeks refuge in the arms of another while constantly seeking counsel from her girlfriends who aren't credible or dependable. But leave it to Tyler Perry to breathe life into a dead genre.

In his latest film, "Why Did I Get Married?" Perry introduces us to a trio of upper-middle class married friends who take group vacations every year to consider why they got married, confront the issues they have in their marriages and hold each other accountable for the stability of their unions. He assembles a wonderful cast including a post-wardrobe malfunction Janet Jackson; R&B songstress Jill Scott; the man formerly known as "Spawn", Michael Jai White; Tyra Banks' B.F.F, Tasha Smith; heartthrobs Malik Yoba and Richard T. Jone; and relative newcomers to the big screen Denise Boutte and Sharon Leal. And lest I forget, Perry is in the film as well. He is also the writer, director and producer—how is that possible?

View the trailer here, and then click "continue reading this post."

Never one to shy away from films dealing with the complexity of family life, Wes Anderson explores the oddity of sibling relationships in his latest film "The Darjeeling Limited." The movie follows three brothers Francis (Owen Wilson), Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and Peter (Adrien Brody), as they take a train across India to connect with their spiritual selves, help their natural selves get along after the death of their father and find their estranged mother (Anjelica Huston) who lives in a convent in the mountains of the Himalayas. Brody, the newest player in Anderson's films, meshed perfectly with Wilson and Schwartzman, adding a bit more quirkiness to the scene—if that is even possible.

When I heard the news about Britney Spears losing custody of her children, my heart fell. This reaction may seem strange to some, but watching her rise and decline in stardom for the last few years, I felt compelled to go against the grain of the media that consistently beats her down.

Yes, she has made some mistakes pre and post-motherhood, but let us all be clear that she was never stable enough to handle the responsibility of having children in the first place. Couple this with the fact that she has not been able to live a normal life away from the lens of the paparazzi or the pen of malicious writers and I think one can understand why she has fallen so far from grace.