I saw The Butler

[Himu]

It was okay.

The middle of the film really started to bother me with how they portrayed civil rights activists. The son of The Butler mentioned in the title is a idealistic and very brave young man who joins in on civil rights protests throughout the 60's. A big problem for me is that he's involved in like, every major one. He does a sit in, HE was one of the people arrested and shown on tv; he's on a bus, HE'S one of the people on the bus that explodes Birmingham. His family shuns him for his dedication to civil rights, as his father works for the white house as a butler. Eventually, he becomes a black panther and goes home, they have a fight at dinner, and he winds up in jail - AGAIN - and his kid brother says he's going to join up to fight in Vietnam. A quote that stuck out was,"you fight your country, I'm going to fight FOR my country" and I just wanted to rage.

Fast forward to Oakland, California and he's at Black Panther hq and he starts to feel anxious like he's not in the right place anymore and realizes how bad the Panthers are because they're apparently going to kill people, so he leaves. Fantastic, another film that completely villianizes the Panthers and the idea of black power.

I'll try to be as respectful as I can while I say this, but I'm fucking tired of black civil rights movement narrative stories. I deplore how the film treats the civil rights movement as a hokey Forrest Gump-like film, as the son gets involved in EVERYTHING and while I can accept it in Forrest Gump - which is a comedy - I cannot accept it in a film that is seriously trying debate civil rights on the grounds of color. Finally, the father comes around as he realizes his son is a hero, and joins a protest with him, but the rest of the film, they depict the son as a selfish prick, so I'm not sure how or why they came around to this.

The previews before the movie made it worse: another black movie that travels to the past and tells the story of an era everyone has fucking heard about. Where the fuck are my modern era black comedies, my black dramas? Where the shit is a new Love and Basketball, or hell, fucking South Central While Drinking Juice? Or a goddamn BOOTY CALL? While I was at fault for not properly researching, this tell the past of our past great deeds shit makes me wanna cap a nicca.

The one saving grace of this film is the acting. Oh man what a cast.

C+

[Great Rumbler]

Where the fuck are my modern era black comedies, my black dramas?

Being made by Tyler Perry. Enjoy!

[Himu]

UGHHHHHHHHHH.

[Himu]

The previews before this movie: A Nelson Mandela biopic, a runaway slave film, a film involving modern pirates and Tom Hanks. I have nothing against these type of films, they have their place. But when the only time you go to a movie to see people who look like you on screen and the general message is always "hey look at what we achieved/went through in the past" does nothing to help me identify with any of these films. Why can't I have a normal film, about normal people, just smoking weed and shooting the shit or something? No ghetto shit. No slave shit. No race angle shit.

Fuck.

[Steve Contra]

Where the fuck are my modern era black comedies, my black dramas?

Being made by Tyler Perry. Enjoy!

[Phoenix Dark]

I hereby nominate "I saw The Butler" in the self ethering Hall Of Fame, right behind "Nature moved to Marcy."

[Mandark]

Actor-driven, mid-tier movies are getting squeezed out generally, and it's going to be worse for black-cast movies which will have a smaller target audience to begin with.

What you should be pulling for is some high quality black scripted television.  Without David Simon's involvement, even.

[Phoenix Dark]

we gonna act like the Black Panthers didn't kill people and do some bad shit? Overall I think they did a whole lot of good, but come on. Especially in Oakland?

I've avoided nearly all news of this film outside of a Brietbart.com article that complained about Reagan being demonized, and the historically inaccurate portrayal of Teh Butler meeting Obama...even though Teh Butler attended the inauguration, was in the front, and almost certainly met Obama.

[Mandark]

Can't speak for Himu, but I think it's that these period political dramas tend to use the Panthers as a lazy symbol for a young character Falling In With The Wrong Crowd.

Civil rights good, radicalism bad, and have some iconic imagery with built-in emotional impact.  Saves us the trouble of honest character development or approaching our central theme with too much nuance or humanity!

[Himu]

I didn't say the black panthers didn't kill people, but the general media stigma of the panthers is that the black panthers were a negative set of people who were evildoers. The same is true for the nation of islam. I hate how people black wash both groups, set in the idea of never considering they ever did any good.

[Phoenix Dark]

yea but the white guy that slapped Jenny was a Black Panther. That told me all I needed to know about the Black Panthers during my pro-black teen years.

[Himu]

In Forrest Gump the black panthers were portrayed as a bad group simply by being associated with the fact that asshole slapped Jenny AND they all had guns. They deconstructed the entire motif of the black panthers struggle and made it in a joke. That pisses me off. Do you think Forrest Gump and The Butler are alone in this? I was this close to walking out.

[Himu]

Actor-driven, mid-tier movies are getting squeezed out generally, and it's going to be worse for black-cast movies which will have a smaller target audience to begin with.

What you should be pulling for is some high quality black scripted television.  Without David Simon's involvement, even.

I'm down with this.