it’s the comradeship of the women, pushing, encouraging each other that gets them all through. That’s the theme of the documentary, it turns out. The bonding that occurs between these women athletes, many of whom won’t make the team, yet who build lifelong friendships, and take away lessons that they say will hold them and push them through the rest of their life.
I can’t think of a better or more purely enjoyable way to celebrate Black History Month than watching Robert Townsend’s brilliant documentary Why We Laugh: Black Comedians on Black Comedy. It is showing on Showtime this month and will be available on DVD in April. It is hilarious and illuminating. And it is essential viewing because, as always, comedy is where the truth is told long before it is recognized by the journalists and politicians.
Rated PG-13 for some language including sex and drug references, and brief partial nudity
Profanity:
Some strong and crude langauge
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drug reference
Violence/ Scariness:
None
Diversity Issues:
A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:
October 9, 2009
Date Released to DVD:
February 16, 2010
Amazon.com ASIN:
B002TOJOY8
Chris Rock’s daughter wanted to know why she didn’t have “good hair.” And so he made this documentary as an answer, exploring the relationship between black women and their hair and hair products and processes — and how that relationship gives billions of dollars to an industry that can be exploitative.
Wildly entertaining and profoundly insightful, this is an exploration of image, economics, history, and standards of beauty. Nearly half a century ago, the ground-breaking “black is beautiful” cultural movement changed the way black and white Americans thought about beauty. It is seldom remembered that the key piece of evidence in the “Brown v. Board of Education” decision that led to school de-segregation was a series of interviews with black children who all said that the white doll was prettier than the black doll, thus showing that segregation was inherently unfair. This movie shows how complex and layered the challenge is and how powerfully media images of beauty can make us feel dissatisfied to get us to spend money to look different.
The movie has interviews with movie stars like Nia Long, Lauren London, and Meagan Goode. Surprisingly, none of them say that they have to have “good hair” to get jobs. They insist that they just like it. Maya Angelou says she had her hair processed for the first time when she was in her 70’s. The Reverand Al Sharpton explains that James Brown talked him into getting his hair processed.
Rock visits the Dudley Hair Products company in North Carolina, one of the few black-owned providers of what some women in the movie call “creamy crack.” He goes to India to discover the shocking sources of the exported hair. He tries to sell black hair but gets no buyers. And he goes to a hair competition and performance event that is simply indescribable.
This is a movie of enormous importance and good will and should be seen by everyone, especially mothers and teen-age daughters, to remind us that all hair is good hair and that beauty is more about how we feel than how we look.
“There are so many movies about love for the same reason there are so many movies about lost treasure and secret formulas and war battles and historical accomplishments, because love really is life’s great adventure,” says film critic Nell Minow, who has been reviewing movies as The Movie Mom since 1995.
“And we like to see movies about love for the same reason we like to see other movies about adventures — to experience the vicarious thrill, the challenge, the uncertainty and the happy ending. Long before there were movies, there were fairy tales, which ended with happily ever after….”
A great love story for Minow makes viewers believe the characters “get” each other. They won’t be happy every day but they ultimately will live happily ever after. Two of her favorite true-to-life romances are 1987’s “Moonstruck” starring Cher and Nicolas Cage, and 2004’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.
Much has been written about the prodigiously talented men who brought Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo to the screen. But if behind every good man stands a good woman, behind Walt Disney and his “boys”–the all-male assembly line–once stood 100. Walt was the impresario of a troop of young women, most under 25–a casting director’s dream of all-American acolytes–who made the screen light up, not with feathered swan dives or the perfect tip-tap of a patent-leather heel, but by making water shimmer or a tail wag just so. It was a job complicated by his unrelenting perfectionism–Jiminy Cricket required 27 different colors–but reducible to a simple imperative of the time: ever nimble but never showy, their job was to make what the men did look good.
I could not resist the opportunity to interview one other treasured behind-the-scenes woman, Marge Belcher Champion, famous as half of the dancing Champions of screen and stage, but known to Disney aficionados world wide as the real-live model for Snow White.
Champion was only 14 and still in school when she received $10 a day to act the part of Snow White for the Disney animators to use as their model. She later went on to partner with her husband Gower Champion in films like “Show Boat” and “Jupiter’s Darling.” But here she is helping the first Disney feature film come to life.
. It is showing on Showtime this month and will be available on DVD in April. It is hilarious and illuminating. And it is essential viewing because, as always, comedy is where the truth is told long before it is recognized by the journalists and politicians.