Author: Brooke Obie

I made it to Canada for the 50th Toronto International Film Festival!! Stay tuned for more from the best fest in the biz, but in the meantime, on this week’s Your Weekly Watch, Sept. 5 edition, I’m watching “The Truth About Jussie Smollett” that has an annoying question mark at the end of the title, which I’ll just ignore because yes, duh, obviously, we been knew. And “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish” which is about something way worse than the documentarians seem to realize or care about.

The Truth About Jussie Smollett

I didn’t need a documentary to tell me Jussie Smollett was innocent—but here we are, anyway!

For those out of the loop, back in 2019, Jussie was assaulted by two men who put a rope around his neck and called him racial and homophobic slurs. He reported to the police that the man whose face he saw was a white man. The notorious Chicago Police Department turned Jussie from a victim into a perpetrator by accusing him of paying two Black Nigerian brothers to assault him in order to gain public sympathy and put pressure on his bosses at Fox, where he was starring in the TV musical drama Empire.

One problem: the Chicago PD are known for lying, criminal cover-ups, and harming Black people specifically. In fact, they were actively in the middle of the cover-up of the murder of Black teen Laquan McDonald when they made themselves the victim of Jussie’s “hoax” of being assaulted. The math has never added up and this documentary shows previously unreleased exculpatory evidence and key witnesses that were ignored and highlights that Jussie Smollett’s conviction was overturned on appeal. Smollett also participated in the documentary, telling the same story he’s been saying from the jump—along with the corrupt Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson who led the case against Jussie and was fired for lying later in 2019. You can’t make this stuff up.

Missing surveillance footage winds up like a Rorschach inkblot test for the audience, and still shows how Smollett could’ve been telling the truth the whole time before his promising career and mental health were destroyed by the CPD and a scandal-hungry media. Journalism is the real winner of this doc, and I hope we see more of it.

Unknown Number: The High School Catfish

This documentary about a small-town high school freshmen couple Owen and Lauryn, who receive harassing and obscene text messages from an anonymous, unblockable number for a year and a half has set the internet ablaze. It’s salacious and the culprit behind the unknown number is a gag. It quickly hit number one on Netflix’s most watched list. But what seems lost in these kinds of documentaries is that there are traumatized children involved, and perhaps this shouldn’t be entertainment. The Owen and Lauryn are still teenagers today, though the harassment led to the abrupt end of their love story. The crimes against them were so close to home and recent enough that healing is a long way off. There were no mental health professionals interviewed in the documentary to put the obvious yet downplayed pyscho-sexual issues that the culprit displayed into a medical context for the audience, let alone the culprit themselves. I hate to say spoiler-alert about real-life events, but I will at least say trigger warning: this is a documentary about pedophilia and not even the documentarians seem to realize that. Anyway, the story is harrowing and —I hate to say this even more, considering the source, but—you’ll find a more compelling story about this tragedy in The Cut, which includes much of the missing context from this low-rent documentary.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

It’s time for another edition of Your Weekly Watch! This week, I’ve got docs, I’ve got Black sci-fi, I’ve got Black travel, and if you’re an LA local, I’ve got the best way to watch a movie. Here we go:

Demascus

In this Tubi original series, the Afro-Future comes to life as a Black man in his 30s, Demascus, tries to heal from the grief of his mother’s death. A true dramedy, Demascus allows a Black man’s mental health crisis to launch him into other possible worlds through immersive virtual reality therapy. Think Black Mirror for Black people. Guest stars like Martin Lawrence and Janet Hubert bring the comedy, and the pilot is one of the funniest I’ve seen in awhile. The laughs wane as the season continues and the finale ends with a bit of a bait-and-switch that seems obvious in retrospect considering the low-stakes way that the pilot ends. Because this kind of ending is such a taboo in the sci-fi genre, I’m shocked the writers went there. But the love letter to Black motherhood, the exploration of Black male mental health and the genuine laughs keep you through to the end. Though Tubi rescued this long-shelved AMC series, it’s yet to be seen if the streamer will give them a season 2. AMC made a mistake dumping the series and hopefully Tubi will cash-in on its better judgment.

Demascus is streaming now on Tubi.

Songs from the Hole

One of my most anticipated films of the year is here! I’ve been following abolitionist and artist Richie Reseda, the film’s EP and composer, for years, so I knew that this documentary about how music saved his incarcerated friend would be powerful. I should’ve known that it would be abolition in motion. Directed by Contessa Gayles, who also did the excellent doc on Reseda, The Feminist on Cellblock Y, Songs from the Hole tells the story of artist JJ’88, a Black man who was imprisoned as a teen for murdering another teen and given more than a life sentence. After being put in the “hole,” or solitary confinement, he began writing songs to help him survive his crushing punishment, to forgive and to hope for forgiveness. Part documentary, part narrative, part visual album, Songs from the Hole is a gorgeous meditation on healing toxic masculinity and breaking generational cycles. It’s thoughtful, it’s searing, it’s painful, and, just like abolition itself, well worth the effort.

Stream Songs from the Hole on Netflix.

Fit for TV: The Reality of the Biggest Loser

I was unprepared for the reality of the Biggest Loser. Though it was one of the biggest shows on TV while I was growing up, I never paid any attention to it. But I did know that the world hates fat people, and after watching the new Netflix docuseries exposé, I see why The Biggest Loser was so successful. It’s the perfect outlet for the hatred of fat bodies. Fat people made to punish their bodies, punish themselves for the world’s entertainment. They even had a spinoff for children! People almost died doing this show and as long as people were losing weight (temporarily) or no longer fat (temporarily) that was enough of a foundation upon which to build a financial empire.

I’m surprised to see all the comments suggesting that the docuseries is boring and nothing “that bad” happened. We really, really, hate fat people as a society. But what I saw in the show was a reckoning, not just for the most awful people involved—Jillian Michaels, Bob Harper, creator David Broome and E.P. David Roth, to name a few—but for a society that has decided that fat people deserve whatever they get for being fat.

Though the series offers no real solutions, it’s interesting that it ends with a bashing of the GLP-1s people have turned to to quickly lose and keep off weight. Until we fix society’s hatred of fat people, there will always be people willing to do whatever it takes to be free, not just of fatness but of fatphobia.

Fit for TV is streaming now on Netflix.

Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross

I am a solo travel girl. As a travel writer, most of my trips are solo and for work. Though I enjoy family vacations and girls trips, I really enjoy doing what I want to do, when I want to do it. It’s peaceful. It’s fun. I enjoy my own company. So, when I saw the commercial for Tracee Ellis Ross’s new Tubi docuseries Solo about her traveling the world alone, I was in! My kinda content. Unfortunately, this is more Rich Person in Resorts than Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Tracee is charming and her confessionals about loneliness in her 50s, being unpartnered and coming to terms with not having children are the best parts of the show. But my appetite for rich people selling their unattainable lifestyle back to the rest of us as inspiration is non-existent.

I don’t want to see the world through its most luxurious resorts and whatever chauffeurs, desk clerks, shopkeepers and waiters she happens to interact with while there. I want to discover new parts of the world and the people who make it, not watch her sunbathe or take a resort cooking class. The thing about peaceful solo travel is that it can also be boring to watch someone else do it! I don’t want to see her crashing other American tourists’ dinners on camera as a sprinkle of spice either. You’re in Morocco! Meet some Moroccans who aren’t your day-laborers and aren’t trying to sell you something.

The title was the clue. This is a show about Tracee for Tracee and people who want to be like Tracee (rich with fancy clothes) when they grow up. It was never meant to be more than that. And it’s working! The series was so popular for Tubi that season 2 has already been ordered, so the structure of the show likely is what it is. And if it inspires women to know that life doesn’t end if you never get married or have children (and are also generationally rich and can travel the world), then fine. But I’ll need a more compelling reason to tune into a second season.

Solo is streaming now on Tubi.

Greenleaf

The OWN soap is leaving Netflix in September, so if you like colorism and church mess, hurrup!

Jurassic Park and Alabama Shakes at The Hollywood Bowl

If you are an L.A. resident or visitor and you’ve not been to the Bowl yet (or in awhile) what are you waiting for? The outdoor arena and public park just set the stage for two of the most incredible L.A. experiences I’ve ever had in my seven years as an Angeleno.

The first was watching Jurassic Park on a massive screen with one of the best orchestras in the world, the LA Phil, playing the iconic John Williams score live. Sure, you can stream the film at home on your nice TV, but watching it at the Bowl? I felt like I was eight years old again, seeing it for the first time, but this time sitting enraptured til the credits rolled instead of hiding from the scary parts in the bathroom.

Yes, it’s a fantastic movie that never gets old, despite how ancient the technology now looks. But it’s the community aspect that heightens the experience. Imagine: 18,000 superfans surrounding you, dressed up like characters from one of the best films of all time. As a Covid Competent girlie, I wear my mask in these kinds of crowds so I don’t miss a thing (except viral airbone diseases!). The shared vibration was palpable and made everything funnier, everything scarier, and gave every win more reason to cheer. We’re clapping when Sam Neil, Laura Dern, Samuel L. Jackson, B.D. Wong or Jeff Goldblum make their entrances or say an iconic line; we’re cheering when the T. Rex eats the right ones. And it reminds me why I love movies; why I love watching movies in a crowd of movie-lovers.

But the technical aspects of the Bowl make it an experience never to forget. I can only describe the sound in the Bowl as an explosion. Thanks to the acoustics of the shell-shaped stage and the perfection of the LA Phil, I felt like I was in the movie. It was only when I looked down from the screen at Dudamel’s invigorating conducting that I remembered the orchestra was playing live—it was that immersive of an experience. Reader, I wept. It was one of the most perfect summer nights I’ve had in this town.

Then came Alabama Shakes!

The next Wednesday, I went back to the Bowl to see Brittany Howard, lead singer of the Alabama Shakes, sing the song that got me through the Great Lockdown of 2020. Like everyone else in the world at that time, I was crashing out and catching up on shows like Fleabag (brilliant show!) which ended on a heart-wrenching yet hopeful note, thanks to the Alabama Shakes song “This Feeling.” I immediately made a playlist that I named Pandemix (ha) and put “This Feeling” at the top and played it on repeat for literal years.

Last Wednesday, let me tell you: Brittany’s mic was on, and she sounded exactly the same as her records. The clarity. The character. The depth. The range. Ms. Mamas has it all, and looked fantabulous in a metallic silver dress that announced her southern divatry before she even opened her mouth. Throughout the show, she masterfully switched between guitars while holding the crowd in her hand and never missing a beat. Standout performances were of course “This Feeling,” and her popular jam “Don’t Wanna Fight,” but I may have a new favorite song in “Over My Head.” She’s gonna give you a show and make you beg for an encore, as only the best divas can do.

Coming up at the Bowl!

If you’re ready to see some magic, there’s some more John Williams score performances with clips from Star Wars, Hook, E.T., Jaws, and more all weekend. You can bring your own food and alcohol too, so don’t worry about going broke!

Plus next week Charlie Wilson & Babyface next week. African artist Angèlique Kidjo & legendary cellist Yo-Yo-Ma; Cyndi Lauper’s farewell tour and the Black Movie Soundtrack coming in September. Special thanks to the LA Phil & Hollywood Bowl for the press tickets and I’ll see y’all at the Bowl!

Stay watchin’

Brooke

*SPOILERS FOR THE PLOT OF HIGHEST 2 LOWEST*

There’s an electrifying scene in Spike Lee’s latest film Highest 2 Lowest where Denzel Washington is facing off with A$AP Rocky in a recording studio. In this remake of the Akira Kurosawa 1963 classic High and Low, Rocky plays a rapper named Yung Felon who has kidnapped and ransomed a child in music mogul David King’s life for $17.5 million dollars. Denzel plays the mogul King, who’s out for revenge. When Felon finds out his baby mama told King some embarrassing information about him, Felon calls his old lady a “bitch” under his breath. King pipes up:

“Why she gotta be a bitch?”

“Why she gotta be a bitch?”

“Why she gotta be a bitch?”

We don’t know if King actually repeats the question three times; it’s a Spike Lee tic where lines of dialogue or action repeat in quick and sometimes overlapping succession. And Felon neither answers nor acknowledges the question(s). But this extra emphasis in the final edit is practically begging for the audience to acknowledge that at least he asked!

This is the extent of Spike Lee’s feminism.

Though I reviewed the film more fully for Contraband Camp where I didn’t mention this scene, I might’ve let Lee’s refusal to engage with past critique about his portrayal of women go if not for this one, repeated, infuriating line of faux depth.

Incredibly—in a film centered around the toxicity of the music industry in late stage capitalism, and an aging, out-of-touch patriarch who’s nicknamed King David — Spike Lee doesn’t swim a drop deeper than that.

At the beginning of the film, when King shares that he’s lost his passion for the music business, it’s because of the rise of A.I. and the “attention economy” that’s obscuring the “real music” he longs for. He’s certainly not crying or reflecting over his role as a pusher of the rampant misogyny in hip-hop. Seriously, how many times was King in the studio, on the other side of that producer’s glass, listening to his artists spout misogyny without blinking? We can safely bet King’s interaction with Yung Felon where he’s trying to son and one-up the man who took everything from him was King’s first and last time objecting to the word “bitch” coming out of a rapper’s mouth.

In fact, instead of any analysis on colorism, sexism and ageism in the music industry in this post-#MeToo era, Lee simply perpetuates all of these things with his paper-bag test visual language.

As I mentioned on Contraband Camp, every woman who is supposed to be viewed positively—as beautiful, as talented, as desirable—is biracial or Latina. Light-skinned women surround King at home, at the gates of his office and even inside it. Faceless, G-stringed, BBL’d asses bounce up and down beside and behind Yung Felon in an imaginative rap performance for the King.

Where brown men from King to his son Trey to his main opp Yung Felon abound on screen, Lee fills out scenes with light-skinned background women like real-life celebrities Ice Spice and Princess Nokia to solidify King and his record label as the center of culture. The only dark-skinned woman character in the film is a cop who unironically touts Spelman College and “Black woman excellence” while working for the loathsome NYPD.

But Lee gets the colorism, ageism, sexism trifecta in his casting of the main woman “lead.”

Want Gina from Martin to play Denzel’s wife? Don’t call the original and age-appropriate Tisha Campbell, who would’ve looked just as gorgeous and had better chemistry with the star; cast the lookalike who is 30 years younger than Denzel, give them a 17-year-old son, and pray the audience can’t add or subtract.

If Ilfenesh Hadera who plays Pam King could act, I would’ve still talked shit might have let this slide too. Instead, when her character gets the news that Yung Felon has kidnapped their son Trey, she reacts like her card just declined at Tiffany’s. Maybe it’s for the best, then, that Lee and screenwriter Alan Fox stripped her character of her role as the emotional core of the Kurosawa original.

In High and Low, when a poor man kidnaps a wealthy man’s chauffeur’s son by mistake, the wealthy man’s wife begged her husband to pay the ransom anyway and save the chauffeur’s son, even if it meant a life of poverty that she had never known. In Highest 2 Lowest, however, when Mrs. King finds out that it wasn’t her son after all but the chauffeur’s son that’s been kidnapped, her response to potential poverty is essentially “fuck that kid.” That could have been an interesting twist on the character—not your typical, soft-hearted wife, but the ruthless, capitalist, #BlackExcellence queen who feels entitled to her throne, even if it costs a child his life.

But Lee refuses to tell us anything substantive about her character or commit to making the rich people the real villains, even as they contemplate letting their “godson” die. Lee is, after all, a very rich person. An anti-capitalist manifesto this is not. And thinly written light-skinned women are par for the course in a Spike Lee Joint.

The epilogue of the film sees King leave his long-time, toxic, corporatized, soulless, capitalistic music label behind and start something new, something authentic. And which artist does he use as the launching pad for his revolutionary new start? An up-and-coming Doechii? The next Lauryn Hill? An undiscovered Amber Riley? An emerging Jill Scott? Surprise! It’s the same kind of Ice Spice and Princess Nokia artist that surrounded him at his old label: young, skinny, extremely light-skinned, and scantily clad. His son Trey literally touts the new artist to King by describing her as “a more-light-skinneded-ed Zendaya.” Be so fucking for real.

I refuse to believe this is unintentional.

During the production of Lee’s 1988 film School Daze, which didn’t “tackle” colorism as much as it perpetuated its existence on screen, the aforementioned diva and star of the film Tisha Campbell recently shared that Lee also treated the light-skinned actresses better than the dark-skinned actresses behind the scenes. Beyond giving the light-skinned girls the name “wannabes” and the dark-skinned girls the actual racial slur “jiggaboos” in the script, behind the scenes, Lee put the male actors up in a nice hotel with the light-skinned actresses like Campbell and the dark-skinned actresses in a worse hotel. “It was to create real method chaos, right? It was a social [experiment], absolutely, to create the true tension,” Campell said. “And it worked.” This was colorist violence then and it is now. Lee’s continued unwillingness to differentiate between analyzing colorism and perpetuating it in his filmmaking is a shame.

And Lee has been shamed before.

In 1986, Spike Lee premiered his first film She’s Gotta Have It. Nola Darling is the titular “she,” a Black woman in New York who loves having sex with multiple partners. But the film is told not from her perspective, but from the men’s with whom she has sex. Black feminist icon bell hooks castigated Lee for this in one of the most iconic and necessary reviews of any film, “Whose Pussy Is This?” She writes:

It is the men who speak in She’s Gotta Have It. While Nola appears one-dimensional in perspective and focus, seemingly more concerned about her sexual relationships than about any other aspect of her life, the male characters are multidimensional. They have personalities. Nola has no personality. She is shallow, vacuous, empty. …[Lee’s] imaginative exploration of the [B]lack male psyche is far more probing, far more expansive, and finally much more interesting than his exploration of [B]lack femaleness.

The film is one year younger than I am. This review was published in hooks’ book Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies in 1996. Lee has been pulling these shenanigans for basically the entirety of my life! hooks, God rest her, could’ve written that same review today about Highest 2 Lowest. Imagine how tired we are.

Though Alan Fox’s script is the weakest part, Denzel and Rocky still make a lush playground of their characters while the women don’t exist beyond their roles as accessories for them. Lee is simply uninterested in exploring the Black women characters in this film with any depth. At least this time there’s no pretense: Highest 2 Lowest is after all, a story by men, about men, for men.

But Lee still remembers hooks’ critique decades later.

In 2018, at the press junket for his Oscar-winning copaganda film Blackkklansman, I interviewed Lee about critics—Boots Riley had just come down on him about making a cop the protagonist in a story about the fight against anti-Black racism—and Lee dropped hooks’ name and film review unprompted:

“With every film, it’s something,” Lee told me, not considering Riley’s criticism specifically. “She’s Gotta Have It is ‘misogynist;’ School Daze, I was ‘airing out the dirty laundry;’ Do the Right Thing, ‘Black people are gonna riot;’ Mo’ Better Blues, I’m ‘anti-semitic;’ Jungle Fever, I’m ‘against interracial relationships;’ “bell hooks had an article called, ‘Whose Pussy Is [This]?,’” he laughed, remembering the scathing essay.

But, he still acknowledged that there could be room for growth:

“No one’s going to do any art form that long and there’s not going to be criticism that’s legit,” he said. “So, if the stuff’s legit, you try to reconfigure based on what the criticism is and just keep stepping.”

Lee must’ve found the wide criticism of his past copaganda compelling enough to “reconfigure” Highest 2 Lowest. This is, after all, a remake of one of the most iconic police procedurals. And since it is set all over Lee’s beloved New York City, inevitably, he would feature one of the most loathsome, corrupt and infamous police departments in the country: the NYPD. As I wrote for Contraband Camp, I was nervous about what his portrayal of the NYPD would be going into the film because it was reported in 2018 that Lee was paid over $200,000 for consulting on NYPD community policing ads during the height of the movement for Black lives. But that lambasting Lee got from the Black community in 2018—specifically, from another Black man, Boots Riley—must’ve paid off.

Highest 2 Lowest subverts the police procedural model of the original by making the NYPD little more than racist, classist, incompetent obstacles to progress. In that regard, it’s practically a documentary. Instead of the police being the brilliant detectives they were in the Kurosawa original, King and his chauffeur Paul (an always great Jeffrey Wright) team up to track down Yung Felon. The film’s theme is King’s refrain (and perhaps a mea culpa from Lee on that $200K): “All money ain’t good money.” That is also the extent of Lee’s criticism of capitalism.

There is some good stuff in the film. Denzel is at his best and A$AP Rocky rises to the occasion. Lee’s two gorgeous train set pieces rival Kurosawa’s original. And the chorus of Rocky’s much-played song “Trunks,” in the film, is an earworm. I can’t stop saying “Shout out to my felons / boy we caught another felony!” As I wrote in my review for Contraband Camp: “With flash and thin substance, amazing performances and little to say, Highest 2 Lowest runs the gambit and lands firmly in the middle.” But when it comes to Lee’s portrayal of women, 40 years later, not a thing has changed.

As Bojack Horseman’s grandfather said in one of the best episodes of the eponymous animated Netflix show: “As a modern American man, I am woefully unprepared to manage a woman’s emotions. I was never taught, and I will not learn.”

That is Spike Lee’s legacy too.

Stay Watchin’,

Brooke

***BLACK MEN! If you do want to unlearn patriarchy, Black Girl Watching is hosting a Zoom book reading and discussion of bell hooks’ The Will to Change. SIGN UP HERE!***

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On July 31, at the Black social club The Gathering Spot in LA, Black Girl Watching had our second Club Juke! A ‘Sinners’ Watch Party & Discussion live event on my 40th birthday. We shut the place down, had valet coming inside to bring us our keys cause they were closedddt! I’m so grateful for every Watcher who came out and enjoyed themselves at the Juke! I’m grateful for every paid subscriber, you help me put on these live community events! You made my year! Watch the recap video here:

This was the 12th time I’d seen the film and the 8th time I’d introduced it to people I love. My godparents, who don’t really watch movies like that and had never been to a screening and discussion before, drove down from northern California to celebrate with me. Old friends, new friends and Sorors, joined us at The Gathering Spot, which had free popcorn for guests and a full dinner menu and bar; Warner Bros. provided movie posters and church fans of the characters; Clean Air Club LA provided air filters for the space and face masks; and I photoshopped myself onto the movie poster for the cake. It was my (and Wunmi Mosaku’s!) birthday, after all! And we watched the film that has been transfixing me since April and had another incredible discussion about the themes, the characters, the music, the subtext.

People ask me why I love this film so much that I would name it the best film of all time on my Top Ten Black Films list for the Black Movie Hall of Fame:

And I’ve written about the themes, the metaphors, the ending:

I’ve written about the urgency of Black history films like Sinners:

I’ve written about the film’s significance in the industry:

With ‘Sinners,’ White Hollywood Is Moving the Goalposts Again (Industry Critique)

And I’ve curated an entire syllabus to help people go deeper on the film’s themes:

GET 20% OFF AN ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION TO BLACK GIRL WATCHING

But I haven’t yet written about why Sinners feels so personal to me. Why I keep watching it like Coogler put roots on me or something. It took me three watches to understand its pull, myself. It was that final shot of Sammie that got me. He’s smiling wide, riding in a shiny car in the country with his big cousins, the whole world laid out before him, on the path to freedom. Then it all came rushing back.

TRIGGER WARNING: ALCOHOLISM.

I had a big cousin named Eddie. He was tall and beautiful. A man of few words and a protector like Smoke. And also the life of the party and everyone’s favorite, like Stack. The two pics I can find that’s just me and him were from my graduations. He was at all of them, gassing me up. He encouraged my gifts. He was kind. Five years older and five inches taller than me, he wouldn’t let nobody mess with me. He knew everything about hip-hop and I would sit enraptured as he argued our cousin Coty down about why Jay-Z was still a better rapper than Nas, even after Ether. He was brilliant. He had a masters in science and worked at NASA for awhile, before things got bad.

Riding in his black Ford F-150 pick up truck on country roads growing up—that was freedom! So high off the ground I swore we were flying in that thing.

On the 4th of July, after the family reunion, when I had turned 16 and got my license, Eddie let me drive his truck. I was terrified and thrilled. The truck was the biggest thing I’d driven and there weren’t street lights on those country roads. But I wasn’t about to pass up that honor. I drove him down pitch-black roads, over gravel and through woods to the high school where we met up with his friends and watched the fireworks all night. I didn’t realize I was the designated driver, and he never made me feel that way—only like I belonged wherever he was. I was his lil cuz and his friends had to watch their mouths when they spoke to me. I had never felt so grown and safe and happy.

The last time I saw him was also on the 4th of July at another Obie family reunion, 9 years later. But there were no fireworks warning me that a shift was taking place. His leaving was quiet, or maybe I just didn’t want to hear it. I’d gone out with my uncle on a hayride tour of our family farm and by the time we got back, Eddie had left the reunion early. I didn’t get to hug him. I didn’t get to say goodbye. He died two weeks later. I didn’t even know he was sick. I mean, I knew he had alcoholism. But I’d seen so many Delta Slims in my life, old-heads who’d numb the pain with drink for decades on end. Why would I think it could take out my 30-year-old cousin?

He was a football player. He was a boxer. He was young. Eddie had time. In 2006, the summer I turned 21 and lived with him and his big sister, I now had to drive him everywhere in my little green VW Jetta because his license had been suspended. Driving him around felt more like a gift than a chore because he was still my favorite and I was on a mission to save him. But I was so mad at him too for being sick. At 21, I didn’t understand the disease and at 26, neither did he. He would pat his six-pack abs and say drinking didn’t bother him like other people, and what did I know anyway? It was the first time we’d fought for real and I longed for the childhood arguments over whose turn it was to race on the Nintendo Power Pad or why he chose his sister to win the cousins singing contest when she was clearly rapping. Seeing him that disconnected was the first time I was scared for him. Alcoholism is scary to witness; I can only imagine how scared he must have been to be trapped in it. I didn’t know enough not to push, not to seek control. But he never stopped being kind anyway. Taught me how to fish that summer. Taught me how to run on my tippy-toes instead of flat-footed. Every time I run or hike and adjust my posture, I see him running next to me on that black tar road that summer, teaching me, like a movie playing over in my head. As the years pass, the resolution gets fuzzier around the edges and the image skips, but in my mind, he’s still laughing and smiling and alive.

***********************************

In 2015, while Ryan Coogler was away from home working on Creed, the biggest film of his career at that time, his great uncle passed away. He didn’t get to be with him. He didn’t get to say goodbye. His uncle loved the blues and whiskey, so Coogler would play his uncle’s favorite artist, Buddy Guy, and drink whiskey to remember him. To conjure him. Ten years later, Coogler gave us Sinners, a film about the power of art to wake the dead, and pierce the veil, and fold time in on itself so we can all be together again. Past and present and future all at once. No loved ones lost to time but all around us, filling the empty spaces, catching the same groove. In the end credits scene, when Vampire Stack hugs Buddy Guy as elder Sammie, it was Coogler bringing his uncle back to life for one last hug and bittersweet goodbye. Art, he insists, is the proof: we were never separate; there never was a veil.

Throughout the film, Smoke and Jedidiah tell Sammie to put the guitar down, do something sensible, do something responsible and stable. Singing the blues only leads to misery, financial instability, drunkenness, sin. But Sammie knew the holiness, the sacredness, the conjuring power of his art. Once he felt that, he couldn’t let it go for the world.

I am living the risks of the artist’s life. I’ve seen the other ways to be, had access to the quiet choice. And sometimes I wonder why I can’t help but choose the storm. I keep writing and dreaming and creating and watching, despite the chaos—or because of it—because I know that power too. I’ve seen what art can do. I’ve felt it. I chase it.

People ask me why I keep watching Sinners: Because for 2 hours and 19 minutes, Eddie is alive again, and so am I. We’re in his truck riding towards freedom, floating above gravel and black tar roads, a whole world of adventure before us. And I can say hello again. And I can say goodbye. So, why wouldn’t I?

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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If you or someone you know struggles with alcoholism, there is help.

What a time to be alive! On the heels of an AMAZING Club Juke live event last week here in L.A. (recap coming soon, I promise! I’m only one person, become a paid subscriber so I can hire some help!!) we’ve got a very Black, very historic, very Diasporic list of films and TV in this week’s Your Weekly Binge Watch.

Yes, I am doing a name change of this BGW regular segment because I believe in the power of words and decolonizing language. ‘Binge’ is a word associated with eating disorders and has been used as a descriptor of TV-watching without breaks as a way to describe our insatiable and unhealthy TV consumption habits. I get it! But I want to be more intentional about not using this word out of its original context and careful not to trigger anyone managing these disorders by using the word casually when it’s just unnecessary and all I wanna do is tell y’all what I’m watching this week and help you decide if you should watch it too! So, let’s go back to Wakanda, take a whimsical trek across the globe in an air balloon, and revisit the man-made horrors in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in this week’s Your Weekly Watch:

Eyes of Wakanda

Pretend it’s a Saturday morning in the ‘90s and it’s time for one of the best animated series you’ve ever seen. Get into Eyes of Wakanda, Ryan Coogler’s latest foray into the fictional central African nation that he first brought to life in 2018’s live-action Black Panther. It tells the story of the nation’s spies (War Dogs), like Nakia or N’jobu from Black Panther, who have been sent out into the world on secret missions to recover stolen Wakandan artifacts in different time periods, pre-dating the 2018 film by centuries. Each of the four episodes in the limited anthology series follows different spies in different countries, adding exciting twists to tales you might have heard before, like the origins of the Trojan Horse and Achilles’ heel in Greek mythology. The underlying theme is, at any time you can think of, and any lasting story you’ve heard, Africans were there, whether we’d eventually wind up erased from the narrative or not. And that our only hope for survival is to think about what our descendants need, even hundreds of years into the future, and act accordingly. Time is a loop in this gorgeously animated series that deserves more seasons to explore this lush world on screen.

Watch Eyes of Wakanda on Disney+.

Freakier Friday

I know people hate reboots, remakes and sequels, as they often come at the expense of Hollywood greenlighting original stories. And that’s valid! I usually don’t mind them, though—if they exist to fix the sins of the past iteration rather than for just a soulless money grab. Freakier Friday is both. Specifically naming the anti-Asian racism in the 2003 mother-daughter body swap iteration, Indian director Nisha Ganatra set out to address immediately.

“It was something I brought up right away when I had my first meetings with the producers,” Ganatra told Entertainment Weekly. “I had a moment of the presentation that was like, ‘problematic Asian representation!’”

She fixed that by bringing back the two magical Asian restaurant owners who cast the body-swap spell in the last version and allowing them to be regular people in this version. Imagine! She also hired the very hot Manny Jacinto (who will always be Jason Mendoza to me), to be Lohan’s love interest and allowed the Filipino-Canadian actor to play in a British accent (take that, colonizers!) and show off his dance moves and physical comedy. He deserves the world and I’m happy he gets to do a little something in this otherwise awful movie. But you fix “problematic Asian representation!” and add anti-Blackness? Okay.

X Mayo (The Blackening) is the only Black woman character, and she exists to be background in Manny & Lindsay Lohan’s meet-cute, and humiliated in a food fight for comic relief. Jordan Cooper, whom I love, is also reduced to Lohan’s comic relief servant assistant who feeds her green juice as soon as she walks through the door. There weren’t even any Black characters in the 2003 iteration, and maybe that was best if this is as deep as their imagination can go for Black characters.

Pretty immediately after the body-swap happens in this film, we’re subjected to a barrage of ageism, with Jamie Lee Curtis mocking how horrific her wrinkle-filled old face and body look for laughs. Sure, her character has been swapped with a teen girl’s, but has our timeline also been swapped with 2003? It’s played. It’s tired. They should’ve kept this in the Disney Vault.

Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time

This five-part docuseries on the Black New Orleans victims of the outrageous man-made disaster that started and followed Hurricane Katrina is one of the most harrowing things I’ve watched all year. Produced by Ryan Coogler and his Proximity Media banner, this docuseries centers the survivors telling their stories and highlights the monumental failures of George W. Bush, FEMA director Michael Brown, Governor Kathleen Blanco, the city of Algiers, NOPD Police Chief Eddie Compass and the entire NOPD, Bill O’Reilly and the entirety of the mainstream press, (Soledad O’Brien notwithstanding) and more. This documentary series is a long-overdue reckoning.

Twenty years later, I admit that my memory had faded. I was a senior at Hampton University in 2005, and president of the Sociology Club when we put on an event to welcome Xavier and Dillard student transfers that September, and to educate Hampton students on what had transpired. The first “film” I ever made was for this program, a simple slideshow of images set to“Hurricane Song” which documented the horrors that Black survivors faced, being left on rooftops as the floodwaters rose. I’d forgotten all the horrors within horrors. What Coogler has done, once again, is create an archive of Black life; a tonic for the wound; a remembrance. This is spirit work that they’re doing over at Proximity Media, so that we will never again forget. It’s devastating. It’s enraging. It gave me nightmares. The images from Katrina side-by-side with the images coming out of the U.S.-Israeli genocide of Palestinians show how hateful and destructive white delusion of superiority is and how all of our struggles are connected. Katrina—caused by oil companies drilling off the Gulf Coast and the U.S. military—is a byproduct of white delusions of supremacy, capitalism, and environmental racism, just as the US-Israeli genocide in Palestine is, making this docuseries both urgent and timely, as we connect our struggles and find ways to heal and fight back. The survival of the world literally depends on it.

Watch Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time on Hulu.

Washington Black

Sterling K. Brown is on a roll over at Hulu, executive producing and starring in his second series for the platform this year, Washington Black. Based on the novel of the same name, this series departs from Brown’s earlier sci-fi production Paradise, as a historical-fantasy series that celebrates Black genius. Beginning during slavery in Barbados and traveling from the American South to Canada to Antarctica, to Africa, Washington Black tells the story of the titular child prodigy, George Washington Black, whose imagination became the source of his freedom.

Pay no attention to the uneven accents, or the insistence on yet another white-passing woman character who longs to be Black. Though I did roll my eyes at both in that opening episode (and there’s truly no reason for the insecurity revealed in these ever-changing accents—COMMIT TO THE BIT!), it does eventually become clear why this white-passing woman is so intent on being Black when this feels more like modern-day propaganda rather than a regular occurrence during literal slavery and Jim Crow eras. But anyway! Get past these two annoyances and you’re off to the races on a fantastical, family-friendly adventure around the globe in a hot air balloon with a brilliant Black scientist who will one day learn that whiteness will never be his savior. Only reconnection to his Africanness and the bolstering of his own imagination will set him free.

Watch Washington Black on Hulu.

The Woman in the Yard

Justice for Danielle Deadwyler. She’s starred in two widely overlooked films this year, 40 Acres and now The Woman in the Yard, where she gets to be vulnerable and badass and confront the challenges of motherhood under pressure on a family farm. In the psychological horror film, The Woman in the Yard, Deadwyler plays a mom in grief as she cares—or barely cares—for her teen son and young daughter in the aftermath of her husband’s recent death in a car accident. One day, a woman dressed in funeral attire, a black veil over her face, comes and sits in the yard of their farm. The haunting figure forces buried family truths to come to light. Though the ending is a bit sloppy, the beautifully shot and almost great film is still a worthwhile watch (even for the scaredy cats), as it explores the horrors of grief and mental health when children are depending on a mother’s wholeness. Deadwyler is so close to getting the role that will make this industry stand up and pay attention to this deserving talent.

Watch The Woman in the Yard on Peacock.

Side Pieces

• I and Black Girl Watching received a 2025 Rotten Tomatoes Critics Grant to attend the Toronto International Film Festival next month! Whoo! BGW launched last December with films I saw at TIFF ‘24, so I am thrilled to be going back and to have the support of Rotten Tomatoes, a regular traffic source to this platform, as I build on everything BGW can be. We outchea!

• Good news! She’s Dead! And Just Like That…has been canceled after three horrible seasons, and just like that, our long, waking nightmare of hatewatching is over and we are free to hate watch something else! Any suggestions? I’m thinking Love Island: Beyond the Villa, because now that I know I was *always right* about that snake Kenny being fake, I can keep watching this boring Love Island season 6 spin-off show with the underlying context of all my fave PPGM gang, JaNa, Serena, Leah and Miguel navigating life not knowing there’s a viper in the mix, and that will give this poorly structured, overly-Connored (seriously, why is Connor there?!) snoozefest a much-needed edge.

• The list of the 100 Best Black Films of All Time has been released by Shawn Edwards’ Black Hall of Fame, and I was asked to contribute my top 10 list. Though I do not stand by the order or the entrants on the official 100 list, I stand by my top 10! Here’s my list:

  

  1. Sinners (2025) BEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME IDC IDC IDC!

  2. Moonlight (2016) literally the only other film that made me feel the way Sinners does!

  3. Nope (2022) a masterpiece and Peele’s best work, fight me!

  4. Eve’s Bayou (1997) absolute classic. Foundational filmmaking here.

  5. The Color Purple (1985) note the date!

  6. Daughters of the Dust (1991) free on Tubi go stream it right now!

  7. Sorry to Bother You (2018) our anti-capitalist legend Boots Riley

  8. The Watermelon Woman (1996) Cheryl Dunye is and has always been that girl!

  9. Beyond the Lights (2014) Gina Prince-Bythewood is the way, the truth and the light!

  10. Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul (2022) stream it now on Peacock and tell me I’m wrong! I’m so jealous I didn’t write this film. Go, Ebo Twins!

What’s on your top 10 Black movie list? Let me know in the comments!

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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***SPOILER ALERT FOR STAR WARS, ANDOR AND ROGUE ONE BELOW*****

It should come as no surprise that the Star Wars franchise about an alliance of rebels fighting against an evil Empire is anti-fascist. Since the original trilogy (OT) began in 1977, the Rebel Alliance, also known as the Resistance, has had a single goal: to liberate the galaxy from its fascist overlords.

Across films and planets, we see the storm troopers of Empire invading, colonizing, exploiting, looting and destroying, keeping the people in fear and under tight authoritarian control. Threats to Empire lead to entire cities—entire planets—being annihilated at its leader Emperor Palpatine’s command. What better way to keep people hopeless and compliant than through constant state-sponsored terrorism?

But while the OT and its three prequels and sequels focus on the force-sensitive Skywalker family of Jedi knights who can manipulate energy to their will, for either evil (Darth Vader) or good (his children, Luke and Leia), the prequel series Andor gives us something different.

Starting 5 years before the first Star Wars film, A New Hope, the Andor TV series follows Captain Cassian Jeron Andor, a skilled thief and fighter pilot with a serious vendetta against the Empire. They colonized his home planet of Kenari, hanged his father and genocided his people. But he’s got no deep love for the Rebellion—at least not at first. Throughout its two seasons, Andor features no Jedi knights, no superhuman powers, no force magic or ancestral ghosts pushing everyone forward, just a ragtime bunch of ordinary citizens facing extraordinary enemies and rising to the occasion.

Where the OT is a campy, family-friendly adventure, Andor is gritty and grounded, exposing not only the Empire’s atrocities but their aftermath on all creatures, the air and the land. In real life, the consequences of fascism couldn’t be higher and Andor takes us deep into the lives of the unsung heroes of the rebellion so we can feel every blow—and feel the bittersweetness of every victory.

With this visceral writing led by showrunner Tony Gilroy, the two-season story of Andor, complete with its grand finale film Rogue One (also co-written by Gilroy), is not only the best Star Wars story Lucasfilm has ever told, it’s also one of the most important TV shows in history. (Seriously, I’m telling my kids that the OT is Andor, Rogue One and A New Hope, it’s that incredible.)

Black feminist writer, filmmaker and activist Toni Cade Bambara once said, “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” Gilroy and his team have done just that, crafting a compelling series and film that both awakens the audience to our fascist reality and provides a guide to anti-fascist resistance.

“I’m writing about how I feel about all the revolutions, about all the insurrections,” Gilroy says of his intentions behind Andor and the obvious parallels critics are drawing between the show and current events, like the Ghorman massacre in season two and Palestinians being genocided by the US-Israelis in real life; and the infamous Empire of Star Wars and the continued rise of fascism in the West. “People legitimately fail to recognize how puny their individualism is. The narcissistic belief that you live in some unique time — it’s shocking. We all do it. I do it. That is not the pattern of history,” Gilroy says.

Recognizing this pattern of history is the first step in a storied anti-fascist tradition.

Know Your Enemy

Before Andor ever accepts his destiny as a revolutionary, he was very clear on who his enemy was. In season one, through flashback, we meet him as a young boy called Kassa on his homeplanet of Kenari, taking care of his even younger sister. Their dress and tribal marks suggest an indigenous culture—a sharp contrast to the colonial spaceship that crashes on their planet. With nowhere for his rage for all that the Empire has stolen from him to go, Kassa takes it out on the Imperial ship. With tiny fists and a rod as a weapon, he tears the ship apart. Though he was soon rescued and adopted by rebels Maarva and Clem Andor, renamed Cassian Andor for his own safety and therefore escaped the fate of the rest of his people, Andor never forgot that his enemy was that system of power and every cog in the wheel that kept it turning.

Knowing Andor’s background of oppression, revolutionary leader Luthen Rael recruits Andor to the Aldhani Heist in season one, promising a bigger blow to the Empire—and a bigger payday than the petty crimes Andor’s been committing on his own. This effort to steal an Imperial sector’s quarterly payroll in order to fund the rebellion would take place on Aldhani, another exploited planet, with another genocided and ethnically cleansed population, the Dhanis. Like Hawaiians, the Dhanis had been pushed into the lowlands as the Empire turned their sacred valleys into military outposts. Just hours before the heist, an imperial soldier brags in front of his soon-to-be assailant that there used to be 15,000 Dhanis who would sojourn that day for the holy ceremony of the Eye that the Heist team is using as a cover for their mission. That small number had been stomped down to 60! The Enemy brags about their terrors, not knowing that their arrogance will soon lead to their downfall.

Though Andor was only on the planet as a mercenary and not yet a revolutionary, Luthen knew enough to connect the dots Andor wasn’t yet interested in seeing—Kenari yesterday, Aldhani today, and any planet could be tomorrow. To know your enemy, pattern recognition is key.

“The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness,” Maarva says via hologram at her funeral in the season one finale. “It is never more alive than when we sleep.” Wake up to the patterns in history that are alive today.

When the Empire and its propaganda arm, Imperial News Now, spend season two manufacturing consent for the eventual genocide of Ghorman, recognize CNN, BBC, Fox News and state governments in western settler-colonial countries colluding to manufacture consent too. Ghorman wasn’t a threat to the Empire, it had mineral resources under its surface that the Empire needed to build the Death Star. Gaza, like Iraq, has oil. Congo has cobalt.

When you see Andor kidnapped by Imperial soldiers and arbitrarily imprisoned indefinitely on Narkina 5, and you see immigrants in America kidnapped from the streets and trafficked indefinitely to a concentration camp in El Salvador, think: what is to prevent this Empire from labeling literally any person in America a criminal and trafficking them indefinitely to a labor camp?

America was built on genocide of Indigenous people of Turtle Island and Africans and our enslavement too. It can only maintain itself with more genocide, more enslavement. Just like the Empire didn’t stop with Kenari, Aldhani or Ghorman, our Empire won’t stop with Turtle Island, Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, or Haiti. Our Empire won’t stop with “undocumented immigrants,” either. Jedha City’s fate was a practice run for Scarif and Alderaan, just like police brutality against Black Lives Matter protestors was a practice run for the bipartisan police attacks on anti-genocide student protestors. Who’s next?

Think of this reality as corporations slash jobs in favor of A.I. labor, corporate buy-backs, shareholder profits and CEO bonuses—and our government criminalizes homelessness and triples down on investments in private prisons. Won’t we make a convenient free labor force when the laws adapt to the needs of the prisons’ profits? There’s only one way out.

Right before the genocide, Ghorman’s senator Dasi Oran wouldn’t stand with secret revolutionary Senator Mon Mothma to end the arbitrary imprisonment of residents, because Oran believed compliance and appeasement with Empire would ease Ghorman’s suffering. He did not know his enemy and, ironically, wound up arrested in the Senate halls of Empire and either indefinitely imprisoned himself or likely executed for treason after all of his compliance.

In the aftermath, Mon Mothma stood alone in the Imperial Senate to call the genocide of Ghorman a genocide, because it wasn’t just one political party that was corrupt and complicit—it’s named the Imperial Senate, after all. Mon Mothma fled the facade of politics to join the real revolution underground full-time because she knew her enemy was not confined to a party. It’s the system itself that birthed cowardice.

Black and brown people have long-since peeped the Empire’s lies of “democracy” and “equality.” The fascism we know well has spread so that white Americans can now feel it too, but it’s not new; it’s simply the imperial, colonial, white supremacist boomerang coming home to roost. The Empire has divided us into hierarchies along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability so that we would punch down on each other instead of up at our Enemy’s neck. This is how Empire keeps us under control. But this is not our natural way of being.

“The imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural,” says Nemick, the youngest member of the Aldhani Heist team, in a section of his manifesto that bookends both the season one and series finale of Andor. It’s why our Empire is so violent to trans and gender non-conforming people; why it must beat women, Black people and Indigenous people into submission and rob us of our rights and existence. If this submission were our natural state, instead of liberation, the Empire wouldn’t need to exert so much effort to try to enforce their will on us. “Oppression is the mask of fear,” Nemick says. “Remember that.”

Think of the guards in the Narkina 5 gulag, shivering behind locked doors when the enslaved rebellion of the prisoners led by Andor and Kino Loy begins. The guards know that the numbers aren’t on their side. There’s only one way out: If we know our Enemy—if we are to win—it must be the Empire of the 1% versus the resistance of the 99%.

Know Your Power

“We’ve grown reliant on Imperial tech and we’ve made ourselves vulnerable,” Nemick records in his audio manifesto. “There’s a growing list of things we’ve known and forgotten. Things they’ve pushed us to forget,” he says, and I can’t help but think of our tech overlords shoving A.I. down our throats on every platform. Google search is essentially non-functioning, spitting out A.I. slop instead of vetted news results. Students are openly admitting to cheating their way through school, using ChatGPT to think and write for them. They can’t even write their own emails or status updates, let alone essays. The Empire is rewriting its racist history, banning books, firing librarians, co-opting museums, and strong-arming universities because when we have time to think, to learn, and read and share ideas in community, we are a danger to the Empire.

Knowing this, the principled rebel commits to liberation by not falling into Empire’s obvious traps. Using generative A.I. not only atrophies the minds we need to think and fight back, but also steals the work of artists, destroys the environment—particularly poisoning Black and brown communities in America —and exploits Kenyan workers with $2/hour slave wages to operate it.

To free ourselves of Empire, we must free ourselves of reliance on Imperial tech. We must see ourselves in all the exploited laborers, all the cut down trees, all the wasted water discarded in its service. The principled revolutionary knows that our futures are inextricably linked.

Boycotting corporations and tools that fund genocide, destroy the environment and that are otherwise meant for our harm, empowers us to not only bring down Empires like Jim Crow in America in the ‘60s and Apartheid South Africa in the ‘90s, and Apartheid Israel today, but also frees us from the deceptive comfort and ease that these tools and corporations provide, making us principled and thoughtful with where we spend our dollar. As we divest from the complacency of comfort, we invest in an ethic of revolution.

To become this dangerous collective, we must also understand every aspect of our individual power. As we see in the series pilot episode, Andor’s trauma of leaving his little sister behind on Kenari led him straight into the revolution; it turned him into a dependable warrior who would never again leave a comrade behind. Because he studied his enemy and could successfully infiltrate the Empire, he turned his petty thievery and his survival skills as a pilot into a full-on and relentless assault on Empire, completing mission after mission for the Resistance.

“One fighter with a sharp stick and nothing left to lose can win the day,” reluctant rebel Jyn Erso quotes her mentor Saw Gerrera in Rogue One, and I can’t help but think of Palestinian professor and poet Refaat Alareer. In October 2023, in the months before his assassination in Gaza by zionist invaders, he said through tears in an interview: “I’m an academic. The toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade …I’m going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I would be able to do.”

Our pain and trauma can be fuel to change the world. Our skills and gifts can be weapons. Think: what has my life experience prepared me to do for the Resistance?

Know Your People

“I have friends everywhere,” is the code phrase for rebels to recognize each other as on the same team. Deeper than code: the phrase epitomizes the Alliance. The team that pulled off the legendary Aldhani Heist was made of a thieving mercenary, a former storm trooper, a current lieutenant of the empire, two badass lesbians, and a prodigious manifesto-writing kid, bankrolled by a rich senator and organized by a former Imperial soldier-turned art collector with an incredible lacefront wig. As my grandma used to say: “It takes all kinds to make a world.”

Skeen—the 7th Heist member who turns on his team in the end—didn’t understand that. When the former storm trooper asks Skeen to cover him so he could rescue their other team member Vel, Skeen just doesn’t do it, and the former storm trooper gets shot quickly. Earlier, Skeen mentions to Andor how upset another team member was to learn of their comrade’s storm trooper days, but it appears to have been a mask for Skeen’s own feelings. But people come to the revolution when they come to it. If they have skills and knowledge that the revolution needs and are taking steps to be accountable and trustworthy—like risking life and limb to rob an Imperial bank to fund the revolution—then there must be space for defectors to join. In more ways than one, Skeen proved he was no revolutionary in the end and Andor killed him for it.

Likewise, after the Heist, Luthen sends his rebel assassins to kill Andor, as the only uncommitted loose end who could turn Luthen over to the Empire. But even after Andor realizes that Luthen is trying to kill him, he recognizes that Luthen is not his enemy—only the Empire is. After all he’s seen, survived and given to the rebellion for pay, Andor’s now a believer, ready to be all-in for the cause. “Kill me or take me in,” Andor challenges Luthen who laughs with joy that Andor is joining the revolution at the end of season one. Recruiting Andor ends up being one of the greatest decisions Luthen makes for the Resistance. Andor goes on to help and save so many people and he is also helped and saved many times, in return.

This is in complete contrast to Syril, the Imperial cog in Ghorman who’s been facilitating the genocide on his girlfriend, Lieutenant Dedra’s behalf, without even knowing what she or the Empire were really up to. He dedicated his life to the so-called law and order of Empire, only to be played and dismissed by the very system that cannot by its nature value its expendable devotees. Empire only tolerates compliance—it has no need for morality or justice, as these threaten its existence. Syril believed himself on a righteous hunt for justice when he pursued Andor to his own peril. He didn’t know his enemy, and in the end, he blames and tries to kill Andor for his own poor choices and lack of foresight. Isolated and alone, hated by the Ghormans for his betrayal of them, Syril is killed out of nowhere by a Ghorman resistance leader in order to save Andor—a decision that ultimately saves the galaxy.

The Empire wants the revolutionary to feel vulnerable, alone, depressed, outgunned, outmanned and crushed under its boots. But the true revolutionary is never alone; all over the world people are waking up and joining the Resistance. “I have friends everywhere” is both a mantra and a conjuring. It includes people we’ve yet to meet—people we’d never expect. “Rebellions are built on hope,” is a common refrain in Andor. And a community of people down for the cause are what sustain it.

Know Your Sacrifice

One of the greatest things about Andor is its refusal to romanticize a revolutionary life. Andor and Bix are so scared and plagued by what they’ve done for the revolution—and what has been done to them—that they can’t necessarily count themselves happy together. Over the course of their two-year rekindled relationship, Bix had been seeing the signs that Andor was compromising the Resistance out of fear of losing her. When Andor is ready to quit the Resistance and go be happy with Bix on a planet far, far away, she knows she must leave him. A force-sensitive healer confirmed for both Bix and Andor that he had a special calling, and Bix knew he would never leave her willingly. So she sacrifices being together so that he can pour his all into the rebellion. “If I’m giving up everything,” she says, “I want to win.”

Vel and Cinta, Luthen’s top rebels and the badass lesbians from the Aldhani Heist also can’t seem to make a revolution and a romantic relationship work. When Vel tries to get closer to Cinta, Cinta tells Vel she already knew the deal from the jump: “The rebellion comes first. We take what’s left.” Like the Jedi knights that came before them, it seems that fear of losing love is not only a distraction from purpose but also, like we see with Anakin/Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith, a path to the dark side.

But their inability to sustain both romance and revolution should not be mistaken for a belief that a revolutionary must sacrifice love. Though hate for Empire may be many a revolutionary’s entry point, it is in no way a sustaining emotion. Indeed, as Che Guevara once said, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”

Andor and Bix don’t stop loving each other, nor do Vel and Cinta. What they sacrifice, instead, is the part of themselves that values their own safety, comfort and love above everyone else’s. Their love is not safe from Empire until everyone is safe from Empire.

Luthen might be the one who gives voice most clearly to what a revolutionary sacrifices:

“Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything!”

Finally caught in Lieutenant Dedra’s trap by the end of season two, Luthen stabs himself, his mission of funding an operating rebel base on Yavin 4 and passing information about the existence of a planet-killing weapon to his confidante Kleya now complete. He burned his life building the Resistance and in the end, it’s only Kleya and Andor who show him gratitude and fight to make sure his sacrifice was worth it. There’s just no guarantee.

In the series finale, Vel—who lost Cinta in a rebellion on Ghorman—urges Andor to reconnect with Bix before it’s too late. She must know that Bix has had his child, even if Andor doesn’t know. He says he’ll do it when there’s time but he’s off to his next mission to pursue Luthen’s intel on the Empire’s potentially nuclear weapon. And he’s out of time. He dies in Rogue One in a blaze of that nuclear weapon just moments after completing his final mission, fueling a sunrise he’ll never see.

The famous opening crawl of 1977’s A New Hope (which picks up immediately after the events in Rogue One) simply declares that the Rebel Alliance has achieved a big victory against the Empire by stealing the plans for how to destroy its Death Star weapon. It doesn’t even mention Andor or his sacrifice—nor the dozens of other rebels in the fleet who died on Scarif for this bittersweet victory.

For every Kleya that Andor could rescue, he couldn’t save his own sister. For the child of Galen Erso (who built the Death Star with its fatal flaw) that Andor protected until their bitter end in Rogue One, he would never even be able to meet his and Bix’s own.

“You think I’m crazy?” Saw Gerrera asks. “Yes, I am. Revolution is not for the sane. Look at us. Unloved. Hunted. Cannon fodder. We’ll all be dead before the Republic is back and yet, here we are.”

But oh, “If I must die… in a blaze— and bid no one farewell, not even to his flesh, not even to himself—” Refaat Alareer writes in a poem before his murder in Gaza, “let it bring hope. Let it be a tale.”

You do your part; you run your race and pass that baton forward until the sun rises and the revolution comes.

Know Your Endgame

Before I was bullied by my friend Charles into watching Andor, I had never taken any interest in a non-Skywalker Star Wars story. I hadn’t seen Rogue One until Monday, after I finished my Andor season 2 screeners. I was unprepared for how gutting it would be to see Andor and Galen’s daughter Jyn Erso destroyed on Scarif in the nuclear blast of the Death Star. To see Andor grow from a vengeful thief into a loving revolutionary; to watch him survive two seasons of countless attacks, blaster burns, spaceship crashes, two enslaved uprisings, two genocides, an Imperial bank robbery, and the nuclear blast on Jedha City at the beginning of Rogue One just to die a short while later in a second blast in Scarif, made me feel the way Empire wants us to feel. Emotionally destroyed. Depressed. Defeated. Hopeless. One of the realest revolutionaries in the galaxy was taken out by incompetent unmitigated evil. Is this victory? What was it all for?

Then I rewatched Episode IV: A New Hope. No, Andor’s name is never mentioned and his and Jyn Erso’s sacrifice to get Leia the plans to destroy the Death Star don’t seem to be known by any of the main players in the OT film. But a whiny farmboy from Tatooine who happened to also be a damn good pilot himself, takes those plans, let’s Jesus take the wheel, and drops two bombs exactly on the target, destroying the Death Star at the end of the movie.

For all of the many times since college that I’ve seen A New Hope, I have only now on this rewatch actually cry buckets of tears—of sadness and joy. We know the sacrifice it took to win this victory. We know what was lost to win. In that context, everything is more precious; everything has more weight; everything means more.

When I think of the structure of Star Wars—the original saga starting in the middle at Episode IV, going forward in time, then backing up to the beginning; Andor picking up right after Episode III and Rogue One leading into Episode IV—I think about Toni Morrison’s first novel. In The Bluest Eye, she tells the entire story on the first page and dares the reader to continue. “If he turns the page,” she said in her documentary, The Pieces I Am, “it’s because he wants either to find out how it happened or he loves the language.”

In these Star Wars sequels and prequels, we already know how the story ends: Darth Vader and his two Death Stars will be destroyed, the Jedis will reemerge, the Force will awaken and return to balance—the endgame is that the Resistance will win. The Empire will fall. The people will be free. Everything else is just the “how” — and a lifetime’s worth of beautiful language.

“You made this decision long ago,” Andor reminds a young revolutionary who asks him for reassurance as she fears her imminent death. “The Empire cannot win. You’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them. You’re coming home to yourself. You’ve become more than your fear. Let that protect you.”

I watched this opening scene of the rare but still nameless Black woman revolutionary having this moment with Andor in the season two premiere and I couldn’t help but think of Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

I watch this series and I think of the Tonis—Morrison and Cade Bambara—I think of Assata. I think of Angela. So, if I have any criticism of Andor, it’s the same one I have had for all of the Skywalker-driven Star Wars properties since 1977—where are the revolutionary Black women of consequence in this story???? In real life, Black women are foundational thinkers and creators of revolutionary art. To have not one Black woman revolutionary of any significance in Andor’s story arc seems like a bow to the racist fanbase that has a conniption whenever a Black woman or non-white person gets to do anything significant in fantasy. The principled anti-fascist knows their enemy and doesn’t comply in advance. Despite this glaring oversight, Gilroy gave us something eternal; he ran his race and passed the baton forward with visuals and language—the language!—that will rattle in the brain until it spur is onward in revolutionary love.

“There will be times when the struggle seems impossible,” Nemick says in his manifesto that’s now been spread around the galaxy by the season two finale, long after his mid-season-one death. “I know this already. Alone unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy, remember this: freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

“Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere and even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.…Remember that. And know this: The day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.”

Never forget that original creator George Lucas set this entire revolutionary franchise not in the future, but “a long time ago.” These stories of anti-fascism take place in the past to spark a guarantee for us that fascism will not be our future. Today, we’re witnessing the dying gasps of Empire and we already know that we will win. The Empire will fall. The people will be free. With every step forward, we write the how.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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In the two weeks since my seventh watch of Sinners, I’ve been looking around like that meme of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. What now? While paid subscribers can expect an exclusive, full syllabus on the groundbreaking film this week(!!!), I have managed to pull myself away from it, in order to watch some other stuff. Here’s your weekly binge:

Andor: The season two finale of the best Star Wars show yet premieres on Tuesday and if you’re not yet caught up, or put on, this is the week to do it. I’ll have a deep-dive on Andor after the finale, but until then, know that it is even more radical than Severance, as Star Wars has always been about anti-fascist resistance. Featuring enslaved rebellions, citizens kidnapped and sent to foreign labor camps indefinitely, and one politician brave enough to call a genocide a genocide on a livestream, Andor hits particularly close to home as fascism continues to rise in the real world. Though it’s not without its flaws, Andor features some of the best antifascist writing on T.V., like this gem of a peptalk that the title character gives a scared rebel who’s losing her nerve as she’s facing certain death: “You made this decision long ago. The empire cannot win. You’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them. You’re coming home to yourself. You’ve become more than your fear. Let that protect you.” Hot damn! And that’s just from episode one. Buckle up for the ride of your life.

Andor is streaming now on Disney+.

Forever: Legendary T.V. showrunner Mara Brock Akil (“Girlfriends,” “The Game,” “Being Mary Jane,”) is back with an all-Black adaptation of Judy Blume’s most-banned book, the Y.A. romance Forever. Starring my favorite girl, Lovie Simone (“Greenleaf,” “Stella and the Spades”) as Keisha and newcomer Michael Cooper, Jr. as Justin, Forever captures the beauty and heartbreak of falling in and out and in love in your teens. Simone’s leading-lady talents have deserved this spotlight for a long time and Cooper is perfect as her sweet, neurodivergent forever-love. Set in 2018 with a fire soundtrack to match, the show balances warm nostalgia with the bitterness of predominantly white institutions built to break Black kids. Simone’s Keisha gets the worst of it. Trigger warning: in a sharp turn from the relatively conflict-free plot of the book, Keisha is the victim of an ex-boyfriend’s revenge porn and is summarily slut-shamed for it by both peers and adults. Though it’s “realistic” that parents can be horrible, if Keisha simply *had* to go through something this traumatic for the sake of the plot, I do wish that Keisha and Justin’s moms had reacted in a less stereotypical and a more healing and loving way. It’s a TV show, after all—why re-trigger when you can heal? The lesson of the show: hire Wood Harris (“The Wire,” “Creed”) to be a wholesome dad in everything and stop sending your Black children to white schools.

Forever is streaming now on Netflix.

FYC SEASON

It’s the most wonderful time of the year and L.A.’s best season: Awards. This is when studios trot out their star shows to hobnob with critics and awards-voters “for your consideration.”

Severance: At the Severance FYC, I got to chat up Adam Scott about how revolutionary the show is and I got my own Lumon Sever’d Floor employee badge:

Watch my recap video on IG here, read my Severance pieces here, and stream Severance on AppleTV+.

MO: At the MO FYC, I got to meet the man himself in my Mandela Hirbawi keffiyeh and enjoy his INCREDIBLE falafel tacos from the show. I asked Mo if his unrelenting truth about the genocide in Palestine led to the show’s cancellation after a fantastic season two, which I reviewed back in February here. We’ll never know, but one thing is for sure, he left it all on the field and told a true, powerful, heartbreaking and hilarious story of Palestinian resistance and survival and should be so proud.

Watch my recap of the event on IG:

Stream Mo on Netflix.

Government Cheese FYC: I had the pleasure of moderating AppleTV+’s new show Government Cheese with showrunner Ayesha Carr (“Everybody Hates Chris,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine) after a screening of the first two episodes. The surrealist comedy follows David Oyelowo’s Hampton Chambers as he leaves prison for fraud and tries to reconnect with his wife and kids in 1970s Simi Valley, CA. Because I hadn’t reviewed the series before being a paid moderator, I’ll refrain from reviewing now, but you can stream the series on AppleTV+!

ABANITU: A story on my directorial debut feature film Abanitu was featured in the May 2025 print and online editions of Inside Nova Magazine! Following five generations of the Obie Family, ABANITU tells our 119-year-history owning land in North Carolina as we heal through the indigenous practice of farming and face heart-breaking challenges when people try to separate us from the land. You can read the story here, and of course, stay tuned to Black Girl Watching for updates on when and where you can watch my debut film!

Brooke on the Island Fever podcast talking Sinners:

I took my friend Krit to see Thunderbolts* and it was fine! Immediately after, we hopped theater screens to see Sinners (my 7th time, his first!) which was way better! Then I joined him on his podcast Island Fever to break down the film:

Fiona Apple(?!) “Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)” – Speaking of revolutionary, new anthem just dropped from Fiona Apple! I’m so sorry, Fiona, I was unfamiliar with your game. But apparently the iconic singer is not new to being woke, she’s true to it. She spent two years as a court watcher where she saw thousands of women be incarcerated before even being convicted of a crime simply because they could not afford bail. She channels the rage of this injustice into her new song, “Pretrial (Let Her Go Home).” The music video features images of real women, mothers and the families and communities destroyed by pre-trial detention. Her rallying cry “Let Her Go Home” doubles as a website to facilitate bail fund donations. Watch and donate here:

The revolution will be live streamed on YouTube.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

For the past two delicious weeks, there’s been little else on my mind besides the full course meal that is Sinners. I’ve now seen it seven(!!!) times, written a deep-dive, taken different friends to see it, and had the most enlivening conversations about it.

Out of all of the best and worst analyses that I’ve seen so far, the most confusing has been the idea that some Black people don’t want to see a movie set in the Jim Crow South because they don’t want to see any more “slave movies.”

Never mind that Sinners is set in 1932 Mississippi—about 67 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the civil war. Though I’m certain a lot of these folks got their history tests and English essays returned to them face down in school, I still won’t fault people for accusing Ryan Coogler’s best film yet—and one of the greatest films of all time—of being a “slave movie.” Through Miles Caton’s character Sammie and Omar Benson Miller’s character Cornbread, we see what life was like for Black sharecroppers picking cotton in the Mississippi Delta. Through Del Roy Lindo’s character of Delta Slim, we see how the Black Codes—which restricted Black people’s newfound “freedom” by policing and criminalizing their activities after slavery—led to Black men being imprisoned for the smallest things like “vagrancy” and being forced to work on chain gangs to give the state the free labor they’d lost when the south lost the civil war.

Just as it traces the history of music through the blues—from R&B to country to folk to hip hop to house—Sinners also traces the evolution of slavery. Both sharecropping and chain gangs were the next iterations of the violent institution, and both did their part to keep Black people in America from freedom. The reason Michael B. Jordan’s twin characters Smoke and Stack were underwater financially on the opening night of their juke joint, Club Juke, was because the Black sharecroppers who came to party were paying with wooden nickels—currency that they could only spend at the general store of the plantations that they worked on.

Yes, even in the 1900s, up through the middle of the century, Black people were still trapped on plantations, picking cotton. And for all the audience hand-wringing about not wanting to see “slave movies,” most commenters didn’t know that fact. They’d never heard of wooden nickels. They know nothing of Reconstruction or the Black Codes. And that’s the point.

At the announcement of any new movie even tangentially related to Black enslaved people in America, the online groans from Black audiences are nearly audible. While most people would be hard-pressed to name more than 10 actual “slave movies” in the past 50 years, “I’m tired of ‘slave movies’” is a frequent social media refrain. Still, usually, there’s a good reason.

Typically, in the “slave movie” genre, enslaved Africans in America are central to the plot, or at least the backdrop of the story, and often face extreme violence. There’s often copious use of “n****r” and other racist slurs, as well as the prominence of a white savior for white liberals in the audience to project their fantasies on to of how they would’ve behaved “back then.” (Hint: whatever you’re doing now is what you would’ve done then.) The purpose of these films is to inform audiences about the horrors of chattel slavery while also, weirdly, occupying that entertainment space. It’s a complicated dichotomy. It’s exhausting and, for many Black audience members, traumatic.

But the problem with these films is not that stories of enslaved Africans are being told on-screen. Often, it’s about which stories are being told, who is telling them, how they’re telling them, and why.

The films in the genre that Hollywood studio heads and financiers usually green-light and champion are the ones that eroticize stories of Black enslavement and promote white savior narratives. The last corporate-approved addition to the genre is 2020’s Antebellum, a film so masturbatory in its commitment to eroticized Black trauma that its co-directors and writers, Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, put Quentin Tarantino and Django Unchained to shame.

Starring Janelle Monaé, Lionsgate’s Antebellum rips off the premise of Octavia Butler’s brilliant novel Kindred but doesn’t even have the guts or the skill to follow through on Butler’s inventive explanation for why a modern-day Black woman finds herself back in antebellum slavery. Instead, the audience is subjected to brutal and gratuitous rape scenes and other horrific violence, mainly against Black women, until an enraging, underdeveloped plot twist appears.

Aggressive in its pointless cruelty to its Black women characters, Antebellum underscores how dangerous it can be when men tell Black women’s stories.

We’ve seen this before.

In Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, the true story of Solomon Northup features directorial choices that gratuitously and heinously zero in on the repeated rape of Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) who is then, separately, whipped by Northup. The excuse of the story’s historical accuracy still doesn’t answer the most important question: Why? Why tell this story of a Black man who is forced into slavery and whips a Black woman nearly to death and then leaves her behind when his white boss finally comes down south to rescue him? Why do we need to see that story on-screen?

Some say we need to educate viewers who don’t know the truth about slavery. But where does education stop and eroticized Black trauma begin?

In the 2016 film The Birth of a Nation, about enslaved revolutionary Nat Turner, writer and director Nate Parker invented a gang rape of Turner’s wife that did not exist in her story. That film flopped, as gang rape allegations from 1999 against Parker and his co-writer Jean Celestin resurfaced during the press tour, raising even more questions about the irresponsible use of sexual assault in the film. Even Kasi Lemmons’ 2019 Harriet refuses to avoid gratuitous violence against Black women. Here again, Monaé stars as a fictional Black woman whose sole invented purpose is to die violently on-screen at the hands of a fictional Black man bounty hunter.

Even as Lemmons chose not to focus on the most brutal elements of slavery in the film, one still must contend with the emotional violence of fabricating the vast majority of Harriet Tubman’s narrative, as if to say her truth was not good enough; deifying Tubman instead of spotlighting her humanity; and skipping over her White enslavers and hunters to create a Black man villain who never existed in her story.

Though it can be of small comfort, at least when Black filmmakers tell these stories, Black people are the main characters.

When white storytellers have full rein to tell our histories, we’re assumed lucky to be the vehicles whom the white savior characters drive to glory. White filmmakers who are obsessed with telling stories of anti-Black racism curiously never want to deconstruct their own. That’s because the white savior’s role in a “slave movie” is not to examine or indict whiteness as a power structure. Their role is to redeem whiteness as a social construct and to protect the fragility of the white audience. Which is why “slave movies” with white saviors, like Django Unchained, Glory, and Lincoln, are so useless to activate any measure of real social progress in the present day.

The 1997 film Amistad had the potential to both educate audiences on the 1839 rebellion of kidnapped Africans on the slave ship La Amistad and inspire rebellions in the present day. Instead, Steven Spielberg’s film continued the genre’s pattern of white savior uselessness by focusing on the white lawyers battling in an American courtroom over whether the rebels were kidnapped people acting in self-defense or if they were property.

The choice to tell this story and tout its “truthfulness” only serves to underscore the “goodness” of whiteness and the legal system it created—the very same system that had legalized slavery in the first place—as well as to normalize the conditional nature of Black humanity.

We can and must do better than this.

At its best, a full-bodied film told from the perspective of enslaved people and centering on Black people processing, surviving, and overcoming trauma — instead of fetishizing Black trauma — could spark more than just another tired and fruitless conversation with white America. It could educate its audience on the foundations of every facet of modern American life and inspire a path forward in the present day with intent to dismantle these continuing systems of oppression.

When Alex Haley’s Roots miniseries came to television in 1977, it was the most thorough and most thoughtful depiction of West African life before, during, and after being enslaved in America. Though largely fictional, the series centered its Black characters, their humanity, their culture, and their resistance to white supremacy over generations. Roots disproved the lie that Black life begins and ends with slavery and inspired generations of Black people to learn their family histories, reject white supremacist narratives, and reconnect to Africa.

We’ve also seen the evidence of dramatization bringing about swift social change in Ava DuVernay’s 2019 miniseries, When They See Us. In the first weekend after the critically acclaimed series told the 1989 story of the five Black boys falsely accused and wrongfully convicted of a rape in Central Park, a global outcry from audience members resulted in the lead prosecutors in the case being forced out of their prominent and lucrative positions. The series also fanned the flames of the growing police abolition movement, perfectly illustrating how the police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and “the whole damn system is guilty as hell.”

Though the story of the Exonerated Five is traumatic, DuVernay illustrates how writers and directors can process Black trauma on-screen without exploiting or fetishizing it. She achieved this by centering the Black audience — mainly the five boys, now men, who would relive their trauma by watching the series. Even the most painful scenes are imbued with empathy and love for the Black audience. When Black people are the target audience, there’s no desire to rub our faces in our own trauma as one does when the goal is “educating” and “bringing awareness” to white audiences.

We’ve yet to see the full social impact of Coogler’s Sinners beyond its historic box-office wins in these first two weeks in theaters, but we have seen a filmmaker center a Black audience in a Black story that deals with Black trauma and is also triumphant. Because this story is for Black people, Coogler does not indulge in gratuitous images of anti-Black violence. A powerful example of this is in Lindo’s stunning scene of Delta Slim recounting the lynching of his friend Rice. The audience only hears faint audio of the lynching in the background as he tells this story—an incredibly effective bit of sound design that allows us to be in the moment with Delta Slim as he remembers it, without forcing those violent images into our brains. And when the inevitable anti-Black violence does come, the victory, in life and death, is ours. That’s how you tell a satisfying liberation story.

Though it is painfully cis-hetero in its presentation of Black life in a Mississippi Delta blues scene that was historically full of musical Black queer folk, Sinners still achieves its aim to be a balm for the grief of what and who we’ve lost in our quest for freedom, and a thesis on how we pursue it: We may not see freedom in this lifetime, Sinners suggests, but we can fight like hell for it and revel in the moments—whether hours or days—when we feel the most free. This is a story worth the cost to tell it.

And good luck telling an American story without slavery because everything about this American life is rooted in slavery. It is the haint that haunts this country’s past and permeates our present and future.

We don’t have the luxury to be “done with slave stories” when slavery is so clearly not done with us.

When the wildfires raged in California this past January, incarcerated firefighters who have historically been the ones fighting these capitalist-made disasters, were forced to risk their lives for the state for less than $30 a day. In the 2020 pandemic lockdown, our capitalist overlords sent essential workers into a pandemic —and many to their deaths —without even a $15 minimum wage, to save the economy that slavery created and maintains to this day. This is slavery! As homelessness and the cost of rent and basic necessities rise, billionaires and their hangers-on like Gayle King brag about joyriding in space subsidized by our tax dollars. As we beg for free healthcare, our government sends billions of our tax dollars to the zionist state to fund theirs—and to facilitate the genocide of the Palestinian people and their land—all while telling us this is the best our country can do for us.

The powder keg of revolution was struck in the summer of 2020, as millions died of covid and millions more lost their livelihoods. Our political overlords have spent decades protecting corporate interests over people, including granting trillions of dollars in pandemic funds to corporations that pocket the money, firing the employees who were supposed to benefit. In July 2020, 30 million American residents didn’t have enough food to eat as unemployment skyrocketed. When the system of policing murdered George Floyd, the explosion of global uprisings shook the ruling class to its core. White politicians kneeled in kente cloth sashes to get Black folks to stop burning down police precincts and setting cop cars on fire. The entertainment industry posted black squares on Instagram to feign solidarity in order to quiet down the evidence of racism in its institutions. And all the while the ruling class was ramping up the police state so that nothing as effective as the 2020 protests could ever happen again.

Biden declared the Covid pandemic emergency over—not because it was ever actually over; in 2025, more than one thousand people still die every week from COVID! Biden wanted our unemployed asses back in the fields making money for this country at the expense of our own health so we wouldn’t have the time the pandemic lockdown gave us to be out in the streets. And when college protestors encamped at their universities beginning in 2023 to protest the U.S.-Israel genocide of Palestinians and their universities’ roles in funding it, Biden created such a fascist hostile infrastructure to punish them that Trump is merely building upon the foundation democrats have laid, kidnapping and incarcerating international students and the deporting immigrants to concentration camps around this country and in El Salvador.

Today, ICE continues its bipartisan reign of terror, detaining and separating even U.S. citizen children from their families and forcibly sterilizing migrant women with our tax dollars. Just last November California voted AGAINST abolishing the slavery of prison labor. With homelessness being criminalized across the country, and private prisons making a killing selling incarcerated people’s labor to the highest bidder, where do you think we’re all headed if we can’t organize right now to abolish prisons and police?

If ever the moment were ripe for “slave movies”—-let’s reframe this: abolition movies—-that could facilitate an understanding of how slavery has shaped us all in the present day while also providing further impetus for healing and upending these systems of oppression once and for all, it’s now.

As the demonic despot continues his attacks on Black history as “divisive narratives” and “indoctrination,” and Hollywood studio executives eagerly rolled back their black square promises to comply with his anti-DEI orders, it’s no wonder this industry won’t allow an abolitionist genre to live up to its potential and tries to aggressively undermine it when it does. Our history is being erased before we’ve even had the chance to know the half of it. But our ancestors have been silenced long enough, and their stories deserve to be told.

The first long-form story I ever wrote was my debut novel Book of Addis: Cradled Embers, inspired by the revolutionary real life of an enslaved girl Oney Judge, who defied her enslaver, George Washington, and lived to tell her own story. My debut documentary film Abanitu, tells the story of my great-great grandmother Lucy Obie, the first generation of our family out of slavery, who bought land to farm in 1906 that five generations of Obies have expanded and continue to steward 119 years later. Facing my past and studying our ancestral history of survival has prepared and empowered me for the fascist United States of today.

There are so many more true and revolutionary stories of enslaved Africans in America that deserve wider audiences — like and Mum Bett and William Dorsey Swann (the first known drag queen!). There are so many reimagined stories on the evolution and impact of slavery like Sinners left to tell. (Imagine missing out on the loving miracle that is Sinners!) Our ancestors had keys, life lessons, tactics and skills that we could be using today against an evolving enemy. When we honor our revolutionary history of struggle and survival, trauma and triumph, our ancestors’ stories from the past can be our healing, our power, and our strength in the present.

Shake off the anti-Black shackles that teach us that slavery is our shame to bear. Enslavement is white history. Survival is ours. And liberation in this lifetime is in our future. What more powerful and far-reaching place to tell these stories than on the screen?

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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****SPOILER ALERT FOR THE PLOT OF SINNERS!***

In the 1930s, a Black wannabe guitar player from Mississippi named Robert Johnson stood at a crossroads. It’s there, legend has it, that he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the gift of playing the blues. He died tragically young at 27, fueling more rumors that the devil had come to collect his due. But the tale of Johnson’s fantastical journey from terrible musician to a seemingly overnight sensation lives on.

Ryan Coogler’s new Southern gothic horror film Sinners doesn’t borrow from Johnson’s story, but it does take the Christian premise that the blues is “the devil’s music” and flips it on its head. In Coogler’s original story—the first and best in his film canon so far—he crafts a love letter to Southern Black people specifically and our generational tradition of searching for and finding freedom through the arts. And I do mean craft. His historic use of both 65MM and IMAX film cameras to shoot the film in the widest and tallest formats possible—also making his cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw the first woman to achieve this, as well—shows the vibrancy of the Black South like we’ve never seen it before on screen and offers a visual feast of Black American culture and a warning of those outside it trying to crash the cookout.

In Coogler’s hands, the blues music of the “sinners” is a holy, righteous, healing thing; both a weapon against white supremacist evil and a salve for its wounds. If we can sing about it, then maybe, for a time, we can be free of it. If we can tell the stories of who we’ve lost, then maybe, in a way, they get to live on.

But survival in this vampire epic is no trifling matter, and who Coogler chooses to let live to tell the story and who he chooses to die feels too much like a metaphor to ignore.

THE HEIST OF FREEDOM

Starring Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers Elijah and Elias Moore in his best performances to date, Sinners tells the legend of the duo, nicknamed the Smoke-Stack twins. Seven years after killing and burying their abusive father, fighting in the trenches as veterans of the Great War and robbing the Italian and Irish mobs in Chicago, Smoke and Stack return to Mississippi with money to spend, buying an old saw mill from a secretly evil white man to turn it into a juke joint. Money is power, and a Black-owned business, they think, can bring them both.

After buying the mill, they pick up their little cousin Sammie (soulful singer Miles Caton in a remarkable debut film performance). Like all the Black people in his community, Sammie is a sharecropper, but he yearns to sing and play the blues. Nicknamed Preacherboy because of his father’s role as a pastor in their community, Sammie is trapped between the cotton fields and the church—two white systems of oppression that won’t let him be who he is. Playing the blues in his cousins’ juke is his way out of pain and oppression, but his father Jedidiah (a powerful Saul Williams) lectures that he should be using his music in service to God at church instead of “dancing with the devil” in the clubs. Sammie chooses the blues “for just one night” and leaves with his cousins, but promises to be back in time for church in the morning.

Pay no attention to the reviewers who call the first hour of this opus “slow;” it’s deliberate. It’s world-building. It’s a filmmaker and a storyteller at the top of his craft. I’ve never been so hype watching the symbolism of Smoke and Stack on opposite sides of their hometown, assembling their rag-tag team of sinnin’ avengers—each with their own conflicting ideas of salvation—all driving towards their common destination: the juke. It’s the hours before the heist and the loot is freedom.

Stack and Sammie pick up local Blues legend Delta Slim (an undeniable Del Roy Lindo), and entice married singer Pauline (Jayme Lawson who is nothing short of a revelation) to stop by and (unintentionally) provoke Stack’s white ex-lover Mary (a devilish Hailee Steinfeld) into coming too. Cornbread (a hilarious Omar Benson Miller) will be the muscle at the door. Smoke enlists the help of the married Chinese couple and local grocers Bo and Grace Chow (a pitch-perfect Yao and Li Jun Li) to bring the food and make the signage, and he picks up his longtime love and the mother of his dead baby to cook the food and otherwise be by his side, hoodoo worker Annie (a regal Wunmi Mosaku who lifts her underwritten character to otherworldly heights).

In a sequence that will go down in film history, Sammie gives his first-ever public performance, singing a song he wrote for his dad about how sorry he is to disappoint him, but how much he loves the blues. As the power of his performance builds, his voice and his steel guitar merge on an ethereal frequency, proving that he is a griot, and piercing the veil that separates the physical and the spiritual realm. All heaven lets loose. A West African griot plays the akonting—the predecessor to the banjo—alongside Sammie, as does a futuristic Black man with an electric guitar, showing the evolution of blues music, from West Africa to the Black American South.

Bo and Grace’s ancient Chinese ancestors dance around them too, as an 80s DJ scratches records on a turntable, modern Southern Black girls twerk to the beat, and a West Coast crew walk it out. It’s not just a history of Black music on display, it’s the history of the shared Black musical experience—from the drum circle to the juke to the disco to the club. The power of our gathering in song and dance has existed long before white supremacist oppression and will exist long after we tear their kingdom down.

In the meantime, the club has been the spot where, no matter which evolution of slavery we’re in, we can, for one night, shake it all off and be a little more free.

Sammie’s singing metaphorically raises the roof and sets it on fire; they all let it burn down around them as they dance the night away. It’s a gorgeous scene of community that made it all the more disappointing that there are zero Black queer-presenting “sinners” in the juke. Even Steven Spielberg’s famous juke scene in 1984’s The Color Purple centered the town’s famous Black bisexual griot Shug Avery. Though a Black queer woman wrote the source material for that film, that shouldn’t be necessary for inclusion. Just look around. Yet even the vampires—known in most modern lore for their undying horniness and sexual fluidity— are painfully and uncanonically straight in Sinners. When I thought about this, even after my four screenings of the film I can’t stop watching (on IMAX 70MM; IMAX digital, standard 70MM and again in XD), I still couldn’t help but quote Stack’s gripe to Smoke: “no vision!”

But the white devil’s is 20/20, and even from far away, Remmick (a horrifying Jack O’Connell) sees Sammie’s celestial talent and, like a true vampire, sets about trying to take it for himself.

THE DEATH OF IRONY

Once the vampiric bloodshed begins, Remmick eventually reveals to Sammie and the surviving Black folks that Sammie’s voice and music are the reason he’s come to the juke.

“I want your stories. And I want your songs. And you can have mine too,” Remmick, in his full, unmasked horror warns Sammie. When the Master Vampire bites, he can suck up and take for himself all of your memories, all of your traumas, all of your rhythm, all of your blues. Yes, it’s a poignant commentary on the demonic music industry that has been robbing our griots since they discovered they could capitalize on Black music. But Coogler hesitates to put too fine a point on this metaphor of white vampires who suck Black musicians and Black music dry for their own gain. His minister of music for all of his Black-music-heavy films—from the Afrocentric Black Panther score to the Delta Blues of Sinners—is, after all, a Swedish white man.

Ludwig Göransson is without doubt a masterful (heh) talent. I own all of his scores on vinyl and will get this one too. He’s an objectively great composer who, much like an actor, can find joy in stepping into other people’s stories and histories and creating new life. But it’s not lost on me that, when Coogler had the opportunity to have a composer tour Africa, to find the music of Wakanda for the biggest Black box office film ever; to connect with something deep and ancestral that was stolen from us, a Black American composer—or even an African composer—was not selected for the opportunity. Sure, Black musicians like Senegalese singer and guitarist Baaba Maal, contributed to the music, shared their stories, jammed in sessions, and got paid and credited for their participation in the liner notes. But there’s only one name on the 2019 Academy Award for Best Score, and it’s not Maal’s.

Perhaps, it would be less of a sticking point that the film is scored by a white European man if the thesis of Sinners wasn’t rooted in white vampires co-opting Black music. This was, after all, the motivation for Coogler to demand the near-unprecedented ownership rights to Sinners. The white elephant in the room was stomping like Pearline on that juke stage and I suppose everyone decided to ignore it. The music is great, after all. And yet.

When Delta Slim tells Stack and Sammie the harrowing tale of how his friend Rice was lynched in the train station because white men wanted the roll of money in his pocket, he beats the side of the car in anguish. He wails. And that beat and that holler turn into a song. That’s the blues.

Coogler wrote that because he knows it’s true. The blues comes straight out of the cotton fields. Straight out of white supremacist oppression of Black people. Straight out of Coogler’s own family history. And it shows. Coogler locked in with his own ancestry and made the best film of his career. You can watch someone else’s people pick the cotton and you can listen to someone else’s people’s stories. You can study it, and give a great impression. But there will always be a distance if you can’t tap into an ancestry, a spiritual tradition.

THE DANGER OF THE “COOKOUT” INVITE

Remmick understood that. He knew his music couldn’t pierce the veil. He needed Sammie. That’s why the image of Remmick’s Black victims-turned-vampires surrounding Remmick and laying their blessing hands on him, anointing him while he absorbs their power, their voices, their music with glee is one of the most haunting images in the film.

Sure, it would be wonderful if, like the vampires promised, that we could all “just be family” and play music in “fellowship and love.” We could all do the Irish jig and we could all share the blues. But as long as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy gives money, power, credit and fame to white men at the expense of the Black musicians at the soul of the music, we can never be in true community with one another.

And that may be the strongest lesson of the film.

In a brilliant and historically accurate nuance, Remmick shares with Sammie that, even though Christianity/Catholicism was also forced on his Irish people by their English oppressors just like Black folk, he too still finds comfort in the words of the Bible. It’s the emotional mimicry of an abuser who’s building a false sense of community by highlighting their shared oppressor, while ignoring his current role as one. He seeks to trauma bond with his victims, promising them new life, just as he takes theirs away.

Bo and Grace, the Chinese shopkeepers who can service both the white side of the street and the Black side of the street in segregated Mississippi, were down to make money with Smoke and Stack—until things got real. When Stack is killed, Grace tells her husband to go get the car so they can leave. They signed up for a party, not to support their friend through his biggest grief yet and whatever demons he’s got to fight. Bo agrees, to his peril, and succumbs to vampirism when he steps outside.

Grace, confronted with the loss of her husband and threats against her child, decides against the will of the Black people she’s supposed to be in community with, to invite the vampires in, which leads to most everyone’s death.

And that’s not to let the other villain of the story off the hook, the one whose actions lead to the death of all the people she called “family”: Mary.

When Mary confronts Stack in public at the train station and brings herself uninvited down to the juke joint, she does so without care or concern for Stack’s life—Black men, after all, have been lynched for less than upsetting a white-looking woman in public. Though he tells her on both occasions to leave, for her safety and theirs, she chooses both times to not only endanger Stack but all the Black people around her. When Cornbread lets her in, Smoke and Stack let her stay, and Annie calls her “family,” she’s empowered to further endanger them. This 1/8th Black reverse-Sarah Jane Johnson from Imitation of Life doesn’t “want to be white,” after all. (It’s no small detail that her hair is styled just like Sarah Jane’s). But she’s been living as a white woman in Arkansas, because whiteness is about how you look, just as much as its about who you choose to be in community with, and she can’t help but act like one.

In true delusional Karen fashion, she sees Remmick and his two white recruits as “harmless,” and seeks them out for the money they can provide. Never mind that she’s married to a rich white man and can likely just give the brothers some money herself! No, these three raggedy-looking strangers are the key to the juke’s financial success. It’s a very unserious plan, and just like Remmick’s first victims that day, Mary’s fate is sealed when she accepts the white man’s gold. Cornbread’s is sealed when he lets her in the first time, let alone the second, and Stack’s is sealed when he pockets the gold from Mary (in both ways).

Of course, none of them knew the full consequences of their actions, but there’s something to be said of Smoke, who’s more worried than anyone about keeping the juke afloat, turning the white man’s money down at the door. Amused by Remmick and his folk band, Stack probably would’ve let them in eventually if Smoke wasn’t there to stop him. Once Stack becomes a vampire, he seems to believe without question Remmick’s promises that—in a world that wants to snatch the lives of Black people out from under us—choosing eternal death is actually freedom.

Freedom is the goal, but there’s some compromises that Smoke wouldn’t make for it that Stack just couldn’t resist.

Still, Coogler’s vampire lore is not without weaknesses—if Mary was already invited in after she turned, and Stack was already inside when he turned, why do they need another invitation to re-enter? Are the vampire’s a hive mind, enslaved to the Master Vampire and forced to do his will, or do they maintain their humanity, as the end-credits suggest, and have their own agendas? Is Remmick a misguided white savior looking to genuinely offer Black people a better way of “life,” — the klan did show up to kill Smoke, just like he said they would—or is he Jim Jonesing them with promises of equality and love while only wanting to increase his numbers and access to Sammie’s talent? Are the vampires rabid and blood-thirsty, unable to stop themselves from killing their loved ones whom they know don’t want to be vampires, or do they have willpower not to kill, but only if their twin brother asks nicely?—It’s a bit muddled.

But the betrayal of Black folk by trusted community members hits hard. It makes the juke joint scene, when all of the people and their ancestors’ spirits were dancing together, with their own beats, their own traditions, their own cultural garb and style—not in unison but in harmony—all the more tragic when it has to end. Despite how much richer the world is when we’re all together, everybody can’t come to the cookout while anti-Blackness is still on menu. This sense of safe community is just another thing white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy has stolen from all of us.

THE DEATH OF BLACK WOMEN

And I do have to mention patriarchy specifically in analyzing this film, as not a single Black woman character survives the night of vampires.

Pearline, a powerful blues singer and performer in her own right, sees Sammie in danger from Remmick and stabs Remmick in the back with the stake, missing his heart and sealing her own fate. When Remmick bites Pearline and she’s processing the devastating loss of her living life, she pushes away Sammie’s comfort and yells at him to go, leave her behind and make it to sunrise. He’s all that matters.

Likewise, when Annie realizes that hurting Remmick hurts all the vampires (sometimes! This is not a consistent truth!), she turns her back on the vampires so that she can warn Smoke. In so doing, Stack, her brother, for all intents and purposes, lunges at her and devours her neck. “Not you,” she cries, over and over as his drool and her blood mix and drip from his fangs into her mouth. “Not you,” she cries and I felt that in my soul.

In what my friend Janae described as “Chekov’s Promise,” Smoke must fulfill what he told Annie earlier that he would do: if she’s bitten, he would drive a wooden stake through her heart immediately and set her soul free. Through tears, he does it, and that’s how Annie goes: her brother and her lover end her life on earth. Aint that bout a bitch? Like our dire, real-life maternal mortality statistics, Smoke and Stack’s mother died giving these boys life. And just like Annie, in real life, we’re more likely to die at the hands of our brothers, our lovers. It’s bad enough in real life, but even in our brother’s wildest fantasies too? Damn.

Annie’s mojo bags keep not only Smoke but also Stack safe from hurt, harm and danger as they fight in the trenches of the Great War, and rob the Irish and Italian mob in Chicago. When his own brother comes to devour Smoke and turn him into a vampire, it’s Annie’s mojo bag around Smoke’s neck that prevents Stack from being able to bite him. She’s a powerful woman. But why wouldn’t she make a mojo bag for herself? She may not have known about vampires, but she’s a Black woman in the Jim Crow South—surely, she would think herself deserving of protection.

If it’s griots we’re supposed to be protecting, Annie is a griot too. She’s the first voice we hear in the film, narrating the story. She’s the keeper of the histories that help them destroy the vampires. Sadly, the bones have been thrown for poor Annie, and the verdict is that she must die. Why? Simply because she was written that way. She has her rootwork and she can cook, but outside of Smoke, no joy that we can see, no reason to fight for her own life. Why would she want to live when she has a baby daughter (who was also written to die for Smoke’s character development) waiting for her on the other side? She was written to empower others, and Smoke specifically—not to benefit from her own power.

It is heartbreaking when Smoke finally removes his mojo bag before his big showdown with the Klan because, without his twin, he’s ready to die and join Annie, his mission of keeping Sammie safe and killing Remmick now complete. But how I wish the Black man could’ve covered the Black woman like she covered him, prayed for her like she prayed for him, given her life like she gave him life for once!

Annie’s final moment, crowned with baby’s breath, breastfeeding their infant while dressed in all white, is breathtaking imagery and a beautifully crafted ending for Smoke to be reunited in death with his family. It’s a scene meant to evoke the highest emotions, and it succeeds. And still, in the aggregate of Coogler’s most recent films, a pattern starts to emerge. In Creed III, which Coogler created and produced and Jordan directed and starred in, Phylicia Rashad plays Creed’s mother and is sacrificed mid-way through to spark Creed’s character growth, using his grief from her death to raise the stakes. In Wakanda Forever, which Coogler wrote, directed and produced, Angela Bassett’s Queen Ramonda is also wholly unnecessarily murdered to raise the stakes for the other characters. The trope of killing off women for other (usually male) characters’ growth happens so often in men’s fiction that the colloquial term is “fridging” the women. And I have to ask: why, in Coogler’s imagination, is the story more emotionally resonant if the Black women die?

In Sinners, I can understand Sammie being a symbol, not just of our youth and promise but of our stories and our songs. It’s not just the women, but Delta Slim and Smoke who promise to die protecting Sammie and what he represents from the white man’s destruction. Especially as Trump is literally erasing Black history from the archives and museums, the symbolism is not lost on me. How and ever, the avatar for our youth/promise/songs/stories in this film is a Black man, at the expense of the Black women. And that feels very much like something a Black man under patriarchy would believe.

To his credit, before he kills her off, Coogler does center a Black woman’s pleasure through Sammie’s brief encounter with Pearline. Thanks to Stack skillfully explaining to Sammie (and the listening audience too) how to perform proper cunnilingus, Sammie does so eagerly in the only scene that is solely about a woman’s pleasure. As another consolation prize, when Sammie becomes a famous musician, he honors his one-time lover and rescuer by naming his blues club Pearline’s. She’s not there to sing her own blues, but he can sing them for her. Still, the haunted sweetness of that gesture and of Smoke and Annie’s reunion is undercut when we learn in the end-credits scene that something else has survived: the white woman.

Speaking of troubling patterns, Jordan’s first big-screen love interest who’s darker than a paper bag is Mosaku’s Annie. (Yes, I checked, going all the way back to his All My Children days when he was romancing Amanda Seyfried, up to his next franchise, The Thomas Crown Affair with Taylor Russell.) Killing Annie off, then, while showing Stack in the end-credits scene “alive” and “well,” 60 years later with Mary, is hard not to take as another stab to the heart. We cheered when Smoke took out all the Klansmen in the film’s coda, but are we supposed to cheer that the white woman who got all the Black people killed in the first place not only gets to survive, but remain in #BlackLove, on earth forever?

Because Coogler will own the rights, a Sinners franchise has endless potential, now that we know one of the twins has survived. But what has survived with him is a far less compelling love story than Smoke and Annie’s, and a bittersweet answer to the film’s central question: how do we get free?

THE CONSTANT STRUGGLE OF FREEDOM

Before they headed north, Stack thinks freedom is in the Black-owned Mississippi town of Mount Bayou. But the town folk figure they’re just as evil as their dad and run them out. They eventually try going back home, creating a Black space, “for us, by us,” with the white man’s blood money, but quickly learn that was always going to be a slaughterhouse, whether by vampires or the KKK. (Catch that message!)

When the devil has Sammie in his grizzly grip of death, Sammie tries to recite the Lord’s Prayer to save himself. But Remmick and his undead pack recite the prayer along with him in chilling unison. When praying only stalls Remmick, Sammie takes hold of his steel guitar and slashes Remmick deep into his skull with it. The power of Black music and community, and the sunlight of truth and time all work together to send this demon and his pack of newly made vampires back to hell (Though I would’ve loved to have seen the Choctaw vampire hunters and the ancestors from the juke return and join forces with the survivors for the final battle of flesh and blood and principalities of the dark). They’re free of Remmick, but he’s only one shark in a sea of evil.

Back at the crossroads, Sammie stands before his father and the church, chastised, bloody, and permanently scarred. Still, he rejects his father’s label of him and the people he lost as “sinners,” he refuses the call to “put the guitar down” and repent. He’s seen the holy things his music can do, and he owes it to the people he lost to tell their stories. He leaves the church, and drives to Chicago, choosing freedom through playing the blues. But, now in his 80s, played by legendary Blues man Buddy Guy, Sammie drinks his trauma just like Delta Slim did, and admits to vampire Stack that the best day of his life, when he felt the most free, was the day they made that juke joint, before the sun went down. Stack, who once thought vampirism was the way to freedom, agrees.

In a genius bit of character work, Jordan’s Smoke doesn’t smile the entire film. Unlike his slick and flashy play of Stack, Jordan plays Smoke with public affection and love only for his brother. Though in the end-credits scene, Stack remembers it differently, Smoke doesn’t kiss or hold Annie in public at the juke. He doesn’t speak to her gently. No caressing of her hair or hands. Only when he’s grieving his brother does he allow Annie’s public embrace. Only as he lays dying, piercing the veil between worlds, does he reach for his baby in Annie’s arms, hold her, and finally smile. Freedom—the kind that lasts—might only be found in heaven.

For a film that undermines the white man’s religion so thoroughly throughout its runtime, it seems a devastatingly Christian ending, and perhaps a foregone conclusion. Maybe, for Black folks on earth, the death that brings eternal life is still our only way out of all this.

But in choosing as the final representation of freedom Sammie’s memory of riding in the backseat of the car with his big cousins on the morning of the last best day of his life, cotton fields to the left and right, and a long stretch of road and unending possibility before them, Coogler offers a bit of hope. It’s those hours before the heist, assembling your team, surrounded by our past, and traveling in community towards freedom—even if we fail, even if it won’t last—that’s always worth the struggle.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

Welcome to another weekly binge!

First, an oldie: In 1970, a white filmmaker chased down an increasingly hostile James Baldwin for a documentary interview on his “escape” from racist America to the so-called utopia of Paris. Because Baldwin wouldn’t necessarily give the journalist what he wanted, the documentary only wound up being about 30 minutes long, but it has a classic quote that inspired my latest piece:

“Where would a fleeing Black man go, if he wanted to escape?” Baldwin responds to the filmmaker, dripping with disdain. There is no “safe” place for Black people in an anti-Black world, but dating all the way back to American slavery, Black Americans have found a port in the storm in Hawaii. In 2023, I spent 5 weeks hopping around the islands, researching and interviewing Black scholars, historians, activists, artists, healers and more to write this piece on the long tradition of Black and Hawaiian solidarity—how we lost it, and how we might get it back. After two long years of writing and selling this piece and it getting killed and publications folding, I’ve finally found a home for the piece that pays what I deserved for the love and work I put into it. Check it out on ContrabandCamp:

ContrabandCamp

A Hawaiian Escape? How Black Americans Found Refuge and Solidarity in the Kingdom

“And where would a fleeing Black man go if he wanted to escape…

Read more

8 days ago · 68 likes · 3 comments · Brooke Obie

Though the annoying filmmaker is annoying, Baldwin is brilliant and this slice of his life in Paris is illuminating and invigorating. Watch the short film James Baldwin: Meeting the Man on MUBI or Criterion Channel (or if you just search on YouTube you can watch it full for free—don’t tell em I sent you though lol)

Mid-Century Modern

I was so wrong about this show! After a bit of a rocky start with the pilot and second episode, I was ready to throw this show in the dustbin. But by the 3rd episode, everything just gels for this modern-day Golden Girls sitcom that features three gay men best friends of a certain age (and one of their moms) choosing to live together in Palm Springs after the death of their fourth bestie. In this sweet tear-jerker starring the iconic Nathan Lane as the Dorothy, the hilarious and fabulous Nathan Lee Graham as the Blanche, and a surprising Matt Bomer as the loveable ditzy Rose. If you’re in need of a pick-me-up, you will not regret this heartwarming watch.

Watch Mid-Century Modern on Hulu.

Dying for Sex

TW: cancer, chemo, childhood sexual abuse

Okay with all these trigger warnings, this is still a dramedy in the truest sense of the word. Molly (Michelle Williams) is a breast cancer survivor two years into remission when she learns that her hip pain is cancer that has not only returned at stage four but has metastasized in her bones. Somehow, this news—and the libido-killing medication she had been taking to prevent the cancer from returning—makes her very horny. After a seriourealizes that her sexless marriage is not for her and takes charge of her cancer journey and what’s left of her life by pursuing pleasure at all costs. With the help of her best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate) she starts choosing the life and the sex that she wants with a bevy of hilarious suitors. Of course, the premise is in the name, and Molly is dying of inoperable cancer, while also trying to heal from childhood sexual abuse. It’s handled with care and love and is based on the true story of real best friends Molly and Nikki and the podcast they did together recounting these adventures of the same name.

Watch Dying for Sex on Hulu.

Black Mirror

The sci-fi-horror-drama anthology series about what fresh hell new technology will bring us is back—despite the fact that we’re already living in the fresh hells of new technology and our tech overlords IRL. Though it digs in its own backyard for many of the episodes — there are sequels and spiritual sequels to fan-favorite episodes this season — series creator Charlie Brooker still has some fresh horrors up his sleeve. Read my full review of the season—featuring Rashida Jones, Tracee Ellis Ross and Issa Rae here.

Your Monster

Okay, another oldie but goodie—I’m so behind on supporting my girl Melissa Barrera! When Hollywood’s zionists came for her neck for supporting Palestine, she continued to thrive and still educates her social media audience on the genocide daily. So, I had every intention of watching her 2024 Sundance romantic comedy and just never did. But I finally watched last week before attending a panel with the filmmakers and when I say this movie has everything, I mean everything: Rom-com-horror-fantasy-MUSICAL. And it’s brilliant at every genre. Melissa plays Laura who gets dumped at her hospital bedside when her horrible boyfriend can’t deal with her illness anymore. Recovering alone in her childhood home, she meets the Monster (Tommy Dewey) whose been hiding under her bed and in her closet. With a little help and love from Monster, Laura learns to tap into her long-simmering rage.

Watch Your Monster on HBOMax.

Stay Watchin’,

Brooke