Are you sitting down? You should sit down. There is some earth-shattering commentary about current events you must read from Jeffrey Wells, a film critic.
In the crowded media landscape, it's not easy to create buzz for a new film. It takes years of careful positioning, delicate marketing skills, a well-cultivated grassroots network...Or you can just buy a bunch of bloggers trips to London.
Most of the attention paid to Jonathan Demme's new film Rachel Getting Married has centered on the Oscar-buzzed lead performance from Anne Hathaway, but many critics are consumed with something the movie treats as a non-event: the fact that the titular Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is marrying a black man, Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe of the band TV on the Radio). The interracial nature of their relationship goes unremarked upon throughout the entire film, and that fact that is vexing several film critics, who dismiss such a notion as a fantasy. Enjoy their thinly veiled discomfort with the shocking idea that white people can marry black people in 2008 without someone giving a speech about it, after the jump!Over at Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeff Wells titled his post about the matter "Not Supposed to Say," claiming that "movie critics haven't come within 20 feet of mentioning this [unremarked-on interracial marriage] in their reviews." We're not sure what critics Wells is reading, but a boatload of the ones we've looked at mention exactly that — and they do it in a way that seems to beg for someone to bestow an aura of au courant hipness on their courageously un-PC observations. Both EW's Owen Gleiberman and New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane take great pains to mention the film's unmentioned racial diversity, though to hear Lane discuss it, it sounds like he'd rather be watching a blunt parable like Crash. "The wedding party is the ultimate guide to Demme’s benign vision: the groom is black, the bride is white, she and her bridesmaids are dressed in saris, [and] nobody so much as mentions race," says Lane. "I don’t know if there were any Republican voters involved in this movie, but, if so, it must have been a lonely time." Ok, yes, some Republicans are racist — but damn, Anthony! Are you really implying that conservatives can never be bred within a cultural melting pot? Worse is Wells, who virtually calls Demme a fetishist of all things African, rattling off some of the black characters Demme has previously included in his oeuvre before concluding:
Jon Voight's recent toe-dip into the murky pool of political commentary attracted more than a few piranhas, the hungriest of whom may have been Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells. And after a July 29 blog item suggested freezing Voight's career as payback for his public condemnation of Barack Obama ("If I were a producer and I had to make a casting decision about hiring Voight or some older actor who hadn't pissed me off with an idiotic Washington Times op-ed piece, I might very well say to myself, 'Voight? Let him eat cake'"), Bill O'Reilly came a-calling last night with a theory about a new Hollywood blacklist against conservatives. While we (and Wells himself, apparently) had hoped for a more bloodthirsty offensive from Wells, we're endlessly engrossed by his session on Dr. O'Reilly's couch, elucidating the vengeful feelings inherent to angry industry bloggers everywhere. Seriously, Bill, this is nothing — wait until Oscar season. [Fox News]
