‘We are trendsetters. We are culture creators.' A striking Toronto exhibition spotlights the vibrancy and resilience of Black creatives
Developed with August's Emancipation Month and Caribbean Carnival celebrations in mind, 'Too Much Fashion' is on now at United Contemporary Gallery from Aug. 1 to Aug. 30.
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‘Highest 2 Lowest' review: Spike Lee and Denzel Washington's latest collaboration is one of the year's best movies
As the legendary (and fictional) record producer David King — a.k.a. King — in Spike Lee's new thriller, 'Highest 2 Lowest,' Denzel Washington evokes authentic music moguls like Russell Simmons and Quincy Jones. He's also, clearly, playing a hybrid version of himself and his director — a phenomenally successful Black entertainer who finds himself with no worlds left to conquer.
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Danielle Spencer, who played the wisecracking and tattling little sister Dee Thomas on the 1970s sitcom 'What's Happening!!' has died. Spencer died Monday at age 60 after a yearslong battle with cancer, family spokesperson Sandra Jones said. As Dee, Spencer was the smarter, more serious younger sister who offered a steady stream of deadpan roasts of big brother Roger 'Raj' Thomas and his friends Dwayne Nelson and Freddie 'Rerun' Stubbs. 'Ooh, I'm gonna tell mama,' would become Dee's catchphrase. The show, set in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts and among the first on television to focus on the lives of Black teenagers, was based on the movie 'Cooley High' and ran on ABC from 1976 to 1979. It had a long legacy thanks to its memorable characters, including the geeky Raj, the catchphrase-spouting Dwayne, the red-bereted dancing phenom Rerun, and Dee with her eyerolls and icy stare. Early in the production of the show's first season, Spencer, then 12, was in a major car accident on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California, that left her in a coma for three weeks and killed her stepfather, Tim Pelt. She would have spinal and neurological problems that would require multiple surgeries in the years afterward. In 2018, she had emergency surgery for a bleeding hematoma, which stemmed from that 1977 car crash. In the immediate aftermath, a family spokesperson said she could only speak slightly and had to use crutches to walk. She had been suffering symptoms from at least 2004, when she had to use a wheelchair and relearn how to walk. In 2014, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a double mastectomy. Thomas also appeared on a mid-1980s reboot of the show, 'What's Happening Now!!,' which ran for three seasons. She went on to become a veterinarian and advocate for animals. She attended the University of California, Davis, and UCLA, and got a doctorate in veterinary medicine from Tuskegee University in 1993. Spencer continued to dabble in acting, including an appearance as a veterinarian in the 1997 Jack Nicholson film 'As Good as it Gets.'
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Streaming: Ryan Coogler's Sinners hits Crave
Article content Ryan Coogler's film Sinners made a quick trip from cinemas to streaming — it's new on Crave — and, well, it's a trip indeed. Article content Coogler's creative journey started with his first feature Fruitvale Station (2013, Apple TV+) starred Michael B. Jordan as Oscar Grant, an ex-con attempting to rebuild his life. It's based on a true story, with Coogler striving to humanize Grant in the 24 hours before he died at the hands of the BART cop who would shoot Grant in the back. Coogler next played with the Rocky franchise with Creed (2015, Prime) before taking on one of the more masterful entries in the Marvel Universe, Black Panther (2018, Disney+). Article content Article content Sinners feel like Coogler's most ambitious film, a long way down the line from the social realism origins of Fruitvale Station. Jordan (Coogler's most frequent collaborator) does double duty here playing twin brothers, named Smoke and Stack, who have returned to their Mississippi birthplace after scoring big, dirty money in Chicago. They buy a disused sawmill with the ambition of transforming it into a juke joint, with the help of young would-be bluesman Sammie (Miles Caton) and select members of their community. Article content Article content It is apparent Coogler was granted carte blanche to make the movie he wanted, which explains why it has the bravado elements of a musical as well as a Southern Gothic drama. It touches on Black history, but also Black mythology, offering its own take on the story of bluesman Robert Johnson, who purportedly sold his soul to the devil in exchange for mastery of the guitar. Article content Article content But it's a horror movie first. As such, it's a film that warrants the viewing of another film to put it in a greater context. Article content That film is the 2019 documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, now playing on the genre specialty streaming service Shudder. In it, director Xavier Burgin makes the case that the horror genre best reflects the Black experience, although not always in a positive way. Article content 'We've always loved horror,' writer-educator Tananarive Due (an executive producer of the doc) observes at the beginning of the film. 'It's just that horror, unfortunately, hasn't always loved us.' Article content The doc proceeds to demonstrate the sorrowful history of black characters in horror movies, often the first to die, and just as frequently sacrificing their lives so that the white hero may live. Scatman Crothers in The Shining is the film's example of the 'sacrificial negro' trope, double painful because the character in Stephen King's book escaped with his life. How interesting it is that Coogler pays a kind of homage to The Shining with a shot of a vampirically possessed character, as well as a scene which is essentially a replay of the blood testing scene in The Thing. ('My very first movie was The Thing,' actor Keith David proudly notes in the doc. 'And I lived all the way to the end.')
