When shooting the film Kindred—directed and co-written by Joe Marcantonio and available on demand Nov. 6—London native Tamara Lawrance found herself mostly alone in Ireland, shuttling between the cottage where she was staying and set. That isolation had resonances with her role in the film as Charlotte, a young woman who has made plans with her live-in boyfriend, Ben, to move to Australia, leaving behind his staid, upper class family and their frigid castle for a “fresh start” in the outback. Unfortunately, the escape plan does not hatch; Charlotte gets pregnant and Ben is killed in an accident. Instead of heading […]
Cassie da Costa
20 posts
Every few months on Twitter, regular people rank the Hollywood Chrises. Out of Chris Pine, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Chris Pratt, one—as they say—gotta go. Nearly every time, Wonder Woman hunk Pine easily comes out on top while Thor’s Hemsworth sluggishly follows in second place. Captain America’s Chris Evans, bless him, does not have to bring up the caboose because inevitably, it’s always Pratt, of Guardians of the Galaxy and Parks and Recreation fame, who can be sacrificed in the imaginary world where only three chiseled Chrises can make it to superhero franchise heaven. Strangely, several of Pratt’s celebrity friends […]
It’s always confusing when Black celebrities gather around to pontificate about what needs to be done for Black America, like rapper Ice Cube, CNN pundit Van Jones, and others did on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk this week. In the U.S., we’re supposed to be interested in political and historical analyses by crafty capitalists rather than by those who are currently living under the failed economic and social conditions that have been engineered by the few in power. Unsurprisingly, both Ice Cube and Jones have recently been on blast for collaborating with the Trump administration on policy instead of humbly […]
Blood on the Wall, the new film from Restrepo co-director Sebastian Junger, and co-directed by Nick Quested, is Junger’s most political yet. The film, out Sept. 30 on National Geographic, follows three groups in 2017 and 2018: a caravan of Central American migrants traveling through Mexico and hoping to make it to the U.S. where they can claim asylum in the wake of extreme violence due to drug trafficking; the drug traffickers themselves, usually Central Americans and Mexicans from poor or working-class families that have been left behind by neoliberal economic policy; and the townspeople and community police units formed to […]
In making sense of former Olympic and Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius’ story, particularly the February 2013 night when he shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, it’s best to assume that you’ll never arrive at a satisfying set of answers. All of the evidence in the case in which he was convicted for culpable homicide—and later, murder—in 2014 was circumstantial. No one alive knows the why of what actually happened except Pistorius himself, but the new ESPN 30 for 30 four-part film, The Life and Trials of Oscar Pistorius, about the event as well as Pistorius’ career as a double-amputee runner, […]
Matt Furie, the cartoonist and creator of the Pepe the Frog character (though crucially, not the meme), reminds me of quite a few of my male friends growing up in Eastern Pennsylvania, and even more of them now that I live in California. He’s carefree, weird in a fun way, queer-adjacent, creative, and a vessel of good vibes. It’s this personality type that draws people in: other cartoonists, his wife, his energetic toddler, his long-haired townie roommate in San Luis Obispo. But contained in this positivity is also Furie’s general aversion to conflict, to bad vibes, which ultimately kept him from […]
The restoration of director Claire Denis’ 1999 film Beau Travail, overseen by cinematographer Agnès Godard and approved by Denis, as well as its entry into the prestigious Criterion Collection, comes at a time when non-dominant visions of the world are still largely excluded from validating institutions. We hear these words spoken again and again, but they don’t seem to sink in. As marginalized groups see their images represented more and more as branding, their artistry is still often sidelined by those with major influence and money—John Boyega reminded us just how high up this practice goes in his recent GQ interview. […]
In the podcast Whistleblower, which released its first episode on August 27, journalist Tim Livingston takes on a major sports scandal that has mostly been swept under the rug with a mix of savvy PR and media incentives. In 2007, former NBA referee Tim Donaghy was arrested for betting on hundreds of games, including several that he refereed himself. Donaghy was convicted and sentenced to 16 months in jail, but to this day maintains that he never fixed any games by making bogus calls; rather, he used his knowledge of the NBA as more of a league of entertainment than true […]
What can definitively be said about the Republican National Convention’s weaponizing of Blackness and poverty to spout predictable American mythology? Trump and his cronies say again and again that he has “done the most for black people.” In fact, every U.S. government has failed and brutalized Black Americans and countless racialized people in the country and outside of it. The most significant positive change to Black life has been made through grassroots activism. Not even Lincoln himself is responsible for the movement that would eventually lead to the eradication of slavery, yet U.S. politicians would have you believe otherwise. Historically, both […]
Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, available on Netflix from September 9, has been met with the ire of the religious right, as well as a wider online public that believes that the film sexualizes children. To be fair, the poster Netflix initially chose to promote the French film, which won the World Cinema Directing Award at Sundance in 2019, was a grossly inappropriate choice—one that decontextualized a scene from the film in order to promote a movie about the complexities of growing up in both modest and modern cultures at once. Netflix has taken the image down but, despite outcry, is continuing with […]
Any ‘Gay and Lesbian History’ college course will dive into closeted white suburban gay male representations. In fact, this group of men, sneaking around in mid-century America, have received a fair bit of Hollywood attention in recent years. There was fashion designer Tom Ford’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s haunting novel A Single Man, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Oscar vehicle The Imitation Game, and Luca Guadagnino’s take on André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. Todd Haynes’s excellent Far From Heaven refocused the lens from a cheating closeted suburban husband to the wife’s own relationship with a Black man who works as her gardener, […]
It’s clear enough that Ben Shapiro and Republican candidate James P. Bradley’s puritanical pearl clutching over Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s (censored!) music video “WAP,” which stands for Wet-Ass Pussy, is largely irrelevant. Shapiro’s and Bradley’s statements decrying the explicit message of the song and the (un)dress in the video constitute the kind of performative moral panics that are so baldly opportunistic as to render them banal. (Though, aside from his ranty and tedious video, Shapiro’s tweets express a bizarre curiosity about the rappers’ vaginal health in which he solicits input from his “doctor wife”.) Yet, here I am writing […]
Ramona Diaz’s latest documentary, A Thousand Cuts, stars former CNN correspondent and Rappler co-founder Maria Ressa, a formidable Filipino reporter who was born in the country yet spent much of her youth, as well as her college years, in the U.S. Ressa became famous herself when she began being targeted by the violent populist government of President Rodrigo Duterte and its online followers. The attacks have intensified to the level of political retaliation, and the government has levied multiple charges, from cyber-libel to tax fraud, against Ressa and Rappler, a news website. On June 15, Ressa was convicted of the first […]
Often, we discuss conspiracy theories as if they are kooky yet benign tales spun by our neighbors, acquaintances, and even friends. But in America’s current political and cultural configuration, prejudice combined with ignorance often masquerades as legitimate thought and leads to devastating outcomes (just see how Floridian COVID-19 deniers are doing now). And in a society marked by incessant high-speed information and spin, anecdotal and instinctual bias becomes the basis of bad-faith arguments about free speech and a “marketplace of ideas.” As much as social media has brought us smart thinking by typically marginalized voices, it’s also allowed careless people with […]
Da 5 Bloods is, like BlacKkKlansman, another attempt by the prolifically astute Spike Lee to blend fact and fiction so to better tell the truth of our times. But with this film, streaming on Netflix now, the subject is the complex and differing experiences of four black Vietnam War vets—the eponymous Bloods—who return to the country to uncover a lost treasure as well as the remains of their fallen commander (Chadwick Boseman, in flashbacks). It’s a weighty project, nimbly navigated by actors Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock, and Norm Lewis—titan character actors who evaded star status mostly because of the […]
Amongst those who know, Diana Kennedy is understood to be the English-speaking world’s authority on traditional Mexican cooking. But not many people—particularly not many people outside of Mexico—know. In the documentary Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy, digitally streamable now and available on demand June 19, director Elizabeth Carroll, a foodie herself, pays close attention to the woman who has for decades evaded celebrity status while carefully and faithfully putting on record what is today one of the most popular cuisines in the world. It’s a film that offers much wisdom to my generation of creative and passionate cooks, pressured by an ever-intensifying […]
In its final 20 minutes, the documentary film AKA Jane Roe delivers quite the blow to conservatives who have weaponized the story of Jane Roe herself—real name, Norma McCorvey—to argue that people with uteruses should have to carry any and all pregnancies to term. McCorvey, who died in 2017, became Jane Roe when, as a young homeless woman, she was unable to get a legal or safe abortion in the state of Texas. Her willingness to lend her experience to the legal case for abortion led to the passing of Roe v. Wade in 1973, which legalized abortions in all 50 […]
Bernie Blackout, a new VICE TV documentary directed by Pat McGee examining the mainstream media’s alleged bias against the Sanders campaign, is rooted in independent and alternative journalism instead of the corporate cable news outlets like MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN. While McGee’s film straightforwardly breaks down the cynical function of corporate media (that is, to turn a profit, not to tell the truth), the documentary unfortunately does not reach beyond the 24-hour news cycle and into the centuries of knowledge produced around spin, propaganda, and political manipulation that came before today’s U.S.-based podcasters, vloggers, and other digital writers (including me) […]
Remember Quibi? The mobile-optimized streaming service for attention-deficit entertainment? Well, it seems like it has finally found a niche. Sports documentaries have recently become a focal point in television programming, particularly now that docuseries are widely available via streaming. ESPN has so far been at the forefront, with its 30 for 30 series and, most recently, The Last Dance. But Quibi is making a bold entrance onto the scene with Blackballed, a 12-part 8-minute-episode doc on the politics around ousting former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling over his secretly recorded racist diatribe in 2013. (Steven Soderbergh and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s High […]
The best of the new Netflix show The Eddy, about an eponymous jazz club and its multicultural house band in Paris, is not at all in Whiplash and La La Land director Damien Chazelle’s first two episodes (he is also an executive producer of the series, along with writer Jack Thorne and lead actor Andre Holland). Instead, the show’s brief streak of brilliance can be found in Divines director Houda Benyamina’s following two episodes. It’s Benyamina, and not Chazelle, who understands what jazz can and should do, and is able to advance the show well beyond its tedious crime subplot and […]