DrunkasaurusRex.com - August 15, 2005

When I spend Friday and Saturday nights pouring alcohol into the hole in my face, I like to take Sunday afternoons and spend them in a dark, air-conditioned theater watching movies that don't require me to think. I typically go with my friend Katie because she'll watch anything with explosions and she thinks it's funny to watch me suffer. Because I've been painfully out of touch with Hollywood's hottest new releases this past month, I let Katie pick the movies we'd see. True to form, she selected Stealth and The Island--two movies starring impossibly attractive people who must blow shit up in order to survive.

Stealth stars Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, and some anonymous hunky white guy whose name I refuse to learn because he is better looking than me. They are elite Navy pilots who fly a new cutting edge fighter plane called the Talon. They are a tight-knit trio of friends and adrenaline junkies; a combination you can be sure will lead to at least one of them taking a dirtnap. Their CO is some grizzled, veteran (played by Sam Shepard) who has a surprise for his pilots. Their trio is about to become a foursome. They will be joined on missions by the next-generation Talon: an unmanned jet that, equipped with cutting edge artificial intelligence technology pioneered by some dude in Seattle, learns as it goes.

If that sounds at all familiar, it should. It's a blatant ripoff of War Games with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. From the computer with a heart to the designer from the Pacific Northwest. I'd like to say that this came as a shock to me, but let's be honest, how can you ever be surprised when Hollywood and stories about futuristic technology are involved? The machine will seem too good to be true, something will happen to turn it evil, the hero will somehow reason with the machine, it will learn AND UNDERSTAND some moral imperative, and then it will either sacrifice itself for the hero or work with the hero to defeat the REAL source of evil.

I hope someday after we are all long dead that some of the apocalyptic visions painted by filmmakers come true and a race of machines takes over the world. If history has a sense of humor, their first stop will be Los Angeles. I take great pleasure in the specter of a small band of brave Angelenans putting up the good fight and making their last stand at the base of the HOLLYWOOD sign only to get lit the fuck up by a battalion of machines whose design was lifted directly from some summer blockbuster 60 years prior. Irony, thy name is extinction.

Katie and I saw Stealth first because we had a bet we wanted to settle. She was sure Jamie Foxx's character (Henry Purcell) was going to die because he's black and the black guy always dies in the movies. I thought it would be anonymous hunky white guy because he was quite clearly going to be Jessica Biel's love interest and getting past his death would be the last true test she would have to face as a woman in a male-dominated profession.

Boy was I wrong. Forty minutes in, Jamie Foxx's character goes after the unmanned smart-plane because it's gone to the dark side thanks to a lightning strike during a nightlanding on an aircraft carrier (I can totally see that happening!). It outmaneuvers Purcell through a series of tight, twisting canyons and leads him nose-first into a cliff face. While becoming excruciatingly predictable as the scene unfolds, props go to the director for the slow-motion crumple of Purcell's Talon. The only thing cooler than watching a plane fly full-speed into a mountain is watching it in slow-motion.

I must admit, I was surprised by the decision to send Jamie Foxx's character into the side of that mountain. I really thought Foxx's star was bright enough at this point to avoid the "black guy who dies halfway through" characters. With the success of Ray you'd think he would have joined Cuba Gooding Jr. and Will Smith in the "Black Guys Who Live" category. Instead, he's still milling about with Delroy Lindo, Yaphet Kotto and all the other "black guys who die halfway through."

At first glance, it's hard to understand why Foxx hasn't made that jump. He won an Oscar for Ray and he cried like a 6yr old on Inside the Actors Studio when that fluffer James Lipton asked him to tell the audience what happened with his grandmother. He hasn't been arrested as far as I know and he's adept at avoiding controversy. So what's the hold up?

My guess is that Foxx just isn't safe enough yet for middle America. After In Living Color, his first noteworthy role was as Willie Beamen in Any Given Sunday. His character represented everything that was wrong with professional sports and celebrity culture. His next notable role would have been as Max in Collateral had it not turned out to be a complete abortion that no one went to see. That led directly to Ray in which he portrayed brilliantly the life and struggle of a blind, philandering heroin addict who just happened to be one of this country's greatest musicians. The performance won him an Oscar for Best Actor and set him on the path to Stealth where he flies into the side of a mountain.

How does that seem like a reasonable next step? Shouldn't he have had people around him telling him that one does not ordinarily go directly from star of Oscar-winning biopic to "black guy who dies halfway through?" The difference between Fox and actors like Will Smith and Cuba Gooding Jr. is that they play nice-guy heroes who save the day. They are sought after and cast for those parts because they are safe. White people in Kansas aren't afraid that Cuba Gooding or Will Smith is going to mug them. I think it's safe to assume that the jury is still out on Foxx and, in the meantime, it's not likely that they're going to let him borrow their cars.

The next obvious question is why are some black actors given more roles where they don't die while others barely ever make it through the opening credits? I don't honestly have the answer to that question, but I think if you look at the pictures of 6 or 7 prominent black actors and figure out which ones play characters who bite it more often, you'll notice a disturbing trend:

Yaphet Kotto

Delroy Lindo

Sidney Poitier

Jamie Foxx

Denzel Washington

Will Smith

Cuba Gooding Jr.

The darker-complected the actor, the more often on average his character is killed off. I don't want to have to track down every single movie for you or get into some sociological discussion about the nature of race in American media. However, it is worth considering that neither Will Smith nor Cuba Gooding Jr. has ever died on screen...at least as far as I can remember. Gooding even survived in Boyz n the Hood before he was really famous. Man, no male character his age in that film survived except him!

The you look at the opposite end of the spectrum with much darker black actors like Yaphet Kotto and Delroy Lindo. Kotto got clipped in Homicide: The Movie. He was the only original cast member from the television series to get killed in that movie. He was also in Friday the 13th: The Final Nightmare and, while I cannot say that I have had the pleasure of watching that fine piece of cinema, I am willing to bet that, as the only black guy in a slasher movie, he did not make it out alive.

I don't know, maybe I'm just bitter from losing my bet and paying $9.50 to watch a crap movie hungover. Maybe a better way to describe this whole thing is that while being a darker-skinned black actor does not immediately consign you to the trash heap of the "black guys who die halfway through," it has certainly been easier for lighter-skinned black actors to flourish in films with "the black guy who lives."

It's a touchy subject, no doubt, but I think both sides can take solace in the fact that none of them die as often as Steve Buscemi. That motherfucker never lives. Not that that's a surprise or anything. What director wants the poster child for fetal alcohol syndrome striding up in the final scenes of his movie with those big bug eyes and that snaggle-toothed grin? I know I wouldn't and that probably explains why Michael Bay offed his ass halfway through The Island.

...which I will get to tomorrow. To be continued.

Posted by nils at 12:42 PM