Green Paper: Bad Rewarding Trend for Sentimental Racism Movies



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Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali in the Green Paper (2018)

The National Board of Review, a New York-based, 100-year-old 'movie-goers' collective, kicked off the awards season with a list of what they saw as the "best" film of the past year. The council stated Green paper the best movie of 2018, according to Variety.

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(via Giphy)

So what is it Green paper? The title comes from The green book of the black motorist, an annual guide for African-American hikers, commonly known as the "Green Book". It was designed and published by the Victor Hugo Green factor of New York, from 1936 to 1966, at the time of the laws of Jim Crow, to help American travelers realize which places would be the most dangerous.

The film, written by Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie and Peter Farrelly (all White), tells the story of Tony "Tony Lip" Vallelonga (an actor who played Carmine Lupertazzi in the Sopranos series), looking a new job after the closure of his nightclub for renovations, to finally get an interview to serve as a driver to the famous American-Jamaican pianist Don Shirley. The film is about their relationship and it is not surprising that Nick Vallelonga, Tony's son, is one of the writers.

From the moment I saw the trailer for Green paper, my reaction was "oh, one of those movies. It sounded like a lukewarm comedy of racist mates coming out every two years to try to say, "Racism would be solved if people just spent time together," as if the centuries that blacks were enslaved on the fields and in White plantation homes were not enough of a team exercise.

Quality movies about racism, even though they are based on real events, are tired.

Just like L & # 39; s help, you see that there is a huge gap between the critics of black films and the white critics in discussion Green paper. IndieWire 's Tambay Obenson explained how the film had a "magical negro" problem, where Shirley was only an accessory for the transformation of Vallelonga, his family and background being fully expanded (his son he, too, is one of the authors), while Shirley's family is just one name: "Farrelly and his team probably thought of representing an" exceptional "African-American in a positive light, but the character is always secondary and serves as a plot.

Jordan Searles, in The ring, wrote not only about the film, but also about the reactions of certain racial terms in the audience: Green paper are derived from moments of humiliation for Shirley and minorities in general. A scene in which Vallelonga and his wife (Linda Cardellini) discussed "traveling in black" was greeted by public ridicule at the screening I attended. Racial insults such as "aubergine", "moolie" and "chink" have also sparked loud bursts of laughter.

Shadow and Act wrote in their opinion that "Although the Green paper [Tony] Dr. Shirley promises comfortable hotels, through the eyes of Lip, the motels he finds are not comfortable homes, but slums in ruins full of stray cats and black dice. Lip even points out that the Green Paper essentially offers false advertising to its desperate consumers. "

Meanwhile, Shadow and act Maira Liriano, Associate Chief Librarian of the Schomburg Black Culture Research Center (which has the largest collection of Green books in the country), strongly contests the evaluation of Lip's "false advertising"

In comparison, Farrelly said Shadow and Act:

"Three years ago, when we started writing this thing, nobody knew it, not nobodyobviously, but no one I knew. The whites did not know it, I did not know it, and most of the blacks I talked to did not know it. "

Maybe he should have found more resources.

VarietyOwen Gleiberman stated the following in his reaction to Green paper low box office participation: "But really, what is the crime of the film? It is based on a true story, which she tells with considerable depth. We are not trying to make a big statement about race other than the idea that whites and blacks, to the extent that their antecedents and experiences separate them, should try to understand each other better. Sorry, but I should have missed where it became a reactionary message. "

The answer is, "When that turned out to have literally never worked in the history of this country". We live in a society where voters who voted for Barack Obama also voted for the man who had run a racist agenda against him essentially throughout his presidency. Blacks and whites should try to understand each other better, but why do blacks always have to do all the work?

Let's be clear: this has nothing to do with "vigilance" or the need to "wake up" this movie. It is argued that these films are not meant for Blacks, but use the historical pain and trauma of blacks to create good movies. to make white people cry – the same whites who will continue to mock the protesters of Black Lives Matter, who will always vote for Trump, and who feel called to be called for racist behavior is as serious as being a victim of racism.

A black or brown person who "teaches" a white person not to be racist, in exchange for learning to appreciate fried chicken, is not a fair exchange.

(via Variety, image: Universal Pictures)

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