by J. Brown
In honor of Black History Month, I spent this past Sunday doing exactly what would have made Martin and Malcolm proud: I watched a bunch of Spike Lee movies. If you watch enough Spike Lee movies, you'll start to notice that he uses a lot of the same actors throughout his filmography. Some of them went on to become pretty big stars in their own right (Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Giancarlo Esposito). Others, not so much (Bill Nunn, Joie Lee, Roger Guenveur Smith). It got me to start thinking about who the biggest stars have been in Black cinema. Now, take note that I did NOT say "biggest Black stars." I'm talking about the actors who have specifically played a large role in Black films. (If you're unsure what a "Black film" is, just ask yourself if it's a movie that most Black people have seen and most white people would never have in their Blu-Ray collection. "Barbershop", for instance, is a Black film.) Based on this criterion, people like Will Smith and Halle Berry obviously won't be on this list. The hardest part about compiling this list wasn't necessarily coming up with the names, but figuring out where to rank them. To shave it down to 10, I tried to factor in how many Black films they were in, how influential those films were, and how big their roles were in said films. Anyway, without further ado...
by J. Brown
A month and a half after its premiere episode, Empire has skyrocketed into the biggest new drama on TV that isn’t produced by Shonda Rhimes. According to this report by Entertainment Weekly, Empire’s ratings have increased every week and are reaching Walking Dead numbers. I don’t know how TV ratings are calculated, but I always measure ratings based on how annoying people on Twitter and Facebook become when the show is airing. Based on these systems, the numbers seem to match. This is all pretty unprecedented, and every report that I’ve read suggests that there weren’t any lofty expectations for the program. To me, it seemed very much like a cheap attempt to attract Black viewers. “Let’s give them hacky hip-hop music and put Terrence Howard in it. He’s in all the Negro films, they must love that guy.” Surprisingly (or maybe not), this has worked out probably better than even FOX had imagined. How did they pull this off?
