She's Gotta Have It (1986)

There is no such thing as watching too many movies. I know that since my family and I have enacted social distancing, the amount of movies we’ve watched has skyrocketed. And if there can be a silver lining in the messiness and ugliness of the situation we’re all in right now, it’s that we have an opportunity to watch a lot of the movies that we’ve been meaning to watch and re-watch a lot of the movies that we’ve been meaning to re-watch. I know the other day I was looking through my Blu-ray collection and picked out the 1933 King Kong, a movie I’ve owned for about a year but never watched. It’s one of those movies I always said to myself, “Not now, I’ll watch it another time.” But because we’re stuck indoors with nothing to do, I finally said, “Screw it, it’s time to watch King Kong!” And I loved it!

With the popularity of my previous list (you can check it out here), I wanted to recommend another 19 movies for people to check out across Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, and Hulu. So here you are; go watch some movies! You can’t really go wrong with any of them.

1 | Apocalypse Now (1979) | Amazon Prime

Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola

The history of Hollywood is as ugly as it is beautiful. You can go back and look at decades of iconic films that have graced the silver screen, from Gone with the Wind (1939) to Citizen Kane (1941) to North by Northwest (1959). Most notably absent from Hollywood history, however, are Black-produced films. When movies did feature Black characters, they were always written by White writers and directed by White directors. The stories were never centered around Black people focusing on what it means to be Black.

Developed by Simon Frederick, They’ve Gotta Have Us (2018) is a limited series on Netflix that explores the rise of Black cinema in Hollywood. From The Birth of a Nation (1915) to Black Panther (2018), and everything in between, They’ve Gotta Have Us offers a comprehensive and compelling look at Black representation in film and the surge of Black-produced cinema.

I’ve mentioned before that some of my favorite classes I took in college were film history courses. I love contextualizing movies and seeing how every film influenced the next. However, I learned virtually nothing about the parallel history of Black cinema in Hollywood. They’ve Gotta Have Us proves to be incredibly enlightening, exploring so many facets of Hollywood history that were previously unknown to me.

The series features interviews with prominent Black filmmakers such as Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk), Laurence Fishburne (School Daze, The Matrix), David Oyelowow (Selma, A United Kingdom), Kasi Lemmons (The Silence of the Lambs, Candyman), John Boyega (Attack the Block, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), Gina Prince-Bythewood (The Secret Life of Bees, Beyond the Lights), Carmen Ejogo (Selma, It Comes at Night), and Robert Townsend (Hollywood Shuffle, The Five Heartbeats).

Going into the series, I would have assumed that Black voices had been suppressed in the industry for decades even if I didn’t necessarily know all of the details beforehand; I had no idea the extent to which this happened. The beginning of the series looks at the early years of Hollywood. The Birth of a Nation (1915) defined the motion picture and shaped everything about what movies are and how they are made. Director D.W. Griffith did not believe Black actors were capable of giving the performances he wanted, so he cast White actors in blackface to play horrific caricatures.

(Note: This article was originally publiched by Mick Cohen-Carroll on Medium in June 2020. For current information about the state of the racial justice movement in America, I recommend reading updates about Derek Chauvin's trial, this interview with Kentucky's Rep. Attica Scott about the ongoing imapct of Breonna Taylor's murder, this update about the shooting of Jacob Blake, and this analysis of the scope of Black Lives Matter protests.)

Hollywood loves to jump on current events, especially those with big socio-political ramifications. There have been timely movies about pretty much every news-worthy incident since WWI. However, stories about race or racial injustice are often eclipsed or buried under other tragic events. So, through the films they produce and finance, how will Hollywood react to the current status quo? It’d be interesting to discover their approach in the wake of the George Floyd protests (which are largely peaceful) and the call to action for anti-racism. There are two things to consider. The first is that Hollywood, after all, is a business and the second is that Hollywood might not be as socially liberal as the right-wing claims.

Though there is room for art, and you must be creative to make a film, the movie industry is, after all, just that: an industry. And in an industry, the primary goal is to make money. If it’s art, great, but that is not the end goal. Artistry is the byproduct. That is why people like Martin Scorsese call the Marvel movies “theme parks” and not cinema. He makes the distinction that cinema is (by his definition) more daring, unexpected, honest and artistic.

So while “cinema” (used in the Scorsesian sense) does exist, the rise in blockbuster movies with high budgets and explosively high box office returns shows that Hollywood is primarily interested in making money. That is why it attracts people to become top execs and producers, like Steve Mnuchin, the current Secretary of the Treasury. Hard to believe that the ex-Goldman Sachs investment banker was in it for the art or the love of cinema.