Discriminations

Sweet Home Alabama - My wife and I went to see the new movie Sweet Home Alabama this afternoon. I was going to let it go unblogged, but then I noticed the recent spate of movie criticism and response that has been provoked by the good Reverends Shaprton and Jackson and their objections to Barbershop (see here for example) and I thought, "if them, why not me too?"

It's the story of a poor Southern girl with a hidden past who makes good in the Big Apple, becomes engaged to a very appealing fellow whose Mom is the Mayor from Hell, and returns home to Alabama (except it seems to have been filmed in Georgia and Florida, or some unknown place where they have lightening bugs in the fall) to secure a divorce from her long-abandoned good ole boy husband. You can probably figure out the rest.

Although the Alabamians were a little hickier and even weirder than we natives think we are, they were at least portrayed sympathetically (or what Hollywood thinks of as sympathetically). I actually liked it and would recommend it (though you should keep in mind that I'm not too far removed from hick myself, and am the type who likes movies much better than films). Still, there was one line in it that grates: after Reese Witherspoon had been back in Alabama a day or so and begun to fit back in a bit, her estranged husband says, "Well, at least you've got your accent back."

I can guarantee you that no good ole boy (even a secretly cool one, as the husband turns out to be) would have said that. He'd have said, "Well, at least you've lost your accent."

UPDATE - I never should have started down this road, but now that I have I should point you to other, less charitable reviews in the New York Times ("a ball of fluff ... that peddles a faux populist sentimentality" -- don't you just love it when movie reviewers act like they know what populism is?) and the Washington Post. In fact, the WaPo disliked it so much that it had to run three reviews: here ("mostly stereotypes and cliches"), here ("tiredly familiar"), and here. This last one was a doozy. After mixing breakfast metaphors every which way from Sunday -- "These Grits Don't Ring True" [!] plus "thin gruel," it also asserts somewhat churlishly that the movie managed to "elide the vexing issues of sexuality and race that tug at the film's edges." Only a very small tweak to the vocabulary -- adopting the mandatory mantra of "race, class, gender" and this review would have been right at home in a History Dept. seminar.

If I might adopt the faux persona (as the reviewers would say) of a character from the movie (something easy for me to do since I was born and raised -- or should I say "reared"? -- in Alabama), I would point out that all these reviews are about what you'd expect some pointy-headed Yankees to say.

And there's even news about those who got me started down this misbegotten path: the good Reverends Jackson and Sharpton. The New York Times reports today of still-roiling controversy over Barbershop. What I found most interesting, however, was not the continuing huff and puff of the aggrieved Reverends but that the NYT, as it often does, managed once again to find an expert who knows even less than the writer. (Come on, be fair. This is an AP story. All the NYT did was run it.) Here's the line the article takes:

The flap over the popular movie has exposed a generational rift between civil rights activists and younger blacks who have no memory of the days of bus boycotts, freedom rides and lunch counter sit-ins, some scholars say.

Some scholars? Unfortunately, one of them (are there more?) is quoted:

"You have some individuals from the civil rights movement, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who are utterly offended that some of their icons have been criticized," said Todd Boyd, an associate professor at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television.

"You have another generation who finds no problem whatever in criticizing anyone who they deem appropriate for criticism. They have rejected this idea of the sacred cow."

Al Sharpton is a lot of things, but veteran of the civil rights movement is not one of them. He was born in 1954, and thus was one year old when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus; six years old when Greensboro students first sat-in at a lunch counter, launching the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee; nine years old when Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech; and fourteen years old when King was killed. True, Jesse Jackson did hire him in 1969, at 15, to help shake down companies that hadn't hired enough blacks, but shortly after that he was off on the road with James Brown and then working with Don King, the fight promoter.

Jackson and Sharpton may be offended that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks have been "disrespected" by one character in a movie. I am offended that they are mentioned in the same sentence/paragraph/story with King and Parks.