Hancock is a hit with a black star . . . but does it do anything to move the horizons of how we see black stars?

re: horizons of the possible, movies, race

Andy:

Smith’s rules for how to be a global black superstar, then?

1.  Keep it easy and breezy. Heroes must work for the good of the white folks (especially families and romantic pairings) in the movie, often to their own detriment.

2.  Don’t risk putting off the white folks/foreigners in the audience with an excess of what pundit John McWhorter might derisively describe as “a surfeit of explicitly black presentation.” (Unless, like Denzel in Training Day, you are playing a degraded, corrupt cop; then you get an Oscar.)

3.  Do not—EVER—make a movie whose subject matter treats or concerns the facts of black life in America in an accurate or illuminated way, this even when said facts are somehow encoded or embedded in the conventions of genre or some other filmmaking trick.