So Wrong, It’s Wright

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me: I love Queen Latifah.  (See last week’s post, doye.)

Not in the sick, sordid sexual way that I love Natasha Khan, but in the sweet tender, pal-like way that you love your favorite college professor or your friend’s mom.  I even started a blog Livinglatifahloca.wordpress.com with the sole purpose of watching each of her films and then writing about it an a pathetic Julie Powell-esque attempt to get money for running my mouth about the one thing I know how to do well: talk about shit I saw on TV. Maybe one day when doing something  real is more fun than being lazy, that whole thing will start to take shape.

I don’t know when my infatuation began but I know it hit fever fucking pitch when Queen portrayed Gwen Ifill during the SNL parodies of the Presidential debates. She was just the cutest! Given my true love thang for Queen I was suitably tickled when I heard she was doing a movie with equally legendary hip hop virtuoso Common.

Common and Queen Latifah.  Queen and Common. Common, Queen.

How could anything other than a movie real, honest and artistically rigorous come from such a fortuitous combination?

Oh. Right.

So, like, a couple of things.

Apparently the writers/marketers/studio heads all were sitting around at fucking Pink Taco or whatever and realized that, oh, man, they had to nail down a plot for this movie before the Maroon Five show that night at Whiskey-A-Go-Go or their boss would go ballistic.  So they put their Ray Bans on as hard as they could and adjusted the lapels on the blazer they wore over their band tshirts to make sure only 45% of the image was showing and thought the shit out of it. They tapped their loafers on the ground with the effort and sweat poured onto their 7 For all Mankind jeans that they were wearing despite being boys.  As the gel in their hair melted and coursed down towards their rapidly receding hairlines, they realized that the three things all people love in movies are :

Dating

Physical Therapy

Common, rapping pretending to be a sports player.

Also, people, right off the fucking bat, why is Denzel Washington still the only black man that anyone in Hollywood thinks counts as good looking?  “Hello, Denzel.” Really, writers, really? is it 1994, is that it?  Are we still so fixated on the one socially acceptable-to-white-people version of black masculinity that his first name has become synonymous with “handsome” or “gorgeous?” what about like, a BILLION OTHER YOUNGER HOTTER, YOUNGER, MORE CULTURALLY RELEVANT MEN OF COLOR I COULD NAME?  Sorry for yelling.

But seriously folks….I’m gonna go see this thing. Who’s in?