THE MO'KELLY REPORT: (Continue to) Boycott Akeelah and the Bee
No, I’m not talking about graduation from high school or college…as it is that time of year. I’m not talking about any of you out there who managed to marry your high school or college sweetheart…as it is also that time of year.
Congratulations are in order because ‘we’ managed to ‘stay the course.’ ‘We’ managed to be consistent and remain true to our collective ideals, blocking anything threatening our growth as a people.
Ladies and gentlemen, put your damn hands together for the successful boycott of the movie Akeelah and the Bee.
It takes real temerity to ignore arguably the best movie of the year. Not the best ‘Black’ movie of the year, but the BEST movie in all of 2006. That takes a level of dedication rarely seen and unheard of unmitigated gall.
Yes, I remember the odds were more in our favor with Phat Girlz. We had more ‘excuses’ available at our disposal. Everything from “not wanting to support a movie starring Mo’Nique,” to not supporting a movie with a supposedly misguided marketing campaign.”
Yes, I was worried. Deep down inside I knew ‘we’ wouldn’t be able to rely on those excuses the next time around and I worried whether we’d have the gumption to make sure another positive movie highlighting the Black experience would under-perform commercially.
When you lay it out on paper, it really didn’t look promising. There was a great script, great starring cast, including two Academy Award nominees Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne…and even a superb performance by relative newcomer Keke Palmer.
But ‘we’ had an ace in the hole. ‘We’ didn’t give a damn.
The movie was executive produced by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Not Oprah, not Quincy, not Bill (Cosby), not Bob (Johnson) but Mark.
As in Mark Cuban. Uh, no thanks Mark. I’d appreciate it if you left the meaningful and ‘positive’ movies to ‘us.’ You have no business trying to produce thoughtful and thought-provoking African-American cinema. You AND Steven Spielberg can go straight to hell. I’m still mad at him for that abomination called The Color Purple. 11 Academy Award nominations? What in the hell was HE thinking?
See, what Mark Cuban didn’t understand was although he had the best of intentions and produced a stellar cinematic piece…he forgot one minor detail.
‘We’ don’t give a damn.
Never underestimate ignorance and indifference. They are more powerful and potent than virtually any force known to man. They are mother and father respectively to self-hatred and self-destruction. It’s true. Ignorance and hatred are inextricably linked; ergo ignorance of self can have only one end result. Mark Cuban was trying to mess all that up with messages about the ‘value of education’ or ‘being proud of who you are.’
How dare he?! Ignorance is bliss and he’s messing with our collective euphoria.
I was so scared that African-Americans might come out and support this movie I saw it three different times, err uh of course in the hopes of making sure other African-Americans didn’t try to see this movie. My job as a card-carrying ‘hater’ is to make sure that I, like most African-Americans would continue to wallow in mediocrity and relative stupidity.
No way in the world did I want Black folk seeing this wonderful story. No way in hell did I want people, especially Black people to support a movie that portrayed African-Americans AND Latinos in a positive light…even with a bit of innocent interracial romance included.
That’s simply unacceptable.
Unless Blacks and Latinos are trying to kill each other or shoot their way straight to jail, we have no business spending our money to see such uplifting garbage. Everybody knows that there are only three stories about minorities worth producing and supporting. You know, the one where we go to jail, the other one in which we just got out of jail…and that other, other one in which we go to jail, get out and develop a scheme that threatens us going back to jail. If the movie is not on the following list, we have no business supporting it. Please support all of these movies, now out on video.
Lockdown
3 Strikes
Caught Up
Get Rich or Die Tryin’
Paid in Full
Civil Brand
(and 187 other movies that I don’t have time to list)
Thank God, ‘we’ are still stuck on stupid. Then again, most of us seemingly aren’t interested in having a relationship with the Lord, so probably He didn’t have anything to do with this. This is all on us. ‘We’ get all the credit.
Thanks be to ‘we.’ Let the church say ‘Amen!’
As it turned out, my services weren’t needed. The theater patrons were mostly White anyhow. I didn’t have to keep the multitude of ‘us’ away. ‘We’ staged our own successful boycott and nobody can take that away.
Mission accomplished.
To add further irony to insult, Akeelah and the Bee was written and directed by Doug Atchison, a White man. I had followed this script for many years, dating back to when it won a national honor in the Nicholls Fellowship Screenwriting competition. For the uninitiated, that’s the Academy Award amateur screenwriting competition.
In other words, all of Hollywood knew that this was a great movie waiting to be made from jump. Another Nicholls Fellowship winner was the shamefully positive (and commercially unsuccessful) movie Down in the Delta
Thank God though for the livid indifference of my people. Without your collective help, ‘we’ wouldn’t be celebrating today.
Let’s put it in quantitative terms:
After four weeks in wide release…Akeelah and the Bee with a great story, cast and matching performances has grossed:
$15,728,000
To put that number in perspective…
Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (50 Cent)
$30,981,850
Baby Boy (Tyrese – 2001)
$28,734,552
Antwone Fisher (Denzel – 2002)
$21,078,145
Soul Plane (Bunch of fools – 2004)
$13,922,211
Phat Girlz (Mo’Nique)
$6,922,865
Down in the Delta (Alfre Woodard)
$5,662,985
Soul Food (Ensemble - 1997)
$43,490,057
Waiting to Exhale (Ensemble - 1995)
$64,236,823
Dead Presidents (Ensemble – 1995)
$24,104,295
If we disregard inflation and assume these figures to be both static and directly comparable, we can come to the following conclusions.
• The commercial appeal of Akeelah and the Bee is akin to the maligned Soul Plane. I’m not sure how anyone should view this fact, no matter how you look at it. I’m disappointed that Soul Plane didn’t do better. I’d much see more cinema with ‘us’ acting like buffoons and smoking marijuana, than I would watch a story about an African-American girl attempt to win the national spelling bee.
• African-Americans have no intention of supporting meaningful Black cinema, irrespective of the color or gender of the writer, director or producers. That’s a very positive sign.
• Black Movies starring Black Academy Award-winners or nominees don’t do well. See: Antwone Fisher. It is a better business decision for a Hollywood studio to put out a movie featuring a rapper with a gun in both his hands, shooting at people who look like him…and that’s a beautiful thing.
• It’s been almost 10 years since a Black, positive, non comedic movie has been a commercial success. Hallelujah!
Today is a great day in Black America. We should all stop and take moment to fully appreciate the magnitude of this accomplishment. Only in America can a movie about two gay cowboys (which was supposedly so ‘repulsive’ and allegedly antithetical to American ideals and morals) could be better received and supported in its community than a positive movie about African-Americans in ours. Although Brokeback Mountain did not have national distribution upon its release…you fill in the rest. Although gays are estimated to be 10% of the population and African-Americans are 12%...you fill in the rest. If you can’t, I’ll do it for you.
Brokeback Mountain
$83,025853
Akeelah and the Bee
$15,728,000
Congratulations Black America…you didn’t let me down and your continued indifference is both noticed and needed.
Keep hope alive. You are not somebody.
The Mo'Kelly Report is an entertainment journal with a political slant. It is meant to inform, infuse and incite meaningful discourse...as well as entertain. The e-book "The Best of The Mo'Kelly Report" will be available...uh, soon. For more Mo’Kelly,
http://mokellyreport.blogspot.com. Morris W. O'Kelly can be reached at
mokellyreport@sbcglobal.net and he welcomes all commentary
j/k
However, it is now out on DVD! maybe it will make more money now!
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