Scene Response 1

The back cover of O has a quote from a reviewer calling it the "most controversial movie of the year." I don't know if I'd say that, but I think I can see where some of that comes from. Personally, I liked the movie. I thought it was a good modern day version of Othello, but I did notice that they were REALLY pushing the racism issue as hard as a mom pushing triplets.

The scene I chose for this post was the basketball game against the Bulldogs. The Bulldogs are apparently supposed to be a real tough team and so it's really special and impressive when O leads his team to victory against them. Something I noticed here was that the Bulldogs team was made up of black guys. There might have been one white guy running around somewhere, but this team was definitely featured as a black team. Every other team in the movie was mainly white, or at the very least balanced. Even O's team was all white with the exception of him. The reason I bring this up is because the movie seemed to be continuing the stereotype that black people are predisposed to be better at basketball than white people.

As I was watching the movie, I actually thought that I wished I had to write our last discussion on Blackboard based off this film, instead of the actual play, because they literally loaded it with racial imagery. The soundtrack was very "urban" with most of the songs either focusing on being black or throwing the n-word around like a normal greeting. I'm not offended by this at all, and as an actor/director I completely agree with freedom of speech and expression, especially with art. I just thought it was a little too transparent that they were relying on the race issue to carry a lot of the film. What is weird about that is that the film didn't need it. I thought the acting was pretty good throughout and the story the told was great. Anyhoo, I liked the movie but I was a little surprised at how hard they pushed the extra bits of race stuff.