As obnoxious as Hollywood can get with its youth obsession, it’s nice when our elders get some love. Ordinarily, when older folks show up in a film, they’re either a wise mentor, a villain, or a wise mentor that becomes a villain. That doesn’t give them a whole lot of colors on the palette to play with. Luckily, Hollywood remembers occasionally that not everybody wants to watch a Marvel movie, and not every filmgoer is a white male aged 18-25. Hence, the Old People Doing Things sub-genre, or OPDT*, where a group of graybeards has some kind of an inciting incident in the twilight... Read More

In today’s America, the easiest thing in the world is to be a straight, white male. I don’t mean that us white guys get our pick of great jobs and get handed sacks of money. Instead, we have a base level of presumed competency. If we say to society that we want to become an author, or an astronomer, or a professional soccer player, the response is something like, “As long as you work hard, you can make that happen.” But try being a black woman in America. Try dealing with the one-two punch of racism and sexism. For example, on an early Delta airlines flight from Detroit... Read More