And the Oscars are out

So, everyone's buzzing about what happened with the Oscars nominations--namely that there was a dearth of black nominees. At this point, why should anyone be surprised? After all, this is the same industry that once listed an overtly racist film in its top 100.

Do Denzel Washington playing a crooked cop in Training Day, Halle Berry sleeping with an old white man in Monster's Ball, the praise over movies like 12 Years a Slave, and "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" winning an Oscar for Best Original Song have anything in common? These movies all have black people in stereotypical or subordinate roles for which there were lots of critical acclaim. That the people behind Selma failed to send screener DVDs to the voters and the uproar over how LBJ was portrayed by the 37th president's apologists as may have been the movie's undoing is really a sign to me that there's still a lot of old boy club mechanisms at work.

Another Earth review

The movie was less about parallel worlds than the protagonist Rhoda coming to grips with what she did as a teenager. She killed a former Yale professor's wife, son and unborn daughter and put him in a coma for months while driving drunk after leaving a high school graduation party. She was set to go to MIT. Instead, she spent four years in jail for the deaths. After she leaves jail, Rhoda gets a cleaning job at a high school. She also cleans ex-professor John Burroughs's house. An essay contest is held for people to win a trip to Earth 2. The SETI spokeswoman ends up talking to an alternate version of herself. Rhoda decides to give her ticket to Earth 2 to John.

I was surprised at how little dialogue there was throughout the movie.  I was expecting the filmmakers to do more with Parallel Universe Theory, but there was no view of life on Earth 2, just a view of the duplicate planet in the sky. I would be creeped out by a spitting image of myself (like Rhoda did in the end) as opposed to other intelligent beings from another planet.

Stars: 2.75/4