#brassparker

Lakeith Stanfield in The Incredible Jessica James (2017)  for @brassparker

In response to the anon who asked me what my favourite blogs were :)

Really? I thought it was 20th century women? And lol what is Julianne Moore’s accent?

I always do. Surprisingly this time it ain’t about you. You’ve been lowkey, which I’m sure means some extra Parker shit is on the horizon.

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“‘Crown Heights,’ is a real story of a guy named Colin Warner who spent 21 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, The real-life guy is here and alive and well so I got to spend time with him to come and understand who he is today. I went to his house — he introduced me to his family, his kids and wife. And they blessed me at a shrine that they had cornered off in their house, and gave me their respect and best wishes to move forward with this.”

“I think she also represents how, in regards to the different kinds of evil, it’s white women in particular. I think back to the slave days, they wore the cotton that was picked and they benefited from the tortured labor of other beings. And while they didn’t crack the whip, although maybe some of them did, they still participated in this horrendous reality. I just think she’s pure evil and she gets off on her power. When I see it in its entirety, it’s very much a predator with its prey and throughout everyone is kind of playing that part. […] [They] go away, come back, lick [their prey] some more and just kind of savor this act of dominance and this act of controlling someone. Sort of enjoying the kill, savoring the kill, making it last as long as it possibly can.” — Betty Gabriel on Georgina in Get Out (2017)

Negga’s physical contributions, which prize restraint above all else, are at once the most distinctive of her category and the ones easiest to underrate. [...] Even in what are easily Mildred’s most private and solitary moments, in which the character receives two separate pieces of pivotal news by phone, Negga formidably maintains her delicate reserve. Nichols honors this decision, training his camera on her face as conflicted responses ripple ever so gently across it. To the naked eye, it might seem like Negga is doing next to nothing in each of these scenes. But look closer at the concentration covering Negga’s face — her gaze rooted to the spot, cheeks flushing — and you can detect the existence of deep inner thought, the process or complexities of which are never spelled out, purposely so. Negga leaves a palpable space between Mildred’s journey and the viewer’s experience of this journey, preserving an elusive air in a genre that hardly has time for individual mystery, much less subtlety of such skillful and deliberate variety. In doing this, Negga lends her scenes a unique and disquieting tension that Loving itself could occasionally use more of. But much more crucially, she enlists the viewer to actually fill in these self-imposed psychological gaps between audience and actress. Negga withholds just enough in her reaction shots and centerpiece close-ups to secure our involvement, leaving it up to us to decipher what Mildred might be thinking, while respecting her privacy enough to not draw us entirely into her mindset. —Matthew Eng