Tag: Lena Waithe

REVIEW: Bad Hair [2020]

Jared Mobarak

You always have a choice. It’s 1989 and Anna Bludso (Elle Lorraine) still hasn’t straightened her hair thanks to an ill-fated attempt years previously that left her scalp scarred and sensitive to the touch. She asked her cousin Linda (Chanté Adams) to do it then because her idols all had sleek, shoulder length locks and she knew it would give her a leg up on a career path towards DJ/VJ stardom even before landing a job at the urban arm of RMV known as Culture. As an interviewer tells her…

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REVIEW: Queen & Slim [2019]

Jared Mobarak

Can I be your legacy? Despite what your Fox News watching relatives say, Black people in America aren’t asking to be killed. They aren’t “thugs” leeching off a system those same folks are banking on to carry them through retirement. And their rage at being left for slaughter isn’t an excuse for you to wield a badge like a southern slave owner. So when a young couple lurch their car while driving at night, they aren’t baiting a cop to pull them over. That teetotaler praying before diner food and…

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REVIEW: Ready Player One [2018]

Jared Mobarak

Ninjas don’t hug. You can’t help but drown within the pop culture vacuum of Ernest Cline‘s Ready Player One while reading. He throws references left and right—most often for no other reason than to namedrop as though he’s racking up geek-cred points within a nonexistent game. There becomes such an influx of information that you begin to see just how flimsy and redundant the plot behind the superficial artifice is in its reworking of common dystopian tropes utilized to bestselling success in the YA world. It’s a thin veil similar…

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