Friday, June 21, 2019

"Even with good intentions, Hollywood still struggles to portray Muslims accurately or fairly, much less positively"

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations - Georgia, describes his involvement in the production of the 2019 remake of Shaft and his reaction after watching the movie.
As a civil rights activist with the Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, most of the emails I receive involve deadly serious topics: hate speech…hate crimes…discrimination…Donald Trump’s latest tweet. So you can perhaps imagine my surprise when I received an email last year from a casting director for the latest sequel to the classic blaxploitation film Shaft, which was filming in Atlanta. --- read more ---
And of course I have to include the Isaac Hayes theme song to the original Shaft.

 


P.S. (April 8, 2020) - I watched Shaft (2019) on HBO today. The plot, as Brother Edward described, is a barely adequate veneer for the real story: the emergence of a third generation Shaft as portrayed by Jessie T. Usher, who like his grandfather Richard Roundtree (Shaft, 1971) & his father Samuel Jackson (Shaft, 2000), decides to stop "working for the man." Jessie begins the movie as an awkward hipster & ends it as another "man with the plan."