What Questlove did last year for a single music festival with his documentary Summer of Soul, film and cultural critic Elvis Mitchell has done for an entire decade of cinema and beyond with Is That Black Enough for You?!?, the first-time director’s new Netflix documentary.
With a focus on the 1970s, one of the greatest decades in American cinema by almost any measure, Mitchell succeeds wildly with Black Enough as a reclamation project for Black cinema of the era. His film is an erudite mix of interviews with numerous luminaries of the film and entertainment world – Harry Belafonte, Samuel L. Jackson, and Whoopi Goldberg are only a few – and incisive video essay-style film and cultural criticism from Mitchell.
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Return of the Jedi, the final chapter in the trilogy that transformed sci-fi movies forever, is itself a rehash of the plot of A New Hope. That, as well as a few other less-than-inspired elements of the picture, make Jedi the weakest of the first triptych of films.
Released in May of 1983, Jedi was the culmination of the previous six years of Star Wars fever. I was about to turn three years old, so, again, I had no cultural awareness at the time outside of the contents of my own diaper. I would like to pretend, however, that I took my brother – who was about to turn 18 months – to the movie while explaining everything he missed in the first two episodes.
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In 1980, I would make my own much more low-key première onto the world stage two months and a few days after The Empire Strikes Back reignited Star Wars fever in movie theaters around the globe. I’m tempted to observe that I missed out on the feeling of anticipation that must have been palpable on the eve of the second installment of George Lucas’s blockbuster phenomenon rëentering the cultural zeitgeist. But I think I have a pretty good handle on what it was like. I’ve been through two additional Star Wars trilogy releases, both encompassing multiple years separating each new installment. And, of course, there’s the MCU, whose overlords have calculated with scientific precision the exact number of seconds between installments in order to achieve peak fan excitement.
Still, I feel like a baseball enthusiast who raves to an older fan about the greatness of a current favorite player. The older fan, the one with more historical perspective, only has to mention, in hushed tones, “That’s great, kid, but you never saw Mantle or DiMaggio swing a bat at the top of his game.” Part of the magic of the original trilogy lies in the fact that nothing like it had ever been done before in film history.
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Do not believe director J.J. Abrams when he tells you that his movie, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, isn’t a rebuke of the hard left turn that Rian Johnson took with his installment, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. This last trilogy in The Skywalker Saga – which includes Episodes I-IX – gives the world what I think is the first ever rap-style beef between film directors, at least in blockbuster filmmaking.
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