I SWEAR I AM GOING TO TALK ABOUT CUBA SOON, I’m waiting to get some pictures off of my parents’ cameras (slash, I have some dear friends visiting me and it’s keeping me busy!). In the meantime, though, I would just like to note that I saw Django Unchained and HOELEE KERAPP.

The single most problematic aspect for me, on first viewing, was Samuel L. Jackson’s character. Also, Kerry Washington really didn’t get a whole lot to do, as Hildy is just a non-character, a human MacGuffin. Two simple facts I’d like to state that I think are favorable:

1. When [SO AND SO] died, I was initially shocked, and then realized that that reaction was because he was a white character in a largely black movie. Normally, his role vs. the protagonist’s role would have been reversed, colorwise, and it would have seemed sad, but normal, because the Black buddy always dies. Having [SO AND SO] bite it was the absolutely correct choice.

2. This being a Tarantino film, there is death everyfuckingwhere. Though I’d have to watch it again to be sure, from what I remember, only two deaths of slaves are gratuitous; every other one is treated at length, head-on, as an important event. Gratuitous white death is everyfuckingwhere. I didn’t notice this until mulling over the movie afterward, but it represents another color reversal of violence in film. (Whether the attention to Black pain and death becomes exploitative of violence against Black bodies is a major question here, and not one I’m sure I’m entitled to give an opinion on.)

I don’t know whether the problematic aspects of the movie outweigh the things about it that I think are great (neither of which I have listed completely here), and once again, I don’t know that it’s really for me to say. But it gave me a lot to think about. 

Oh, PS, Jamie Foxx was sneakily amazing in this movie. The transformation in his attitude, speech, body language, EVERYTHING from beginning to end is hugely important to the movie, and so much of it lies outside of the script.

According to the cab drivers of Cairo (who apparently collectively turned the fucking asshole knob up to 11 this evening), there are major protests going on tonight, but it’s all very contradictory. Nobody would take me to Garden City because of some supposedly huge protest on the Corniche, which doesn’t make any sense because that’s the highway by the Nile. There’s nothing there but hotels and felucca docks, really (in Garden City, I mean). There’s no gathering place and nohing to protest there, although it would be a great place to get hit by a car. So I took the Metro to downtown and got a cab from there. We drove through Tahrir, which was totally uneventful—if anything, it was unusually quiet—and to the Corniche, which, except for a sudden spate of cars going the wrong way, was totally normal. Then I hear that two people died on Mohammed Mahmoud street, which feeds into Tahrir.

I can’t find any news anywhere—none of the usually reliable liveblogs seem to be covering any protests right now—so basically I’m confused as hell. This is on top of having had the kind of evening that makes you want to burn it all down and start over with amoebas, because clearly humans are the real scum here and amoebas won’t stare at anybody’s tits, you know?