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'Princess' reigns at weekend boxoffice
Disney's animated film pulls in $25 million
By Carl DiOrio
Dec 13, 2009, 01:11 PM ET
Updated: Dec 13, 2009, 02:25 PM ET
Disney's animated feature "The Princess and the Frog" leaped into first place in the domestic boxoffice with an estimated $25 million weekend performance roughly in line with pre-release expectations.
Her Royal Highness: Anika Noni Rose
Monday, November 30, 2009 | 6:45 AM
by Regina R. Robertson
For decades, our images were rarely featured in mainstream fairytales, but a new day has come. This holiday season, Anika Noni Rose makes history when she's crowned as Disney's first, Black Princess--Tiana--in 'The Princess and the Frog.' With credits spanning stage ('Caroline, or Change'), film ('Dreamgirls') and television ('The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency'), the 37-year-old Tony Award-winner is intent on keeping her good fortune rolling.
Essence.com caught up with Rose to chat about landing her dream job, seeing herself in animation and how she hopes to switch things up for her next, big role.
ESSENCE.com: What was your initial thought when you heard there was going to be a Black animated princess?
ANIKA NONI ROSE: Oh my God, I was thrilled. [Working with] Disney has been my dream, so I just focused on getting the part and when I did, I called home screaming! [laughs] There's no reason why a girl from Connecticut would end up being the first Black Disney princess.
ESSENCE.com: Well, there's no reason why not, either! Weren't Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys and Tyra Banks being considered, too?
ROSE: I read that they were, but I don't know any details. Ultimately, that didn't matter to me because I was competing against me. As an actor, if you spend so much time thinking about how many other people are coming into a room, you'll psyche yourself out before you even get there.
ESSENCE.com: How did you feel when you saw Tiana on the big screen for the first time?
ROSE: When I saw Tiana, with my expression on her face, in color, standing in the moonlight, surrounded by sparkles--I was truly undone! I've been crying for a year-- seriously.
ESSENCE.com: What does it mean to you to be making history?
ROSE: The largesse of it all didn't hit me [in the beginning], but when they unveiled the doll to me, I remember thinking, "There's a doll, based on me and the work I've done, that's going to be here for these little girls--and she's glamorous." This movie is showing the world a different picture of Black America, which is phenomenal. It's just phenomenal.
ESSENCE.com: What were your feelings about the initial criticism surrounding the film, specifically relating to the prince not being Black and the firefly being a bit...ethnic?
ROSE: I was surprised by some of the things that the community took issue with, especially considering the amount of negativity that's in the world about us, on TV and film. But I think it's really about us not ever having this happen before and wanting to have some control over our image, because we so rarely do. There's a lot of humor in the film. There are also a lot of touching moments that I think are very genuine and it's all been done with such love, which you can see in the details. You can see it in Tiana's little, round nose and in how she moves...and that firefly's funny!
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Obama Not Comfortable With Women in Basketball, Golf ... or Anywhere Else
October 27, 2009 11:39 AM ET | Bonnie Erbe |
By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
President Obama drew heat last week for a story that surfaced outing his private White House male-only b-ball games. The story was that even though two female members of his cabinet were members of their college basketball teams, they were excluded, as were all women, from this most private of male-only clubs. The story became a metaphor for how the president views women generally and threatened to reveal some inconvenient truths about the man.
Now we see reports that gender-insensitivity charges have resonated with the Obama White House. According to Politics Daily, the president dragged chief domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes to the golf course on Sunday, and she became the first female to join his golf foursome since he took office. The event produced a photo op of global proportions.
President Obama could invite Chamique Holdsclaw to the private White House basketball court and Billie Jean King to play tennis with him. I still wouldn't believe he's any more comfortable dealing with women or concerned about "women's" issues than the dearly departed former Sen. Jesse Helms. President Obama talks the talk a lot better and a lot louder than Helms. But Jesse Helms was so rooted in his atavist traditions, he chose to remain true to his misogyny rather than pose for cameras with faux female golfing partners. President Obama must hide the side of his personality that is clearly uncomfortable with women because he needs their votes much more than Helms ever did.
Whether it was his treatment of Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail (as in his condescending remark that she was "likeable enough") or his clearly career-oriented mate who has been toned down and remorphed into a Stepford Wife, I just don't get the impression this man is comfortable with women. Nor do I believe he cares about them beyond needing women's votes. It's an act and a thoroughly see-through, amateur one at that.
Queen Michelle the First?
By JEREMY D. MAYER | 6/30/09 4:44 AM EDT
Michelle Obama wants a bigger role in her husband’s administration, according to The Washington Post. Unlike Laura Bush, who focused on a few peripheral issues, Obama wants a seat at the table when key policies are made.
Obama’s new chief of staff, Susan Sher, is part of the crucial 8:15 a.m. White House staff meeting. The first lady’s team of more than 20 has been told to think “strategically” about how to make her a player on policies she cares about.
This could be a very bad idea.
Washington insiders haven’t seen a first lady this ambitious since Hillary Clinton, without question the most powerful holder of that unofficial office.
Clinton put herself in charge of her husband’s plans to radically reform health care, and the nation is still paying the price for her mistakes.
While the failure of the Clinton administration’s health care agenda had many causes, she made some missteps that a more experienced Washington policymaker would not have made. And because she was the spouse of the president, it was very tough for anyone to tell her husband that things were going badly.
Clinton was a Yale-educated lawyer and, without a doubt, a brilliant woman (and she has learned a lot since then). And much the same could be said about the double-Ivy League-degreed Obama.
But if you throw a pebble up in the air at rush hour in Metro Center, you would very likely hit someone with an Ivy League degree. Succeeding at policy development and advocacy at the highest levels of government takes a lot more than that.
Marrying a top policymaker doesn’t magically grant you the rare skills necessary for your spouse’s profession, any more than marrying Serena Williams would enable you to win Wimbledon.
I know few music fans who believe Yoko and Linda improved the music of John and Paul with their contributions.
Yet even if Obama is a natural and immediately grasps how Washington works, there is something troubling about the whole concept of a presidential spouse with a multimillion-dollar staff.
Someone Needs to Tell Bonnie Erbe to Let It Go (Rants)
Friday, May 22, 2009 at 10:56AM
Columnist Bonnie Erbe of "why isn't the First Lady kicking ass and taking names already" fame is still complaining. Most recently she shot down professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell's argument that Michelle Obama's domestic and ceremonial role as First Lady was already a revolution for black women considering how we've been treated and portrayed historically -- which would be not as women, let alone human, at all.
But let's listen to what Erbe had to say this time. (Sigh)First lady Michelle Obama could be making history. She could take giant steps to give women and women of color more power in society and in the workplace. Instead, she self-selected the title of Mom-in-Chief and told Time Magazine, she stays out of public policy.
This attitude of hers is sad, very sad. I know it's constructed by the Obama public relations types—who want to tone down this brilliant, eminently qualified career woman. This new quote in particular reminds me of an all-time clunker from Barbara Bush who told the media when her husband was president she just, "went her own dumb way" and stayed out of politics.
What is it with these women? Or more importantly, what is with American society that it cannot accept a working spouse first lady? Is that so threatening it causes immediate public fear and dislike? If the answer is yes, and I fear it is, it reconfirms my belief during the last election attitudes toward race moved markedly forward, but gender-bias was allowed to remain politically correct.
Once again, Erbe continues to basically ignore the bigger picture or get over her narrow view of feminism or even acknowledge the arguments of black women and feminists who do find Michelle's role revolutionary because of its novelty and her background.
More after the jump.
Michelle Obama, Mom-in-Chief
posted by Melissa Harris-Lacewell
05/05/2009 @ 1:46pm
With Mother's Day approaching I want to think about Michelle Obama's assertion that her primary role as First Lady is "Mom-in-Chief."
Many progressive feminists were distressed with Michelle's assertion of motherhood as her primary role. They hoped she would seek a more aggressive policy agenda. After all Michelle Obama is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. She spent her career as an effective advocate for urban communities in their fraught relationship with powerful institutions. She is smart, capable, and independent. She maintained her own career and ambitions throughout Barack's early political career and even during his election to the U.S. Senate.
...........................................................................................
Over the past several months I have received many press inquiries from reporters and scholars who are anxious about the ascendance of this kinder, gentler Michelle Obama. They worry that Michelle is being manufactured and handled in a way that thwarts her authenticity and undermines the efforts of feminist movements committed to the notion that women can and should have both family and career.
This is a potentially fair criticism, but I want to complicate this easy narrative a bit by encouraging us to remember that as an African American woman the stereotypes against which Michelle is struggling are distinct from those that seek to limit and inhibit white women.
No Apologies
We're all worried about seeming racist. Some advice: just relax.
By Raina Kelley | NEWSWEEK
Published Feb 28, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Mar 9, 2009
Dear fellow journalists (especially the ones on TV): can I offer you a bit of unsolicited advice? Be brave. Listening to you talk (and talk and talk) around the subject of Barack Obama and race has been downright painful. Yes, our new president is black, and most of you are white, and judging by the way you excruciatingly measure every word you say about him, it's pretty clear that you are worried that you'll inadvertently say something insensitive and you'll wind up being accused of racism and it will ruin your career. I understand your fear. But seriously, it makes for some pretty painful watching.
An example: presidents dance at inaugural balls; that's what they do. Yes, it's a racial stereotype that all black people have rhythm. It is not racist to say that Barack and Michelle Obama looked good dancing together. Trust me on this.
I know there are plenty of Internet sheriffs trolling the airwaves for the next Imus-style outrage. Ignore them. Of course, if you send an e-mail cartoon depicting the front lawn of the White House as a watermelon patch, as the mayor of Los Alamitos, Calif., did last week, you're on your own. But there is simply nothing racist about saying that adorable little Sasha Obama is "sassy." The Huffington Post got clobbered for pointing out a "sassy" pair of sunglasses the president's daughter was sporting. You know, cute, sporty, fresh. If we're all sounding the alarm for that kind of thing, it's going to be a long four (possibly eight) years. I don't remember any indignation when the Huffington Post ran a story about Sarah Palin's daughter called "Piper's Sassiest Moments."
There she is -- no, not Miss America, but the Angela-Davis-Afro-wearing, machine-gun-toting, angry, unpatriotic Michelle Obama, greeting her husband with a fist bump instead of a kiss on the cheek.
It was supposed to be satire, but the caricature of Barack Obama and his wife that appeared on the cover of the New Yorker last week rightly caused a major flap. And among black professional women like me and many of my sisters in the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, who happened to be gathered last week in Washington for our 100th anniversary celebration, the mischaracterization of Michelle hit the rawest of nerves.
Welcome to our world.
We've watched with a mixture of pride and trepidation as the wife of the first serious African American presidential contender has weathered recent campaign travails -- being called unpatriotic for a single offhand remark, dubbed a black radical because of something she wrote more than 20 years ago and plastered with the crowning stereotype: "angry black woman." And then being forced to undergo a politically mandated "makeover" to soften her image and make her more palatable to mainstream America.
Sad to say, but what Obama has undergone, though it's on a national stage and on a much more prominent scale, is nothing new to professional African American women. We endure this type of labeling all the time. We're endlessly familiar with the problem Michelle Obama is confronting -- being looked at, as black women, through a different lens from our white counterparts, who are portrayed as kinder, gentler souls who somehow deserve to be loved and valued more than we do. So many of us are hoping that Michelle -- as an elegant and elusive combination of successful career woman, supportive wife and loving mother -- can change that.
Michelle Obama credited with helping recast image of U.S. black women
BY CASSANDRA SPRATLING • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • July 20, 2008
There's a new joy and excitement among many of the patrons of the Spiral Collective, a collection of businesses owned by black women in Detroit.
Their happiness centers on Michelle Obama, a woman they say puts a refreshing face on America's image of African-American women.
"People who come in here are absolutely in love with Michelle Obama," says Janet Webster Jones, who owns the Source Booksellers, one of the four businesses in one building at the corner of Cass and Willis in Midtown. The others are an art gallery, a natural hair care salon and an eclectic boutique.
Jones and others say that Michelle Obama knocks down old stereotypes of black women: Sapphire, the angry black woman; Mammy, the caretaker and nurturer of her own children and everybody else's, and Jezebel, the loose woman.
Jones' daughter, Alyson Jones, 34, says the modern-day jezebels are booty-shaking hoochie mamas popularized in hip-hop videos.
"So Michelle comes along and she completely dispels all that," Janet Jones says. "She represents someone who came from humble beginnings to achieve a high level of education. She has a strong self-identity as a female.
"You know she likes to wear dresses and high heels and she's almost 6 feet tall. And she's a loving wife and a great mother."
"She normalizes black women," says Alyson Jones, an elementary teacher at Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse, a charter school in Detroit. "She's not the bitter black woman pundits have tried to make her out be."
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