A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 12, 2010
Original Title:
Blacking Up: Hip-Hop's Remix of Race and Identity
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 57
Against the unique backdrop of American popular music, Blacking Up explores racial identity in U.S. society. The film artfully draws parallels between the white Hip-Hop fan and previous incarnations of white appropriation from blackface performer Al Jolson to mainstream artists like Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and Eminem. It interweaves portraits of white Hip-Hop artists and fans with insightful commentary by African American cultural critics such as Amin Baraka, Nelson George, Greg Tate, comedian Paul Mooney and Hip-Hop figures Chuck D., Russell Simmons, Ml of Dead Prez, and Di Kool Herc. Blacking Up will be a useful resource for courses in Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, African American Studies, Anthropology, and Cross-Cultural Dialogue as well as for Student Services programs.
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.