The Bernie Mac Show is on its third and fourth seasons, and the Spike Lee-directed The Original Kings of Comedy is a staple in every Black home. It’s on the still-relevant cable channel MTV, and he’s the pretty boy from That 70s Show, a sitcom just getting into its stride. Somewhere out there, there have to be the minutes manga quiz of the pitch meeting that created this film. Or, if not that, maybe there’s a recording somewhere, some piece of evidence taken by a wary Sony executive assistant horrified at what was about to happen to one of Sidney Poitier’s most culturally significant films of the 1960s.
It turns out that though some of those thoughts were justified, few were for the right reasons. It quickly becomes clear while watching Guess Who that it is less a race-swapping remake than a distant, modern-day cousin of the original. In fact, the film’s first act has more in common with Meet the Parents than the sophisticated classic, diving headfirst into Ben Stiller territory.
D.W. Griffith’s Movie, Birth of a Nation Shows the Reality of Racism
I’d actually give my soul to see the folks at Screen Rant cover this because, boy, what a misfire. The Northern Star is the student-produced, independent media at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, and is a limited public forum whose content is determined exclusively by its student editors. Information presented on this website and in its print products is not controlled by NIU administration, faculty or staff. The Star publishes online at northernstar.info and sends out its TLDR newsletter Mondays through Fridays while class is in session during fall and spring semesters.
The film successfully captures the theme of racism as depicted in the novel. In the novel, Bob Ewell, a poor drunk, accuses Tom Robinson of raping his daughter Mayella. Tom Robinson passed the Ewell house everyday on his way to work and almost everytime that Mayella saw him she would ask him to help her with something around the house and Tom would always be glad to help her. Mayella had seven siblings and a drunk father that never helped her and in addition she had no friends. Mayella even offered to pay Tom after he helped her but he always refused because he knew that she had no one else to help her and that she didn’t have the money to give away.
From the time the first African set foot in the North American colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, race relations have always been whites’ superiority over blacks. One of the nice aspects of Guess Who is that the two central relationships – Simon and Theresa, and Percy and Marilyn – are credible. We come to care about the characters and root for them to be together.
Poitier had made history in 1964 as the first Black actor to win an Oscar for a lead role (as Homer Smith in Lilies of the Field). Loving v. Virginia, which made interracial marriage legal in all the United States, had been decided in June. A few months after the film’s release, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. When it works, it’s a pleasant, undemanding comedy about mismatched individuals finding points of mutual understanding.
In addition, the film also makes reference to its predecessor – Jamal, Percy’s ideal (and imaginary) husband for Theresa which closely resembles Sydney Poitier’s character from the original. A 2011 episode of the American sitcom Last Man Standing features a similar theme, although the couple is lesbian instead of mixed-race. The falling action must play out the battle between the protagonist and the antagonist, allowing one of them to win. I decided that the next movie or play I watched would be tested to see if it followed this ‘rule’, and as luck would have it, on television this afternoon the great Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) was screened, with no ads. I have been working on a play script for ten (yes, 10) long years and I still don’t have it down.
In fact, because Tracy was experiencing heart failure during filming, Columbia Pictures, the film’s production studio, could not secure the necessary insurance for him. Instead, Kramer and Hepburn put their salaries in escrow to cover another actor’s costs in case Tracy needed to be replaced. Hairspray is a musical which stars a good natured overweight teenage who helps integrate the races in a popular teen dance show, the Corny Collins Show, in segregated Baltimore. It focusses on racism and segregation in the 60’s, but has the underlying theme of equality for everyone in spite of their race, class, sexual orientation, gender or outward appearance. Tracy Turnblad, an overweight teenager, finally gets a spot on the “Corny Collins Show”, a teen dance show she has always dreamt of being on. She is disturbed when she finds out the “Negroes” are allowed to dance on the show occasionally.
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It wouldn’t have taken more than a simple re-write for Guess Who to feature a young black actor instead of Kutcher. Despite the allusion in the title, Guess Who is not a remake of the classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In fact, other than borrowing the underlying premise (girl brings home boyfriend of a different race to meet her family), there are few similarities between the films. To start with, the 1967 feature was primarily a message melodrama that doubled as an examination of race relations at the time. Kevin Rodney Sullivan’s (How Stella Got Her Groove Back) 2005 movie is an overt comedy that, while not ignoring the race issues altogether, uses them more frequently for humor than to illustrate serious points.
Guess Who?
“Don’t let our modern society shape who you are and don’t allow stereotypes to define you. Live outside of labels we so often stick upon ourselves and allow your individuality to change the world around you.” (unknown). This quote by an unknown person shows how you shouldn’t allow the modern stereotypes of gender define or affect you because men and women can have just as much self control as the other. In the short story “The Dinner Party” by Mona Gardner, a colonel official and his wife are throwing a large dinner party with multiple people of high social standings from army officers to government attaches.
The movie shows all the telltale signs of the genre – there is a musical number, a dance number and climax where a character drops everything to make a mad dash to correct a mistake. Unfortunately, the first half of the movie is pretty much “Meet the Parents” all over again. Percy searches for some dirt on Simon, who has just quit his job and doesn’t want his fiancée to know. The entire subplot involving Simon’s job is merely validation for Percy to dislike Simon.
Percy responds by locking himself in the basement with Simon at night to keep Theresa and her beau apart. Eventually, the racial and relationship conflicts explode, dividing the family on the night before the big anniversary party. Is a two-player board game in which players each guess the identity of the other’s chosen character. The game was developed by Israeli game inventors Ora and Theo Coster, the founders of Theora Design. It was first released in Dutch in 1979 under the name Wie is het? Milton Bradley then produced the game in the United Kingdom, and it was brought to the United States in 1982.[1] It is now owned by Hasbro.