Sal Marciano

Feels like some arrogant white artsy liberals got together to make some sort of racial statement (e.g. on "black" love) which they were completely out of their depth in doing. They tried to be woke, but fell into the same pitfalls of just making a superficial and trite message that their target "black" female audience is quickly growing tired of. We are tired of the surface-level "plight of the black man/woman" stories depicted through the white gaze! Even if it is "understated". I was really looking forward to a movie that finally centered a woman with a dark complexion (and natural hair) who looks like me in a complex, nuanced and humanizing role! Which is very hard to come by! So, imagine how excited I was to see in the trailer Cynthia getting to be fought over by two men (and not just two black men, which we're all too often limited to as if we can't have any sexual identity outside that of a black man) ... Only for them to sideline her for 80% of the movie! It becomes a standard, typical movie that focuses on a dark skinned MAN and the lighter skinned, straight haired women in his life...at the expense of a rare chance for women like myself to finally get to see ourselves in an unstereotyped romance, that doesn't center our existence on our "race" and our dedication to black men.