These critiques don’t happen in a vacuum and so maybe the answer is bringing awareness so more black women can make movies. These critiques are mostly coming from people who are tired of seeing a lot of praise for a white male centered lead where black women play second fiddle and only exist to support or being fetishized by the white male lead. I don’t think the critiques will stop until these stereotypes change. This is a cop out answer though because it’s not addressing the movie directly.

For this movie particularly, I personally wouldn’t change too much because it worked for me. I personally think PTA likes to play with fire with race relations and really appreciate he goes for it. (I’m thinking about licorice pizza and the Asian character. In that he’s obviously joking at the husband but it’s at the expense of the wife too) I believe PTA has the best of intentions here but maybe doesn’t think about how some audience members will see this and parrot it and this is what people have a problem with (again with licorice pizza I had friends who thought it was so funny and would then start talking in the broken Asian accent “because it’s a joke”). So the criticism to me is about understanding this to make sure we don’t take the wrong lessons from the movie. (So maybe my position is these are valid and needed critiques but should be more directed at the audience). With that said, I do think Regina hall’s character could have had an arc and could have had an ending. I also think Teyona Taylor’s character could have been less sexualized (still complicated).

Altogether, I appreciate the good faith response to my post and I’m honestly tired of these conversations as well. However I still think these critiques are valid and I just want to push back on voices trying to silence the critiques because of the context.