Movies are one of Black people's favorite forms of entertainment. Films like Soul Plane and Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood have long been some of Black people's favorite cinematic treats.
However, a recent Nicholas Cage movie left Black people wondering if Leni Riefenstahl had directed the film posthumously. The science-fiction film, Knowing, grossed more than $175 million worldwide and was a moderate success during its theatrical release in 2009, in America.
It might have been a bigger hit, had the trailers for the film been more forthcoming about the plot, as Nicholas Cage - whose hairline continues to change in each film - plays an MIT professor who uncovers a 50-year-old numerical sequence that has correctly forecast major disasters:
"When John (played by Cage) was looking at the numbers, he quickly realized that it was some type of code that predicted the month, date and year of a specific disaster, and how many people died in that particular disaster. After witnessing a plane crash at Logan International Airport, and saving people from a freak New York Subway accident, John realizes that the last disaster on the code is the end of the world when one of the Sun's solar flares will scorch the Earth."So it's another end of the world flick, and like in so many movies before it, Black people don't get a chance to save the world from solar flares. In fact, they barely are even seen in the film at all.
What makes this film so incredible and yet, so offensive to Black people - and perhaps all non-whites - is the ending of the film. For, like in Nordic mythology, the end of the world is met with fire, complete destruction and yet, a re-birth of Nordic life. A Ragnarök that seems alien to Black people.
Throughout Knowing, strange Blond hair, blue eyed people help the son of Cage's character and in the end, these angelic people turn out to be the savior of mankind, or perhaps only European-kind, as they are aliens that take two white children (one being Cage's character) to another planet. There, they avoid the destruction of earth and the film ends with the white children (one boy and one girl) running in fields of gold (perhaps the Elysium field's).
As the world is about to consumed by fire, Cage's character in the film reunites with his father, who tells him, "This isn't the end son," to which he replies, "I know."
Prior to making it to his parent's home though, he traverses through Boston and New York City, where mobs of people are looting the cities as anarchy reigns. Interesting, Beethoven's 7th Symphony Major, 2nd Movement - Allegretto in A Minor" is playing as he makes his way throughout he cities, a stark contrast to the savagery outside the windows of his car and the beauty within.
Classical music ( a future inclusion to the growing list of SBPDL) accompanying the end of the world is just to much for Black people, especially one in which angels or aliens only saved white children.
What's more is after the white children are safe from the fiery remnants of earth, they run toward a magnificent white tree. Accompanied by two white rabbits - a sign of fecundity - the white children are prepared to rebuild a world that the movie stated, unequivocally, that needed "a cleansing". That's how Knowing ends... and it was made in 2009.
Below, you can watch the last few minutes of the film, including the part of the movie that Black people found so offensive. For a world without Black people would never function properly, as entertainment would be but a mesh of whiteness.
Knowing, directed by Alex Proyas (who also directed the fantastic movies The Crow and Dark City), has been put on notice. The world in his latest film was destroyed, not even saved by Black people, but was afforded a re-birth where white children, headed toward a white tree, accompanied by white rabbits are to re-build civilization.
Stuff Black People Don't Like includes Knowing, because this film shows that angels (or aliens) would only chose white children to re-build a world, and give them a pure Nordic mythological paradise to do it in, and yet, Black people are forced to endure the destruction of earth.
In the new world to come, the aliens (or angels) of Knowing decree that Black people serve no fucntion, and leave them behind to fires of the solar flares. The film is racist, and SBPDL has yet another entry.
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