So I was home all weekend, the kids were gone, so it was nice and quiet around my house. Sunday, I decided to get with ON DEMAND, and see what they were talking about. I promise you I love ON DEMAND. Whatever you miss during the week just catch up on Saturday and Sunday.
I had remembered a couple days before reading an article on NecoleBitchie.com about this year marking the 15th anniversary of Love Jones, and they interviewed Nia Long and Larenz Tate to discuss the affect this movie had on black romantic movies, the poetic movement, and just African-American culture period. I know you all remember the explosion of what I like to call “bro-mantic dramas and comedies” that came soon after this movie: Love and Basketball, Soul Food, The Best Man, Brown Sugar, Disappearing Acts, Deliver us from Eva, Two Can Play That Game, The Brothers, The Wood, The Inkwell (which everyone felt was corny but to this day I am so touched by that coming of age tale that Tate delivered with such artistic sweetness) and the many other movies that I may be forgetting about. For a minute there all you saw on the big screen was Sanaa Lathan, Gabrielle Union, Taye Diggs, and Morris Chestnut.
I hope they saved some of their acting money because them days are long over. Loooong over. Hell I just saw Morris Chestnut was in some Sunday afternoon BET stage play a couple weeks ago. And the shit was horrible. I mean, is this what you’ve been reduced to Morris? What is going on with Morris anyway? He used to be so chocolate and so chiseled and so smooth and so sexy…now I just look at him and I get that same confused look my little Shih Tzu Jazmine gives me when I fuss at her for chewing up a crayon on the floor. Like, huh?
However, I digress.
So um yeah….the movie. Love Jones.
You guys I love this movie. I love this movie. I love it for its sexiness. I love it for its rawness of Chicago
“It’s was like…it was like his dick just…talked to me.”
Hypnotized pause by Josie, then dreamily: “What it say?”
Nina trying to sum it up, can’t, then comes up with: “Nina…”
And who can forget “I love you….that’s urgent like a mothafucka.”
Y’all, Love? Yeah, that shit IS urgent like a mothafucka.
But anyways, like I said, I love this movie. Probably more than I did back in the day because after watching it yesterday with new (old, lol) 41 year old eyes, I realized that the movie I remembered was somehow different. You know, it was the same movie, but my understanding was different. Yeah, that’s a better way of saying it.
I saw the exact same movie differently.
First, let me tell you guys how I remembered it. Nina and Darius had started off with the usual fireworks that new relationships provided. She wasn’t sure she was over her ex, so she wanted to go back to make sure one way or the other. Meanwhile, Darius goes, finds another woman to fill Nina’s place. When she returns, she finds him with another woman. She goes off and innocently with a friend of his, not sure what her intentions were with Bill Bellamy’s character, if she used him for companionship, to make Darius jealous, or if she genuinely liked the boy (which, eww, I know Bill Bellamy was big time back in those days but he has never been anything more than comical to me) but whatever. Nina finds her way back into Darius’s arms, however now with all the baggage that dumb decisions, unconfirmed betrayal and good old fashioned busted up trust supplies. Immaturity and inability to express themselves appropriately, the rocky relationship soon succumbs under pressure and like the saying goes, another one bites the dust. Then there’s the ending, where Nina and Darius hook up after a year apart, and find themselves in each other’s arms again. It never was clear if it was just for that moment or if they actually made a go of it, you know, what with her in New York and he still in Chicago
And that’s generally how most would remember it I believe.
So why, then, when I watched it yesterday, did I get so annoyed with Nina? My beloved Nina who I copied her cute little flip hairstyle, cute knitted caps, and y’all can’t tell me I wasn’t cute when I wore the little short vest with the long button down shirt underneath it. Man, I loved that style so much I feel like I could still wear that to this day.
But yeah, I was annoyed. Because for the first time, I saw her initial mistake to make the whole thing come down much like a Jenga game tumbling to a close. Some say it’s his fault for not saying how he truly felt when she announced she was going back to New York
No, she wants to test Darius’s feelings, put up to it by her girl. See if she could get a rise out of him. Game playing 101 ladies and gentlemen. Oh, but it doesn’t stop there. Because when she returns and Darius isn’t at her beck and call, she goes out with his boy. For real? And that boy especially? He was slimy from the beginning, I still for the life of me couldn’t understand what she was thinking. The booty call man? Just…no.
Then it goes on as these things go: she’s mad at Darius for not telling her about Lisa. Gives him hell for not even asking if she slept with the booty call man, and then explains that she can’t trust him. *insert little Jazmine the Shih Tzu face here*
I just shook my head. Nina, Nina, Nina.
I remember little stupid discrepancies like these when I was younger, my inexperience and embarrassment at communicating on a level that a man and woman in lust must now maneuver around holding me back. Feelings got involved and I was ill-equipped at handling them. What did I know? I messed up a few good things with a few good guys simply because I didn’t admit to myself that my actions changed the course of their stay.
In simpler terms, she fucked that up.
I know Darius played his part, but I now kept seeing him more reacting than at fault, him more rebounding than shooting the ball, him scrambling to pick up her pieces. You know, between his sometimes unhappily married friend giving him relationship advice and his other friend stabbing him in the back, I thought he was doing damn good just sticking it out there with Nina. Because with all the bravado and machismo he put up in front of his friends, that boy was sprung.
I know that a lot of problems with relationships today is the inability to step out of one’s self and see things from their partner’s perspective. We are sometimes so fixated on why we are pissed off at them that we refuse to see how we played a part in all this pissedivity. Who started what? What came first, the chicken or the egg? Where is the beginning to this unhappy, wobbly circle?
I know some wouldn’t agree with me, but women gauge the temperature of their relationships. If the woman is unhappy, then the whole thing suffers. Nina’s trust issues came not just from her getting out of a bad relationship, but instead of immediately talking to Darius about her true feelings when she returned she let the boil of game playing fester until it became a gaping wound that couldn’t be fixed. (That withholding sex scene after he’d hit it a good number of times before just made me mad. She was lucky she didn’t get hit.) The temperature she set was foolish at first, then it was suspicious in the end. Relationships can’t last under suspicious eyes. No trust folks. So watching the movie yesterday made me see that my cute little Nina who I championed all them years ago, for a lack of better words, was tripping. Damn.
Go on and celebrate the anniversary by watching Love Jones and reminisce on true good black cinema (and then go on and pop in that Tyler Perry movie and really accept the death of black cinema for good measure). Did you guys feel she was more at fault than Darius? Felt Darius was more at fault than Nina? Or were they about equal? Am I too hard on Nina? Tell me what you think.
itsrox
