George Jones
African American Cinema
Teddy Champion
Oct 30, 2022
I felt like Set it Off was a very important film for us to view, it’s one of my childhood favorites. I always watched it and referred to it as a “black movie.” I really love watching these black movies because they are relatable to me more than any other type of movie. Ever since I was a kid, I grew up in an upper-class household which was very different from the childhood that my parents faced especially my father. So I would watch these movies to try and get a better understanding of the time period that my parents grew up in. Set it Off was a really interesting movie to me because it was actually the first time I had seen black women depicted as gangsters. Not saying that’s a good thing, I think robbing banks is obviously not the best decision to make, however seeing these movies growing up I idolized the main character energy that all of these people carried with them, and to see a group of black women carrying that energy so heavily was really fun to see. I think my favorite character was the banker boyfriend of Jada Smith’s character, because often in these movies black men have a bad reputation, but it was really nice to see a black man who worked for everything he had and knew how to treat a woman correctly.