One of the Better Film Writers

I'm starting to enjoy reading this Wesley Morris fellow over at Grantland.  He reviews 21 and Over.

I don't agree with everything he says, but he talks about interesting things.  I rather liked this bit:

Lucas and Moore acknowledge the existence of race, but they don't seem to grasp what about it is funny beyond the novelty of non-white people being something other than what white men assume them to be. That's what made Seth MacFarlane so exasperating about women, brown people, and homosexuality last week at the Oscars: It's like he'd never left his cave. It's a kind of achievement that Lucas and Moore often devise movies that know there's more to the world than straight white men. But if they're going to continue to direct what they write, it would be refreshing to see them do more with that world than laugh at it.

While race has never been a particularly interesting subject to me, I've noticed a certain handling of it in films and TV recently that seems oddly disconnected with the world I know.  Sometimes the punchline of the joke is that an individual is another race.  This is a rather strange development as American films treated race is a pretty interesting and realistic way going back to the 1970s.

Maybe this is the result of a more hermetically sealed society we've achieved by shoving the middle class into upper and lower and creating a credentialed professional class.  Who knows.  But I find it very strange.