Photo: "Love Jones," movie
The movie tells the story of slam poet and wanna-be novelist Darius Lovehall (Tate) who falls for photographer Nina Moseley (Nia Long), 20-something creatives based in Chicago.
Their romance is played out through deep connections over Black photographer-filmmaker Gordon Parks, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, singer Prince, and poet-playwright Amiri Baraka. And their love story is entrenched in hip-hop culture — a combination that is magical, critics raved. It is a complex yet fun love story between two young Black people that hadn’t been developed for film prior to this. “Love Jones” was quietly groundbreaking.
Hollywood was full of profitable hood genre films, but “Love Jones” didn’t fit into this Hollywood box.
The film’s ensemble cast also features Isaiah Washington and Bill Bellamy.
“I didn’t want to write a bourgeois fantasy like ‘Boomerang,'” Witcher told Pop Matters. “Nor did I want to write something in the ‘hood genre. All of my friends exist in between those worlds. We’re not bourgeois, nor are we ‘hood rats. We are a combination, and I was interested in making a movie about that group of people who never get to see movies about themselves.”
