Gathering the notion that excess equals legitimacy, studios as well as independents seem to have recently relegated the term "black" filmmaking to mean diversity-centric productions with market potential. In the past few years, as films like "Pariah," "Restless City," and "Middle of Nowhere" carve out singular representations of black perspectives. It seems damaging to believe that simple bait-and-switch tactics, as seen in Neil LaBute's remake of "Death at a Funeral," can fall under the same blanket classification.

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When Sydney Pollack was making "Out of Africa" in 1985, he considered the problem of how to film Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in love scenes that were not explicit, yet were erotic. "When I have Streep and Redford together," he told me, "I don't want to see them strip naked and writhe around in bed together. The challenge was to find love scenes that would have emotion and passion and yet not violate a certain place where we want to see them. There are two really sensual love scenes. One of them is the undressing scene. I always like scenes like that. I think they're sexy. I tried to make a sort of passionate dance out of them undressing each other. The second scene consists of three absolutely terrific lines I took out of a screenplay that was written in 1973 when Nicholas Roeg was going to direct this project. It's only three lines, but what lines: "Don't move. I want to move. Don't move."

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