Black Culture In Jessy Terrero's Soul Plane

Soul Plane (2004), follows the flight Nashawn Wade (Kevin Hart) as he starts his own airline after receiving a multimillion dollar settlement from an airline he sued for being injured on one of their flights. As the story continues, it follows the flight of a caucasian family and Nashawn as he makes an attempt to make matters right with an old flame. By using various visual and sound techniques, Soul Plane (2004) is comical, absurd, and entertaining, by amusing the audience with scantily dressed women, hip hop music, and its use of colorful slang. However, director Jessy Terrero takes the audience on different aspects of black culture, mainly through a heavily stereotypical viewpoint. He does so by using various shots, angles and several …show more content…
At one point, there is a shot introducing a new character into the film and the character (which is an old blind man) inappropriately touches various women in one shot, and the women show their displeasure with the unwanted touching, yet, this is typically seen as funny. The director uses the woman's body to keep the viewer intrigued numerous times. An example is as the Hunkee`s are waiting to board their flight, there is some tracking of black women's backsides and it cuts to various shots of the backside of different black women, there is bright lighting used, and R&B playing in the background, in between these shots are the reaction from the man. In another scene, when Muggsy (Method Man) makes an attempt to flirt with Blanca (Sofia Vergara), the director uses the tracking movement of the camera and moves up from her feet to her buttocks, and even then it cuts to a different shot from which you can only see her back and once again, there is a cut to another shot of her breasts and then finally to her face. The director usually takes a while to introduce the character of females in this film, as when there is a new female character being introduced to the film, there is always a focusing shot of her body and then her face. The exception to this film's recurrence to introducing new female character was when the introduced Snoop Dogg as the pilot of the film, from which the same pattern applied. However, when a new male character is being introduced, they usually show the man`s face before introducing the rest of his stereotypical built body. This is the immediate sexualization of the bodies of black women, and the director doesn't hesitate to use black women`s body to keep the rest of the film “interesting”. Either way, this type of imagery in the film does represent a broader issue in Black Culture which