#I GUESS YOU COULD CALL ME THE LATE BIRD ARY LLARSON MOVIE#

#I GUESS YOU COULD CALL ME THE LATE BIRD ARY LLARSON MOVIE#

Maybe it’s the fact that this movie is so small and niche it’s just a simple story about two people, their messy relationship and their opinionated friends, all set against the backdrop of Chicago’s dark and bluesy poetry scene.

Over two decades later, we’ve got more Black love stories onscreen, but there’s something about Love Jones that still keeps Black audiences rapt. “It just seemed so outside of what Hollywood was making at the time.” “It had never occurred to me that the movie would get made, quite frankly, because it just seemed so small and niche, even for Black people,” Witcher told the LA Times in 2017.

So much so, the film’s writer-director Theodore Witcher didn’t think his script would see the light of day. Black love like this didn’t make it into mainstream movies back then, and in the late ‘90s, a romance about a Black poet (Darius, played by Lorenz Tate) and a Black photographer (Nina, played by Nia Long) falling in and out of love in Chicago was unprecedented.

In 1997 when Love Jones premiered, Darius and Nina’s love story wasn’t supposed to exist on the big screen - a romance about Black intellectuals living and loving in a big city was so rare, Roger Ebert called it “a world more unfamiliar to moviegoers than the far side of the moon.” It’s a cheeky line in his mostly positive review that hails the movie as “romantic and erotic and smart,” but he wasn't wrong.

I guess you could call me the late bird ary llarson