Terrence Howard vs. Jeffrey Wright
Battle of the Next Great Black Actors

You've probably heard of Terrence Howard already if you've done any of the following since January: read a magazine; watched an entertainment-news show; opened a newspaper; looked at a billboard; talked to your grandma; or gone outside. This is really Terrence Howard's year, you see. He's in every movie -- even the ones that were made for TV. He's the great black hype of 2005.

Does Howard live up to that hype? Well, let us be honest: we don't know. We have no interest in Hustle & Flow, the John Singleton-produced pimp epic that set a new sales record at Sundance earlier this year ($9 million is nothing to sneeze at, either); we no longer needed any insight into the fascinating world of pimpology once we'd seen Risky Business. And until this year, all he'd made were the sorts of movies we either had no interest in seeing -- Biker Boyz, Glitter, Hart's War, Big Momma's House, The Players Club, Sunset Park, we could go on but we're trying to be nice. And even the movies he's recently made for a more discriminating audience either haven't intrigued us enough to make us seek it out before its eventual airing on the movie network (which in Canada is actually inventively called The Movie Network, true story, and we're talking about Ray, which looked like a big old yawn to us), or were pretentious muddles that seemed even worse in retrospect because they were critically praised beyond all conceivable measure (Crash). He seems like a pretty good actor, and he's easy on the eyes, but he's going to have a hard time making an impression on us if he insists upon being in movies like the Mark Wahlberg interracial adoption revenge romp Four Brothers and then doesn't even play any of the four brothers.

The other reason Howard hasn't penetrated the stony, forbidding walls of this commentator's heart is that we know Hollywood can only pay attention to one person of colour per casting slot at a time. Therefore, the ascendancy of one great-acting African-American whose comparatively light skin colour allows him to play a wider range of characters and ethnicities means that another actor who fits that exact description is probably going to be eclipsed. That totally sucks for Jeffrey Wright, who happens to be awesome, but had the bad luck not to be cast in the movie that set that record at Sundance. Wright has made the decision to star in fewer sucky movies than Howard. Note the "fewer" -- it's hard to defend Crime And Punishment In Suburbia, for instance, and maybe Ride With The Devil could have worked out beter. But he was heartbreaking as a damaged soldier in The Manchurian Candidate, effortless in Basquiat, and kind of legitimately terrifying as a Latino gang kingpin in Shaft. His minuscule role in Ali, as photographer Howard Bingham, made us wish he were famous enough to have been a contender to play the title role, because he would have done much better than that grandstanding tool Will Smith; and if you saw any of the three roles he beautifully embodied in Angels In America (which he also originated on Broadway), then you don't need any further convincing that he's a genius.

Howard and Wright have also starred together -- in this year's Lackawanna Blues (recorded it, got bored forty minutes in) and in 2001's Boycott, in which Wright played Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard...didn't. Just saying.

We haven't had a chance to see Wright play an amateur sleuth in Broken Flowers yet, but we're sure a lot more interested in that than we ever were in Howard's Angel Eyes. Or in the project Howard has selected as the capper to his many triumphs of 2005: Get Rich Or Die Tryin'. Opposite Mr. 50 Cent. Juuuuuuuuuuuuuust saying.

Advantage: Hype be damned! Wright on!