I’ve been woefully undisciplined about my promise to talk film on Fridays. (Apologies to the one or two readers who might really have remotely cared.)

With my recent (and mercifully short) foray into fiction, the just-announced news of my promotion to full professor, and Michael Jackson’s very public and unexpected death, my head has been in many other places lately. And my body hasn’t been in a movie theater or checking out any DVDs, not even on computer. But I do want to be better about my Friday film segment for the rest of the summer, at least for my own enjoyment and sanity.

Since I’ve missed an installment, I thought I’d briefly mention (and recommend) three films this week. The first is a few years old and can be purchased on DVD. The second has just been completed and was recently aired (I think) on PBS. And the third is still in movie theaters.

Zora Neale Hurston: Jump the Sun, by Kristy Andersen, is a playful and poetic examination of this eccentric Harlem Renaissance anthropologist from the “autonomous all-black town of Eatonville, Florida.” Hurston is one of my heroes, and I would constantly channel her flamboyant angularity while conducting dissertation fieldwork just to build up enough courage to start conversations with strangers on the streets of Harlem or Brooklyn, New York. It worked wonders for me as a shy ethnographer.

This careful film takes us from Eatonville to Harlem and back, chronicling Hurston’s mentorship by Franz Boas, her sometimes oddly self-effacing relationship to benefactors, her public falling out with Langston Hughes, and even the accusations of pedophilia that clouded the last few years of her life. Some of the best parts of the film have to be the “folk footage” Hurston shot herself. Amazing stuff. Raw and unapologetically committed. The film helps to explain why it is so important that Hurston was rediscovered (by critics and a popular audience) many years after dying in relative obscurity.

Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, by Llewellyn M. Smith, is a slick and sophisticated examination of Melville Herskovits, another Boas-trained anthropologist. Herskovits is probably most famous for his debates with the likes of E. Franklin Frazier about the cultural links between New World and Old World portions of the African Diaspora. Frazier imagined the Middle Passage as a rupture-producing shut door between African cultural practices and behavioral patterns found in African-American communities. Herskovits tried to demonstrate cultural ties/similarities dampened but not completed shorn by the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses, among others, argues that forms of Afrocentrism are fundamentally indebted to Herskovitsian claims. But it wasn’t just a one-way transmission. Historian Vincent Brown, one of the films producers and talking heads, describes Herskovits as “the Elvis of African American studies.” He might have gotten more credit for work that other African Americans were already doing, gaining from their insights while mainstreaming the entire endeavor (for the benefit, ostensibly, of all researchers interested in such topics.) With Michael Jackson’s death still shrouded in mystery and his eccentric life being replayed on TV all the time, the angularity of (and accusations against) Hurston and Brown’s invocation of Elvis seem particularly apt nodes of discussion right about now.

The third film, Away We Go, by Sam Mendes, is a fictional examination of thirtysomething love in a rather bizarre American landscape. The movie, co-written by Dave Eggers and Vindela Vida, stars Maya Rudolph (of Saturday Night Live) and John Krasinski (of The Office) as an unmarried couple (Verona and Burt) expecting their first baby and trying to recalibrate their collective life as a consequence. They visit nutty friends and relatives all across the country in search of parental role models and some actual assistance in baby prep. They find none of that. Instead, they come to slowly realize (maybe) that they are already far ahead of all the folks they thought had them beat in terms of functional familial relationships. By the end of the story, you don’t even see it coming, but Burt and Verona end up inspiring you to think about love, family and community just a little bit differently. Enjoy the weekend.