- DC Murderverse
- Nov 10, 2016
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"Tell that to Zod's snapped neck!"
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Get Out is the directorial debut of Jordan Peele (of Key and Peele fame), and is, in very short, a horror movie about a black man meeting his white girlfriend's parents, and the worst thing that could result from that (which surprisingly is not "racist dad threatens boyfriend with a shotgun"). It is dope as poo poo. It's currently at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.5/10 on IMDB (thanks angry nerds!)
Here is a slightly longer review from a CineD user who caught it at Sundance (which I will post without being banned because we are all about free speech here at Cinema Discusso)
I'm behind on this thread because I've had to deal with preperations for moving and my general laziness but I'd thought I'd at least do my write up for Get Out now because that one is coming out any day now.
Warning: while I will spoiler the actual spoilers, I will be getting pretty deep into the ending so read that stuff at your own risk.
Get Out
I was really excited for this movie from the first trailer and was loving psyched when it turned out to be the mystery midnight screening I took a chance on. Before I really discuss it's guts (which is hard to do without getting really spoilery} I'll just get the basics out of the way. Peele directs a an interesting and original horror film here. it's clear how much he loves the genre because the nods to other films are numerous and loving without actually being outright references. This is a movie that has many clear influences but doesn't really ape them so much as pull them all together to be it's own weird thing. If it's ripping off anything, it would probably be The Stepford Wives but even then it's a very different beast from that. Performance-wise, it's has a strong cast through and through with special shout outs to Daniel Kaluuya who anchors the film well and Allison Williams who makes some hard to work things work very well.
For a horror movie it is happily very short on jump scares (though they are there) and relies more on the offness of situations and general tension. It does handle both sides equally strongly though. Early on there is a jump scare that is very well done with a long spinning shot that both gives you a good view of all the happenings so you don't feel cheated while still creating ramped up tension. On the other hand, the best and most tense shot in the entire film is a close up on someone's face as they're apologizing. The Comedy side of things is also fairly good (though not as prevalent as you'd expect), mostly focusing on the awkwardness of situations and a character that's in the TSA.
I think that about covers what I can discuss unspoilered so now I'll just get into the rest after I set it up a bit.
I think from the seeing the trailers you kind of suspect that underneath the friendly white family there's really a hidden Deliverance or People Under The Stairs. You'd suspect that this was going to all end up being a social commentary about the friendly face that conservatism puts on and then the real horrible monster of racism that lies beneath. That isn't quite the case. This movie is more about taking smug, "post-racism" liberalism and taking it at face value. Early in the movie you get people talking about how great black people are. The father talks fondly about Jesse Owens beating his father in the Olympics. He talks about how he would have voted for Obama a third time. People do the usual thing of saying how well spoken the main character is and how he really brings an urbaness to his art and so on and so on. For most of the movie you'll think this is just the usual insincere, talking down racist bullshit but it's not. These people really believe everything they're saying about how black people are better and they want that for themselves.
This is a movie that takes bullshit backhanded compliments seriously and takes what that would mean to an extreme conclusion. It's a movie that asks "what if a white person really thought a black person was weirdly articulate?" and concludes that white people would do what they always do and take that for themselves like they deserve it. Like the characters in this movie aren't even really racist in some perverse way. They are so not racist that they themselves want to be black and will happily steal it. Characters you think are acting weird because they are being forced to by white people turn out to be white people trying their best to act black. The weird lawn ornament version of people they becomes is due to that being how the people controlling them think they would act rather than because of what you assume of it just being some weird brainwashing...well I mean it is just not how you think it is.
One of the things I really like about this movie is that it doesn't really have a "holy poo poo" twist but it does have a plot that once you understand that going on, everything else makes just a little more sense and in not the way you expected it to. It's a movie that really fun to watch and then equally fun to later think back upon and realize how all that stuff fit in. I think it's literally coming out Friday as I'm writing this so I'm just gonna say go see it because it rules.
My heart was still rushing when I left the theater after this movie. It's at once a very thrilling, very well made, well shot, well acted, and well plotted horror movie with a good sense of humor, as well as a great example of white supremacy in action. All of the performances in the movie are great, with special shoutouts to Kaluua, Allison Williams and Betty Gabriel, the latter two have the heaviest lifting in the movie and take you exactly where you need to be.
Spoiler talk: The way they deal with the twist in this movie is pretty phenomenal. It's pretty obvious from the moment the word "hypnosis" is said that the family is up to no good and that hypnosis plays a part, to the point that the comic relief character basically spells out what the audience is thinking halfway through the movie. The reveal, then, that the black bodies being auctioned off aren't just hypnotized to doing the bidding of whichever white person has the money, but are literally becoming new housing for old white people jealous of supposed "advantages" that black people get by way of a mother loving brain transplant surgery hits you like a motherfucker. The grandparents inhibiting the bodies of the help makes all of their actions earlier in the movie make perfect sense too, and I think my eyes almost popped out of my head the moment I realized that grandpa was so jealous of Jesse Owens that he stole the most athletic black body he could find to do what he couldn't before.
And also to it's credit, the final sequence was really well made. The audience cheered when Allison Williams got what was coming to her and then immediately got silent again when the guy shot himself. And the flashing lights and her starting to yell help dropped my heart all the way to the ground because I knew exactly what would come if the police showed up. That said, I'm glad they didn't go that route because it sent the audience out cheering instead of completely destroyed. I think it's really smart to make a crowdpleaser instead of a deathly serious movie because the crowd of college students, black and white, that I saw the movie with were really engaged with the movie, and left talking excitedly about it. I think we'll see a great reaction this weekend from crowds and hopefully this movie will make a lot of money, because Jordan Peele deserves a big hit.
edit: also this movie totally should have had an exclamation point in the title, it definitely deserves it
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Feb 24, 2017 06:12
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- DC Murderverse
- Nov 10, 2016
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"Tell that to Zod's snapped neck!"
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Also, while I'm writing, can I just give a shout out to how good Williams is in the movie, especially how loving creepy she becomes the second she puts her hair up in a ponytail. Betty Gabriel and Keith Stanfield are also great, doing so much their performance simple through their eyes
Williams is really great, and her casting is one of those examples of using what are normally disadvantages for an actor (she's really only capable of playing a very narrow character) and turning it into an advantage, like casting Ben Affleck as the lead in Gone Girl. I have a question for y'all about that: At what point did you realize that Rose was a willing accomplice instead of a tool? When Chris found the box of pictures in her room I rationalized it away as her mom repeatedly hypnotizing her to not remember, and it wasn't until "You know I can't give you the keys babe" that it hit me that she was in on it as well.
Also, the best laugh by a long shot: Rose sitting on her bed with a glass of milk and some Fruit Loops googling "Top NCAA Prospects".
Edit: I just had a brief image in my head of this movie with Taylor Swift as Rose and it would have been glorious.
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Feb 24, 2017 11:44
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- DC Murderverse
- Nov 10, 2016
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"Tell that to Zod's snapped neck!"
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I think it goes further than that. Their son is a total creep MMA psycho with crazy eyes and wears a metal helmet. So he can't make any friends or girlfriends to bring home to the family. So they have to rely on their daughter who is both pretty and socially functional. But the downside is that she likes black guys. So it's like an ultra "Guess who's coming to dinner" only for slavery. Like the family has got some dyed in the wool deep racism because their family was denied Olympic greatness by a black guy. And then when their daughter was sent out to get fresh meat she brings home a black guy. So like the old guy says, black is "in" this season. And the thing is, it turns out that they end up liking black guys, like the grandma checking herself out all the time and the meat market drooling by all of the old white women who were choosing their husband's body.
So you can imagine that after the second or third black guy the dad had to craft a liberal persona for himself because it turns out the customer base went black and never went back.
Edit: Also, hell of a movie. Fun, funny, wove racial themes nicely, and some uniquely creepy visuals. Peele is not a bad director. Did he direct any of the short movie segments in the show?
I think you have this backwards. The plan has always been "kidnap black people and put old white people in their bodies" because these people have some incredibly wrong and terrible views on black people. They believe that black people are inherently physically superior to white people, and mentally inferior, so it can almost be seen as them "doing a favor" to the world by "fixing" the black people. I'm sure Rose is fine with dating black people, but I don't think this whole enterprise was born from her desire, especially considering that the video that Chris is shown while he's tied up was made when Rose was a kid. So now that she's an adult, she can help out with the family business, and because she's capable of acting like a normal human being (unlike her brother, who has to resort to straight up bashing and stuffing black guys in a car trunk), she can do so in a way that is much more subtle and less likely to get them checked out by the police.
This operation has always been about black people, and it makes sense when you think about it through their incredibly distorted lens. The grandfather believes that he lost to Jesse Owens because black people have a genetic advantage athletically, and there are plenty of negative stereotypes about the bodies of black people (remember the creepy old lady who asked about Chris' junk?), and it certainly helps that "adult black man goes missing" is not something that the police are going to put a whole lot of time and effort into investigating (which the movie so helpfully points out).
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Feb 25, 2017 11:46
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- DC Murderverse
- Nov 10, 2016
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"Tell that to Zod's snapped neck!"
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Something I thought of...if the procedure leaves the victims vunerable to flashing lights, wouldn't the last thing Stephen Root's character want to get back into is photography? It's kinda if a beekeeper were offered a life-saving procedure where the side effect would be a massive bee allegy, it doesn't make sense.
He doesn't want to get back into photography necessarily, but he'd like to be able to appreciate visual art on the level he once did. The movie does a great job of building up sympathy for him when he and Chris are talking at the party and then ruining that when you figure out what's going on.
He's a great representative of people who intellectually understand what racism is and can point it out, but also have absolutely no interest in actually fighting it, and will happily contribute to racism in society if it benefits themselves. He gets to say "yeah these people are hosed up and racist" and then directly benefit from said hosed up racism. IMO he's the best criticism of liberal race relations, because there are a lot of people who are at that point; "racism is terrible, but hey, what can I do?"
edit: also, as a more general rule, more movies should have Stephen Root in them. It's easy to forget that he's actually an incredibly talented actor because 90% of the time he's playing a really goofy character, but he can pull off roles like this in his sleep.
DC Murderverse fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Feb 26, 2017
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Feb 26, 2017 23:30
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Apr 28, 2024 08:28
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- DC Murderverse
- Nov 10, 2016
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"Tell that to Zod's snapped neck!"
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Armond White's review of 13th, presented in its entirety:
quote:
A New documentary reveals the black bourgeoisie’s political correctness.
Would W. E. B. DuBois, the prophetic sociologist, author, and negro activist of the last century, approve of the instantly celebrated race documentary titled “The 13th”? Director Ava DuVernay’s nonfiction film interprets the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which officially abolished slavery, as a political sham; then she shifts to an extended, jumbled alarum about what’s called the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). The film ignores black American uplift (DuBois’s great concern) for the currently fashionable appeal of “protest,” a term that patronizing news media always preface with “peaceful” — sanctioning it as synonymous with uplift.
But DuVernay’s thesis nose-dives. She glosses over the painful course of African-American history from slavery to segregation, from integration to pride, and on to endless, inescapable oppression.
This de-evolution of an American populace could make a fascinating film subject, but it would have to be proved — not just asserted — and The 13th isn’t that film. DuVernay, a former publicist who now directs movies with a publicist’s regard for exploitation over explication, is better at marketing concepts than she is at expressing ideas or feelings. Her previous film, Selma, about the 1965 civil-rights march in Alabama, was a similarly oversimplified Martin Luther King biography rather than a history of a movement. The 13th also slights both the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, then castigates American racism, with none of DuBois’s rhetorical specificity, elegance, or intellectual rigor.
A product of disastrously confused times, The 13th shows DuVernay’s trendy infatuation with the black civil-rights past. Her argument doesn’t aim toward the kind of enlightenment DuBois envisioned, according to which our moral and political understanding would allow us to overcome America’s slavery-based heritage. Instead, DuVernay demonstrates a perverse nostalgia for the torment and anguish that accompanied mid-century civil-rights activism. She rolls through history, drawing quick, superficial parallels between recent racial events (Ferguson, Baltimore) and past civil-rights milestones. Her implicit message: Nothing has changed. But this insults history and misrepresents black Americans’ spiritual, ethical, and economic drive.
The 13th proposes that through a century of political U-turns, blacks have endured sociological stasis. Her facile accusations and observations (the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Bill Clinton’s 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill) evince mere pity for black America. Never confronting the Left-Behinds, the film neglects a critique of poverty and disregards the cultural and psychological phenomenon of racism. It follows the news media’s typically unhelpful assumption that contemporary racial issues can be approached in the same way as racism of the past.
DuVernay accepts the sophomoric term “institutional racism” as a catch-all for the complexity of U.S. society, industry, culture, and personal relations. She appropriates images of southern black pacifism and stoicism against thuggish white mobs as if by doing so, she is demonstrating the same courage and nobility. But she is no more noble than contemporary activists who let the principles of black advancement be overtaken by anarchists and lowlifes (the new mobs), or today’s craven media who exploit unrest for ratings and clicks.
In assembling a peculiar ensemble of characters, DuVernay disgraces the legacy of DuBois’s tough thinking. Of the people she spotlights, only a few actually suffered convictions such as those we saw in The Return, the documentary by Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie Holloway, which followed efforts by working-class ex-cons to mend their lives after surviving the dehumanization of imprisonment. DuVernay gives more screen time to an aristocratic group of black achievers and spokespeople: Van Jones, Henry Louis Gates, Michele Alexander, Cory Booker, Khalil Muhammad, and others — all pontificating while looking glamorous and peering thoughtfully off-screen).
DuVernay demonstrates a perverse nostalgia for the torment and anguish that accompanied mid-century civil-rights activism. How ironic that DuVernay’s “experts” — post-civil-rights patricians and quislings — exemplify the group that DuBois labeled “the Talented Tenth.” In a 1903 essay, DuBois predicted a class of educated blacks — one out of ten — who he dreamed would help lead their fellows out of post-slavery misery. More than a century later, the black educated caste (professors, pundits, foundation-funded “activists”), bolstered by the privileges of academia and the media, are an embarrassment to DuBois’s prophecy. These select few have hijacked the grievances of the less-successful to justify their own protected professional standing and to broadcast their individual resentments as if grinding the axes of the masses.
The 13th is full of accusations by opportunists-posing-as-historians who profit from reinforcing the fear that black Americans by and large have not experienced progress. There’s such a serious lack of political sophistication that DuVernay never confronts the welfare state as enslavement. She picks apart the American Legislative Exchange Council but fails to examine its counterpart, the Service Employees International Union. Her PIC pretext depends on the false assumption that the economic and political issues of the 21st century are exactly like those of the past. This becomes insupportable when Duvernay perpetuates the canard that the circumstances of Trayvon Martin’s death are equivalent to the circumstances of Emmitt Till’s killing. The emotional pain of these completely different events has moved many people to favor their dismay over the facts. Thus, DuVernay’s mashes together Jim Crow, PIC, Black Lives Matter, and police brutality. If all these calamities are the same, then none of them have particulars that a historian — or a real-life, suffering witness — might truly respect or learn from.
The use of newsreel and video montages to link Millennial race turmoil with the fight for freedom that was waged more than 50 years ago denies what separates contemporary law-breakers (Michael Brown, Eric Garner) from their dignified, victimized ancestors; it misses the opportunity for a more complicated, less self-satisfied DuBoisian examination.
As she did in Selma, DuVernay piles on tragedy, guilt, and abhorrence. She follows Spike Lee’s method of throwing in every grievance she can think of, every offense she has stored up. Black American history as Bamboozled II. From Fred Hampton to the miscreant Freddie Gray, DuVernay trots out a motley troupe of undifferentiated fatalities; her haphazard technique makes Angela Davis’s comment that “reform inevitably leads to more repression” sound unreasonable. (Convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal must be lost on DuVernay’s hard drive — or else his once-sacred position in modern protest lore has been usurped by Trayvon Martin–inspired sentimentality.) When DuVernay invokes cheerleaders Rachel Maddow and John Oliver, The 13th hits the bottom of the barrel.
The 13th could be the recruiting film Black Lives Matters has not managed to produce on its own. DuVernay borrows BLM’s shallow perspective and lack of consequence, as well as its progressive jargon — academic persiflage about “the black body,” leading to the repetitive motif of the word “CRIMINAL” flashing on screen. This fundamentally confuses social prohibition with cultural demonization. That graphic word-image is underscored with anxious, angry-sounding hip-hop music to give it unearned emotional weight. It’s cheap bombast because DuVernay uses utterly mediocre, didactic hip-hop, often the uninspiring, doggerel-prone rapper Common.
Here’s the Talented Tenth’s 21st-century iteration (and alienation) that is overlooked in Duvernay’s bourgie approach: the great Houston rap group Geto Boys. Their rough-spoken, bluesy, and magnificent 1995 album The Resurrection takes DuBois’s prediction and spins it: “By the year 2015 they gonna have 70% of our community locked-up. . . . It’s gonna be like Warsaw. Ghetto.” But the Geto Boys went beyond simply exaggerating and griping about incarceration; they dealt with the corruption affecting the Clinton-era black urban mindset and carried the voice of the Left-Behinds. The Resurrection’s opening track, “Still,” was a stunning and profane declaration against the insidious persistence of deprivation and racism — black outrage turned in on itself and thus exposing the range of America’s human tragedy — treating it as, well, black humor. Geto Boys examined their own lethal desperation and rethought the sentimentalizing of civil-rights politics. This was long before DuVernay’s Talented Tenth of black academia — and Hollywood — discovered guilt, horror, and blame and capitalized on them as the new social consciousness. Great art like Geto Boys’ The Resurrection goes deep; this facile documentary doesn’t.
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About precedents: The 13th was chosen as the opening-night event of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival. It is the first documentary ever accorded that prestigious position, breaking precedent with the festival’s 53-year emphasis on narrative fiction. It’s perverse, given that DuVernay’s film blames The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s 1915 masterpiece, for setting new precedents in racism — an insultingly glib defamation for a venerable film institution to sponsor. One of DuVernay’s talking heads blathers about a “search for the medium of technology that will confirm your experience such that your basic humanity can be recognized.” If The 13th is payback, it isn’t good enough to answer Griffith’s flawed genius. But black-and-white cookies were served at the opening-night party.
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Feb 27, 2017 00:40
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Feb 24, 2017 06:12
