6103 replies to this topic

[Essay21]

He was a great character, but never a focus of the show. He was the lone gunslinger in a show about the system. Stringer, Avon, Bunk, Cool Lester Smooth, McNulty. Then maybe Omar. But what about Bubbles and Marlo. Wallace? Deangelo? The show is the goat.

[BigDMcGee]

brvheart, on 14 July 2018 - 02:30 PM, said:

I finally saw Get Out.

Spoiler

It feels racist to say anything other than I loved it. I thought it was ok. Its crafted well, but man, I was not expecting the racial violence porn angle. It's all just very bizarre to me. The same movie with the races reversed would legitimately get people killed in real life. I fully admit that I could have missed an underlying statement, but all white people from hipsters to old people to rednecks were the villain in this thing, and nobody good, including every cop at the police station, was white. This movie felt like it was created for black people that wanted to fantasize about killing white people. Again, I could be wrong. I would say that it was like a Tarintino movie but against white people, but Tarintino movies are already revenge porn against mostly white people.

Still, I enjoyed the story. It was good.

I have been thinking about how to more fully respond to this, off and on for the past couple days. I didn't just want to be snarky, and give you a serious response, because I think you're being earnest, and you're not a horrible monster like Essay.

Spoiler

When you say something like, "the same movie with the races reversed would legitimately get people killed in real life" it makes me think you missed the entire point of the movie, because switching races in this story would be nonsensical. What I think you're missing, is that this movie is generally about the black american experience, and specifically Jordan Peele's experience, in interacting with liberal white people. Peele grew up one the upper west side of manhattan, surrounded by wealthy, upper class, largely liberal white people. He was perpetually in situations where he was the only black person or one of the very few black people, in social and professional situations. I assume he has dated white women and met their wealthy, liberal parents. This movie is about the angst resulting from that feeling of otherness, in those social situations It is about, specifically, the racism of liberal whites. About, even though they profess to accept and support black people, black people perpatually feel like the "other", never fully accepted, that they are being treated differently ( and they are right, largely, they are being treated differently). Reversing that doesn't make any sense. How many times have you been in situations where you were the only white person or one of the very few? How many of those times, were the black people upper class, highly educated elites? I personally have rarely been in the former situation, and never in the later. The movie doesn't work the other way around. If you were to make a movie, based on my fears and unease in being in those sorts of social situations, it would be a much different movie ( and you can argue that unease has been well portrayed in TV and movies for a long, long time)

The movie is also playing with classic black movie and tv tropes and conspiracy theories of the black community. The evil white girl that fetishizes black bodies and only dates black men is a trope in black movies and fiction, from Madea to power and on and on. There are all kinds of black conspiracies theories about rich white people's nefarious schemes to hurt black people, some based on kernels of truth, others wildly fictional ( "the plan" in washington dc, the CIA selling crack to black people, etc). So this movie is taking something, the social awkwardness and passive racism of interacting with "liberal" white people, taking the unease of those social situations of black people, and taking it to it's most far flung and paranoid extreme, for the purposes of making a horror story. I thought it was quite clever. To view it only from the view of revenge porn and equating it with something like Django or Inglorious ( which draw much more directly from Exploitation movies, that are revenge porn), I think really misses the point. The violent ending in Get out is basically like any other horror movie. It's what comes before that violence, that is what is interesting about the movie.

[brvheart]

BigDMcGee, on 16 July 2018 - 01:57 PM, said:

I have been thinking about how to more fully respond to this, off and on for the past couple days. I didn't just want to be snarky, and give you a serious response, because I think you're being earnest, and you're not a horrible monster like Essay.

Spoiler

When you say something like, "the same movie with the races reversed would legitimately get people killed in real life" it makes me think you missed the entire point of the movie, because switching races in this story would be nonsensical. What I think you're missing, is that this movie is generally about the black american experience, and specifically Jordan Peele's experience, in interacting with liberal white people. Peele grew up one the upper west side of manhattan, surrounded by wealthy, upper class, largely liberal white people. He was perpetually in situations where he was the only black person or one of the very few black people, in social and professional situations. I assume he has dated white women and met their wealthy, liberal parents. This movie is about the angst resulting from that feeling of otherness, in those social situations It is about, specifically, the racism of liberal whites. About, even though they profess to accept and support black people, black people perpatually feel like the "other", never fully accepted, that they are being treated differently ( and they are right, largely, they are being treated differently). Reversing that doesn't make any sense. How many times have you been in situations where you were the only white person or one of the very few? How many of those times, were the black people upper class, highly educated elites? I personally have rarely been in the former situation, and never in the later. The movie doesn't work the other way around. If you were to make a movie, based on my fears and unease in being in those sorts of social situations, it would be a much different movie ( and you can argue that unease has been well portrayed in TV and movies for a long, long time)

The movie is also playing with classic black movie and tv tropes and conspiracy theories of the black community. The evil white girl that fetishizes black bodies and only dates black men is a trope in black movies and fiction, from Madea to power and on and on. There are all kinds of black conspiracies theories about rich white people's nefarious schemes to hurt black people, some based on kernels of truth, others wildly fictional ( "the plan" in washington dc, the CIA selling crack to black people, etc). So this movie is taking something, the social awkwardness and passive racism of interacting with "liberal" white people, taking the unease of those social situations of black people, and taking it to it's most far flung and paranoid extreme, for the purposes of making a horror story. I thought it was quite clever. To view it only from the view of revenge porn and equating it with something like Django or Inglorious ( which draw much more directly from Exploitation movies, that are revenge porn), I think really misses the point. The violent ending in Get out is basically like any other horror movie. It's what comes before that violence, that is what is interesting about the movie.

Thanks for the response. He has definitely dated white girls, since he's married to one of the main white chicks in Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

I didn't view anything about Get Out to be liberal/conservative. Sure, the dad mentioned he would have voted for Obama, but I think that could be viewed as any of the hundreds of lies he told and not specific to a "liberal bubble" or whatever.

I definitely appreciated the subtle racism throughout and explained it to the kids that watched it with me. (i.e. Mentioning Tiger Woods, Jesse Owens, Obama, etc) I enjoyed that part, and it you think the end was just standard horror movie fare, I'll believe you. That's just not how I received it.

[SuitedAces21]

BigDMcGee, on 16 July 2018 - 01:57 PM, said:

I have been thinking about how to more fully respond to this, off and on for the past couple days. I didn't just want to be snarky, and give you a serious response, because I think you're being earnest, and you're not a horrible monster like Essay.

Spoiler

When you say something like, "the same movie with the races reversed would legitimately get people killed in real life" it makes me think you missed the entire point of the movie, because switching races in this story would be nonsensical. What I think you're missing, is that this movie is generally about the black american experience, and specifically Jordan Peele's experience, in interacting with liberal white people. Peele grew up one the upper west side of manhattan, surrounded by wealthy, upper class, largely liberal white people. He was perpetually in situations where he was the only black person or one of the very few black people, in social and professional situations. I assume he has dated white women and met their wealthy, liberal parents. This movie is about the angst resulting from that feeling of otherness, in those social situations It is about, specifically, the racism of liberal whites. About, even though they profess to accept and support black people, black people perpatually feel like the "other", never fully accepted, that they are being treated differently ( and they are right, largely, they are being treated differently). Reversing that doesn't make any sense. How many times have you been in situations where you were the only white person or one of the very few? How many of those times, were the black people upper class, highly educated elites? I personally have rarely been in the former situation, and never in the later. The movie doesn't work the other way around. If you were to make a movie, based on my fears and unease in being in those sorts of social situations, it would be a much different movie ( and you can argue that unease has been well portrayed in TV and movies for a long, long time)

The movie is also playing with classic black movie and tv tropes and conspiracy theories of the black community. The evil white girl that fetishizes black bodies and only dates black men is a trope in black movies and fiction, from Madea to power and on and on. There are all kinds of black conspiracies theories about rich white people's nefarious schemes to hurt black people, some based on kernels of truth, others wildly fictional ( "the plan" in washington dc, the CIA selling crack to black people, etc). So this movie is taking something, the social awkwardness and passive racism of interacting with "liberal" white people, taking the unease of those social situations of black people, and taking it to it's most far flung and paranoid extreme, for the purposes of making a horror story. I thought it was quite clever. To view it only from the view of revenge porn and equating it with something like Django or Inglorious ( which draw much more directly from Exploitation movies, that are revenge porn), I think really misses the point. The violent ending in Get out is basically like any other horror movie. It's what comes before that violence, that is what is interesting about the movie.

what you say here is obvious and true. the movie was about the "soft" racism of liberal whites. anybody who didn't get that must have been stone drunk when watching or mentally disabled - they certainly were not subtle about what they were trying to say. but that idea, that truth, doesn't make a good movie. the idea was clever, the execution was lacking. the main character is a great actor, his episode of black mirror being the best of that show, but he was left with nothing to work with in this movie. i just didn't think it was any good.