BEFORE: I had several paths I could have followed out of "Black Panther", there's obviously plenty of crossover with "Avengers: Infinity War", but that film doesn't open up for another two weeks, and anyway, I'm not sure I can get a ticket to that during the opening week. Plus I have to think about hitting the right films for Mother's Day. Not to worry, the chain's already created and the plan is in place - though there's always a little bit of tweaking involved, like there might be one or two films that I can drop in at the last minute, or if I find out that a film's no longer available on Netflix, I can remove it, provided it falls in the middle of a 3-film chain with the same actor. It looks like that will definitely happen at least once, so I can only hope that these two forces cancel each other out.
Daniel Kaluuya carries over from "Black Panther", and this really has been a weird week for horror and fantasy, when you factor in "Tusk", "Yoga Hosers" and "Pirates of the Caribbean". Plus it's Friday the 13th, so I'm hoping something like this on the horror track is appropriate today.
THE PLOT: A young African-American visits his white girlfriend's parents for the weekend, where his simmering uneasiness about their reception of him eventually reaches a boiling point.
AFTER: Oh, this is so very clever - I can see why this film won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. By taking a very normal, everyday situation - a minority is nervous about meeting the white parents of his girlfriend - and blowing this up to outlandish proportion, something symbolic and somewhat universal was created. And for the longest time in the film, you don't know if the parents are well-intentioned and accidentally racist, or actually very racist and just doing a good job of covering it up, or it something else is really going on.
It's amazing I made it as long as I did, without learning the truth about what happens in this film. Somehow I avoided all spoilers, so of course I'm not going to print any myself. But damn, clever clever clever, and I went in cold, so I didn't know for sure what to expect. I spent a few months thinking this was a comedy, something along the lines of "Scary Movie", because of Jordan Peele's comedy background. But it's just not. There was that old routine from Eddie Murphy about why you never see black people in horror movies, because as soon as they would enter the haunted house and hear a creepy voice say, "Get out!", they'd turn around and say "Well, too bad we can't stay here!" Maybe that's why I thought this was a comedy. While white people would stay in the house and try to live there...
Turns out that joke inspired Jordan Peele - according to the Trivia on the IMDB, anyway. OK, enough said today, because I don't want to say much more for fear of spoilers. I've already stated before in my reviews that hypnotism is a bunch of B.S., though, and I wish films would stop relying on it as a plot device. The scene where Mrs. Armitage tries to hypnotize the main character to get him to quit smoking - yeah, hypnotism can't really make anyone do anything they don't want to do, and most movies forget this little NITPICK POINT.
Also starring Allison Williams, Catherine Keener (last seen in "Hamlet 2"), Bradley Whitford (last seen in "Robocop 3"), Caleb Landry Jones (last seen in "The Social Network"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Trumbo"), Lakeith Stanfield (last seen in "Miles Ahead"), LilRel Howery, Erika Alexander (last seen in "He Said, She Said"), Marcus Henderson (last seen in "Whiplash"), Betty Gabriel, Richard Herd (last seen in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"), Geraldine Singer, Jeronimo Spinx, Ian Casselberry, with cameos from Keegan-Michael Key (last seen in "Keanu") and the voice of Jordan Peele (ditto).
RATING: 6 out of 10 bingo cards
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