BEFORE: Another day, another dollar - headed to the movie theater early this morning, because I need to unlock the place so someone can come in and take the wooden armrests out of theater 1, they're going off-site to be re-stained, and then in theater 2 this afternoon, a double-screening of "Monkey Man" and "The First Omen". Yeah, gonna pass. I'm busy catching up on films that screened there months ago, like "Fair Play" and "American Fiction". That makes FOUR films in 7 days that I worked as a House Manager on, and did not view yet, except in little bits where I had to pop my head into the theater and check on the film's proper sound and picture. Well, somebody got to do it.
But I should have about four hours to kill in the office with literally nothing to do, so if I can find a way to watch "American Fiction" on the office computer, I'm going to do that. It's available On Demand on cable, and I'm paying for cable, so I'm not really hurting anybody by watching this for free some other way.
Patrick Fischler carries over from "Fair Play".
THE PLOT: A novelist who's fed up with the establishment profiting from Black entertainment uses a pen name to write a book that propels him into the heart of the hypocrisy and madness he claims to disdain.
AFTER: I'm catching up on another film that was screened at the theater where I work, this one got quite a few guild screenings, so I knew early on it could be an Oscar contender, because there was so much advance publicity for it. You can't say that didn't work, the film got five Oscar nominations and one win for Best Adapted Screenplay. I think Jeffrey Wright would have had a good chance at Best Actor if "Oppenheimer" hadn't completely dominated the awards this year. I like Jeffrey Wright, he tends to make films more enjoyable, from the last few Wes Anderson films to... well, the last few James Bond films, I guess. Even James Bond and Batman need at least one black friend, whether it's Felix Leiter or James Gordon. I don't see how THAT James Gordon ends up looking like Gary Oldman later, but hey, multiverse.
Here he plays Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a writer who is black, but whose books aren't connecting with a black audience, or a white audience, for that matter, so he's teaching literature at an unnamed California college and he gets put on sabbatical because his use of the "N" word offended some white students, which is both ironic and ridiculous - if the word doesn't bother him, why should it bother white college kids? It's probably because of "white guilt", only he doesn't see it that way. Honestly, he should feel good about the fact that the word makes those kids uncomfortable, but he's got no patience for them, he's becoming a curmudgeon, like Tom Hanks in "A Man Called Otto".
He travels back to his hometown of Boston to visit his family, though he points out that's not likely to improve his outlook. His elderly mother is showing signs of dementia, and while he's there, his physician sister becomes unable to care for her any more. So his divorced and now-gay plastic surgeon brother flies in from Arizona, and they have to work out what to do about their mother, how to pay for her care, whether to let the family cook/maid go and what to do about their father's beach house. If it seems weird to you that a black family has a beach house, first, you may be racist, but also, remember this is a family of mostly doctors, "Monk" is the odd one out, as a writer. I grew up in a town in Massachusetts where a lot of people had summer homes on Cape Cod, but my family didn't. (They filmed part of this in Scituate, which is a beach town 30 miles south of Boston, between Quincy and Plymouth.)
While appearing at a book festival in Boston, he notices a large crowd that turned out for a novel "We's Lives in Da Ghetto", written by another black author, Sintara Golden. Monk's jealous of her success, sure, but also after reading some excerpts he's convinced that it's an example of a book that plays upon black stereotypes (like, I don't know, maybe "Precious") and has black characters talking in broken English, acting all street, taking drugs, living the thug life, and therefore really connecting with white readers.
At the same time, Monk meets a soon-to-be-divorced female lawyer who lives across the street from the beach house, and also meanwhile, he gets a call from the New England Book Association to be a judge for their annual Literary Awards while he's in town - they're trying to demonstrate their diversity, so he'd be helping them improve their image while collecting a daily stipend for his time.
Monk has also taken it upon himself to write a satirical novel, playing up those same stereotypes, under a pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh, and then is shocked when his agent gets an offer for a $750,000 advance on this book. He hate-wrote the book as something of a joke to make a point, and now it looks like it will be his first big hit, a best-seller that's somehow just what the market seems to want. Well, giving the public what they SEEM to want seems a bit like a no-brainer, and perhaps this would explain why there are so many movies in the "Fast & Furious" franchise.
It's not very hard to predict how these plotlines are going to collide with each other, I mean, what are the odds that a publisher is going to rush the printing of his book he wrote under a fake name in order to JUST make the deadline for the literary awards that he is going to be judging under his real name? Well, pretty good if you realize it's a movie and coincidences are just convenient ways to drive the plot forward. Monk tries to slow the publication by changing the book's title to a four-letter word, but that only drives interest in the book higher. He does some talk show interviews with his identity concealed and acting all "gangsta", and this creates even more fervor, plus the FBI wants to know if he's really a wanted felon. Umm, don't you think the FBI would have a way of un-altering his voice and image and figuring out his identity if they really wanted to? Or they'd trace the payments or tap the agent's phone calls and find out the author's identity if they really wanted to.
Meanwhile, things kind of work out on the family front, he uses the money from optioning the film rights to get his mother into a nursing home, the maid conveniently gets married so he doesn't have to keep paying her, and Monk reconciles with his brother and they figure out that it's OK that their father had a few affairs, so what, and also it's OK for Cliff to be gay, again, so what? That just leaves the relationship with the lawyer, but Monk kind of screwed that up, because he was upset that she was reading the book he wrote under the other name. Jeez, get over yourself, please! She likes your other books too, you shouldn't be jealous of yourself! Do you think Stephen King has a problem with his friends and family reading his books that were written under the name "Richard Bachman"? That would be really dumb.
NITPICK POINT: Monk sees his own book on sale in a chain bookstore, and gets upset that it's featured in the "Black Authors" section, or "African-American Interests", or whatever, it's a special interest part of the store, and clearly he feels that it should just be on the "Fiction" shelf, so he complains and then tries to move the books himself. The employee says that because it's a chain store, none of the employees have any say in where the books are placed. I doubt this is true, because I've seen a lot of bookstores, like a Barnes & Noble in the suburbs of Boston, where the employees are encouraged to make recommendations about the books they like, and put those books on special shelves with notes about what they loved about those books. When the employee realized that the author was standing right there, I think IRL a bookstore employee would have been more helpful, maybe even offer to place the books in the "Local authors" section, or maybe even get him to autograph a few. My point is that I think a bookstore's staff are more likely to be people who care about books and how they're presented, and not just mindless drones taking orders from corporate overlords.
NITPICK POINT #2: $4 million for film rights to a novel sounds like a great deal, but is it? Monk's agent would probably get 10% of that, so that's part of the money gone off the top, and he's down to $3.6 million. Then it's just like the lottery, I think, that much money puts him automatically into the 50% tax bracket, and since he wouldn't want to pay that money with his return, it's better to put away half for taxes, or better yet, send it to the IRS in advance to pre-pay, that's what an accountant would probably suggest, anyway. So now it's down to $1.8 million, and he also said he was going to pay off the reverse mortgage on his mother's house, not sure how much money that was, but it's a three-story colonial with a widow's walk, that can't be cheap, so maybe a few months after the deal he's still got a million, and that just doesn't buy what it used to. MAYBE he can cover the cost of his mother's senior living apartment, but for how long? It's almost $7,000 a month for a private room. My point is, like in yesterday's film, mo money, mo problems. If it were me, I'd sell the family home to pay for her senior living and medical expenses and live in the beach house, rather than the other way around - the beach house is smaller and probably easier to maintain, it's just that living on the coast in the winter or during hurricane season would be a real nightmare. But once Agnes goes into permanent elder care, surely there's no need for both houses.
I don't really like it when a movie about an author writing a book turns into "Hey, then a movie company wanted to turn my book into the movie that you're all watching RIGHT NOW..." It's a narrative cop-out, it worked for "Adaptation" but then a million other movies copied that "meta" idea, and it's worn out now. But on the other hand, there were ZERO scenes of an author with writer's block staring at a blank computer screen or, worse, a typewriter with an empty sheet of paper, so there's that.
Also starring Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Tracee Ellis Ross (last seen in "The High Note"), Issa Rae (last seen in "Vengeance"), Sterling K. Brown (last seen in "The Rhythm Section"), John Ortiz (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Erika Alexander (last seen in "Love Liza"), Leslie Uggams (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Adam Brody (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Keith David (last seen in "Nope"), Okieriete Onaodowan (last seen in "Person to Person"), Myra Lucretia Taylor (last seen in "Swallow"), Raymond Anthony Thomas (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Miriam Shor (last seen in "Maestroe"), Michael Cyril Creighton (last seen in "Home Again"), Neal Lerner (last seen in "Ode to Joy"), J.C. MacKenzie (last seen in 'The Hunt"), Jenn Harris (last seen in "Better Living Through Chemistry"), Bates Wilder (last seen in 'Confess, Fletch"), Ryan Richard Doyle (last seen in "Free Guy"), Skyler Wright (last seen in "The Forger"), Michael Jibrin (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), John Ales (last seen in "Spy Hard"), Carmen Cusack (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), David De Beck (last seen in "The Company Men"), Joseph Marrella, Stephen Burrell, Nicole Kempskie, Greta Quispe (last seen in "Human Capital"), Elle Sciore, Dustin Tucker (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), Celeste Oliva (last seen in "Thoroughbreds"), Christopher Barrow, Alexander Pobutsky, Joshua Olumide, Megan Robinson, Samantha Gordon, Adrian M. Mompoint.
RATING: 7 out of 10 family photos
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