[2019-03-23] Us (2019)

I'm not a big horror movie person, and Us didn't interest/appeal to me from the trailers -- but Get Out was so good that I was intrigued to watch Jordan Peele's latest.

Zira and I saw it yesterday and left feeling like we wanted it to have been a smarter movie -- to have done more with the "they're us" element (it used that to really good effect sometimes, especially with the son, but I wanted more). Hartley went to a different showing and concurred. Also, the more I thought about the twist at the end, the more difficulty I had with "How does the worldbuilding actually work?"

I hadn't had a chance to read any thinkpieces, but Zira texted me this afternoon:

This is the first article I’ve read that’s given me a deeper appreciation for the movie:
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18277163/us-movie-ending-what-happened-adelaide-red-explained
This is also a good one:
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/22/18275141/us-spoilers-twist-ending-explained-jordan-peele-lupita-nyongo

( excerpts from those articles )

Addendum: la_dissonance linked to "Jordan Peele's 'Us' is a Commentary on Double Consciousness" (originally this Twitter thread).

Imma quote from the Twitter thread:( excerpts )

Addendum2: I would be very off-brand if I did not talk about the biblical reference. One article which asserts that "Our ugliest history is coming for us." did the work for me: ( Read more... )

Addendum #3: I think the first couple pieces I read were by white folks, and I'm glad to be reading more thinkpieces about this film written by Black folks.

Someone at The Root notes (perhaps tongue in cheek, perhaps not), in "A Thinkpiece About Thinkpieces About Us":

Good black films can’t be about regular black people. For a black film to be a critical darling, it must be centered in whiteness. The pain, the heroism or the story must be relatable to white people. The film must have a white savior or teach us an existential lesson about the universality of mankind. Black people are only seen as human when they are suffering from black shit (slavery, oppression or injustice).

Back to thinkpieces, from ShadowAndAct: ( Read more... )

A writer in The Atlantic talks about how the face of horror tends to be white (e.g. the iconic shower scene in Psycho) and how Jordan Peele is changing that:

The greatest effect of Peele’s work as a director so far has been to subvert the mainstream offerings of horror, which themselves were originally subversive. It might be, then, that Us’s most powerful mode is as a meta-satire. The film confronts the genre with a Hadean version of itself, this time possessed by disinherited Others with an intent to dismantle. This new self—composed of a growing collection of diverse talent embodied by Peele and his production company—resembles the old. It shares a soul, to quote the film. The tropes and the basic structures employed are similar. The genre is still horror. But instead of Janet Leigh’s scream, the representative image is of a black face, looking to the void.