TYPING IN ALL CAPS IS
And for a FILM REVIEW?
Posted on 10/29/2023 4:24:58 PM PDT by sphinx
American Fiction stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an English professor and struggling novelist. Monk prides himself on writing novels that challenge the reader and has become deeply bothered by how the industry repeatedly continues to sell, push, and cash in on clichéd and offensive black narratives. One evening, as a joke, Monk decides to write a book that plays up all of the black narratives and stereotypes he despises. So, under the pen name Stagg R. Lee, Monk sends the book to his agent. To Monk’s surprise, the agent loves it, and the book quickly becomes something everyone in town wants to buy.
I have always been a big fan of satire, but good satire is hard to find nowadays. American Fiction is a sharply-written and whip-smart satire that isn’t afraid of poking fun at Hollywood and the entire media industry for trying to cash in things like slavery and police brutality while continuing to keep negative stereotypes alive....
(Excerpt) Read more at weliveentertainment.com ...
Dick Shawn died way too young.
This rotten culture is contagious. I’m a big fan of Science Fiction. The long time magazines still in business , however , are full of wokeness. It is a tiny market yet it still panders to the cultural rot. If anything Science Fiction is the place for innovation and new ideas . To see it swimming in the swamp with all the same old worn out Marxist drivel has made me stop buying it.
Could not be led interested I’m tried. Would prefer watching paint drying.
Well, we’ll see. Jeffrey Wright is a very good actor but he has appeared in some stinkers too (now that I think about it, haven’t they all?!).
I like the description...
Jeffrey Wright is a fine actor, and this sounds perfect for him. (Also, see him as Muddy Waters in Cadillac Records.)
And for a FILM REVIEW?
Thanks for the “heads up”.
Thanks. I appreciate your work here.
Thanks for the heads up.
Considering Mr. Wright’s political positions, it will be interesting to see if your opinion of the film becomes more widespread.
I have no idea about Jeffrey Wright’s political positions. I assume that most people in Hollywood are on the left, with a scattering of conservatives undercover (I keep an eye out for people who keep their heads down on the trendy issues) and a vanishingly few who are open. There probably would be more on our side of things absent the goons in positions of power, but I get the impression that the blacklisting is real. Unless someone in a position of power is ready to go to the mat for an actor, all it takes is one objection from a party liner to blackball someone.
That said, my baseline position is that reality is conservative. People on the left can and do make surprisingly conservative or conservative-adjacent films if they tell honest stories, because an honest story needs to let both sides of an issue breathe, accept real dilemmas, and recognize real costs.
That is true in all domains, but it may be especially acute in comedy. We keep hearing from comedians that political correctness is the death of comedy. Comedians need to be able to take a swing at hypocrisy and sacred cows, and nowadays, the left is a huge pile of hypocrisies and party line lies that need to be mocked. Comedians should be in the forefront. And black people in films need to rebel against the plantation bosses. That doesn’t mean they will become overnight conservatives, but they need to break from the party line.
In American Fiction, the missing character would have been a serious, responsible conservative — maybe a faculty colleague, maybe a neighbor or lifelong friend — who turns out to be the only white person who comes to Monk’s defense when he is disciplined by his department. Had I been writing it, that person might have been the campus’ token conservative, one of the three Republicans in a faculty of 1,500, probably in a different department, who has been fighting the same war for a long time. He wouldn’t need to be a major character, just a contrast to the virtue-signalling, implicitly racist woke liberals who consider themselves “allies” and are driving Monk to distraction with their smug condescension.
That was about a scam.
Sounds like a novel concept to this author! LOL!
To quote Ronaldus Maximus: “It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”
Yeah, I know. As I said at the beginning of this thread, the reviewers are mostly part of the woke clown show that the movie parodies — and they are so deep in their echo chamber that they don’t realize it.
I wonder if the writer/director understands this either.
The white people in the film are complete idiots, but they are idiots of a particular type. They are all good little liberals, smugly and unconsciously racist in their condescending attempts to be good allies of the melanin enhanced set. Most of the reviewers are at pains to think profound thoughts — as long as they are politically correct — about the movies’ depiction of race relations in the U.S. But that’s because they are liberals. Conservatives will have no such problems. The movie eviscerates liberal posturing on race. It is hilarious. It is a brilliant takedown of the crowd that we spend our time despising. And I suspect that most of its targets don’t really understand that the joke is on them.
As I also said at the beginning, conservatives may not be perfect — at least not all seven days of the week — but we’re not the people being critiqued in the film. Any conservative who watches this movie will understand this reflexively. I wonder if any of the filmmakers do.
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