Thursday, March 28, 2019

Us


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In case you haven’t seen the intro from my entry dated 1/26/19 (it’s in my archives whenever you want to read it), I’m no longer going to review every single movie I see.  I’m going to review one, with the occasional bonus, and just give ratings for the rest from now on (unless I decide to pick it up again in the future).  You can always ask me why I gave the ratings for the films without reviews though (via comments or the e-mail addresses under the ‘About Me’ section).
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Us                                                                                OK/G
I did like Get Out but not as much as general moviegoers, critics or not, apparently did (enough to get Oscar recognition).  This is director Jordan Peele’s (one half of Key & Peele) sophomore cinematic effort.  While Get Out focused entirely on the topic of race, Us just happens to focus on a vacationing black family with race not factoring into the plot involving doppelgangers.  [I’m glad I read an article afterwards where Mr. Peele stated he had no intention of this film being about race, because I was afraid perhaps I missed something; I didn’t read Get Out 100% correctly the first time after all.  To me, that’s progress showing black people live like every other American without being labeled a “black movie” and simply a “horror movie,” but it makes me wonder if it wasn’t labeled as such since the primary ancillary characters were a white family.  Therefore, more progress is still necessary in order for a film to have a predominant black cast without being labeled a “black movie” regardless of genre.  Or perhaps all movies should just always have an equal amount of representation, no?].  Anyway, to say I was disappointed with this film would be an overstatement, although I kind of was considering I’ve been looking forward to this upon hearing of it and seeing a preview for the first time.  There was a bit I liked about it and Jordan definitely knows how to make movies (as proved twice now), but I believe much of the first half was rather ordinary by horror standards after a fairly ominous beginning (scissors are an awesome weapon of choice though by the way).  During the last half, I felt like there was much more than met the eye (which Mr. Peele also revealed was the intention so, again, I’m glad I may not have missed something) and the revelations didn’t make me ponder too much about what came before, but rather the revelations themselves.  I know I’m probably going to have to eventually rewatch this after reading a couple different analyses and thinking about it more, but for now I’ll say I wasn’t completely satisfied even though I was still hooked throughout and I’m absolutely not dismissing it.  3/24/2019



Other movies I've seen and their ratings (see above):

Evil (2006)  >>>OK/G

If Beale Street Could Talk  >>>OK

Love (2015)  >>>OK

Puppet Show  >>>EH/OK

Second Act  >>>B/EH


---Sean O.
3/28/2019

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