Oscar Season Lightning Round 2! (Patreon)

Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

There they are, our two mismatched heroes, enjoying a drink and potty break at a roadside Stuckey's somewhere along the Southern highways. I wonder if they split a pecan log?

Where do I begin? First I can direct you to some other reviews that quite rightly deconstruct the racism of Green Book back to the stone age. Doyin Oyeniyi has taken it on. Sean Burns has had a go. Alissa Wilkinson has taken the movie's very premise apart. And the twitter feed of Odie Henderson has been filled with bon mots about the horrendousness of this film. This could be the worst Hollywood movie about race since Crash. 

In short, the horrors of the Jim Crow South are experienced vicariously by a Northern Eye-talian stereotype (Viggo Mortensen) who is constructed throughout, formally and narratively, as the audience's surrogate. We are encouraged to join him in seeing Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali, who apparently lost a bet) as strange, foreign, inscrutable, and out of touch. This is primarily because he does not fit the available notions of what a black man should be (educated, cultured, well-dressed, gay, invested in Western art music), but also because he is an intellectual, not down-n-dirty with "the real people." Here, race and class are intermixed to the point of being interchangable, such that Tony Lip can claim -- outrageously, but within the film's logic, not implausibly -- to be "blacker" than Shirley.

This film is so bullhorn-wielding racist that its homophobia actually fades into the background, but let's not forget about it. It's not just that the cruising incident at the Macon, GA YMCA provides Tony Lip yet another opportunity to show how "worldly" he is. ("I been a bouncer in Manhattan for years. I know...life is complicated.") But the event also recasts Shirley's excessive drinking, his inability or unwillingness to play baseball at the "colored" hotel, and his overall coding of personal oddness and fussiness. Until stumbling upon the healing friendship of Tony Lip, Dr. Shirley, regardless of his accomplishments, is cast as little more than a sad old queen.

Fuck this movie.

Widows (Steve McQueen, 2018)

I ordinarily post actual film stills, not promotional images like the one above. However with Widows I've made an exception because I think the sliced-and-diced teriyaki picture the studio created is actually quite indicative of the film and what's wrong with it. Considering that McQueen began his work in commercial cinema with a couple of films, Hunger and Shame, that were meticulously edited above all, I was irked by how slack Widows was, especially for an ostensible heist film. Concatenation is the order of the day: one damn thing after another.

Also, I am aware that as a writer, Gillian Flynn tends to like to work with foreground / background relationships, presenting personal struggles as the result of broader changes in the economy or the political landscape. This is admirable, and it's great when it works. (The stuff in Sharp Objects about the pig farm and the influx of migrant workers was quite organically woven into the otherwise pulpy miniseries, for example.) But here, the crime stuff and the politics stuff is just sort of floating atop each other, oil and water. The alderman election is, I suppose, logically entangled with the stolen money, but it feels utterly extraneous, so much so that once we have Robert Duvall ranting about illegals and anchor babies like an old coot who just snorted Lou Dobbs off a mirror in the bathroom, it's ridiculous.

Props, I suppose, to whoever decided that Viola Davis's character could be so unlikable, and that the movie would hit the two-hour mark and then stop, whether it really ended or not.