American Fiction (Cord Jefferson, December 15, 2023) Movie

looks great!

 

this is pretty good. jeffrey wright is great and so is some of the comedy. it doesn’t really work as well when things get dramatic, however. i’d say it's worth checking out overall

 

Agree that it worked better when leaning into the comedy but I really enjoyed it as a whole and thought some of the family/wedding stuff was pretty heartfelt.

Also Sterling K. Brown was great

 

Yeah, enjoyed this a bunch. Way more of a melodrama than I expected. But I think what it explores about identity and being accepted or rejected fully as a person was great. Ending will divide people though.

 

Pretty rough and dated (?), but I’ll give it some extra love for Wright and Brown especially, plus I did have a few lols.

Also, the part about a father dying before knowing the real you and what if he still rejected the real you hit real fucking hard.

 

I very much enjoyed this

 

This didn't work for me at all. The satire wasn't biting or funny enough. Good performances though

 

I liked pretty much everything about this except the ending

 

This was overall pretty good. Sterling K Brown ties the whole thing together. Without him, the themes of everyone is going through something different and no group is a monolith wouldn't work.

 

It was very funny that he was doing coke with 25 year olds though

 

Watched it with my family and we were very torn on the ending. I dug it. Mom did not.

 

Liked this quite a bit. Didn’t dislike the ending but I can see why it would throw people.

 

Sterling and Jeffery both looked distractingly good

 

I was too hard on Saltburn. This was so grating.

 

Oh my god

 

Reverse Shot warned me so I was not completely shocked but it is really something that a film that purports to examine the ways Black characters are forced into stereotypes turns around and makes the gay characters so cartoonishly one-note.

Opening the scene with the conservative version of a college feminist liberal, with the blue hair to match, telling the Black professor that the racial epithet offends her and she is the one that walks out is something that would be in one of those Ben Shapiro movies.

 

a lot of the dialogue in this was particularly bad but it still moved me, especially in the second act. absolutely hated the ending though. good performances. sterling was deserving in his nomination even if the writing of his character doesn't do him any favors

 

This was so boring. Whose decision was it to have the whole score be the kind of light jazz you’d hear in a hotel lobby? The movie had a bizarre tone to it the whole time, as if there was never any weight to anything that was going on.

I think it’s a good idea on paper to have this whole plot that’s a family drama about a black family that is explicitly *not* the kind of cliche that Monk is mocking. But jfc the execution could not have been more bland and uninteresting. The parts that were actually about him writing the book weren’t particularly great in any way but they felt like a breath of fresh air every time they saved us from having yet another scene about his mom having dementia. But having that family drama take up probably 70% of the screen time just makes the book plot feel like an afterthought

 

The thing I think about the most is how they had the exact same Ruth Bader Ginsburg poster twice in the publicists' office in case you didn't get the joke the first time.

 

VOD tomorrow

 

Like, Brahmin white or Southie white?

 

Watching

 

Is the dialogue in this incredibly bad or am I being hard on it?