Get Out

You know all those black stand-up comedians over the years who had a bit about horror movies and black people? How the brother always gets killed first? How a real black dude would have been gone from that damn house after five minutes? How black people in the audience are screaming for the black dude to GET OUT of the damn house? Well, comedian Jordan Peele put his money where his mouth is. He placed all those horror movie conventions in a blender and mixed in some Rod Serling. He even called the movie “Get Out” (2017). And it’s fantastic.

Finding Nemo

Pixar films are generally very good. “Finding Nemo” (2003) is a very, very good Pixar movie about persistence and helicopter parenting. But reviews of Pixar films don’t matter. We watch them because we are kids of a certain age or parents of kids of a certain age and all the other kids (and parents) are watching the movie and we’ll be social outcasts if we don’t watch the movie (and buy the action figures). So let’s instead talk about the underlying morbidity of this Disney flick. About a thousand fish embryos and an expectant mother die before the opening sequence.

No Country for Old Men

Whenever I hear about Hollywood executives forcing a movie to re-shoot its ending, I roll my eyes. Can’t they just let the filmmakers’ vision unfold and not worry about whether a focus group thinks an ending is sufficiently upbeat? But then I saw “No Country for Old Men” (2007), which could have been re-titled “No Payoff For Patient Moviegoers.” I mean, you spend two hours immersed in mesmerizing acting and brilliant dialogue as drug money leaves a bloody trail across West Texas. And then Tommy Lee Jones tells a story about a dream he had. The end. Seriously? Seriously? WTF?