Us (2019)

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE CONTAINED HEAVILY WITHIN THIS REVIEW.

Jordan Peele is now a first-rate horror director, it seems. Get Out was a great start, but I was curious where he could go from there. Fortunately, the answer seems to be into even more wild, pointed social commentary with his sophomore feature Us.

Director: Jordan Peele

Starring: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke

IMDb

This is a movie so dense you’ll probably walk out of it wanting to see it again. There is a real breadth of ideas to be unpacked here, and the movie – aside from a few exposition scenes – doesn’t waste its time waiting for you to catch up, weaving its commentary into cat-and-mouse horror tribute and some slasher gore. Basically the premise is that this family is on vacation and runs into exact doppelgangers of themselves in the night - and from there everything just spirals.

It’s a wandering, free-form exploration of the political and social divides in America. There’s something to be said for a few wry winks about Trump/MAGA types – the doubles of everyone that pop up from the subterranean are wearing red, and the fact that they target rich liberal-types in Santa Fe is something I noticed for sure, for maximum dichotomy between them.

But the larger message is about poverty and classism. Lupita Nyong’o’s character Adelaide’s double, Red, talks with some real spite in her about how everything good Adelaide has has been duplicated in a worse way: “And the girl ate, her food was given to her warm and tasty. But when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit raw and bloody. On Christmas, the girl received wonderful toys; soft and cushy. But the shadow's toys were so sharp and cold they sliced through her fingers when she tried to play with them.”

And then, when asked who they are, an even more direct line: “We’re Americans.” Later she also has a line about how “we’re humans, too.” Individually these lines are pretty evident in meaning, but the thing about social commentary is that it’s more about consistency of messaging and how the message is woven into each scene, and the story overall. It’s all about the haves and the have-nots. The rage of the under-class, burbling up to the surface like a volcano. All that’s wrapped up in a fiery and exciting romp through a beach town. Gorgeous images of the shore and of a classic American amusement park serve both to make this look great as well as to amplify the message – this is an American problem.

We’re at a fairly precarious, difficult time in our history right now, as anybody who lives here probably knows. Peele feeds off that like a vampire and creates a film that’s chaotic and off-kilter as the political climate here. Nobody understands each other in America right now. Suitably, the red-suited doppelgangers can only scream and howl – they’re unintelligible to those from the above-ground world. Violence becomes the only language common to them.

And I think what’s striking to me is that there’s really no resolution to it. Peele doesn’t pose a solution for the divide or the chaos. He just shows it as it is, this glorious miasma of violence and resentment. The red-suited doubles win in the end, unifying themselves in a literal hand-linked chain across the land, which is a pretty glaring commentary of its own. They were able to unify and come up to the surface.

At the end it’s also revealed that Adelaide is actually the real ‘Red,’ having switched places with the above-ground version as children when they met in a hall of mirrors. Both of them lived the others’ lives and now the fake Adelaide does whatever she has to to keep her status – every woman for herself. It becomes less of a monster movie, upon knowing this, and more of a struggle between two human beings. “We’re people too,” the real Adelaide, who’s spent her life underground as Red, says with biting venom and bile through every word. And maybe knowing that, then it’s a bit of an oversight for someone like me to have ever thought the other red-clad doubles were true monsters at all in the first place. Even the slasher-style murders start to make more sense. They’re fucking angry as hell.

A good twist is one that you can watch the whole movie again after knowing and the rest of the movie retroactively makes sense in a different way. This twist adds to the layers of the film and makes it more than just another monster flick. The fake Adelaide’s fear is for her own self-preservation. That’s as human as you can get.

It’s a weird-ass movie to be sure. Vague and metaphorical and not all of the in-universe world-building is explicitly explained. Why were there these shadow-doubles living in caves underground at all? We only get a few lines explaining that stuff and it’s not really a thorough explanation. I kinda like the vagueness, not gonna lie. I wouldn’t have wanted a bunch of long drawn out backstory scenes for the mechanical functions of this world – that would’ve just dragged it down and the exposition we got from Red, in character, made sense for how she sees things, adds context to the movie, and that was enough for me.

Horror, like any fantasy, is about feeling rather than mechanics. What we’re seeing on screen in Us has more resonance and meaning than a lot of movies in this genre try for. I think this is an evocative, mesmeric and hard-hitting piece of film. I haven’t been this fascinated by a movie in a while now. I’m sure there will be even more things to notice about this on future viewings. If you like classic horror and/or social commentary, Us is fucking profound and insanely engaging in its labyrinthine mirror-hall of layers.

PS: Here are some good pieces I’ve read about Us so far, which offer some views I didn’t know about or didn’t catch – I’m sure there are shitloads more, too.

https://twitter.com/kyalbr/status/1109984274114064385?s=19&fbclid=IwAR0trpsf-_PIpsflZZZLnIhOAuj_HXCYrtZXHYG4VooGwX9i1hGY6PVJjLI

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/us-was-movies-biggest-twist-hiding-plain-sight-1196584

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/03/us-meaning-costumes-kym-barrett-interview-red-jumpsuit/585793/?fbclid=IwAR0wCXNaXkRBJPQK9YBjwQEjXwN1EdWc7pl94T0K5epng003Cbjbs-aA7WI&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=5c9fe6f43ed3f00001723f9d_ta&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

American Sniper (2014)

The verdict is still out on whether or not Clint Eastwood hasn't just been dead for years, and really it's some kind of voodoo sorcerer using his reanimated corpse puppet to bitch about “political correctness culture,” like he's so senile in his old age that he forgot that Gran Torino was just a movie and is now just acting it out forever in some hellish loop. And we're all too nice to tell him.

But maybe we shouldn't be so nice. Eastwood, after all, hates what pussies our generation has become for caring about racism. So I think we should toss the baby out with the bathwater and stop caring about offending senile old people like him, too.

If Eastwood wants the kind of culture where we just say whatever we want with no repercussions, allow me to say his movies have sucked ass for years. He can't do it anymore. All his recent movies are hack work garbage. And yes, especially the one about the American military. What was that one called?

Oh yeah – American Sniper.

Director: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

I realize it's weird that we're doing this so soon after 9/11. There. The elephant in the room has been addressed. This is a supremely lame and boring movie for something that should feel so important. It chronicles the life of Chris Kyle, the “American Sniper,” who killed a record number of people over in the Middle East in the war. The way this movie tells it, though, is more like an overt love letter to blind patriotism with no actual character or drama. Watching this thing was like listening to my conservative uncle blather on over a Thanksgiving dinner, getting drunker and drunker. So, yeah – not fun.

Not that I expected “fun” out of this movie, but I did expect something. And it didn't deliver! The first 20 minutes rushes haphazardly through Kyle's childhood and into adulthood, when he and his brother find his wife cheating on him in his house. None of it is really given any importance or drama – why should we care about any of it and why is it being shown? It's not very interesting. The dialogue fucking sucks, too. Gotta love when he finds his wife cheating on him and she just flat out says “I'm doing this because I want attention!”

...That is not good writing. Unless her character is just super self-aware and in touch with her emotions, it's god-awful dialogue.

"I have a deep well of personal issues stemming back to the absence of my father in childhood which now causes me to act out in ways that some men may find to be dishonest. I use sex as a crutch to hide my crippling emotional deadness and during the day I feel ashamed, but I can't stop," - a deleted scene in the film involving this character, who is the most in-touch with her emotions out of any of the characters

It just gets worse from there – he meets a girl at a bar and they hit it off in the most cliché and hollow way, exchanging horrendous dialogue on their second scene together about how perfect she is and how he wants to be together forever. Pass the barf bag! She even admits that they barely know each other, which I think was her character breaking from the mundanity of the script and saying something that made sense before the idiocy pushed her right back down.

Love at first sight.

There's just no complexity to these characters. Every interaction between every character is a safe bare minimum slice of vanilla, like the writers were afraid any diversion from the most standard, nonspecific dialogue would alienate their viewers, like they are that fragile-minded. Is there even a point in going over much more of it? Every relationship is exactly what you'd expect it'd be if I told you who was talking to who, AND you were just a really boring, unimaginative person. Kyle and his brother? Just the most empty, banal jocular quips back and forth, bro! Kyle and his wife? “I love you, please don't go back overseas, you can't see what this is doing to you.” Repeat ad nauseam. That's literally all there ever is in this fucking movie.

"My whole existence is based on wanting you not to be in war. I have no other personality. Oh God, I'm having an existential crisis! What is the meaning of anything in life? Am I just a two-dimensional character written down sloppily and hastily to finish a script? Is life just a meaningless black void of nothingness?" 

If it seems odd that I am harping so much on this, well, shouldn't a biopic trying to honor and respect a guy's life be a bit more interesting than just this stale, generic kind of characterization? It's practically a Made for TV movie so far as the writing goes. Yes, as Michelle and I both noted when watching this, it's obviously going for the whole “rah rah America, fuck yeah” conservative attitude. But does that mean it also has to be a bad movie? I just have to ask these questions.

Also, there's really not much conflict to be had when the whole point is that he is a great and untouchable shooter in war. Not like he ever struggles with THAT aspect... and since there's no real drama otherwise, it just comes off as flat.

But speaking of politics, let's talk about this movie's shitty politics. Do you think every Muslim is a terrorist? Do you think the Middle East is nothing but a bunch of gun-toting, bomb-loving terrorists who want to KILL AMERICA? If so, then this movie will really speak to you.

What kind of erudite, hard to glean point could he be trying to make here??? I just don't know.

And, look, I know they aren't going to take time out of this military war movie to show a bunch of peaceful Muslims playing with a dog in a park. I get it. But that's the problem in itself. If I can't tell whether your movie is racist or whether you were just cramped for time, that isn't a really good problem to have.

The bulk of the movie is taken up by fairly passe, dull scenes of military guys wandering around, shooting stuff, wandering around some more, and shooting stuff some more. I can't even believe how many fucking scenes there are in this movie of guys walking slowly and tensely up stairs or driving around corners in their military vehicles. It's seriously way too many.

The above two pictures = 95% of the movie. And you know I never exaggerate anything.

They do vary it up a bit, though, when they show a military funeral for some guy we didn't know. It's so boring I can't even describe it properly. Am I an asshole if I was looking at Facebook on my phone during this scene? Does it count if it was only a fake military funeral? No? Phew.

So then after some more boring action scenes, he goes back home and spends a fuckload of time with a bunch of disabled vets, and sure, it's god-awful that they got blown up like they did. But I will say there's a reason that Eastwood is showing you this in such a gratuitous manner and hammering it home, and it isn't because he really liked the concession stand in that veteran's hospital. Do veteran's hospitals have concession stands? They do for the purposes of this. Shut up.

Obviously it's horrific when things like this happen to people. It sucks. But isn't it really creepy and weird that he's basically using amputees as a political prop to make his shitty point? "See? Look at what those Muslims did to our American soldiers!" If they were real characters we already knew from earlier, and not just appearing on screen for a second at the end of the movie, maybe it'd be something else. But it just can't be ignored with the tone of this whole movie being "America good, Muslims bad." It's uncomfortable.

The film ends with Kyle going off to hang out with the guy who would kill him that same day in real life. Like many true-life biopics, this doesn't actually show anything and instead fades to black on them standing in place outside Kyle's house, making it yet another disappointing choice in a movie full of them. I get why they wouldn't want to show the guy dying. But I dunno - the way they did end it just feels a bit weak to me.

Honestly, this is awful. It sucks because it's relentlessly boring, generic, vanilla scriptwriting and moviemaking that does nothing to tell a good story. Instead it just serves as a hollow pro-America propaganda piece. And I'm not against the troops or anything – certainly, good for them if they chose to go over there and do what they do. I wouldn't want to do it. But it's not like I needed THIS movie to tell me America is good. If Eastwood thinks he needs to make this to drive that point home, maybe he needs to have a bit more faith in his own country if he needs to try this hard to convince himself.

It's just so bad, though. Even if it wasn't a propaganda piece of shit, the characters are bland, the action is dull and the writing is plastic and hollow. I may disagree with Eastwood's politics, but the film is bad no matter what. This isn't some kind of lost masterpiece that just has a political view I disagree with. Bradley Cooper did a good job and I enjoyed some of his performance, but others like Sienna Miller as the wife are just bad, probably because she was given very little to work with. The other soldiers and side characters are entirely unmemorable.

Apparently, Steven Spielberg was going to direct this, but the idea he had for it was too much money for the studio's budget. So they threw Eastwood in as a consolation prize I guess. I dunno. Watching the scenes set in Iraq, I think this could've been good with a more noirish, slow-burning, artistic style of filmmaking, maybe a style that really drove home the desperation and eerieness of the darkness over there and the danger the troops faced. You don't really get a sense of that in this movie.

But the way it shows the Middle East, as solely a hive of evil villains waiting to kill the good Americans, comes off as shitty and ignorant too. I don't think it was just Eastwood being crunched for time like I joked about in the review – I think he deliberately portrayed the Middle East this way to make a fucking awful "point." And given our country's current climate, it's not helpful and is actually more harmful than anything. Again, there's no exploration of any of the complexities of this war or why we're there or whether or not we were doing any good at all, and the movie would've been more interesting with some of that. The only exploration of Kyle's character at all is "war is hell," and that isn't enough to carry a two-hour movie in the 2010s. Not exactly a striking, in-depth characterization...

Remember – Eastwood wants a world free from the political correctness he claims is destroying us. So here's me not being politically correct: this movie sucks, and Eastwood is a cranky old man who needs to hang up his hat and retire. Fuck American Sniper.

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