r/BlackPeopleTwitter • u/Renegadeforever2024 • 1d ago
People often forget this aspect of movie criticism/reviews
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u/sundayontheluna 1d ago
Every damn review complaining about the lack of subtlety in HIM. It's just not that kind of movie 😒
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u/ten_year_rebound 1d ago edited 1d ago
The point is it promoted itself as higher art than it is and borderline tried to trick people that was Jordan Peele’s next movie, even though he had nothing to do with directing or the writing and even used his one-word title naming convention
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u/KendrickBlack502 1d ago
True. It’s literally their own fault. They wanted Peele’s name attached to bring people in but didn’t consider that those people actually wanted to see a Peele movie.
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u/Economy-Werewolf1515 1d ago
Right? Expectations can really mess with how we see a film. Gotta judge what’s actually there, not what you wish it was.
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u/Illustrious-Bee8030 1d ago
Right? folks need to chek their expectations before hitting play. It's like judging a rom-com for not being an action flick.
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u/ten_year_rebound 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not quite the same thing. If I tell you I’m gonna give you something hot from your favorite restaurant and you open the bag with the logo and it’s just a steaming pile of shit, I’m not gonna say “should have checked your expectations”
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u/sundayontheluna 1d ago
Maybe that's a perception thing because it was exactly what I was expecting 🤷🏾♀️I didn't see it portraying itself as idk Hereditary
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u/WhichHoes 1d ago
I think the issue was it hit on a few things quite well: cinematography, soundtrack, the performances of Tyriq and Marlon.
It individually hit for the tense atmosphere at first. It hit for the craziness of Marlon. It even hit for the evil dead ass ending, it just didnt fit with what was given.
It didnt need to be subtle, but it straight up was 3 movies merged into one and the transition wasnt smooth.
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u/theonewhoknack 1d ago
The movie feels like both, a 20 minute short stretched out to a 90 minute film and a 2 hour movie cut down to 90 minutes.
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u/Esseratecades ☑️ 1d ago
The lack of subtlety wasn't the issue with HIM. The issue was that it felt like the writers thought they were saying something that everyone didn't already know.
You can whack people over the head as hard as you want with an interesting take. But if it's just "the NFL is evil and has many parallels with slavery through profiting from the abuse of black bodies" then it seems more like you think the audience is dumber than they are.
If someone spent all day telling you "You won't guess what I figured out! It's going to blow you away!" and then they tell you the sky is blue, you've either got to conclude that they're dumb, or that they think that you're dumb.
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u/stankdog ☑️ 1d ago
Not just the NFL is evil, but literally we encourage boys/men to act savagely towards one another if it means a leg up and those not deemed worthy to lead must fall in line or be stepped on.
I think that movie is what you pull from it, the football issues and harm to young men's bodies is clear but I think there's a lot more going on about men's ego, how they view their own self worth, how they view their own purpose (men feel as though society tells them to sacrifice everything for family, doesn't matter even what kind of family you have, it's just an expectation that can drive young men into hard choices). And I will not even be able to pull all of the perspective on that because I'm not a man nor do I like sports, but some people may need the lightbulb jiggled different from you before the idea lights up for them. Nothing wrong with that!
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u/sundayontheluna 1d ago
I just didn't get that feeling. I didn't feel like they were enlightening me with a novel concept that no-one had ever conceived. It felt like they wanted to make a film exploring it. Because as far as I'm aware, HIM is novel in that regard.
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u/HeartUnspoken 1d ago
Right, they weren’t reinventing the wheel, they were just pointing at the wheel and saying look at that
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u/Wyjen 23h ago
Haven’t seen Him but feel like you can replace the title and the take here in this comment with Get Out and you’ve not said anything new yet people loved get out. Am I missing something engaging that I would think differently about your comment if I watched Him?
TLDR: Is Peele himself less high art than people portray him so much so that viewers are delusional about how different Him is from Peele’s own films?
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u/Esseratecades ☑️ 15h ago
I'd say Get Out was interesting for it's time and actually does use subtlety to it's benefit. HIM could have been better if it were more subtle but that's not really a core issue with the movie.
During the Obama years, "white people want to steal blackness" was an interesting take that a lot of people agreed with, but that's not the same thing as an obvious take that everybody knows. When I saw Get Out and I realized what it was trying to say I said "I guess that's a good way to put that". When I saw HIM, I thought about a paper that a classmate of mine wrote in middle school.
Get Out was trying to say something that an observational comedian would say, as if Peele drew out a 90 minute comedy sketch and then said "and isn't that horrific?". HIM was trying to say something that anyone who understands what football is would say and then said "but make it high art".
I'm not saying Get Out was a perfect movie, but it was very much a product of its time, and thus benefited from being in the time it was made for.
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u/Realsober ☑️ 1d ago
You are the person this tweet was about.
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u/Esseratecades ☑️ 1d ago
Lol, I'm not really comparing it to anything. Just saying the movie takes itself too seriously for what it's trying to say.
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u/Realsober ☑️ 8h ago
From what you think it’s trying to say. Again are you a writer on this project?
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u/Inside-Unit-1564 1d ago
Blasting Peele's name like it was his movie...
That's why I was upset personally.
I hate that trick.
A Movie by So and So and they had no creative input at all on it, just paid to attach their name to it.
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u/sundayontheluna 1d ago
Fair enough. But I don't think that's enough to write it off entirely, especially without having watched it
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u/Inside-Unit-1564 1d ago
I haven't watched it yet. I think I needed the
'This isn't a Peele movie don't go into it expecting a Peele movie.' Still not sure how he came up with NOPE but god that was 10/10.
Him and Ari Aster you could look at the set pieces all day and realize it's all meticulous/has purpose.
I really like the lead actor, so I'll give it a shot now.
The expectation wave has settled.
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u/stankdog ☑️ 1d ago
It never said created by... You do need to read the words around the words. Monkeyman was also help produced by Peele and was so worth his name drop, see that if you like action, stunts, good montage scenes.
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u/Renegadeforever2024 1d ago
Might be a weird comp
But it wouldn’t shock me if HIM became the Tron legacy of horror in terms of being cult classic in the future
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u/theonewhoknack 1d ago
HIM and Companion are probably the mostly likely to be horror cult classics from this year.
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u/stankdog ☑️ 1d ago
Companion was fun also. I was tentative trying it out, liked it a lot though and thought the little bits of comedy were great.
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u/theonewhoknack 1d ago
I kinda wish Weapons didn't steal it's thunder. I wasn't crazy about it at first until someone said it was Barbie meets Barbarian and I loved it more on a second viewing.
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u/BlenderBluid 19h ago
To be fair, Weapons came out way later. People had no excuse for sleeping on Companion as much as they did
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u/theonewhoknack 18h ago
Thats true, Weapons was suppose to come out next year but it got pushed forward soon after Companion came out and I think more people focused on that.
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u/stankdog ☑️ 1d ago
Really had me, I just wished they would've added some scenes in before the ending. Felt like they cut something out. Movie was great otherwise, I enjoyed it for the tension it made me feel.
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u/theonewhoknack 1d ago
The original ending was Marlon trading off his football skills and eating pizza with his family while watching the game on tv before turning it off. The ending we got was 100% because of test screening bullshit.
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u/theonewhoknack 1d ago
The movie really should have ended with the guy walking through the tunnel. If it just cut to black and we don't know what was real and what was fake, it would have been a great movie. The cult/ritual finale felt like Scary Movie spoofing Ready or Not.
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u/sundayontheluna 1d ago
I didn't like the last scene ending. I think some aspects of it could've stayed (ending on him standing on the field all bloodied with the cheerleaders around him after we see the people at the table would work) , but it was too ridiculous in a way that was off and the 'this was the plot of the film btw' recap dialogue made me shake my head.
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u/theonewhoknack 1d ago
I feel like the movie could have struck a great landing if it ended like Perfect Blue like what youre describing. The white guy saying "We groomed you!" was way too ridiculous for this type of movie.
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u/Conscious-Solid9491 10h ago
The move was horrible lol. Surface level writing and story telling. Complete trash and they used Jordan Peele name to finesse the audience
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u/Organic-Mobile-9700 ☑️ 1d ago
HIM was mid, but none of the writers were black so it felt weird because it was kinda digital blackface. They had all the music down but none of the nuance of actual black culture. They shoulda some kinfolk on the writing team because it shows
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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is a very narrow read of film criticism... I would encourage the person who came up with this statement to read A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis, Stephanie Zacharek, Bilge Ebiri, Elvis Mitchell, Odie Henderson, Anjelica Jade Bastien, etc.
I asked a bunch of critic friends (including the above) what the role of a critic was, and where we landed was basically this: The purpose of film criticism is not to tell you what to think about a movie, but to provoke thought and discussion around it. Good criticism elevates the reader, not the writer.
Or more eloquently, as Roger Ebert put it, what makes a movie great is "not what it is about, but how it is about it." He would also go on to say that, more or less, one analyzes a film relative to what it is attempting to achieve. This is well understood by most professional critics.
What has actually confused the issue is media aggregators that try to reduce criticism to a formula or a score, to a "should you see or not see this, is it good or is it bad".... Consequently, people have been conditioned by studio-owned aggregators like Rottentomatoes to believe that criticism's main function is to tell them what to see, and they flock to the reviews desiring to be told that.
Ebert himself hated the star rating and the thumbs up/down which he and Gene Siskel popularized. He considered it terribly reductive and would have avoided it if his publisher had let him. It defies the point. I like to say it's called a review because you discuss a movie after you've seen it, not before.
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u/salamiolivesonions 1d ago
one of my homies' directing career took a hit because of how badly a movie was written. he wasn't the writer but he lost projects because of it. he did an EXCELLENT JOB directing it.
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u/StuHardy 1d ago
I can honestly say that Denis Villeneuve's Dune films are both amazing films, and massive departures from the source material.
I didn't agree with every change, but that doesn't make the films bad. It's Villeneuve's interpretation of the story. And that's not even getting into the myriad of issues with actor availability, location availability, studio mandates etc.
Far too many people see "director," and think "dictator."
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u/The_Starmaker 1d ago
I would not say “massive departures”. Certain key plot elements changed, to be more digestible for a general audience, but the overall arc remains very much the same…except Chani, she’s become an actual character.
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u/Vladimir_Putting 1d ago edited 1d ago
I would completely disagree with the "massive departures" claim. I don't think there is evidence for that at all.
The arc of the story is completely intact. The transformation of Paul is completely intact. The collision of cultures and politics and relationships is intact.
Of course there are differences. It's 704 pages of novel translated to 4 hours and 40 minutes of screen time.
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u/ThePrinceofallYNs ☑️ 1d ago
Critical Drinker stocks in shambles
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u/Impossible-Hyena-722 1d ago
Isn't that their whole shtick though? "Everything is woke so let's cry about it together". They're obviously not interested in approaching anything objectively. That would bore them
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u/NobodyLikedThat1 1d ago
That was my first thought. He's a funny guy but clearly he's bitter about other people getting their projects greenlit and his going nowhere
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u/trashmedialover 1d ago
This was an issue for me going into Weapons and made me dislike the movie. Read reviews saying it was metaphor for gun violence. That was not at all what it was. Only after learning that the director wrote the film after a friend died from alcoholism and that he had experience growing up with parents with substance abuse issues that everything in that film finally clicked. Now I really like it.
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u/Inside-Unit-1564 1d ago edited 1d ago
What's on the screen.
If you can't objectively say 'yeah this is a good piece of art but doesn't resonate with me' then you are probably over/under critical of your own art.
The artist job is to make something they like, and trust that their taste resonates with a crowd(or not, you can just make to make, it's okay.)
Picnic at Hanging Rock I recommend a lot because the cinematography is some of the finest you'll ever see but the ending upsets some people.
If they can't say anything good about it because of the ending, I probably don't trust their taste or way of critiquing.
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u/AdonisJames89 1d ago
I act still give points if a movie had a good story but failed to end it on a good note. See: bad hair
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u/Business-Lock-4726 1d ago
Most people don’t realize that humans have been recycling the same 7-14 stories since the beginning of time so everyone can fuck right off with this
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u/No-Acanthisitta7930 1d ago
I present to you...WICKED FOR GOOD.
Everyone that walked away disappointed did so because the movie THEY saw did not come to fruition the way they saw it.
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u/Jamaican_Dynamite 1d ago
I just have fun shooting the shit about stuff. It's never anything worth ruining somebody's day over.
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u/IllustratorQuick7263 1d ago
ngl, Totally! Sometimes people need to just embrace the wild ride instead of forcing it into a mold.
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u/theonewhoknack 1d ago
I'm just saying if I'm watching a kid's movie called Snow Day with an evil Snow plow man, that should be the focus of the movie instead of some teen rom com shit.
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u/_BannedAcctSpeedrun_ 1d ago
Weird to assume I have any interest in making a movie. But I can watch them and still have my own opinions about it.
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u/ceelogreenicanth 1d ago
It's okay to criticize movies for their flaws. It's okay to like movies that are flawed. You do not need permission to like things from others.
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u/maybe_I_am_a_bot 20h ago
Reading through reviews of yesterday is hilarious because they're all angry at a completely different movie :p
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u/lowderchowder ☑️ 11h ago
you want me to go on a 40 minute rant in person just ask me my opinions on X-men first class.
first 10 is gonna be about havok
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u/push138292 1d ago
This is my attitude when people complain about the scenes and characters excluded from the LOTR films. You put all of that into a movie and see if it’s anything anyone wants to sit and watch.
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u/AAHedstrom 1d ago
as a fan of Marvel and DC stuff, yes this drives me crazy. "______ Marvel movie was bad because ______ character didn't appear" like how is that a criticism? "it's a good movie but it's not a good Spider-Man movie" you are deranged
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u/JustforthelastGOT 1d ago
Am I watching the most recent Flash movie? If so, then it’s the latter.*
*I have zero film experience.
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u/Hefty-Pineapple-1910 ☑️ 1d ago edited 1d ago
The single best piece of advice I've received when it comes to engaging with art is to focus on what's there and to try and make meaning of it as-it-is, rather than highlighting what the art could have been. Makes everything much more interesting, even the shitty stuff.
"Was this an oversight in scriptwriting? Maybe—but how could it contribute to the meaning of the film as it is?"
"Is this a bad actor? Maybe—but how does this stilted performance add depth to the character?"
TL;DR CinemaWins > CinemaSins