Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker
March 2019
If it wasn’t Peele, I’d probably give this one a pass, but his writing and Lupita Nyong’o? Yeah, I’m in.
Ooh, looks pretty good!
Turns out it’s pretty good. Not, IMO, as creepy as the trailers, but there’s some very solid horror moments, it’s frequently very funny, the acting is great, and it brings in elements I wasn’t expecting.
There are one or two things I didn’t get/didn’t care for, but on the whole, definitely worth watching.
$70 million opening weekend, exceeding expectations of $45 million. Jordan Peele is now the new mid-budget king in Hollywood. I wonder if someone will throw a huge franchise at him, and if he’d take it.
Maybe Marvel will give him Captain America 4 starring Anthony Mackie.
Meh… I didn’t like it.
Just saw this tonight and really enjoyed it. It was not as scary, jump horror as the trailers led me to believe but instead a longer and winding thrill horror. Like a roller coaster you got tense, then let up, then repeated again and again.
I really liked quite a few things. The early introduction of characters, and key things from their alternate that got repeated later. Mom not talking and later meeting her alternate who struggled to talk and the meaning behind why for both. The introduction of Elizabeth Moss’s character who just had, “a nip taken off,” who later gets her throat slit. I liked the music, especially so with that one recurring song used as a theme that later became battle music. Especially how they broke the theme up in the rhythm of a ballet, while also stuttering the fight itself as it played out. Or the use of of the exact lyric in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” as the reds killed their whites. “You know it’s gonna make it that much better, When we can say goodnight and stay together” I like the camera play and shot placement. Like the slow reveal of all the white rabbits as though we’re following them down the rabbit hole but as we fully reveal there’s one black rabbit. A premonition of the one red that has swapped lives with her white. I really dug the recurring light and dark theme, especially in the end, racing into the depths and the light/dark repeating scenes. Especially the slowly planned reveal of who mom really is that gets played through lighting throughout the movie. When you expect her to be shot as the heroine, her face gets darkened in shadow. Or the use of the white and black T-shirts. Or the actual use of repeating or patterned dark and light right as mom goes into the other-world. And the throwbacks to earlier mentions or finishing of even small mentions as the plot wound through a separate line.
It was very well packaged and planned, just like Peele’s last movie. He has a knack for storytelling that can be taken as a light fare at face value but is deeper. Unlike the last film I didn’t quite get the meaning he was shooting for in this one, I still loved it.
Nice analysis, Skipper! I didn’t pick up on much of that because I wasn’t so into the movie. It was definitely well-crafted but all in service of a story that just didn’t do much for me. Like a lame Twilight Zone or something.
Still glad I saw it. It’s like when a sketch doesn’t work on Key and Peele… doesn’t mean I’m not dying to see the next one!
Any word on his next project?
And speaking of Jordan Peele, I forgot he shows up in this amazing scene: