American Fiction

Already nominated for Best Picture, American Fiction is a movie that I would highly recommend for dramatards. I will try to explain why in this relatively spoiler-free review (you can see all of the things I describe in the trailer).

American Fiction is based off a novel called Erasure, written by Percivel Everett in 2001 - a more hopeful time when racial tensions were nearing their lowest. The book itself is pretty genius, with an interesting meta-structure as it is about an author. The movie is a faithful adaptation of the book, centered around its great, immediately funny premise: an Ivy-educated black novelist gets fed up with the pandering shit that gets published, decides to write a fake book meant to be racist and play up black stereotypes, and that book becomes a hit. If this was the whole movie, it would probably be funny for 30 minutes and then run out of steam (see Ladyballers or any of the anti-woke conservative movies). What makes American Fiction so good is that it wraps in a emotional human story about grief, acceptance, and struggle into the comedy. It's a movie that is especially great because you can bring it up at work and annoy libs who will begrudgingly have to agree with it.

You know the movie is going to be good, when it starts off with the word BIPOC written on the whiteboard and a fat white college girl gets This is how we meet our hero, Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a professor and struggling novelist. He's who shows up when you google "Uncle Tom." He's well-educated and comes from a well-off family of high achievers. Yet, he and his family still face many of the struggles of blackness - absent father figure, drug abuse, affairs, poor health, homophobia, etc. Most notable in the movie is his rivalry with another black author who he is about because she is successful in writing "black books" that read like your average rdrama rightoid post (we wuz kangs n shiet leshanda!) He feels that her books are trauma porn for white people and allow them to think of all blacks as these poor creatures with "powerful", "raw" stories, and also fake & gay since she herself went to a good college, landed some assistant publishing job, and is pretty well off.

The movie also ends in a way that I really loved, but to avoid spoiling too much, I'ma end it here. The only negatives of this movie are that sometimes, the jokes are a bit too predictable or on the nose. There's enough subtlety, so it doesn't get too repetitive, but I do feel that it doesn't need to hit you over the head with some of this stuff. For example, our main BIPOC goes "I don't think race is even real" and then a racist thing happens to him immediately. Another mild criticism is that the author/director really like to leave you to figure out what it all means & derive your own conclusions, but sometimes this feels like a copout where he's posing an obvious question, but not really adding insight by trying to answer it. Then again, comedy is more about and it mostly works so pretty mild criticism.

In summary,

This movie is a 9.5/10. It's weirdly like Get Out, but if the director and actors were actually smart. Go watch it. I've included a link to watch it at home, because what is more black than stealing. Watch it and let me know what you think below!

Also, (((they're))) onto us: