Watched American Fiction instead of working. 6/10. Worse than I thought it would be.

I give it a 6/10. Expected a lot more from all the hype I heard about it in the kinosphere.

If you are actually an educated Black, you might give this a soft 8/10. If you are a soycucked redditor you will give this a 9/10 even though you want to give it a 10/10 but people will accuse you of being a gargler of black balls.

Only decided to watch this for my neighbor Jeffrey Wright, who deserves better roles and better than this. Every character in his family is some sort of stereotype of an educated black and I hate it.

TL;DR: No one wants educated blacks because they are white adjacent. They want hood black because its a minstrel show they can enjoy because everyone is so dumb and stupid so their life choices are so comically bad which engages the Mayo. Its essentially Catcher in the Rye but for educated blacks instead of pretentious incels.

I wouldn't even recommend this to your Mayo parents. In fact, make them go watch the Green Book instead of this if you ever need to a smokescreen to show how not-racist you are.

!kino

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If you are actually an educated Black, you might give this a soft 8/10.

Spot on. !kino, I gave it a 7.5/10. My biggest issue with the film was that it leaned too heavily on the final scene (the "reveal" that everything we saw was just part of the film Monk was writing) as an excuse for why it played into a lot of the things it was ostensibly decrying. From the sister's death onwards, every scene unrelated to the novel, and many of the scenes related to the novel, became pure melodrama. Yes, some of it was what you'd typically find in "white" melodramas rather than "black" melodramas, but that doesn't stop it from being a melodrama, and that last scene doesn't somehow retroactively excuse that. :marseyprojection:

Call it the "Spike Lee Problem". Although in this case, I suppose it's the "Rian Johnson Problem". The second I saw his studio was producing the film, I knew this was the most likely outcome. :normielarp:

Also, and this is a relatively minor gripe, albeit one that effectively demonstrates the problems with the film, I hated that encounter between Monk and Issa Rae's character, the other pandering Black author. She makes a fairly weak argument as to why her book was somehow okay when Monk's wasn't, and the film frames it as though she just dunked all over him and every member of the audience should agree with her. He doesn't even attempt to rebut anything she said. Probably because the filmmakers weren't sure how to rebut it themselves. :npcsupport:

You should read the book it was based on, Percival Everett's Erasure. It was significantly more interesting and insightful, not to mention more clever in its use of metafiction. As always, Hollywood ruins everything. :daffydoubt:

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