Review of Us (2019) by Jeanrenoir — 26 Mar 2019

Just saw US. Liked Get Out better. People who think US is a great horror movie either have never seen The Shining, which makes US look pathetic, or can't get anything more complex than US. In the beginning, I thought Peale was doing something interesting in apparently satirizing the complacency, blandness, and "normality" of contemporary upper-middle-class suburban black professionals, and showing them that they are culpable for doing their best to wear "Howard" sweats as symbols of how they've left their shadow selves in the ghetto behind.

But when Peale doubles their white upper-middle-class pals, too, suddenly the movie is incoherent. If Peale's trying to show whites in his audience that they are just as bad for forgetting about their own poor white, low rent "shadow," that be okay.

But by showing all the red horror figures of either race as shadows of the American middle-class masses epitomized by the vapid idiocy of "Hands Across America" Peale is shooting fish in a barrel.

It's all to easy and simple-minded. Kubrick was a genius. Geniuses produce works of art as complex and mysterious as genius itself. Peale's just a talented journeyman Hollywood director who gets overrated because he's black and black directors are still too rare.

US is sort of the horror genre version of the action genre megabit Black Panther. Both films are shallow and ultimately rather empty, but they get lots and lots of extra points for the blackness of the principles involved.

This overrating of works by blacks is actually a form of patting them on the head, as if it's "amazing" "they" can do so well, when their "so well" would have gotten a yawn from whites.

Moonlight is incomparably the best black film in American history, on every level, and is one of the great American films period. It makes US look like a crude comic book. Black Klansman, not to mention Do the Right Thing, was a much better movie than US.