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Barenaked Reviews Get Out: Fear is Colorless
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Who's In It?
- Written & Directed by Jordan Peele
- Starring
- Daniel Kaluuya (Black Mirror, Sicario)
- Allison Williams (Girls)
- Catherine Keener (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Captain Phillips)
- Bradley Whitford (West Wing, Billy Madison)
Bullet Points
- The 1st movie in 2017 to get nearly 100% (it's at 99) on RottenTomatoes.
- Jordan Peele, 1/2 of Comedy Central's Key & Peele, is the first black writer-director to get $100 million at the box office with their debut film.
- It's the fastest Blumhouse Productions (the studio behind the Paranormal Activity series and Split) film to get $100 million.
Synopsis
A young man, Chris, prepares to visit his girlfriend's family in the homogenously white suburbs, except she failed to inform him that she's never told her family he's black. The couple then deal with the awkward friction of trying to keep it cool while the society struggles to embrace Chris, that is until things in the society turn out to not be exactly how they appear...
Spoiler-Free Quickie
Get Out is best the less you know, however the writer/director Jordan Peele himself says it is a horror thriller that explores social themes; in this case race. On this point, the take-away of this movie for me will be how it perfectly mixed horror film tropes with visualizations of covert racism against the protagonist, to the point that at the end everyone in the theater, black white (and the brownies like me who are in-between), were all cheering & applauding for the black guy at the end. You can't do that with just a bunch of civil rights clips from C-SPAN for over an hour, you have to have made a good movie. Everyone without a serious heart condition should watch Get Out because it's a fun movie watching experience with just enough race to make you think about what you just saw afterwards. Thus Get Out earned:
5/5 Fine China Tea Cups
*Spoilers* Fear is Colorless
Chris, played by Daniel Kaluuya, is a young black man who is in a relatively new relationship with a white girl, played by Allison Williams, when he gets invited to her parents house. The movie initially appears to be about a interracial couple just trying to chill in a world obsessed with covertly checking on the black guy; for example, on the way to her parent's house a deer steps out in front of them, they call a cop, and the cop asks for Chris's ID even though he knows Chris wasn't driving the car. After they get to the parent's house Chris sees they have a black groundskeeper & a black housekeeper, both of whom act funny around Chris. The brother (who is played perfectly by Caleb Landry Jones) makes comments about the strength & endurance of black men. Furthermore, the neighbors all make comments about how "being black is in fashion" and they all ogle him over very creepily.
In a mixture of psychological thriller & science fiction (you just have to watch it for the full effect but believe me; you'll never look at fine china tea cups the same), Chris is mentally taken hostage via mind games by his girlfriend's mom (played by Catherine Keener; her and Mary Steenburgen need to have a buddy cop movie stat). It then turns out the girlfriend's family, including the girlfriend, and neighborhood are all part of a society that conduct a type of neurosurgery that mixes the brains of 2 people and put them into either body; if one person is a mental hostage this allows the other person to take control over the first person's body. In an odd spin on (everyone's favorite kind of) racism, the neighborhood/society believes black people are physically superior to white people so they all take part in a process of kidnapping & overtaking a black person. Luckily for Chris throughout his time at this house, before he found out he had been kidnapped in order to be mentally moved aside so a blind individual in the neighborhood could see again, he had been talking to his best friend Rod, who is a TSA agent ("I'm T-S-motherfuckin'-A") and ends up finding the house to help Chris escape.
I first heard about Get Out from a podcast interview (Shout out to You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes) Jordan Peele did in Oct 2013. Full disclosure, I haven't relistened to the interview so I'm now going off my memory, but at the time he talked vaguely of the movie; I don't think he even had a name yet. But he said something around the effect that he wanted to use horror satire tropes to talk about serious issues like race. For my book, that's what makes Get Out such a memorable movie & reminds me why I love entertainment and comedy: at its best it has a way of shining a new angle on an exhausting discussion topic like race. At the very end of the movie, Chris is on his way to escaping from the house in a car but then he crashes into a tree just outside the girlfriend's family house. His former girlfriend attempts to stop him here but she ends up getting shot in the stomach. Just then a car that appears to be a cop car pulls up to the scene and Chris puts his hands up because from the cop's perspective (who most likely would not have watched the 1st 3/4 of the movie) it would appear Chris had been trying to kill a young white woman for no reason. Everyone in the theater held their breath, and some people audibly said "Oh no!", until it turns out the car is not a cop car but is a TSA car with lights that look like a cop car's flashing lights. Chris's best friend Rod steps out and the whole theater, black white & brown (in my case) applauded and cheered. Jordan Peele succeeded in his mission: he made an enjoyable movie-experience where everyone can roots for the good guy & everyone can, if even just for a moment, feel the fear/apprehension a black guy feels. - 5/5 Fine China Tea Cups
Rishi Bee
What did you dislike or like from Get Out? How many Fine China Tea Cups do you give it? Did I grossly miss something? Am I gross? Come at me bro and/or sis:
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