Cinema Joes Podcast: March 2018 Update

            Another month is in the bag, but for scheduling reasons it was a little quieter on the Cinema Joes front as we adjust to a new recording schedule.  Nonetheless, we still have three lovely new episodes out for you all to enjoy, viewing and downloadable on our Itunes page. 

March 7^th: Our Favorite Post-2000 Best Picture Winners (mini)

            With another awards season finally fading into the rear-view mirror, we looked back at nearly the past 20 years of Academy Awards history to discuss which Best Picture winners we feel have and will continue to stand the test of time. 

March 11^th: Mute/Is Netflix In Trouble? 

            We’ve had an extraordinary run on Cinema Joes of us picking films to review that, by and large, we all loved or at least enjoyed watching.  With Mute, one of the latest original works by Netflix, that changed, and for the first time we found ourselves at an utter loss to try and understand the decision-making process.  The result was one of our most frustrating, but also one of our funniest, discussions yet. 

March 18^th: Our Favorite Underappreciated Character Actors

            With Sam Rockwell finally winning an Oscar after years of acclaimed-work, we decided to sit down and discuss which of our favorite character actors that, in our eyes, are still yet to get the attention and love they deserve.  A follow-up on actresses will also be out soon, so stay tuned! 

            Please continue to follow, like, subscribe, and recommend us further! 

-Noah Franc

Films for the Trump Years: Arrested Development

**blanket alert: pretty much ALL of Arrested Development will be spoiled in the following article**

            Few TV shows have proven to be as enduringly meme-able as the glory that is Arrested Development.  Created by Michael Hurwitz in the early 2000’s, the show originally aired on Fox until low viewership led the studio to pull the plug.  Things stayed that way for a while, with the show accumulating a larger and larger cult status, until Netflix got hold of the rights and produced a fourth season, which debuted back in 2013.  Starring Jason Bateman, it was a tale of the hilariously sad antics of a perpetually dysfunctional rich family forced to confront their demons after their father is arrested and the company (along with their fortune) threatens to fall all to pieces before anyone can say, “Banana.” 

            From episode one onward, the show is a masterclass on how to build a story for the long-haul.  The lengths the show’s creators went to set up jokes and plot twists episodes, and sometimes seasons, in advance, and the myriad references to hilariously obscure movies or past roles of the actors in the show are rightfully legendary, and may prove Hurwitz and his team to be the greatest (or most terrible?) masterminds in television history.  And even beyond the writing, the show constantly used shifting cameras, perfectly-timed sound effects, and spot-on editing to throw just about every possible audio-visual gag at the audience it could. 

            And that could have been enough.  It could have been a show driven solely by its own pessimistic nihilism ala Family Guy or South Park, and make bank on how fiendishly layered its fourth-wall breaking plot contrivances were.  But it didn’t.  Instead, its creators went the extra mile and ended up creating a damn-near perfect time capsule of America in the early-to-mid-2000’s.  There are probably no two events as seminal to the fall of American public trust as the twin hammer blows of the Iraq War and the Great Recession, so it is eminently fitting to examine how they both became focal points of Arrested Development’s ever-winking cynicism. 

            It starts gradually at first, but as the second and third season go on more and more of the story centers around the unique cultural myopia around the start of the Iraq War and the fallout a year into the conflict, when people started to wake up to just how extensively the Bush administration had lied and manipulated to pull us into a war humanity is still paying for in spades today.  Depending on how you swing it, in fact, the Iraq War might be the most important external event in the show that affects the plot and characters. 

            Some (by no means exhaustive) examples; George Senior, we learn, is arrested and put on trial in part for building palaces for Saddam Hussein in the 90’s (one of which turns out to be hiding a veritable army of Hussein doubles).  A side character Gob marries was a torturer in Abu Ghraib.  One episode revolves around supposed proof the Bluth company was building WMD bunkers in Iraq…..except by the end the “evidence” ends up being a hacked picture of Tobias’ testicles.  Buster enlists in the army and is only taken because of how direly low recruitment has gotten….because of the Iraq War.  It’s his emotional struggle with the risk of enlisting that eventually leads him to take his fateful swim in loose-seal-infested waters.  The show was one of the first to parody the use (read: overuse) of “because 9/11” to justify the shitty, shitty policies of the Bush years.  Rob Cordry has a brief side role as an NRA-fanatic who literally forces people at gunpoint to accept his extreme interpretation of the Second Amendment.  The use of a black hand puppet to skewer racism and police violence YEARS before Ferguson.  And on and on and on.  

            The show is the debacle of Iraq.  It is crass, 21^st-century capitalistic commercialism at its nihilistic peak.  It is the devil-may-care economics of the wealthy that directly caused the Great Recession.  It is one dig after another at the demise of reality TV and all it touched, and of the descent of local news organizations into Nightcrawler-style pits of ethical darkness. 

            With the original show being such a perfect product of its time, it was perhaps inevitable that the long-awaited fourth season could not possible match it, being too far disconnected from the era and culture that spawned.…..

…..oh my God, there’s a subplot about Lucille proposing a wall on the Mexican border to keep minorities out, and her and George Senior searching for a politician dumb enough to latch onto the idea.  And this aired in 2013.  TWO YEARS before Trump opened his Presidential campaign. 

            Guys.  Arrested Development warned.  They fucking warned us. 

            And once again, while this coincidence would be scary enough, the deeper I got into Season Four the darker the rabbit hole became.  Much as the war on Terror became central to the story of the original three seasons, the Great Recession becomes a recurring theme tied to season 4.  Family members constantly gripe over who gets a cut from “the Stimmy.”  Tobias and Lindsay are directly roped into the housing bubble scam right before the market goes belly-up.  The season also managed to slip in predictive digs at the sheer absurdity of the “bubbled elites control the world, dude” conspiracy theories currently in vogue amongst the left AND the right, a phenomenon that proves stupidity is the only true equal-opportunity employer in this world.  In a passing remark, Ron Howard suggests that he and other Hollywood producers knew about the housing and market crash before it happened, implying an alternative world where tinfoil-hat claims that a cabal of snooty leftist elites control the world are real- and then never addresses these implications again, almost directly giving the finger to people who buy into such crap.

            Nothing there?  Overinterpretation on my part?  Maybe, but then this show has always been so meticulously constructed that even thinking such a possibility feels like a form of heresy. 

            The fourth season, by the end, almost feels too harsh, too cold, too terrifying.  People get really, genuinely hurt; Lucille 2 ends up dead, Maeby is going to prison as a sex offender, a desperate drug addict is literally left to die in a trash heap, and the relationship between Michael and George Michael- once treated as the show’s lone emotional center- is left so broken and twisted in the season’s brilliant final scene that it’s hard to imagine it ever healing again. 

            Sad?  Harsh?  Too much?  Perhaps.  But it’s a fitting conclusion for the Bluths, because there ultimately is no happy end for people like this.  Such constant lying, selfishness, close-mindedness CAN’T end any other way.  And it’s here the parallels between the Bluths and the Trumps, the GOP, and American conservatism and evangelism writ large get downright uncanny.  It’s not a perfect 1-1, obviously, but the shallow ignorance, the vain superficiality, the obsession with toxic masculine “strength” and the shows of wealth and might to hide the existential emptiness within- all present and accounted for. 

            One example in particular won’t stop haunting me.  Every time an uncomfortable truth about his life rears its ugly head, or he’s called out for his lies, cruelty, and hypocrisy, what does Gob do?  Grab whoever confronts him by the neck and shove a roofie down their throat so they forget by the next morning.  If there is a functional difference between that and the unceasing efforts of Trump and the GOP to cover up their lies and corruption with even more of the same, we haven’t yet invented a microscope strong enough to spot it. 

 

            And what better summation is there of the mental state of any sane, moral, thinking person in America over the past two years than the deep spiritual horror signified when characters are faced with a terrible truth, stare into the middle distance, and “Sound of Silence” begins to play in the background?  If there is one, I haven’t found it yet. 
 

 

            There is, of course, a very key difference between fiction and non-fiction to consider in all this.  The Bluths are monsters, but they mostly just hurt themselves.  The desolation of Trump and the GOP, however, could all-too-easily encompass the world if we don’t fight back enough. 
 

            Guys, Arrested Development tried to warn us.  We chose not to listen.  And now we’re paying the price. 

-Noah Franc

Previously on Films for the Trump Years:

Part 1- Selma

Part 2- Good Night, and Good Luck

Part 3- 13^th

Part 4- Get Out

Part 5- Chasing Ice/Chasing Coral

Part 6- The Big Short

Part 7- Human Flow

Part 8- Winter’s Bone/Moonlight

Part 9- Black Panther

Review: Das Schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution)

Das Schweigende Klassenzimmer (2018): Written and directed by Lars Kraume.  Starring: Leonard Scheicher, Tom Gramenz, Lena Klenke, Isaiah Michalski, Jonas Dassler, Ronald Zehrfeld, Florian Lukas, Joerdis Triebel, Michael Gwisdek, Burghart Klaussner, Max Hopp, and Judith Engel.  Running Time: 111 minutes.  Based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Dietrich Garstka. 

Rating: 3.5/4

            Despite modern classics like Goodbye, Lenin and Das Leben Der Anderen, the experiences of life in Communist East Germany remain a topic relatively untouched by German cinema.  Why this is I couldn’t say, except to hazard a guess that it’s still #toosoon, too fresh for many still alive who remember it and could claim offense or misrepresentation.  After all, how many decades did it take American WWII films to move beyond simple, unquestioning sanctification of “The Greatest Generation?” 

            This makes Das Schweigende Klassenzimmer a bit of an oddity in the recent upswing of major German movies to come out in recent years.  Starring a bevy of young acting talents, it tells the story of a class of Abitur students (the German equivalent of a high school degree) who find out the hard way the price of being a disobedient teenager in a restrictive society.  At first, they think nothing of meeting in secret to listen to RIAS, the radio station of democratic West Berlin that was explicitly forbidden as capitalist propaganda within East Germany.  One day in 1956, a chilling report comes through of the Soviet’s brutal repression of an attempted democratic movement in Hungary.  This immediately strikes at their clear-eyed sense of a morally simple world- the eternal prerogative of the young- and they decide rather spontaneously to hold a protest minute of silence at school the next day, as a show of solidarity with their fellow Hungarian socialists.   

            Such an unplanned act of deviousness obviously sets off every alarm bell in the heads of the school leaders, fine-tuned to turn every unplanned citizen act into the mark of an enemy of the state; the eternal prerogative of the authoritarian.  What begins as a simple trick to anger their teacher soon pulls in the school principal, the parents, and eventually the higher-ups from the education ministry, all threatening dire consequences if an instigator is not thoroughly named and shamed by the entire class.   

            Most of the film follows Theo, Kurt, and Lena, three students whose uneasy love triangle with each other is easily the film’s weakest link, but to its credit it never draws much focus.  They are all fine as performers, but in the end the movie’s heaviest moments and biggest surprises are provided by many of the (at first) seemingly less-consequential side characters.  This is especially true for Erik (played by Jonas Dassler), a more distant classmate obsessed with living up to the perceived legacy of his dead father.  You might assume at first that you know exactly where the film is going with his character, but the film soon reveals hidden depths to his story that culminate in him having arguably the best and most emotionally gripping scene in the entire film.  The entire young cast acquits itself well, but Dassler shines the most with what he’s given. 

            The older characters are filled out with mainstays of German film and television, and here too, most notably with Kurt’s parents, there are things we eventually learn about them or see them do that contradict what we may have assumed about them from the start. 

            Authoritarian societies, by their very nature, force nearly everyone living within them to resort to secrecy, to always find ways to hide what they really think while still communicating it to others when needed.  In looks, in glances, in how hard you hold someone’s hand, you have to say more than you dare with mere words.  The cast and crew of Das Schweigende Klassenzimmer clearly possessed a firm grasp of this fundamental truth in their source material, and continuously find remarkable ways to bring that across throughout the movie, making this film seemingly simple, quiet, and unassuming on the outside, but with more than enough emotional depth to resonate with any attentive viewer. 

-Noah Franc

Review: Der Hauptmann (The Captain)

Der Hauptmann (2018): Written and directed by Robert Schwentke.  Starring: Max Hubacher, Milan Peschel, Frederick Lau, Bernd Hoelscher, Waldemar Kobus, and Alexander Fehling.  Running Time: 118 minutes. 

Rating: 3.5/4

            A man- dirty, ragged, desperate, possibly a deserter- is fleeing from a group of Nazis who appear to be hunting out for nothing more than sport, calling out “little pig, little pig” as he runs.  He manages to shakes them off in the woods, but finds life as a vagabond in wartime Germany to be no less violent or deadly than life on the front.  He finds an abandoned car with the full uniform of a Luftwaffe officer that fits him perfectly.  After putting it on, another soldier (also a deserter?) mistakes him for a real officer and offers his services.  Thus begins his wild and increasingly cruel existence as the Hauptmann. 

            We never learn his real name. Who he is, where he came from, what led to him being hunted; he betrays none of it, stuffing it all deep within himself in his fight to survive from one minute to the next.  And what a strange and surreal fight it is.  In a world where all revolves around whether your papers are in order, the man continuously bluffs his way past one obstacle after another by insisting he’s been entrusted with a secret mission by Adolf Hitler himself.  Soon he’s practically handed control over a small concentration camp with the expectation he will single-handedly solve its overcrowding problems.  If you have ever seen a single film about Nazi Germany before, you can probably guess where the end of this particular road lies. 

            That the main character remains such an enigma from start to finish is ultimately the main stumbling block holding this film back.  The ever-more-complicated lies he’s forced to spin to keep up the charade leads to him ordering and/or personally committing heinous war crimes, but because we know nothing of who he was before, we don’t know if he was already someone with a propensity for murdering people in cold blood or not.  Does he go through any sort of personal transformation, and does this hurt or trouble or haunt him in any way?  Is it all the act of a supremely skilled con artist, or is he really as fervent an ideological Nazi as he pretends to be? 

            Perhaps the movie is simply meant as a meditation on the moral entropy we are all prone to, especially in times of crisis.  Perhaps we are witnessing an adaptation of Dante, seeing one man arrive and welter in the deepest pit of hell.  This would certainly fit with how the tone of the shift continues to shift into more surreal and debauched territory in its second half, including a shot of the man wandering alone across a literal carpet of human skeletons in a forest before being swallowed up in the darkness of the pines. 

            Perhaps the real story, the real narrative arc, lies with Freytag, the first soldier to join the man.  At first, he seems a simple man and a simple soldier (if there is such a thing) content to help as best he can.  But you can see the shift in his eyes as he slowly begins to realize something is terribly off about the man he’s sworn himself to. 

            Ironically, for all its horrors, this is a stunningly beautiful film to watch.  Shot in crisp and piercingly clear black-and-white, every frame is packed with a richness of detail few color films could hope to match.  A steady knowledge of composition is clearly at play, because sequence after sequence provides us with worlds of information about the various characters and their relationships to one another without ever needing to explain much of anything. 

            Still, at least a few moments of introspection on the man’s part would have done much.  I can’t help but feel that the film does itself a disservice by ignoring a lot of potential depth in its thematic material.  This is, apparently, based on a real-life war criminal named Willi Herold, but as of this writing I don’t know enough about him to ascertain whether or not the film is historically accurate.  As it stands, I see it as much more of a moral allegory for the depravity people are always and ever capable of, once enough societal restrictions are lifted.  This is a remarkable film I will not forget seeing anytime soon. 

-Noah Franc

The Cinema Joes Podcast: February Update

            As many of you know, in addition to my writings on this channel, I am a founder and longtime contributor to the intrepid cinematic explorations of the Cinema Joes Podcast.  It was a busy month, what with the build-up to awards season and all, so here’s a short run-down of the topics we explored this month: 

February 4^th- 2018 Oscar Reactions (mini-episode)

            With the Oscar nominations out a bit later than normal this year, we sat down to give a shortlist of our biggest thoughts on this year’s nominations, and what some of our desired outcomes are. 

February 11^th- I, Tonya/Should Real-Life Villains Be Awarded Their Own Films? 

            With I, Tonya causing a major cultural effort to re-visit the sordid world of early 90’s Olympics drama, we offered our take on what the film could/should mean for cinema going forward, and discussed the merits of trying to make films from the perspective from…shall we say, less-than-sympathetic real-life figures. 

February 18^th- Notable Sports Documentaries (mini-episode)

            With the Winter Olympics in full swing, we decided to give shout-outs to sports documentaries we found particularly impactful and worth seeing, whether or not you fancy yourself a sports fan. 

            And by sports, of course I mean baseball, and literally nothing else. 

February 25^th- Black Panther/What Makes A Fantastical Setting Work?

            What else could we close the month out with but with our thoughts on Black Panther, which is shaping up to be one of the defining cultural events of 2018.  Being a trio of white men, of course, we are quite limited in what we can say about a lot of the film’s cultural meaning and import, but since we all loved it, we saw no shame in taking an hour to laud its merits and suggest everyone and their grandmother go out and see it. 

-Noah Franc

Films for the Trump Years: Black Panther

            Because really, what else could it possibly be?  Not only is Black Panther THE cultural event of the moment, with nothing else coming even close, it could very well end up being the cultural event of the year.  It’s shattering of box office records has the potential to permanently shift the world of movies away from their hitherto unbreakable obsession with white men as the be-all-and-end-all of our pantheon of cultural Gods. 

            But beyond all that, while the very existence of the film itself would be a radical thing in this day and age of political and social regression, its very story, character arcs, and themes present explicit, direct challenges to the threats presented to us by conservative extremism around the world. 

            Maybe it was intentional design on the part of Ryan Coogler and his team, that they set out from the beginning to make a movie with the potential to spark a veritable revolution.  Maybe it was sheer luck of timing.  Either way, this movie has perfectly captured the Zeitgeist of 2018, and with theater after theater being bought out for inner-city and disadvantaged children of color to see the film for free, I don’t think we’ve developed the mathematics yet to grasp just how much sheer optimism this movie could unleash on the generation for whom the characters of this movie will be their first great cinematic heroes.  A population filled with happiness and a strong self-confidence in their own colors and identities is one far more immune to the manipulation of would-be tyrants and oppressors. 

            On top of that, the movie is already starting to have an immediate political impact through growing movements like the #WakandatheVote drive to use screenings of the film as a conduit to get people to register to vote.  Even within the movie itself, in one of the credit-scenes, a practical GOP-stand-in figure at the UN challenges T’Challa’s assertion that Wakanda will help improve the world with a scornful, “What does a nation of poor farmers have to offer us?” 

            Every movie, every part of our culture, is political in some way, shape or form, but few embrace this as willingly as Black Panther does, and few could change us for the better the way this film very much could. 

            So if you haven’t yet, log off this site, close the laptop, and get your ass in a theater seat RIGHT NOW.  You don’t want to miss a second of this.  This revolution will not be televised.  It's live.  It's right now.  

-Noah Franc

Previously on Films for the Trump Years:

Part 1- Selma  

Part 2- Good Night, and Good Luck

Part 3- 13^th

Part 4- Get Out

Part 5- Chasing Ice/Chasing Coral

Part 6- The Big Short

Part 7- Human Flow

Part 8- Winter’s Bone/Moonlight

Review: Black Panther

Black Panther (2018): Written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, directed by Ryan Coogler.  Starring: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Andy Serkis, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker.  Running Time: 134 minutes.  Based on the Black Panther comics series created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. 

Rating: 4/4

            It’s taken far too long for us to get to this point, but here we are at last- a major superhero blockbuster, financed by one of the biggest production companies in the world, made by black filmmakers about and starring black characters.  And although there’s no excusing how long it took, the wait was worth it- Black Panther is not just great “for a Marvel movie,” it’s a great movie period, an immediate cultural event that can and should dominate our cultural conversation through 2018 and beyond, and like last year’s Wonder Woman, will also hopefully serve as a harbinger of a more pluralistic future for both cinema and human culture in the years to come. 

            Picking up in the aftermath of his father’s death in Captain America: Civil War, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) is preparing to take over the mantle of King of the hidden, super-advanced African nation of Wakanda.  The nation has existed in isolation for centuries, but T’Challa now faces a difficult choice over whether or not to end this isolation, and under what conditions.  His former flame, the spy-warrior Nakia (the ever-magnificent, ACADEMY AWARD WINNER Lupita Nyong’o), lean towards opening the country benevolently to share its wealth and technology with the world, especially the poverty-stricken African nations surrounding them.  Others, most notably the film’s main antagonist, Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan, finally granted cosmic mercy after suffering through the latest Fantastic Four reboot) want to end the country’s isolation as well, but take it to the further extreme of wanting to export weapons to cells throughout the world, sparking a massive African uprising to literally upend the racial hierarchy of the world through the same violent methods Westerners used to establish it. 

            This film is a staggering accomplishment on so many levels.  There are technical nitpicks to be had, if you must; several scenes are held back by some dodgy CGI, and yes, the plot does follow much of the same “hero’s journey” beats every major blockbuster follows.  However, like last year’s Wonder Woman, this is a movie that rises to such epic heights in its best moments, and achieves such potent cultural meaning in this particular day and age it was made in, that the sort of regular criticisms applied to other movies just aren’t ultimately relevant here. 

            Much of this is due to how explicitly and thoroughly the movie delves into the most potentially troubling and/or uncomfortable questions its basic premise raises when you pursue it to its logical end.  In most other Marvel movies, you could squint and pretend that the whole affair was taking place in an alternative Earth without all the baggage of our history, but Black Panther blows up any remaining chance to pretend that’s so.  This film clearly establishes that colonialism, the slave trade, and the depravations that followed happened, that Wakanda deliberately chose to shut itself off from the world and (more or less) ignore it all, and that it might be time for the Wakandan people to ask themselves some hard questions about what their responsibilities in an increasingly globalized world should be. 

            Permeating it all are questions about what the sudden reveal of the most advanced nation in the world being an isolated “third-world” country (the film walks right up to the “shithole” line in one of its best scenes) could mean for oppressed minorities throughout both the Marvel world and our real one.  As a white person, I feel it’s not my place to try and stake any ground in that particular discussion, but the varied and passionate responses (from both African-Americans and others) that have been filling the internet since the film’s release, examining the movie and its premise from dozens of different angles have been truly amazing to behold, and are well-worth digging into and pondering no matter where you approach the film from. 

            Even though some of the action fails to stand out from the rest of the Marvel pack, this is one of the most visually-arresting comic book films ever made.  The sets and costumes on display are lavish in their uses of colors of every shade- this movie continues the streak started by Guardians 2 and Thor: Ragnarok of Marvel movies becoming increasingly colorful, bright, and daring in their production designs.  Ruth Carter’s costumes are such exact creations that I almost felt I could see the fabrics pushing through the screen, and Best Costume Design just one of many categories where this film should be considered an immediate nomination favorite come the next awards season. 

            What makes the film soar, of course, is how the remarkably layered script by Joe Robert Cole and Ryan Coogler is brought to life by one of the most powerhouse black casts ever assembled.  Chadwick Boseman is solid and steady as T’Challa and Michael B. Jordan remains one of the most gifted rising actors in the business, and their dueling goals, ideals, and personalities make the film arguably the deepest one to yet enter the MCU.  Daniel Kaluuya and Winston Duke provide effective contrasts in their ideas about how Wakanda should change, and Andy Serkis, at last, is on screen in-person as Klaue, and oh my God, does he grab every second of screen time he gets and wrings it for all it’s worth.   

            Where the film sings the most, though, and where it stands to potentially have the greatest real-world impact, is its depiction of women.  Everyone knew Nyong’o as Nakia would be amazing, but I don’t think the world was quite prepared for the Earth-shattering awesomeness that is General Okoye (Danai Gurira), leader of the all-female Royal Guard (imagine a dozen Rey’s and you’ll be on the right track), and Shuri, T’Challa’s sister and a technical genius/smartass to match, and quite likely to exceed, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner combined.  Oh, how I can’t wait to watch Stark’s mouth drop when he inevitably gets shown up at a key moment in Infinity Wars. 

            Seeing this film, and just thinking about it on and off after my screen, makes me so, so happy, almost giddily so.  There is an inescapable sense in the air of a movie mattering to people in real ways that hasn’t been felt there for a long time.  With Duvarnay’s A Wrinkle In Time just around the corner, the already-staggering success of this film on the heels of Wonder Woman could very well be remembered as a key fulcrum in cinematic history, where the old cultural power structures built by and for white men passed the proverbial tipping point, and finally began to crumble into true irrelevance. 

            The best part of all this came when I realized that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter what I or any other white critic or viewer has to say about this movie, because black audiences are already using it, interpreting it, and giving it meaning that no one else can touch or stop.  There are many white people in the world who sense this and choose to take it as a threat to their own existence.  In fact, though, it’s liberating, for all of us.  The time is fast approaching when the white man will no longer be able to decide the fate of the world.  And thank GOD for that. 

-Noah Franc