Get Out 2017
From the previews, Get Out looked like a kind of interesting but typical horror movie of questionable quality, but it has gotten surprisingly strong reviews. I’m generally not a fan of macabre movies, but this one is actually pretty good, though you have to keep expectations low. As shown in the previews, the movie is about a white girl in New York City bringing her black boyfriend home to meet her parents out in the country. They get an awkward and then weird and then increasingly troubling reaction from the family. And there is something very odd in a sort of Stepford Wives way about their black maid and groundskeeper (who calls them “groundskeeper” anymore?). I don’t want to give away any more than that, but it goes from weird to much worse. There is a lot of humor as this Brooklyn-born fish out of water meets these crazy white people, and even more when he phones a very colorful friend who works at the TSA about what is going on. This keeps things fairly light as the situation becomes more dire and eventually quite bloody. The performances are good and once you find out what is going on, it is neat to think back about how well that explains everything you’ve seen so far. But this still is not high drama, and despite being written and directed by comedian Jordan Peele, it is not really a comedy either. The whole backstory is great but makes very little sense and the way the main character finds out about everything is way too convenient. But the movie is a showcase for creepy performances and it was fun to see it with a diverse crowd due to the racial things going on. I felt like I needed to apologize on behalf of white people to those sitting around us, and maybe they felt the same way since a black writer had written these white people this way. Definitely worth seeing.
Written: 25 Mar 2017
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital