US by jordan peele

Film people are really into ALL CAPS TITLES idgi myself

ya but in this case it’s confusing because titles only two letters so it looks like an abbrev. bothers me

It's just a titling convention, sheesh

it's not tho is the thing

see promotional material for the film and listings.

simon was saying what wins said. it's true that the title and thematic concerns of this movie mean that the standard titling convention creates confusion. the world's just a big ol mystery :(

peruse new answers and you'll see several all-caps movies and TV titles

i realize it’s insanely pedantic ok

Are we all tethered now

saw it again. decided that the ending isn’t illogical at all really, it makes the film make sense

my main take was that an excellent way to have your audience leave with a more positive impression of your film than they previously had is by sticking Les Fleurs on at the end of it

saw it tonight

flappy is nutso w/ this relentless "MAGA red jumpsuit" thing, as if jumpsuits or any red clothing items beyond transplant-protecting caps were associated with Trump

there's a broader melange of on-the-nose allusions: people wearing prison-style jumpsuits, chained and tethered and joined to each other, an underclass marked by this clothing and colour rising up

good night

good morning!

sic otm

also on top of the excellent performances from the central cast, tim heidecker and elizabeth moss are both phenomenal in this

Heidecker was born to play a murderous subterranean ape who is also somehow still just an asshole

I don't know if I ultimately more than merely liked the movie, but there was enough going for it that I loved, important stuff, like acting and direction and score, that I'd still recommend it to someone. I mostly wished there was less explaining and more sticking to the metaphors and fairy tale motifs.

I actually like it more the morning after than I did right after I saw it. Plenty of fuel for thought in this one, and I look forward to reading a bunch of think pieces. Honestly I agree that the MAGA metaphor is the most coherent one at work here (bar the unnecessary twist), but obviously there's a lot of other stuff going on as well.

Oh, and the uppercase US can't be a coincidence. US=U.S.

yeah it's not uppercase though, is the point

Actually Us stands for "Universal Soldier" and the twist is this movie is in that universe

The title in the opening credits is ambiguous re: upper v lowercase.

no it isn't

the allusion is obvious, but the title is written as Us in the film and every piece of promotional material

Still not a coincidence, imo.

well they say we’re americans

Oh, and the uppercase US can't be a coincidence. US=U.S.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, March 29, 2019 10:06 AM (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

look what you did Simon

jesUs christ

justice, or just us?

The very beginning in the funhouse was great, and that twist at the end - which I winced at right after it happened (didn't see it but I never try to work stuff out in advance) and then it worked its way through as mirroring the kind of confusion that we find ourselves in. Until then this settled into a serviceable enough Romero-by-numbers with a hint of Haneke's Funny Games, with its play and violence in those well-off settings, but that ending hasn't yet let go.

Haunting. Movie will stick with me. Great performance all around.

this was great, all the performances were so excellent. i did sense the twist coming, starting from that early scene in the psychologist's office, but the movie didn't depend on the twist being surprising, necessarily.

Re: the final twist, is there anything really gained by that? I suppose it's just the final character beat of a villain who has played a veeeeeeery long game, but even so it (like the film) might have been a little more effective with some more ambiguity, though to be fair the movie's already ambiguous enough to bear a few different interpretations. Anyway, it's the rare movie definitely worth thinking about despite any number of elements that you're better off not thinking about. Peele toes a pretty precarious line with the exposition drop and the final twist, but he's such a good director and the acting is so good that he pretty much pulls it off.

Ending, fwiw, reminded me of the ending of "The Invitation." Lots and lots of echoes of "The Birds" in this, too, ending and all.

all the performances were so excellent.

yeah, I'd give this the imaginary casting Oscar

Ending, fwiw, reminded me of the ending of "The Invitation." Lots and lots of echoes of "The Birds" in this, too, ending and all.

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, March 31, 2019 10:05 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

something i read pointed out that the final shot of lupita was a wink towards the final shot of the thriller music video and that makes so much sense

Huh. Yeah, I like that!

That owns

I was always struck at what a good actor Peele was (along with Key) in their show, which made the parodies and skits really convincing, but the downside is that every time I see him interviewed now I keep thinking he's playing a character.

lol maybe he is, did you see his Jack Torrance outfit?

Winston Duke as Gabe = Winston Duke as Jordan Peele

saw it again. decided that the ending isn’t illogical at all really, it makes the film make sense

i think it’s undercooked

feels like ‘the metaphor’ was left ambiguous for the sake of interpretive ambiguity, but there’s not actually much there for rich inrerpretating...

Haven’t seen again but my sense is that the “nonsensical” part is not at all the carefully foreshadowed ending but the expository speech in the dénouement, which was the one part I struggled with when I saw it.

i mean yes, it totally is, and yet i'm also not really bothered by the expository speech especially bc, even without the twist, it's much less expository than it seems

my feeling is that adelaide's submerged memory of being one of the tethered resurfaces gradually over the course of the movie though it also doesn't require this reading at all to *work* bc either way... she's a survivor in every negative and positive sense, whether she's aware of how corrupt her moral compass is or not

also, the script wasn’t actually that good..? the dialogue between the family in the beginning felt stiff, most of the character development was cliched; dad is goofy (the scene with the boat fell flat, like the physical comedy wasn’t even well-timed), daughter’s on her phone, mom stares out window with uneasy dread... i really think this is a huge drop off after get out

All fair enough, I need to rewatch both (and I am never your man to talk to about “character development”)

yeah I thought the same thing about the script flopson, remarkably awkward & stilted dialogue, and not the actors' fault (who were all great in this)

i'm probably ruined forever re: being able to tell when dialogue is stilted but also i don't really care. all the character development seemed credible and felt to me

Eh, family stuff was pretty solid, imo. Dad was a buffoon, but a plausible one. There was a really good line in the Lane review:

What the Wilsons encounter, in the course of the plot, is harrowing and outlandish, but they have too many wits to be frightened out of them, and it’s the very normality of the family that sees them through. If Pixar made an animated version of “Us,” it would be called “The Credibles.”

I think this is one of the best aspects of the film. They're freaked out to begin with, but it doesn't take them long to get into the swing of things (so to speak), and during the brief respite when it transitions from a take on a home invasion movie to, essentially, a zombie comedy, the family dynamic played out pretty amusingly. Speaking of swinging, what was up with the golf gloves the morlocks had on? Or, for that matter, the bloody handed guy who is the first of his kind we encounter on the surface?

I also don't know what to make of all the 11:11 stuff, other than ... twin numbers. By why those numbers? Anyway, Red Letter Media guys made a really clever observation that the Golden Gate Bridge and Twin Towers from the Hands Across America video are visually pairs of "11," too.