get out (2017, dir. jordan peele)

so this was good! just a very well-constructed thriller that synthesizes a lot of established works in horror and suspense that also function as allegories about racism (included in peele's recent bam showcase were night of the living dead and candyman) or are just total showcases of conspiracy and dread (imo stepford wives and the '70s invasion of the body snatchers are present, and the finale feels like an inverse funny games in the best possible way) into a movie that's also literally about racism, appropriation, miscegenation, microaggression, etc. hard to determine if this is necessarily a trend or just an observation about horror movies recently finding non-traditional audiences, but it feels potentially like a horror movie that people who don't watch horror movies will like a la babadook/it follows etc. but feels stronger than most of those bc the metaphor, though just as transparent, is much richer. (it's also a pretty funny movie, like there is literally a character who serves entirely as comic relief.) at first i was sort of underwhelmed with the cinematography, everything felt kinda drained of color (maybe on purpose) but about halfway through it settles into some very pretty kubrickian asymmetries. the score also rules

this was surprisingly controversial in my circles. I really enjoyed it. the cast is great. with some very smart casting choices I won't get into for reasons.

i really liked it. great job of building tension, really creepy performances (especially the groundskeeper and maid but also all the party guests). my main quibbles were i could have done without the comic relief (dude was funny but the tonal shifts whenever he appeared were abrupt) and it kind of falls apart in the action scenes a bit (but this is a very common issue with high-concept horror/thriller movies).

currently sitting at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, guess I should go see it

are we doing spoilers on this thread or no

I think we probably should

actually scratch my babadook/it follows categorization upthread, the recent horror film this resembles most is the invitation imo

SPOILERS FOR A COUPLE OF MOVIES

what was funniest to me is that it very closely parallels the not as good A Cure for Wellness which came out the previous week - our hero hits a deer, then ends up in an idyllic, very white place where everyone is freakishly content, led by a friendly patriarch, discovers the seamy underbelly (and in both cases the truth evokes creepy eugenics shit and racial pseudoscience), there's a supernatural dimension to both revelations, the hero is rendered immobile during a key expository sequence, in the end the hero gets out alive with the help of their only ally after killing off the mad scientist and burning the place to the ground

obviously a lot of those are just general genre touchstones but there were some amusing similarities to me

one of the best theater going experiences I've had in years. multiple applause breaks, cheering, people cracking jokes and the crowd laughing at them, total silence when it was tense.... an amazing experience, and a great great movie.

my audience's reaction to the cop car pulling up was profound

i feel like i've seen a bunch of horror/thriller movies that start with the hero hitting an animal with their car (including the aforementioned "the invitation"). i think it's a new cliche. but it works well with the backstory in this case.

can't think of direct precedents for some reason but it is definitely not a new cliche

SPOILERS
it was pretty tightly plotted, but i wasn't sure why he kept asking rose for the car keys even after he knew she was involved in the plot. maybe he thought she was just hypnotized too, but even then, why would she be able to give him the keys?

my audience's reaction to the cop car pulling up was profound

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Monday, February 27, 2017 3:02 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! DUDE. it was incredible

and then "man I told you not to go up there," roaring laughter

Horror is not my genre, esp the gory kind, so I'll hold off til i can watch this at home. If yer not in NYC you may want to replicate this Peele-programmed series:

http://www.bam.org/film/2017/jordan-peele

this is really not very violent/gory fwiw (esp by contemporary standards), about as violent as say Under the Skin (which it echoes in some pretty specific ways)

there's only one particularly gooey scene

yeah it's certainly not DON'T BREATHE, the last horror movie i saw theatrically. awful, way too gross...

...though frankly that also had one incredible moment of audience reaction

If yer not in NYC you may want to replicate this Peele-programmed series:

... Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?!

well there's obviously an influence/spin there.

besides the more obvious touchstones in his series it reminded me a little of those oddball suburban paranoia horror flicks of the late 80s like Society and Parents (albeit less eccentric)

or the original Stepfather

the parents reminded me of the parents in HEATHERS ("Oh, you.")

There's a reason why The 'Burbs is included.

it feels potentially like a horror movie that people who don't watch horror movies will like

True in my case.

I loved it.

SPOILERD

the asking Rose for the keys thing...at that point I thought it was still possible that she was hypnotized, like maybe she keeps bringing people home and then is hypnotized to forget it. I wasn't sure until the final twist. With hindsight, her not being in on it doesn't make nearly as good a story.

And the cop car showing up at the end was great, I was at a pretty empty showing but that was the loudest it got, and a fun play on the Night of the Living Dead ending.

I am not a horror movie guy, but if more were like this, I would be converted easily. Key & Peele fans will be gratified if not surprised that this works so well. If you are this insightful at working an audience for both laughs and terror, you've got some formidable talent.

lmao http://www.thewrap.com/armond-white-ruins-get-out-100-rotten-tomatoes-jordan-peele/

hahahaha classic

White wrote of Peele’s film: “‘Get Out’ does not rank with America’s notable race comedies — Brian De Palma’s ‘Hi, Mom!’, Ossie Davis’s ‘Gone Are the Days! (Purlie Victorious)’, Robert Downey Sr.’s ‘Putney Swope,’ Melvin Van Peebles’s ‘Sweet Sweetback’, Hal Ashby’s ‘The Landlord,’ Rusty Cundieff’s ‘Fear of a Black Hat,’ or any of the genre spoofs by the Wayans family, … or the recent Eddie Murphy films that are so personal and ingenious, they transcend racial categorization.”

Still taking this in.

So I had to double check and yes, he DID love Norbit:

http://www.nypress.com/norbit-well-fat-suited/

lol @ Armond calling "Sweet Sweetback" a "comedy"

it's that among other things

ppl caring about perfect RT scores -- ah internet + movies = DOOMSDAY

Whites review was ridiculous in many ways regardless.

I fucking hate rotten tomatoes so much

I just read Armond's pan of Fences, which RT somehow lists as "fresh"

congrats to armond on managing to write something dumb and grossly offensive even by the standards of national review

I loved this. the comedy was great. I feel like Peele's plot developments were a bit familiar (I mean it was v similar to the plot of that shit movie The Skeleton Key which wasn't exactly original when it came out) but twists weren't the point really.

I liked the cheesy over the top horror moments like the evil latin music while Bradley Whitford was ...uhh....doing something that I won't reveal.

not really 'scary' but I'm hard to scare so I'm not a good metric for that

one of the best theater going experiences I've had in years. multiple applause breaks, cheering, people cracking jokes and the crowd laughing at them, total silence when it was tense.... an amazing experience, and a great great movie.

― flappy bird, Monday, February 27, 2017 2:55 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah the audience was howling at the TSA guy throughout. it was one of the few times I enjoyed being in a packed theatre.

i really liked this a lot. there were echoes of a lot of other horror films (one that kept coming to mind was "house of the devil," which had a similar scene where the main character has an important revelation through stumbling on some old photographs) but it all felt surprising and fresh. i saw it a couple days ago and i'm still thinking about it a lot, which is unusual for me.

spoiler

rose's sudden change was really chilling, she dragged that scene out just long enough where i genuinely wasn't sure whether she was in on it or not, and then that ice-cold delivery of that single line: "you know i can't give you the keys." creepiest scene in the movie for me.

yeah I loved that. I was fairly certain given the reveal a moment prior but her transition (and then her subsequent acting job on the phone call) were chilling.

her "you were my favorite" and kiss blow too.

*one of my favorites

that was the creepiest line for me

her not noticing the commotion due to listening to (I've Had) the Time of My Life on headphones was funny as hell too

Speaking of Eddie Murphy the film's title is taken from this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IH6IeiLtts

This was so good.

the Jeffrey Dahmer sequence w/ the TSA guy is perhaps the most I've laughed in a movie theatre in eons. the whole theatre was roaring to where I almost couldn't hear dialogue.

kind of nice to see horror with actual comedy as the moments of levity rather than the stilted laughs you typically see in horror films.

I didn't make it through Keanu.

the most literally one-joke / single-sketch-brutally-extended-to-feature-length comedy in recent memory

Haha, I enjoyed Keanu when it came out, but it took me several minutes to figure out why you all were suddenly talking about Keanu Reeves on this thread, which I guess shows how well that film stuck with me.

I saw Keanu on a plane and enjoyed it, was able to rewind the bit I'd napped through

a good oral history on vulture about the film's genesis: http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/making-get-out-jordan-peele.html

includes this nugget:

Peele: I was trying to figure out what genre this movie was, and horror didn’t quite do it. Psychological thriller didn’t do it, and so I thought, Social thriller. The bad guy is society — these things that are innate in all of us, and provide good things, but ultimately prove that humans are always going to be barbaric, to an extent. I think I coined the term social thriller, but I definitely didn’t invent it.

Footnoted with:

To coincide with Get Out’s release, Peele curated a selection of classic thrillers that dealt with social issues for BAM: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Rosemary’s Baby made his list, along with Misery, Rear Window, The Shining, Candyman, and more.

This is kind of an interesting list:

• Rosemary's Baby
• Night of The Living Dead
• The People Under The Stairs
• Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
• Get Out
• Funny Games
• Candyman
• Scream
• Rear Window
• The Silence of The Lambs
• Misery
• The Shining
• The 'Burbs

i linked to that series way up dere about a year ago

I probably had you blocked at the time, sorry

I wonder if JP's seen Society.

My buddy's been harping about Society @ me for decades now. It's streaming on Amazon Prime (in the U.S.) so I may finally check it out.

Meantime, next year...

pic.twitter.com/6j43s9YC8e

— Jordan Peele (@JordanPeele) May 9, 2018

Awesome

Is the last OG good?

I saw the first episode behind someone's head in a bar, with the sound off, which is the only time I have heard of it at all, in any way

Mixed feelings about this, it was very interesting and meticulous but something about the style didnt do it for me. Surprised so many people liked the TSA guy so much, I thought that fell flat. My favorite thing might have been the wonderful theme music by Michael Abels.

The most interesting plot element to me was the chosen life of the grandparents, which rang quite true to me that they might want that lifestyle.

In some of the deleted scenes commentary, Peele suggests the girlfriend has actually been hypnotized. Really? Because that changes a lot. I thought he seemed sarcastic when talking about the original/alternate ending, as if that's the one he really wanted? He talks about an interesting way that it's actually a kind of happy ending even though it's definitely worse in most ways.

Surprised so many people liked the TSA guy so much

it really was a different experience seeing this in theaters

His YouTube show is a major misfire on every level

Finally got around to watching Get Out and did not enjoy it! Am I the only one? Guess I'll read the thread and find out.

I only just watched it. I liked it though!

The Us commercial running looks scary. (Joining It and Them! in the ever-expanding pronoun-horror genre.) I wonder if Jordan Peele wants to make horror films, or if he just had a fluke hit (that had lots else on its mind) and it was hard to turn down all the money that was thrown at him.

I'll let y'all know next week.

I fear it's both. he's not pivoting with this movie, afaik this one had at least a rough draft before Get Out even came out. But I think this one is going to lean harder on horror and people will be disappointed and hold it against him, OR he might've felt compelled to amp up the "social horror" angle post-Get Out. I don't know, I'm really rooting for him because it's so hard to pull off a follow-up to the sort of surprise, semi-fluke hit that Get Out was.

I was somewhat lukewarm on Get Out (while admiring its audacity), so there's a decent chance I'll like this one better. I notice, though, that they use the "From the mind of..." come-on in the trailer, a red flag that makes me think of Cronenberg and Lynch at their silliest.

not that much money! he's sticking with Blumhouse rather than chasing cash

(listened to an interview with Leigh Whanne1 this week where he talked about Blum's extreme resistance to raise his usual $5m budget for Upgrade: Get Out was 4.5, BlacKkKlansman was 15, Upgrade was 16, Us is on wikip at $20m.)

will also say the trailers are too long/give too much away - then again I haven't seen it

early festival reviews were SUPER positive so I'm approaching this with some excitement

I wonder if Jordan Peele wants to make horror films, or if he just had a fluke hit (that had lots else on its mind) and it was hard to turn down all the money that was thrown at him.

Get Out gave Peele options. He was offered BlacKkKlansman, for example (he decided Spike Lee should direct it instead, and he would produce). He was offered big superhero movies (he won’t say which ones). If he’d wanted to make a Get Out sequel, he could have named his price. But really Peele was committed to directing his own, original stories, mostly in the key of horror.

Horror was Peele’s first love, he says. He describes himself as “a scared kid”, but he was also the one who’d tell scary stories around the campfire: “The feeling of hearing an audience go ‘Ooh-hoo-hoo’ and shuddering. I got results. That sort of marked the transition from the scared kid to the guy who lived with the monsters, who could wield the fear.”

Now Peele has come out as a horror nut, he is making up for lost time. Next month, he launches a star-studded reboot of The Twilight Zone for CBS’s All Access streaming service, in which he serves as co-producer and host. He has also got Lovecraft Country – another horror-tinged drama for HBO, co-producing with JJ Abrams.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/09/jordan-peele-on-us-this-is-a-very-different-movie-from-get-out

Yeah, he did an interview on the Nerdist podcast back when Get Out came out and it was evident that he had big horror plans.

he curated several weeks of "black horror movies" at BAM when get out was hot; his taste was solid and smart

I think Us looks scary and amazing. I can't wait to see it.

yeah, i'm all in for this one

deeper he gets into genre the better imo

otm

All of this is good to know--clearly he's doing exactly what he wants to.

This was fine. Illogical ending.

Perhaps a new thread?

US by jordan peele

Finally watched this yesterday. I liked it a lot! Cracking up at TSA guy. I look forward to seeing Us in two years time.

Noe *this* is a trailer:

What’s a bad miracle? pic.twitter.com/x37K3Inwk7

— Jordan Peele (@JordanPeele) February 13, 2022

Now, not Noe, lol. Noe is a different animal.

Holy shit that’s a trailer

THAT is what a trailer should do: get you hype without a diagram of what the movie is.

yeah it looks so good & i have no idea what it is lmao

EXACTLY.

us's rabbit teaser wasn't quite enough. this is good.

Is it aliens? Is it Eldritch abominations? Is it environmental catastrophe?

Perhaps… it’s all three.

yes to nope

Looks good

looks great, i just hope peele isn't going shyamalan on us

hope it's more of a film theory thing than plot twist thing

the maid in the kitchen and Steenburgen standing next to her

Haw at this. For a split second, I thought maybe Mary Steenburgen had been in this movie.

Shows you what clever casting this was. Catherine Keener in those windows from The Sunken Place after having also starred in "Being John Malkovich". That movie written by Charlie Kaufman, who also wrote "I’m Thinking of Ending Things," a movie about a couple going to visit the parents, who may or not be who they seem, etc.

Mary Steenburgen. I thought she was wonderful in Twister.