get out (2017, dir. jordan peele)

^^ 100% agreed, though i think it was the right decision to end on an up note

Caleb Landry Jones seems to play predominately creepy characters too, between this supporting role and the part he played in The Last Exorcism

― waht, I am true black metal worrior (Neanderthal),

he looks like a young pre-AA Steve Bannon

i didn't think the ending was predictable at all!

i think it was the right decision to end on an up note

― neva missa lost, wednesday nights on abc (voodoo chili), Saturday, March 18, 2017 11:25 AM (forty-five minutes ago

it's undoubtedly helped the film's word of mouth / box office

yeah i was fully expecting the cops to shoot him or for him to go to jail or something, evil prevails, etc

well the great thing about the ending is that the movie has its cake and eats it too -- it gets the big payoff of a happy ending while also giving you the momentary horror of a cop showing up to see a black man next to a white woman in distress, and i think that's really all the ending really needed to work. the movie ending with chris being shot or arrested would have felt macabre and unnecessary given what he had just gone thru. also i think there's a nice subtle message in the end about being absolved not by authority but by your friends.

in a sense i think you could almost think about the movie having two endings w/o there actually being an "alternate ending" or whatever. it forces you to ruminate on what would have happened had a real cop showed up in that moment w/o actually having to show it on screen.

one thing i really liked about this movie is that it was laugh out loud funny w/o resorting to being meta or ironic about the genre conventions of horror films. allison williams searching "top NCAA prospects" had me howling in the theater.

in a sense i think you could almost think about the movie having two endings w/o there actually being an "alternate ending" or whatever. it forces you to ruminate on what would have happened had a real cop showed up in that moment w/o actually having to show it on screen.

― J0rdan S., Saturday, March 18, 2017 12:25 PM (three minutes ago)

this is a great point, one i hadn't really considered

Not sure it's a happy ending! He's still covered in blood and is responsible for three deaths. I'm not sure how he talks his way out of it, even with a TSA pal.

I was the only person who laughed at the NCAA joke. My audience was uncomfortable through most of it.

well it's certainly a happier ending than the alternative. and if cops went to the house they'd find the surgery room in the basement, they'd track down the missing friend previously dismissed in the movie and be able to snap him out of hypnotization etc. it's entirely plausible chris comes out the other end as the hero.

Watching Chris standing over the body of a dying white woman, I thought about Eric Foner's Reconstruction, which I finished last Wednesday and its recounting of what happened to black men accused of murdering a white woman.

that NCAA joke, complete with creepy geometric Kubrick-esque framing, had me dying

So many other subtle things people have pointed out to me. Like, I didn't get it at the time, even in immediate retrospect, that all the guests were sizing him up for their own selfish purposes. Do you play golf? You must be great in bed. With the right training you could be a MMA guy. And so on. And that's why they were bidding. I know, obvious, but at the time, like I said, just seemed like more weirdness. The brainwashed guy he recognized, for example, in passing it's noted that he was a prominent jazz musician. I wonder if that is why he was chosen?

The more I think about it, the more I think the happy ("happy") ending is in a sense an ironic subversion of expectations.

The "you're leaving...without me *sob*" moment a brilliant piece of strategy in that he is clearly considering it cos "NO relationship is worth THIS" but she wins him back to where he "realizes" that 'you're all i got'.

Of course that to me makes the ending a lot sadder. It's true for him to the point where he can't even kill her after she tried to blow his head off. These "she's not what you think" movies often forget to consider that after the protag has escaped, he has to process the end of a serious relationship too. This one didn't labor on that but it was there.

it's funny when people act like peele copped out by not having chris get killed by a cop at the end when that's already basically the ending of the most famous horror movie with a black protagonist and that one was made 50 years ago

in mentioning the film's overall predictability (subtleties notwithstanding) and somewhat disappointing ending, I'm not referring to the last few minutes, but rather the whole third act. it's suspenseful, well acted and clever, but i wanted things to get a whole lot wilder. like society-style. i mean, even the relatively staid rosemary's baby goes farther, gets weirder. but my tastes in horror don't square with peele's aims and certainly wouldn't have helped the film's commercial prospects...

xp i was straight up afraid he was gonna do that ending as I watching it! really glad he didn't

He originally did.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/get-out-almost-had-a-much-bleaker-ending-according-to-1792959724

it's amazing how many npr-ish white people i know went to see/can't wait to see Get Out and i know for a fact they would never go see a horror movie otherwise in a million years. it's the white liberal feel good movie of the season! i mean my father-in-law's wife really wants to see it and she hates horror movies with a passion. she hates most popular things. she's nice though. she once asked me why people watch horror movies.

I think there was a concerted PR effort to convince non-horror film fans to see it. I think there are indeed just a lot of horror films people don't see because they're horror films, and while it might have taken NPR to convince them to see a movie because it's Important Satire About the Way Things Are, I think it also took NPR and its adjuncts to convince people to see something marketed as a horror movie, period. I mean, even the trailer doesn't exactly make Get Out look like anything other than a typical horror movie.

yeah i wasn't originally interested in seeing it

it's almost like "a horror movie" is incredibly poor shorthand for what it is

That's how it was marketed and advertised, though.

and anyone who did three seconds of reading about it came to realize that there was more going on

Reading? I think you're thinking of a different medium. We have movies so we don't have to read.

The trailer made this look absolutely ridiculous, but people seem to love it

it's almost like "a horror movie" is incredibly poor shorthand for what it is

― call all destroyer, Saturday, March 18, 2017 8:39 PM (forty-two minutes ago)

horror's a broad genre, especially these days. get out fits in pretty comfortably.

i'm not very invested in horror movies as a genre, but the trailer for this (which i saw months ago) piqued my interest immediately. (i *am* a fan of david lynch and rosemary's baby, though.)

btw, there was a group of late-middle-age NPR-ish white people behind me in the theater, one of whom quipped as the end credits rolled: "guess the moral of the story is, stay away from the in-laws!"

well the great thing about the ending is that the movie has its cake and eats it too -- it gets the big payoff of a happy ending while also giving you the momentary horror of a cop showing up to see a black man next to a white woman in distress, and i think that's really all the ending really needed to work. the movie ending with chris being shot or arrested would have felt macabre and unnecessary given what he had just gone thru ... in a sense i think you could almost think about the movie having two endings w/o there actually being an "alternate ending" or whatever. it forces you to ruminate on what would have happened had a real cop showed up in that moment w/o actually having to show it on screen.

― J0rdan S., Saturday, March 18, 2017 3:25 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM

yeah

yeah the trailer definitely made me want to see it, knowing that Peele directed helped a lot, too - but I never would've seen it if I hadn't gone to the only theater around here that plays horror movies regularly (stuff like Don't Breathe, The Bye Bye Man, etc.). Glad I saw it on opening weekend, wouldn't have known about it otherwise.

I dug this, Partially because it was uncanny as fuck particularly in that 70s way that they don't really do anymore.

I wonder what Mark Fisher would have written about it.

According to IMDb:

Keegan-Michael Key, who is known for collaborating with Jordan Peele, portrays one of the "Top NCAA Prospects" that Rose searches online for.

Also, the music/scoring in this was dope and I hope it gets more attention.

Don't have much to add to what everyone's already said other than what a headfuck that the first music we hear is Flanagan and Allen, such an unlikely, perfect introduction.

saw this again yesterday. just as dope second time around. didn't notice much additional the second time other than the "help" had very visible, pronounced brain surgery scars at the end that weren't visible earlier in the movie, which I didn't notice the first time.

no creepier scene to me than the bingo scene tho

They all wore hats or wigs

not saying it was continuity issue, just that I figured either they concealed it earlier in the film or that somehow Chris just was hypnotized out of seeing it.

"concealed" like w/ makeup or wigs as you say etc etc

this movie was great. clever how so much of the horror movie tension of the first half was just racial tension. I saw it in a full theater here in Vietnam and almost none of the jokes got laughter, but I guess a lot of it relies on knowing the racial climate of the US. in fact, it's kind of a weird movie to make it into theaters here except that it's ostensibly a horror movie, and those are very popular in Vietnam

That's an absolutely fascinating take. Really! I wonder if that's how it's playing out elsewhere in Asia. So horror is a big Vietnamese thing, you say?

yeah Ned, we get pretty much every horror, action, or animated film from the US. Those types of movies tend to translate well across cultures. Horror films are very popular here, and I think in other Asian countries too (Korean horror films play here frequently).

occasionally we get dramas and comedies like Hell or High Water - theater was empty was I saw that - and Dumb and Dumber 2. American movies are competing against Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese movies here so I think the stuff that requires more cultural knowledge of the US tends to be rare. Which makes Get Out pretty unusual, but hey, I feel lucky that I got to see it here

i wasn't sure why he kept asking rose for the car keys even after he knew she was involved in the plot.

I feel like if you're in a relationship with someone it's super-hard to believe that they've been lying to you! I read this as: he's hoping against hope that, despite what he knows, she actually truly cares for him and will save him in his hour of need, the whole thing couldn't have been completely fake -- could it??

yeah the tension in his voice there wasn't just "i'm being threatened by your parents and doofy looking brother", it was also 'please don't betray me too, Rose'

he's probably hoping she's an unwitting participant, either brainwashed into it herself or forced against her will etc

saw this at the cinema last night. so good. the balance was perfect. as a satire/comment on racism aside, it worked brilliantly as a horror in its own right. Not so much jump-scares as jump-laughs, as in how some of the most effective humorous moments came out of nowhere.

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

AFAIK UK cinema audiences don't tend to be as 'responsive' as US audiences, but yes there was a notable 'oh shit fuck shit' feeling running through the cinema when this happened.

in the London cinema where I saw it, the audience cheered at the reveal in that scene

in the London cinema where I saw it, the audience cheered at the reveal in that scene

― Neil S

Me too! It's not impossible we were at the same screening...

I had the pleasure of visiting Stratford Westfield to see it!