Critics have "ruined us"

I receive the message that we are all supposed to love the film Us . The second film of Jordan Peele, author-director, after his first sensational film Get Out . He has a lot of talent and we attract him all for good.

Social media whistles to pay tribute to the greatness of the film. The box office of the opening weekend of the film crushed.

And the critics go wild, trying to find more complete adjectives to describe the film's brilliance. Richard Brody of the New Yorker states: " We is nothing short of a colossal feat."

I wonder if I should not withdraw from the film. Because although I went to see him impatiently and leaned over my seat to drink his wonders, I must admit that for me it was a bust. Even the audience of teenagers and young adults around me, inclined to shout "Oh no!" In the scary parts, sat in a still darker silence in the last third of the film when the huge dump of 'exhibitions occurs. Once the credits were obtained, they became distraught.

I would have liked to be able to love Us . But – how to say politely – what a boring mess, with just some scary scenes in the middle and a really good plot idea that went wrong. This idea involves a terrifying subclbad of doppelgangers that appear in the homes of the haves, all dressed in a red jumpsuit and leather gloves that protect hands, ready to crush the candle types to help of scissors.

like, right? I mean, it's an entertainment!

But the choice of scissors – extremely brilliant tools featured prominently on movie posters – warns us that something is wrong. This seems too important to go against the basic symbolism already in place.

Disordered monsters emerging from abandoned mining tunnels and tunnels digging the foundation of the country already represent the oppressed working clbad. So, why do not they come with all the weapons at hand – baduming you want to leave the guns out, because melee combat is important in this movie – anything that can go up to # 39, pleated bars, tire irons, hammers, keys, bats, sticks, rocks, whatever damage? Scissors could be inside too, but just ordinary household items that one would find lying around anywhere, not fancy scissors that look like the Bronte sisters who used them for sewing in the past and who have been in a museum ever since.

But scissors are needed to interpret the idea that Peele has what happens on that fateful night, which will be explained later under the sign of yawn and called 'The Untethering ".

It's just a terrible name, precious and old to nothing. Do really appreciate the one who came with The Purge.

The problem is maybe I like a lot of genre movies. And I have it under the authority of Richard Brody, who created this tribute to the word salad in his magazine, no matter the genre, and even if he does, Jordan Peele transcends its modest limits:

The genre does not matter for the merits of a film, whether its conventions are followed or challenged; What counts is that Peele cites the tropes and precedents of horror to deeply root his film in the landscape of pop culture – and then to elevate those roots. Us is a film that places itself in popular culture for diagnostic purposes – and even for self-diagnosis; its subject is, to a large extent, cultural consciousness and its counterpart, the cultural unconscious. The crucial element of horror is political and moral – the realities evoked by metaphorical fantasies.

It is not uncommon for a critic who favorably examines a genre film to indicate that this genre is irrelevant, even though this criticism continues to contradict itself in this way. crazy everywhere. But I know it's time for me to take a step back when everything about a movie needs to be described with more clarity and finesse, and more engaging so it's appreciated. This is usually a dull movie.

I must admit that even though I wanted to love I did not even like the trailer when I saw it for the first time. Hated the title – by announcing so kindly that it concerns us as a society, America now, "United States", understood it? It's as if Jordan Peele was reading the glowing reviews of Get Out and had all the misconceptions about what to do, based on what the critics approve. Critics like the big obvious messages, allegory and symbolism, but that's not what made the good of Get Out.

The Amazing Thing About Get Out – Which Also Had A Weak Third Act, But Not Half As Weak As The Third Act Us – Was That He presented bluntly some of the most common experiences of Black life when negotiating fortresses of wealth and white power. Based on this approach, Peele seemed to miraculously create a new variation in the American horror film simply by linking it to the point of view of a black character.

Get Out begins with a prologue with a black character. The man (the excellent Lakeith Stanfield) went astray looking for an address one night in a white district of the upper clbades, where he is more and more sure that all the looks that are addressed to him since the high houses will be paranoid and hostile. It means he is in danger and he starts to walk faster, looking nervously on the other side. Then a sophisticated sports car with tinted windows begins to follow him at his own pace, clearly harbading him. From there, you only need the British song "Run, Rabbit, Run" from World War II to start playing and a somewhat fantastic scenario development to allow you to move from social realism to a real horror.

We ] is trying the same kind of openness, putting the emphasis on ordinary experience before stepping aside in a related world of 's. fantastic horror. But the sequence is much longer and faster, and its impact is infinitely less clear. We see a black family strolling in the carnival of Santa Monica Pier, play games, watch the rides. All of this sounds tense and false, in a way that makes you aware that it's supposed to be forced and wrong. Although there is a complicated reason for this effect, explained later, it does not help at the moment. The family is full of tension, the father is erratic, the mother coldly angry, the little girl solemn and inclined to stand apart from both. She walks alone in a gaming house and meets her doppelganger who marks her for life.

Thirty Years Later, Her Daughter Becomes Adult (Lupita Nyong & # 39; o), Adelaide Wilson, With Her Family Now Includes Her Husband (Winston Duke), Her Daughter (Shahadi Wright Joseph) And Her Son (Evan Alex) . They are clearly well off financially. They go to a vacation home in the same area of ​​Southern California that will inevitably bring them back to the Santa Monica jetty.

They meet at the beach with rich friends, a white family with a high degree of dysfunction, including an alcoholic mother (Elizabeth Moss), her sneering father (Tim Heidecker) and her naughty teenage twin daughters (Cali and Noelle Sheldon) . These people are so grotesque that it bothers and must be significant – they represent terrible bourgeois values ​​that have infected the family of Adelaide. The two fathers, for example, are in a competition of consumer goods for the best new product. A white father always wins, but a black father is an eager candidate. Its new fixation is that of boats, a well-known sign of obvious consumption.

Only Adelaide tends to be worried about everything; his traumatic past, his premonitions of a future chaos and his current family vaguely troubled. His son, for example, hardly speaks, still wears a beast mask, is obsessed with a failed trap with a broken lighter and seems to come out to the point that Adelaide tells him with love how to move at the simple pace with the clbadic hiphop song.

You can not miss the allegorical function of Adelaide's discomfort: she is uncomfortable with both the supernatural fear that is built up and the way her family is bonded with the characteristics badociated with rich and corrupt whites. She is very opposed to her husband's new boat, for example.

Finally, after long preparations, you arrive at the arrival of the Doppelgangers in red uniform, silently holding their hand at the end of the driveway of the holiday home. This section of the plot invaded by the house is pretty scary for a moment. Hard to beat doppelgangers or violent invasions at home for intestinal fears. Lupita Nyong's done a great job playing her own scary double, with big frozen eyes and a voice that echoes strangely, creating words from sore breaths from a throat that does not work correctly.

The voice speaks to several sources: the "death rattle", Edgar Allen Poe's story "The facts in Mr. Valdemar's case" on the experimental attempt to hypnotize a man and continue to communicate during the end-of-life process: "the sound [of the voice] was hard, broken and hollow" as if it came from a "deep cave in the earth." In addition, Richard Pryor also celebrated the famous "J & #" program I forgot how to breathe! "

The multiple allusions work well here, but make the rest of the movie heavier because it tries to point in several directions at once, all of which require parsing.For example, the pattern" Hands Across America "is promising, starting with Adelaide's unfortunate teenage years when public service announcements aired on TV, but the effects are not really disturbing, even in the last shots supposed to be scary, when rows of Doppelgangers in red uniforms extend across the landscape of America on helicopter shots, all holding hands with stiffness and silence, baduming this is one of those ideas that are good on paper.

of a 1986 real life minor historical event, a supposedly comforting publicity operation involving Americans united in an attempt to cover the entire nation of cito to raise funds and raise public awareness of homelessness. Peele does not tell us in the film that there were not enough hands willing to travel across the continent in 1986, leaving large gaps in the western states where the culprit was doing his hand to clear the air. They also did not raise so much money, given the media coverage obtained by Hands Across America. But many people thought that they were really "doing something" to deal with the disaster of economic injustice of Reagan Era's government policies. The majority of Americans in no way linked the excesses of the government to the disastrous problem of the homeless. connect the points thematically in Us ? I mean, I remember, but I remember a lot of terrible things that happened in the 80s. And for me, "understanding" did not help me in any way to make the film more exciting after the first scenes of home invasion. I had the Us /U.S.

Even Jordan Peele is very vague in an interview with NPR when asked what the film is about. After all, Us consistently indicates that it means something big:

I think a lot of people realize that images taken in the United States and the United States are numerous. And I think that the duality of this country and our beliefs and our demons are exposed. But I think Us is bigger than that. And I think one of the reasons this movie has an expansion is that "we" is subjective. Everyone thinks the term "we" in different ways: it can be "we" the family, "we" the city, "we the country," we "humanity. I think in the simplest form, the very nature of "us" means that there is a "them", right? That's what this movie offers me: whatever your "us" is, we turn them into enemies, and maybe we're our worst enemy.

Well, so be it. Everyone loves Us, and it's a great success. I will always be present for Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone series, hoping that the premiere of this April fish will not be as dramatic. Us was inspired by an episode of 1960 Twilight Zone titled "Mirror Image", which is one of many other things that the film aims to do. It also offers a nice advertising hook for Peele's new film. I personally hope that Jordan Peele will find inspiration from lived experiences as the main source of horror. A perfect example is the hypnotizing party scene in Get Out in the country house of wealthy white liberals, whose repeated expressions of admiration for black personalities such as Barack Obama and Tiger Woods are only Adding to Peele's discordant symphony he stated that he had to film because he had attended a version of that evening. The reality is horror, especially nowadays where we see apocalyptic endings everywhere we look. We need administrators aware of this fact and ready to show ourselves to us in a clear and limpid way, which does not require lengthy explanations in the third act.