GREEN BOOK
Dir. Peter Farrelly
https://i.imgur.com/UOUVNit.jpg
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GREEN BOOK
Dir. Peter Farrelly
https://i.imgur.com/UOUVNit.jpg
IMDb page
This won the top prize at TIFF this year, so I got to see for free when it screened again on the last day. Lucky me?
It is exactly the kind of film you would expect to win an audience prize at a public film festival.
It is exactly the kind of film you would expect based on the premise, trailer, etc.
You don't have to see Green Book to know exactly where it's going, and what it has to say about racism.
Which is to say, it's a very white movie, made by white people and for white people, all so white people can convince themselves they're not racist.
Spoiler alert: Turns out they're pretty racist.
Oof haha
Sounds like the new Oscar bait.
I can't escape the trailer anytime I see a new movie at the theaters. It looks like My Cousin Vinny Driving Miss Daisy.
This was alright. I felt like it danced around the subject matter and a lot of its messages more than once in favor of sentimentality. But Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortenson are tremendous, it's well shot, and the banter between the two leads has some humorous moments. I can certainly see why Peter Farrelly was brought on to help write and direct because his style of comedy is very prevalent here. The ignorance of Mortenson's buffoon of a character is played for laughs for the first half of the movie, although he does become more of a character as it goes along. Mild yay for the performances and humor, but that's all I'll give it, because by the end I felt like I had just watched a Christmas movie for the woke generation.
Mortensen and Ali are fantastic, but is that enough? I am not talking about the "problematic" stuff either; one aspect of growing up in a homogenous Asian country as a viewer is that I still have some weird little distance in watching films like this (even then, this still somehow manages to make me cringe hard at many moments). But this feels so obvious in every story beat, especially early on, where the script seems to be filmed with little sense of its own rhythm or cut, so every dramatic or comedic beat just lays flatly there, almost purely rescued into mild effectiveness by the great, entertaining strength of two performances. Not enough for me. Still, this makes me feel retroactively better about mildly liking The Help now; at least that one has a sense of being directed. 5/10
It's harmless and plays all the nice beats. I certainly can't see why one would love or hate it. But it is enjoyable at least for Viggo and Mahershala alone. They're great actors.
Farrelly has been doing road movies since the beginning. He knows how to do these.
It's fine. Surprised it got as big as it did, and even more surprised that there's a lot of hate for it too. If anything, it exposes us to a musician that we more than likely didn't know about.
I pretty much hated it. It's almost saved by Ali, but even his character is often cringe. Fuckin' everyone is a stereotype in this. It's honestly more insulting to Italians than Black people, but even Ali's character is almost a magical negroe. I can't stand these phony movies (like The Help) that self-consciously make the White characters broader and dumber just to prove White people can be dumb and broad too. There's also some questions about how accurate it is. Don Shirley's family is hitting it hard and has said Shirley was friends with lots of Black people (inc. Sarah Vaughan) in music or otherwise.
I'm sorry I criticized BlacKkKlansman so much, Spike Lee. All is forgiven.
I enjoyed the hell outta this. The performances are ace. It's very well written. Grade-A, old school Hollywood moviemaking. (And by "old school," I mean the 1990s.)
It's also weirdly regressive and paternalistic. I get the hate, but I can't deny my reaction, either.
PS: Vallelonga isn't dumb. The film goes out of its way to demonstrate that he isn't, so I dunno how people walk away with that reaction. (To qualify: I've seen this reaction in many place outside Match Cut.)
PPS: "Black Klansmen" is as reductive about race as "Green Book," and almost as condescending and pat, but I guess Spike gets a pass? How does that work?
Were you asleep when he was trying to write a simple letter to his wife? The guy acts like he dropped out of 8th grade.
re: BlacKkKlansman I criticized it for having super broad stereotypes of the Klan guys (except for the David Duke portrait, which is well done aside from some clunkers of Trump-forshadowing lines) ... but at least there is some interesting dialectic going on with the Black Panthers and Harry Belafonte's scene, and the editing over all. Plus I mean, do I really need to say Peter Farrelly is no Spike Lee? I love Dumb & Dumber as much as the next guy, but there's nothing more pathetic than a diarrhea comedy guy "maturing" into the most milquetoast TV movie level race relations buddy comedy around.
I had a great time. It's nothing too sophisticated, but that's fine too for a change. Really entertaining, went down easy, probably funnier than most 2018 movies.
Richard Branson didn't finish school either. Anyway, being unable to write a letter to one's wife without grammar mistakes doesn't mean one is dumb. And the film makes the point that the letters weren't romantic enough. I can imagine writing from the heart may not be easy for anyone, let alone a tough guy Italian.
I dunno, it's an ironic comment to make about someone, given the subject matter of the movie.
This movie is simpleton garbage. I feel so bad that Mahershala Ali had to show up to work everyday and make do with this script. How he manages to make Shirley so interesting when nothing is from his POV is incredible, and opposite Viggo who is mugging for the back row- give Ali the damn award. GAH.
This years Hidden Figures.
This was frankly abysmal. My only positive takeaway is that Viggo Mortensen plays a great dago.
Btw, Steven Spielberg championed this movie and he's the reason it landed at Universal. He told Farrelly that it was the best buddy-comedy he's seen since "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and reportedly watched it 5 times in 2 weeks.
WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW, MATCHCUT? WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW???
;)
He'll always have Duel.