What's The Movie About?
An affluent black writer is annoyed with the crop of "true stories" of the black struggle in America, so he writes a fictionalized account parodying those books. Which then get's incredibly popular because white people don't get the joke.
What I Like.
This movies is hilarious. I mean I was expecting that, it is a comedy, but it was way funnier than I was expecting. I was expecting it to be mostly dry humor and jokes about how stupid white people are, and there is a lot of that. But there's quite a bit of crass humor as well, and I'm nothing if not crass. The attention to detail in this movie is very good as well. Like it's pretty much standard for any black movie to touch on microaggressions, but there are all these other touches in the movie that are easy to miss. And the satire in this movie is sharp and wide spread. Obviously white people, more specifically white liberals, are the main target of mockery, but the movie has critiques on conservatism, boomers, the business world, the movie industry, affluent Americans, hell it even turns the satirical scalpel upon it's own premise at one point. There's an amazing conversation between the main character and another author about exploiting a narrative versus genuinely telling a story the market wants, and I loved it. This, in my humble opinion, is the reason to see this movie. Even if you're a target of the satire (Go read my Color Purple review. I'm literally the white Literary Award judge lady.) I think the message of being critical of narratives and where them come from is an important thing to learn. (See, I am white Literary Award judge lady.)
What I Didn't Like.
Uh, well... If you want me to nitpick... There's a couple tone shifts that were really abrupt. The ending, while I liked it, did kinda feel like the writer didn't know how he wanted to end it so found a way to put them all in. Also, and I want to stress this as much as possible, this is just a me thing, but I was distracted with how much I related to the main character. And before Joe Buggknutz starts flaming me in the comments for saying I relate to an affluent published author who's own mother calls him a genius, I mean I identified with his mental struggles. He would get called out for certain behaviors relating to depression and anti-social tendencies and I realized "Shit, I do that."
Final Summation.
So no shocker, this movie is great. Normally I'd say go see this movie if you think you can roll with the premise, but honestly, I think even people who think they can't should go see it. That's the point.
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