Saturday, February 17, 2024

American Fiction (2023)

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score    Hands down, this is the funniest non-Barbie nominee for this year.

Facing a number of unexpected medical expenses to care for his mother (Leslie Uggams), Professor Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is desperate.  He's about to lose his job at the university, his last book isn't selling, and his brother (Sterling K. Brown) is no help.  Monk is also frustrated by the constant diminution of the Black experience, specifically the hot new bestseller "We's Lives in Da Ghetto" by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae).  As a joke, he decides to write his own "Black" novel under a pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh.  Of course it's an enormous hit and Monk is plunged into a rabbit hole of fame, or at least notoriety.

This movie is incredibly funny, scathing in its denouncement of the hypocrisy of profiting off of Black people's pain as entertainment, and wry in its depiction of how the threat of poverty makes us question our convictions.  It collapses under its own meta-narrative a little in the final scenes but it's still eminently worthy of a watch.  I'd say it's an outlier for Best Picture but probably a lock for Best Adapted Screenplay.  I was rooting for Ryan Gosling to win Best Supporting Actor, but now I think if they don't give it to Sterling K. Brown I might riot.

Currently, it's only available for rent.  I read somewhere it was dropping on Peacock on the 15th but now I can't find where I saw that.  Which doesn't make sense, because it was produced by MGM which is now owned by Amazon, so if anything it should be dropping on Prime.

Whatever.  Whenever it comes out, you should see it.

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