Nope: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Nothing to see here. Just more cinematic fool’s gold from Jordan Peele.

Back in 2017, writer/director Jordan Peele became an adored critical darling, and Academy Award winning screenwriter, for his box office hit, socially-aware horror film, Get Out.

What critics and many fans failed to realize at the time, and still seem completely blind to, is the fact that Peele became the new “it” director not because he’s a great talent or because Get Out was some brilliant piece of moviemaking, he isn’t and it wasn’t, but rather because liberals were in such a furious tizzy over Trump’s election victory and presidency that they were defiantly grasping for anything at all to hold on to and celebrate. As a decades-long Trump-loather myself, I understood the impulse, but refused to fall under its disorienting spell, especially when it comes to cinema.

Get Out was the perfect movie to be celebrated in this rather insane moment for two reasons. First, because it was a movie about how awful white people are and white liberals could signal their virtue and how they were “one of the good ones” by watching it and being vociferous in their praise of it.

Secondly, Get Out was directed by a black man and critics were desperate to heap praise upon anything that made them seem “not racist” aka “one of the good ones” and which inflated the “diversity and inclusion” balloon.

I said it at the time, and it only holds more-true today, that Get Out is an absurdly over-rated movie written and directed by an even more absurdly over-rated director. If Get Out had come out at any other time it would have been quickly, and rightfully, forgotten for being shallow, tinny, amateurish and vapid.  

Proof of my thesis regarding Jordan Peele and his sub-par work was evident in Peele’s follow-up film, Us (read my review of it here). Us was, like Get Out, somewhat clever in theory, but an absolute shitshow in execution. Whatever kernel of a good idea Peele had regarding Us, eventually grew to be an unwieldy and incoherent mess of a movie. But since Peele has been tapped as the new “it” director, critics, and many fans, pretended that Us was brilliant. So-it-goes in matters of cultural/political faith, I suppose.

Which brings us to Peele’s latest cinematic venture, Nope.

Nope, a sort of sci-fi/horror/western, stars Academy-Award winner Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as siblings, the depressive O.J. and the aggressively depressing Emerald Haywood respectively, who grew up on their family’s horse farm in Southern California. The family raises and trains horses to be used in the movie business and are actually related to the first man to have ever been captured on film (a black man riding a horse).

Things start to get interesting for O.J. and Emerald when some very strange, UFO-related stuff starts happening on the ranch.

I will refrain from any further exploration of the plot to avoid spoilers but will answer these specific questions about Nope.

Is it coherent? Nope.

Is it well-written? Nope.

Is it well directed? Nope.

Is it well-acted? Nope.

Is it a good movie? Nope.

The reality is that Nope is a frustrating and irritating, middling misfire of a nonsensical sci-fi horror film that has nothing of import to say about much of anything.

Of course, other critics are slobbering all over Nope for the same exact reasons they slobbered all over Get Out and Us. But critical and fan praise of Peele is becoming more and more untenable as he continues to churn out these cinematic shit sandwiches that are critical fool’s gold.

It’s somewhat amusing to me that one of the least comprehensible parts of the movie concerns a neighbor of the Haywood siblings, the Park family, whose patriarch is a former child star named Jupe (Steven Yeun). Jupe suffered a horrible tragedy while working on a sitcom in the 90’s, and that story is infinitely more interesting than the Haywood’s UFO stuff. In fact, I’d love to see a movie about Jupe and the calamity he witnessed rather than the tedious tale of the Haywood ranch.

I mean, I get it, Jupe’s story and the Haywood’s story in Nope all deal with the horror of being moved down on the food chain as well as the exploitative nature and dangers of fame and fortune, but Peele seems allergic to profundity and brings nothing unique or mildly interesting to those topics.

As for the cast, Daniel Kaluuya is a terrific actor and a very pleasant screen presence, but his O.J. feels flat because there’s nothing for him to grab onto in the script.

Keke Palmer may be a good actress, I don’t know, but her Emerald is one of the most annoying characters imaginable and grates to epic proportions every moment she appears on-screen.

Other characters, like Steven Yeun’s Jupe and Brandon Perea’s Angel, are so thinly written as to be vacant caricatures. Although to be fair, Yeun at least fills his vacuously written Jupe with some semblance of inner life which is missing from the rest of the cast.

The problem is that due to the fact that there is almost no character development beyond exposition, it’s next to impossible to feel any connection to these people or to ultimately care what happens to them.

Other issues with the film abound as well. For example, the special effects are second-rate…and they include one of the more laughable on-screen monsters in recent memory as it looks like an origami jellyfish or a paper-mache octopus or a headache-inducing screen-saver or something.

Peele’s writing on Nope is scattered, his pacing lethargic, his storytelling anemic and the entire affair feels egregiously bloated with its excruciating 131-minute runtime.

Peele also loads the film with a series of empty scares that are false and cheap and ultimately undermine audience trust in the film and the director. This tactic can sometimes work in building tension, but in Nope it ends up strangling audience anticipation until in the climactic final act they are left with nothing to give and nothing to care for.

Nope will do fine at the box office because there is basically nothing else out there and the weak-kneed critics and Peele fans will relentlessly bang the drum for its brilliance, but let’s be real…Nope is not a good movie.

And finally…can we stop? Can we just fucking stop pretending that Jordan Peele is Alfred Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg? He isn’t. Hell, he isn’t even M. Night Shyamalan for god’s sake.

Look, I get it. I thought Alex Garland was the next big director after I saw Ex Machina. Unfortunately, he wasn’t (and it should be said that Ex Machina is an infinitely better film and better made film than Get Out) and has churned out two dogs in its wake.

Other people fell for Jason Reitman in the same way after his early films (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air), which, like Get Out, were all ridiculously and egregiously over-rated.

It happens, critics and movie fans can get carried away and envision a bright career for an “important” movie maker that requires talent you think you see but which isn’t really there. But you’ve got to snap out of your spell of infatuation when the facts are contrary to your fandom inspired delusions.  

In regards to Peele, Jason Reitman is the perfect example because, at best, Jordan Peele is maybe…maybe, a mediocre moviemaking talent who has successfully pulled the wool over critics and fan’s eyes, just like Jason Reitman did. That’s it. Jordan Peele is Jason Reitman, and now we are just waiting to see if critics will ever wake up to that moribund reality.

As for Nope, it is not a good sci-fi film, or a good horror film, or a good western, or a good social satire. I can honestly report that not only do you not need to see this movie in the theatres, you actually never need to see this movie at all. If someone wants to take you to see it, just look them in the eye and say “nope”.

©2022

Birds are Racist!!!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes and 27 seconds

A bunch of loons have declared that bird names and bird-watching are racist.

Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, the dodo’s in the establishment media are once again pushing an absurd racism narrative.

Everything is racist…including birds. I learned that fact by reading an article in the Washington Post titled “The racist legacy many birds carry” by Daryl Fears.

The headline makes it seem as though racism is like avian flu and is spread either by racist birds or birds carrying the racism bug. As dumb as that sounds, it isn’t nearly as idiotic as what the actual article contains.

The aptly named author Mr. Fears lays an egg in his insidiously insipid investigation into racism in bird watching and how many birds, “bear the names of men who fought for the Southern cause, stole skulls from Indian graves for pseudoscientific studies that were later debunked, and bought and sold Black people. Some of these men stoked violence and participated in it without consequence.”

It’s difficult to read that quote without rolling your eyes so hard you give yourself a seizure and it’s even harder to read the whole article without wanting a murder of crows to peck your eyes out.

The article claims that birds being named after people who did awful things in history shows that “as with the wider field of conservation, racism and colonialism are in orinthology’s DNA”.

Most normal people don’t know and don’t care that the Townsend’s warbler and Townsend’s solitaire are named after John Kirk Townsend who dug up Indigenous skulls to study them and “prove the inferiority of Indigenous people”. Or that Wallace’s owlet is named after Alfred Russell Wallace who in the 1800’s used the “n-word”. Or that James Sligo Jameson (of the Jameson whiskey family) purchased a girl in Africa in 1888 and watched as she was killed by “cannibals”. Or that John James Audubon, the patron not-so-saint of conservation and bird-watching, was a slave owner in the 1800’s.

Normal people don’t care about how birds got their name as it’s completely irrelevant to enjoying bird-watching. They don’t interpret names as celebrations of awful (or good) people but simply as a way to identify different birds.

Of course, in our current racial hysteria every narrative besides race is ruthlessly pushed out of the nest and left to die of under exposure.

For instance, in the article black ornithologist Corina Newsome says that after she was hired by Georgia Audubon and wore the organization’s work shirt she felt “like I was wearing the name of an oppressor, the name of someone who enslaved my ancestors.”

Regarding Newsome the article also states that “On urban and rural trails, she quickly lifts her binoculars when she sees White people do a double-take. In a scorching Georgia marsh where she slogs through muck to study a seaside sparrow, she shifts heavy equipment to the side of her body that faces the roadway so suspicious White motorists “won’t think I’m doing something illegal and make trouble for me.”

Another “ornithologist of color” Alex Troutman says he “goes out of his way to smile and wave at every white passerby when he’s in a marsh or field “to appear as least threatening as possible”.

Look, racial prejudice exists across all racial and ethnic lines, but Newsome and Troutman’s tales are more akin to the subjective ramblings of delusional paranoiacs conjuring boogey men of racial violence and oppression where none exist rather than a serious recounting of racist incidents by thoughtful people.

The article goes on to attempt to explain the root of the racist/colonialist problem in ornithology with this fantastically flaccid paragraph.

“Europeans named birds as though they were human possessions, but American Indians regard them differently. The red-tail hawk in some languages is uwes’ la’ oski, a word that translates to “lovesick,” because one of its calls sounded like a person who lost a partner.”

How exactly naming a bird by its identifying marks…like a red-tail, is a sign of European possessiveness or racism remains a mystery, though curiously the changing of the name of the ‘McCown’s longspur’ to the ‘thick-billed longspur’ due to John Porter McCown’s confederate past is deemed a victory against racist bird names.

The most interesting pieces of information in this asinine article come after its conclusion. In his bio it states that Fears has a Pulitzer prize, which is a shock considering he writes so poorly I wouldn’t trust him to correctly and coherently write a grocery list.

Also revealed is a hysterical correction which reads “An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the location of an 1855 expedition by Alfred Russel Wallace as Africa; it was the Malay Archipelago. In addition, some historians believe that the mother and baby Wallace wrote about in demeaning human terms during his trip were orangutans.”

Confusing Africa with the Malay Archipelago and humans with orangutans seems super-racist to me. Unfortunately, Mr. Fears doesn’t have any birds named after him that we can re-name, but he has a Pulitzer and a job at the Washington Post, so maybe those can be rescinded?

Ultimately, those manufacturing tenuous claims of racism in bird names and bird-watching are as ridiculous as movie-goers who would watch Hitchcock’s The Birds and conclude it’s a civil rights movie about black crows rightfully pecking to death a bunch of privileged white people over the injustice of Jim Crow laws.

The reality regarding the buffoonery of these manufactured bird-based racism claims is that if you want to undermine the fight against legitimate racism by coming across as an absurd, insane and inane loon, then a preposterous, pretentious and beyond parodic cause like “racism in orinthology” is a truly terrific way to do it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021