Candyman (2021): A Review and Commentary

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT POINTS AND MINOR SPOILERS!! THIS IS TECHNICALLY NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars 

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This charmless film eschews entertainment and thrills in favor of relentless preaching of ugly race-based politics and revels in the notion that audiences will find catharsis for black pain watching violence against whites.

The new horror movie Candyman made news this week for being number one at the box office, but it should have made news for how virulently it espouses hatred and violence against white people.

Candyman is a direct sequel to the 1992 film of the same name that, despite lackluster reviews and tepid box office, became a cult classic as its title character, the hook-handed, serial-killer demon conjured when you say Candyman five times into a mirror, was sort of the black Freddy Krueger.

The new film tells the story of Anthony, a black artist trying to navigate the white art world, who stumbles upon the urban legend of the Candyman and exploits the story for his new art project to murderous results.

The Candyman character/myth embodies black pain from white violence. As urban prophet Colman Domingo declares in the film, “Candyman is how we deal with the fact these things (historical white violence against blacks) happened…that they’re still happening!”

Candyman is one of those tiresome pieces of black grievance cinema for which the film’s co-writer and producer, Jordan Peele, who directed Get Out and Us, has become so famous. It’s basically a celebration of black victimhood searching for catharsis through violence against whites.

Whether its obnoxious art critics, mean white teenage girls, or evil white cops, every white person in the film is irredeemably awful, and every one of Candyman’s ten victims is white.

It’s no shock that a cinematic charlatan like Jordan Peele would want to update Candyman for the vacuous Black Lives Matter generation, as he’s made his career by ham-handedly playing the racism card and inciting guilt from white liberal film critics. These critics, an integral part of the woke entertainment industrial complex, then do their part by writing the most positive but unconsciously patronizing and paternalistic reviews of Peele’s middling and mediocre work.

Not surprisingly, like Peele’s other insipid creations, Candyman is generating a bevy of undeserved critical love. Peter Travers of ABC is a perfect example of the reflexively deferential assessments lavished upon the movie by white critics.

Travers opens his review with an eye-rollingly inane quote from director DaCosta who claims, "On one level, the character is a myth and a monster, but as we know, America creates monsters out of Black men all the time."

Speaking of eye-rolling, Travers signals his virtue so hard with gems like “the Candyman spectre emerges as a symbol of community revolt against white violence to Black bodies“, I worried he might have given himself a hernia writing his review.

Not to be outdone, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody gushed,  “The symbolic elements of this new “Candyman” have a raw and furious power—the anguished bearing of witness and the burden of unbearable, unspeakable knowledge, and the silencing of it by the oppressive indifference of (white) society at large.”

When I watched Candyman I saw none of those things, all I saw was a visceral and virulent hatred of whites cloaked in a didactic, pedestrian piece of Peele-esque racial political propaganda.

The film is one of those middling, moronic, mind-numbing messes of a movie where characters incessantly and tediously explain the film’s social and political views because the writers are viciously allergic to subtlety.

For instance, the main character, Anthony, titles his Candyman-inspired art exhibit “Say My Name”, which is an obvious nod to the “Say Her Name” chants surrounding Breonna Taylor’s killing by police in 2020. How clever.

This level of obnoxiously dim-witted, simp-inspired anti-nuance permeates the entire ugly film, most particularly in the end sequence, which is so ridiculously and egregiously adolescent it actually made me laugh out loud in an empty theatre.  

The funny thing is that critics like Travers and Brody actually do recognize that the film is an incoherent pile of excrement, but they’re such cinematic cuckolds they force themselves to couch their criticism in long-winded, flowery praise of what they deem the film’s righteous political premise, instead of its egregious lack of execution.

For example, Travers admits, “You can fault the film’s heavy messaging but not its blazing passion for racial justice and the need to see the demon inside ourselves.”

In defiance of Travers’ decree, I fault the film not only for its “heavy messaging” but also for its “blazing passion for racial justice”, because that blazing passion is what blinded the filmmakers and forced them to eschew entertaining for “educating” its audience in the anti-white woke worldview.

Brody takes a slightly different route than Travers and absolves the filmmakers of their amateurism by instead blaming the horror genre itself for the film’s fatal flaws.

“Yet for all its symbolic heft and keen-eyed flair, there’s a scattershot quality to “Candyman” that has to do with the seemingly inescapable demands of its genre source. The horror-film combination of constrained tautness and calculated gore keeps some of the themes from fully developing and leaves narrative loose ends dangling.”

A more accurate assessment is that when a creatively bankrupt writer/producer (Jordan Peele) and an artistically and cinematically bereft director (Nia DaCosta) team up to exploit shallow horror intellectual property in order to push black victimhood and truly disgusting anti-white hatred, you get the noxiously stale nonsense that is the new Candyman.

My recommendation is that rather than watching this movie on a screen you spend an hour and half trying to conjure Candyman through a mirror. At least then if the hook-handed demon shows up, you’ll be put out of your misery much sooner.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Invisible Man: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This movie starts off well but spins out of control and becomes ultimately a whole lot of silliness. Even if you are a big horror fan, you can wait to see it for free on a streaming service or cable.

The Invisible Man, written and directed by Leigh Whannell, is the story of Cecilia Kass, a woman in an abusive relationship whose controlling ex-boyfriend goes to remarkable scientific lengths to torment her. The film stars Elisabeth Moss as Cecilia, with supporting turns from Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Harriet Dyer and Michael Dorman.

The Invisible Man is H.G. Wells’ iconic story of a mad scientist who tries to play God and turns himself invisible, this film version however is set in modern times and turns the story on its head by giving the viewer not the perspective of the scientist, but that of his long suffering girlfriend trying to get away from him.

The trailer for The Invisible Man was terrific and while I am not much of a horror film aficionado, I was excited to see it. The film’s opening sequence lives up to the trailer’s promise, as it is extremely well-done and directed, and immediately captivates the audience by throwing them directly into the tension. The problem though is that the opening sequence is scuttled by its illogical conclusion, as the film quickly deviates from a real-world setting into make-believe movie-dom, thus defusing the tension and knee-capping the suspension of disbelief. Things go down hill from there.

The first half of the film is a decent thriller, and director Whannell effectively uses long, slow pan shots that hold on seeming nothingness, as well as natural sound and a paucity of music, to convey an ominous sense of tension.

In the second half of the movie though, Whannell abandons this successful restrictive directorial approach for more conventional movie making and the film and its narrative spiral out of control and stumble into a morass of melodrama.

Whannell, who also wrote the screenplay, made the fatal error of not committing entirely to his perspective choice, namely having the audience see the world through Cecilia’s eyes. By breaking perspective and periodically showing things from other viewpoints besides Cecilia’s, the connection between audience and Cecilia, and spell of the movie, are broken, and thus we are left with a rather mundane movie of little impact.

Whannell’s other error is that he expands the story beyond the bounds of its natural power. This film, about an abusive relationship, needed to stay within the intimate confines of that relationship, and eschew the wider world, which dilutes the claustrophobia and terror of the premise. Whannell’s failure to contain things neuters the drama as well as the film and its feminist message.

I genuinely like Elisabeth Moss as an actress, as she is a highly skilled and compelling screen presence, but with The Invisible Man she repeats herself and comes perilously close to caricature. Since 2017 Moss has played Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, and won an Emmy for doing so, but her Offred and her Cecilia seem to be the exact same person.

Cecilia, like Offred, is the noble female victim who finally “stands with fist” and fights back against the deplorable patriarchy that has its hands around her neck. The seams of Moss’s work are definitely showing as she spends a lot of her time on screen in both A Handmaid’s Tale and The Invisible Man, not blinking so that her eyes well up with tears, and then blinking so that the tear gracefully falls down her cheek. She also locks her jaw and steels her eyes in an act of defiance that always feels a lot more faux than formidable.

Moss certainly has greatness within her, but I wish I could see her get lost in a performance rather than being forced to see her act.

The rest of the cast are fine, if underwhelming.

Aldis Hodge is a very likable actor and does the best he can with his under written and rather illogical character James.

Stormy Reid is another likeable screen presence but she too is handed a thin character that doesn’t amount to much.

Michael Dormand and Oliver Jackson-Cohen fall pretty flat in their roles which needed to be much sharper for the premise of the film to work.

The Invisible Man is obviously a #MeToo allegory about the patriarchy and the “gaslighting” of women, and that is actually a pretty fascinating take on the story. The feminist politics of the movie and the portrayal of an abused woman’s PTSD work very well in the first half, but they do lose steam and coherence in the second half.

Another troubling thing of note in the movie is its racial politics, which can be boiled down to this… The Invisible Man movie doesn’t hate all men…just the white ones. It is made very clear throughout that The invisible Man wants all white men to vanish. Not only is every single white man in the movie is bad, but every bad person in the film is white. Every single one. The villain, his brother and even some throw away small characters are the token evil white men.

I have no issue with the villain and his brother being white…but what I find disturbing is the film’s decision to paint all of the even mildly prominent white male characters as bad.

For instance, there is a scene where Cecilia goes for a job interview and her interviewer is a nerdy white guy. The scene and the nerdy white guy character are not very important…which is why it is so striking that the choice was made to have this nerdy white guy sexually harass Cecilia. Instead of just a throw away character with meaningless dialogue, this choice of having him be a predator sends a clear and undeniable message, that all white men are intrinsically evil. The choice to have this sexually harassing nerd be white is also no accident. He could have been any race or ethnicity…but he was specifically white.

Further proof of the film’s anti-white racial politics are seen when James, who is a black cop, sits down with a white cop to speak with Cecilia. Cecilia won’t speak freely with the white cop in the room, so James asks him to leave. You may think that this scene makes sense devoid of the cop’s race as Cecilia is friends with James and wants to confide in him…this is true…but just like the sexually harassing nerdy architect, the choice here is subtle but very deliberate. They could have had the other cop be of any race or ethnicity they wanted…he could have been black, Asian, Latino…a woman…but they didn’t, they made him white and once again reinforced the message that not all men, but just the white men, cannot be trusted.

Of course Aldis Hodge’s character, James, is black and is a really good guy…a great father and friend who is patient and kind and never even considers being inappropriate with Cecilia.

The only reason I bring this up is because it struck me as being such a blatant piece of racist misandry (with racism defined as - "prejudice, discrimination or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity” and misandry defined as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men”) as to be propaganda. I would certainly mention the same thing if other races, ethnicities or genders were universally painted with such a negative brush by a film.

Regardless of this questionable ideology, I would still have been all on board with The Invisible Man if it had just been consistently good, and sadly, it isn’t.

In conclusion, The Invisible Man never lives up to the hype, to its trailer or to its source material, and thus squanders a golden cinematic opportunity. I do not recommend spending your time and money seeing this film in the theatre, but if you are interested in seeing it at all then you should check it out on Netflix, cable or a streaming service when it becomes available.

©2020

Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

Knives Out is not the seemingly innocuous piece of mainstream filmmaking it pretends to be. Beneath the movie’s welcoming veneer hides a shamelessly pandering, politically trite, vicious and virulent piece of racial propaganda.

I recently watched The Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith’s century old ode to the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith’s masterpiece is a disgusting piece of racial propaganda, but it was a huge box office success and no doubt kicked off Hollywood’s long and ugly history of demeaning and belittling portrayals of people of color in its movies.

I thought of The Birth of a Nation while watching Knives Out this week. Knives Out, a star-studded and fun-loving murder mystery that boasts a 92% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, has banked over $128 million at the box office.

You may be wondering why on earth something as seemingly innocent as Knives Out made me think of The Birth of a Nation? Well, when I went and saw Knives Out I fully expected a light-hearted and comedic take on the whodunit genre, but what I got instead was a politically charged, thinly veiled allegory of immigration in America fueled by a pernicious anti-white racism. The racial animus on display in Knives Out is certainly not as vicious as anything seen in The Birth of a Nation, but it is just as gratuitous.

The plot of Knives Out revolves around the death of successful crime writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who may or may not have committed suicide. Harlan’s Latina immigrant nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas), is the protagonist of the story, and she works with famed private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to try and solve the case.

The main suspects are Harlan’s adult children Walt and Linda, Linda’s husband Richard, a widowed daughter-in-law Joni, and the grandchildren, chief among them Ransom. The Thrombeys all have a reason for wanting Harlan dead, the most notable of which is inheriting his vast fortune and palatial estate.

The Thrombeys are the picture of spoiled white privilege as they live off their father’s largess, and are so self-absorbed they can’t even be bothered to remember what Latin American country Marta originally came from. They are a conniving and scheming bunch whom without hesitation, threaten to have Marta and her family deported when she becomes a threat to their fortune.

Knives Out drips with a visceral hatred for white people that permeates its every scene. All the white characters are portrayed as morally, ethically and intellectually revolting. It isn’t just the rich Thrombeys who are held up for scorn by Knives Out, as the film’s anti-white animus crosses class barriers as well. For example, even the Thrombey’s white housekeeper, Fran, is shown to be greedy and duplicitous. Another example is Trooper Wagner, a dim-witted white police officer obsessed with pop culture who provides comedic relief by being an empty-headed buffoon.

In contrast to the loathsome and irredeemable white characters, the Latina immigrant Marta is portrayed as a near saint, so much so that she is literally incapable of lying without vomiting. Marta is inherently noble and good, which is very evident when the watchdogs do her the courtesy of never barking at her, and also when the esteemed Benoit Blanc simply declares her to be “a good person” upon meeting her and takes her on as his accomplice in solving the crime. But even Blanc is not up to Marta’s intellectual standard as she consistently outwits him in some of the movie’s most funny scenes.

I enjoy it when a film has a political perspective, and I think making the immigration debate a part of a film’s text or sub-text is a noble venture, but that venture loses its moral authority when the politics put forth are as racially-driven, odious and insipid as that on display in Knives Out.

Hollywood has long misrepresented minorities with cheap caricature and stereotype because it is the easy path. The hard path is that of nuance, where characters, regardless of race, are comprised of differing shades and motivations that highlight their humanity. When even the most villainous of characters are multi-dimensional, art flourishes and insight is soon to follow…look no further than the artistic and commercial success of Joker for evidence of that. But when characters are stereotyped and caricatured, especially out of racial animosity, art stagnates and insights recede, Knives Out is proof of that.

What is seemingly contradictory about Knives Out being insidious anti-white propaganda is that the film is written and directed by a white man, Rian Johnson, and the cast is majority white. This should come as no surprise though, as it has become de rigueur out here in Hollywood for white people to consistently self-loathe over their whiteness.

White social justice warriors basking in self-loathing is the most vacuous and common form of virtue signaling nowadays. Woke white self-flagellation has become performance art posing as racial sensitivity that, in actuality, is the most pernicious form of cheap grace as it costs the self-loather nothing and reduces fighting racism to mere narcissism and masturbatory theatre.

It is understandable with the ugly history of racism in Hollywood that filmmakers would want to push in the opposite direction, but countering the demeaning and belittling portrayals of minorities with equally demeaning and belittling portrayals of white people is not a solution to the evil of racism, but a continuation of it.

What I find so unnerving is that audiences are so enamored with Knives Out. I guess the film’s success at getting white people to cheer their own degradation, and by film’s end, their own demise, is a testament to American’s susceptibility to propaganda and their addiction to celebrity culture.

Sadly, Knives Out teaches us that the knives of racism are still out in American culture, they are just pointing in a different direction. Some people want to celebrate that notion…I’ll hold my cheers until the knives of racism are sheathed and not pointing at anybody.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2019