Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
Movie: Get Out
Director: Jordan Peele
Available on: Amazon Video and iTunes
The last time a movie released in February won the Academy Award for Best Picture, it was the unlikely horror movie The Silence of the Lambs, which stuck around for a full year before sneaking up on more established contenders like Warren Beatty’s gangster biopic Bugsy and the Al Pacino showcase Scent of a Woman and sweeping the top 5 honors at the 1991 Oscars. It it entirely too early to start introducing discussions of Get Out with Oscar place-setting? Almost certainly! But remember two things: 1) Get Out is going for it. Universal is already holding hype events to announce Get Out as an Oscar contender; they’re going to put out a proper and serious Oscar campaign. And 2) this is one of the best-reviewed movies of the year, with a top 10 box-office total. It’s a phenomenon. It’s a huge crowd-pleaser and it has something to say. Buckle down for Oscar season, folks.
So now that your expectations for Get Out have been sufficiently raised, watch it this weekend on VOD and have a blast with it. Jordan Peele managed to capitalize on one of his great strengths from Key & Peele: an ability to take outlandish, genre- and pop-culture-infused premises and imbue them with urgent social politics. There is no missing what Peele is putting out there with Get Out. Its politics are not subtle. Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris, a handsome young photographer who’s heading upstate with his girlfriend to meet her parents. The shadow of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? still hangs over interracial relationships even in 2017, but Peele is smart enough to know what’s changed and what’s stayed the same in America’s racial persona. Rose (Allison Williams) is attuned to the ways in which her boyfriend is discriminated against, but she assures him that her parents are good liberals. They’d have voted for Obama a third time, if they could! And so off they drive into post-racial white liberal America, where as much as we’d all like to believe that everything is fine, it’s most decidedly not.
The genius of Get Out lies in not simply its racial politics but in the way that Peele is able to manifest those racial politics as elements of paranoid horror. Microaggressions become the equivalent of a screech on a soundtrack. Rose’s parents snap at their black housekeeper. [SCREECH] Rose’s brother is an aggro lax bro. [SCREECH] A garden party is full of old white people asking if it’s cooler to be black. [SCREECH] Peele knows the world he’s putting his movie into. Virulently overt racism isn’t what’s insidious … or all that interesting, either. It’s these small things that come from white people who’d never think of themselves as racist that mask something uglier. Because its a horror movie, what lies beneath this facade actually IS evil, and Peele strings the audience along just long enough before dropping the floor out from underneath them.
The filmmaking is also remarkably assured and distinctive. The entire “sunken place” first hypnosis scene is masterfully filmed and full of distinctive imagery. He benefits greatly from the talents of Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford as the parents. Keener us easily the most underwritten of the main roles, but you cast two-time Oscar nominees for a reason, and she makes herself indelible just by her presence. All that said — and with all due props for Kaluuya’s excellent lead performance — the two standouts in this cast are Allison Williams and LilRel Howery. For pretty much opposite reasons. Williams gets the I Never Knew She Had This In Her award, benefitting from the low expectations of Marnie-haters and using her good looks to her advantage. She’s underestimated until it’s almost too late. Howery is gifted the comic relief role, and he absolutely runs with it, perfectly undercutting the tension without ever snapping that tether.
Will this be the movie to stick around for a whole year and survive to duke it out at the Oscars? Honestly, it’s still an uphill climb. But one thing that is is no doubt: if Get Out does manage to pull it off, it will have deserved it.
