Film Review: QUEEN & SLIM

It's Black History Month and I just watched a film about police violence against Black people that was so fine I will be thinking about it for a long time. It was as if GET OUT, the novel Les Misérables, and a prescient biopic on Luigi Mangione were rolled into one. 

Daniel Kaluuya played the lead in both QUEEN & SLIM (2019 release) and in the 2017 psychological thriller GET OUT, a story built atop a "meet the parents" structure. No parents are getting met in Q&S -- though the film is also a love story, a tragic love story along the lines of Romeo & Juliet.

Q&S also reminded me of a Hitchcock film with its prolonged and artfully sustained horror. The Hitchcockian theme of the "guilt of the ordinary person trapped in a criminal situation" is used to great effect by writers Lena Waithe and James Frey, and director Melina Matsoukas makes the most of it. 

Starting from a meet cute date between two unlikely Tinder users, the story gives Queen and Slim ample time to grow into their relationship. Each has a different approach to navigating the world, a different belief system, and little consistency in the way they handle an encounter with law enforcement. At least that's true at first. By the time they run across an unexpected sheriff their approaches start to converge. Jodie Turner-Smith turns in a star performance developing from a rigid, prissy attorney into a grieving family member capable of exercising nuanced moral judgment. 

Slim's father is forced to make a similar moral judgement in a brief scene that will stay with you long after the film concludes.

There is so much going on here: it's also a road trip movie, and the plot is eventually strongly driven by an unspoken shared bucket list.

Slim's choice of response to the moronic howling of a cop with a bullhorn surprised me. I suspect it will surprise you, too.

Throughout the story runs the thread of white privilege. I've always explained this to my fellow white people who deny its existence by asking, Did your teenage kid ever do anything that brought them into contact with police and, if so, were you afraid they would die? No? That's white privilege.

Don't miss this film!

What's In A Name?

What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Wm Shakespeare

The Associated Press announced that it had been banned from covering the White House because its style guidelines continue to call the body of water west of Florida and east of Mexico the "Gulf of Mexico" instead of the "Gulf of America" as directed by 47.

https://x.com/TaraCopp/status/1889429565619183940

Much of what 47 says/does is purely for show intended to stir up controversy i.e. give his opponents easy targets to vent their spleen. Threatening to annex Canada, Mexico, and Greenland would fall this in this category.

Why stir up faux controversies? To create a smokescreen of chaos obscuring the more deadly and authentic plans afoot e.g. "taking over" Gaza, whatever that is supposed to mean. Buying it from Hamas or individual owners who have no desire to sell? Invading it with U.S. boots on the ground (already there) and occupying it in perpetuity? Sending all Gazans to Egypt and Jordan who have emphatically stated they will not accept them?

Renaming is just getting rolling though because now comes word that the warriors of anti-wokeness are overturning names that had replaced racist namesakes with more admirable ones.

Pentagon head Hegsweth directed the Army to stop calling the former Fort Bragg in North Carolina "Fort Liberty" and return to calling it "Fort Bragg." Previously named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg (a traitor to the U.S., by definition, and a slave holder to boot), it's now named for Pfc. Roland Bragg.

I heard about this because Pfc. Bragg was a WWII veteran from Maine where I live. Who could make up something this absurd? 

It could be because I'm reading Eli Valley's Museum of Degenerates right now, but I often feel like I'm living in a Mad Magazine satire.

On that note, I'll leave you with a funny meme about Hegsweth and the war on DEI.