Hacker Cinema
Us
2019 · Film · 116 min
Directed by Jordan Peele
Husband and wife Gabe and Adelaide Wilson take their kids to their beach house expecting to unplug and unwind with friends. But as night descends, their serenity turns to tension and chaos when some shocking visitors arrive uninvited.
7 positive1 mixed7 neutralfrom 15 commenters
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16 comments on Hacker News
It's hard not to be cynical or entertain thoughts of Hollywood planning these things in case the show sucks. Because they can clearly do entertainment with diverse casting, non-white people, female leads and succeed:
- Tom Holland Spider-Man does not have a red-head MJ, Flash is Indian and the made up best friend is Filipino. - Domino in the Dead Pool movies is black. NTW doesn't seem to have the same powers and is gay. But I'm not sure what the current character status is. - Everything Everywhere All at Once - Black Panther - Shang Chi - Jordan Peele does good work: Nope, Us, Candy Man, Get Out - The Expanse - Life of Pi - Sandman swaps a bunch of stuff
Appetite for completely foreign media is much slower in English speaking countries but once in a while you get a major break through: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Parasite.
For iconic female leads: Terminator has Sarah Connor, Ripley from Aliens, The Bride from Kill Bill, Charlize Therons character in the last Mad Max movie. Buffy. I apologize for how narrow the genres are here.
I don't think the popular media for anything I just mentioned was too negative (maybe Black Panther?). Is it really just the fans? I bet the overlap of Rings of Power watchers and watchers of the stuff I listed is pretty big ...
edit: formatting
Counter arguments:
While there are a ton of lost movies, we also live in a world in which services like Criterion Channel, Mubi, and Shudder make more film available than ever. The other week, I got curious and watched a movie from Ulrike Ottinger, loved it, and when I get around to it I can watch any of a dozen more of her movies.
Likewise, I just bought a boxed set of folk horror movies from Severin Films. I miss good video rental stores, but even pre-Netflix there weren’t more than a dozen US cities with video stores where you could rent stuff like that.
The top grossing lists are mostly dominated by blockbusters, it’s true, but let’s look at (say) 1978. Grease, Animal House, Close Encounters, Every Which Way But Loose, and Heaven Can Wait (a remake!) are the top five. It’s been a blockbuster-driven market for 40+ years, with the occasional breakthrough art house film and, more frequently, a big non-franchise genre film (The Martian, Us, etc.) None of this has prevented great directors like the Coen Brothers, Soderbergh, or del Toro from making very good movies.
There’s a market for super-hero movies. There’s also a market for “real” film. These two things are sometimes in tension, but I think at the moment they’re both viable.
I think meditation is a way of being nice to our right hemisphere. Our left hemisphere is responsible for speech, and our right hemisphere is mute. Be nice to your right hemisphere, it's you too, and it doesn't like listening to your jibber-jabber.
On a semi-related note, I think the movie 'Us' by Jordan Peele is about our split-minds. The protagonists are the left-hemispheres, and the clones are our right hemispheres (they cannot speak). I read a book called "Of Two Minds: The Revolutionary Science of Dual-Brain Psychology" recently and it just reinforces it. So if you break it down that way theoretically, our right-hemispheres live impoverished lives eating cold, raw rabbit and are experimented on, forced to be 'tethered' to us, listening through us to 'pop' music and the 'government' getting angrier and angrier, fantasizing about using scissors on our own corpus callosum...
What rotten tomatoes considers the "best films of all time" is laughable across the spectrum.
Some gems from the top 10:
4. Black Panther
6. Parasite
7. Avengers: Endgame
9. Knives Out
10. Us
Its surely just coincidence that the half of the best films ever made in human history were produced in the last 5 years.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/
I was thinking more of the tethered https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/us-the-tethered-explained/
Some of the films recommended in this thread..
- The Nice Guys
- I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
- Don't Worry
- He Won't Get Far on Foot
- The Favourite (2018)
- Druk (2020)
- Amélie
- The Lobster
- Turist (2014)
- Parasite
- El Hoyo (The Platform)
- Quo Vadis
- Aida?
- 200 Meters
- Luzzu
- El robo del siglo (The Heist of the Century)
- Knives Out
- Us
- Get Out
- "Tokyo Story" (1953, Yasujirō Ozu)
- Aleksei German's Hard to be A God
- Edward Yang's A Better Summer's Day
- Maren Ade's Toni Erdman
- Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love
- Wings of Desire
- Do the Right Thing
- Drugstore Cowboy
- Gates of Heaven
- Beauty and the Beast
- Life Is Sweet
I've seen some really fun or thought provoking movies recently: Parasite, El Hoyo (The Platform), Quo Vadis, Aida?, 200 Meters, Luzzu, El robo del siglo (The Heist of the Century). Just don't watch the mind-numbing crap that hollywood churns out every year. Truth be told, I've enjoyed some excellent american movies as well, like "Knives Out", "Us" or "Get Out".
My favorite original movies of 2019: Parasite, 1917, Once upon a time in hollywood, midsommar, uncut gems, ford v. ferrari, the lighthouse, knives out, jojo rabbit, us, a number of shows that have shifted towards a streamed series format vs. traditional film
I think the film industry is alive and well.
I'd also say that dr. sleep only barely qualifies as a sequel if we're in the mood to complain about hollywood cliches.
I disagree. There are quite a few interesting movies out there. From 2019 alone: Uncut gems, Marriage Story, the Irishman, Us, 1917, Jojo Rabbit and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. All of those are good movies depending on the preference. In fact, they are innovative and creative. The main problem with judging now vs past, is the survivorship bias of the good movies, the bad ones are forgotten and lost.
Two of those are netflix movies - Irishman and Marriage Story, I don't see them any more synthetic than 1980's RAMBO 2-5? or God Father 2,3 etc. Movies were always based on the popularity, the difference being the better data.
> bad comic adaptations, getting their rating from wide fan base
The amount of haters and lovers might not offset each other perfectly, yet it should not matter after the hype dwindles. Besides, the top rated comic books adaptations are quite good - Joker?
Just last week I noticed the description for the movie "Us" in the HBO Max app on iOS and AppleTV displayed all of the left-leaning and right-leaning quotes and double-quotes as question marks, but displayed ® correctly. My guess is something in their pipeline is using latin1 encoding[1].
Which is to say, just getting everything onto UTF-8 (or UTF-16 if you must) would be a huge win.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1#Quotation_marks
What was the difference between the rich and the poor family? Who is the parasite? What is it exactly that the rich family does better or gives to this world that they deserve the exceptionally better lifestyle?
Are they more intelligent? Surely not, since they were duped by the other family. Do they really care about other people and what's going on in their surroundings? Not really, they never bothered to figure out any of it, they are blissfully unaware of the of the less fortunate, untouched by the reality around them until it affects them directly. They don't care who serves them. Are they more virtuous? Not exactly, look at how they behave on the party when the girl gets stabbed. The dad takes his boy who fainted and tries to pick up the car keys, all the while pinching his nose in disgust of the 'poor people smell'. Does he help any of the wounded people? What are their actions?
> The rich people were never mean or overbearing to less well off people and treated their workers well.
How about the part when they act like they own them? One example is dad having to wear a costume for the boy because the boss is paying overtime for his non-working day. The driver dad is not exactly in a position to refuse or he could ruin his position (we saw how easy it is to get replaced), so he has to put up with it, humiliate himself and play the clown. The rich dad doesn't see how this is a problem, money should buy everything after all.
The movie is an allegory and it requires a deeper look and a bit of thinking. Contrast and compare this movie to 'Us', you will find similarities in how it deals with social class.
It's been a great decade for horror.
I think Oculus (2013) was the first movie to genuinely scare me. Other favorites: The Babadook (2014), The Witch (2015), Get Out (2017), Hereditary (2018), Us (2019).
The most unassuming movie I was recommended, but turned out to be spectacular: Upgrade. I read somewhere the producers had really low expectations for this movie as it is low budget and not about comic book superheroes. Apparently, there are no plans for the 2nd installment. But, imho, creative camerawork, beautiful cinematography and wild choreography put it anywhere above and beyond most any superhero flick out now.
The movie that shattered any expectations I had for it: Enter Nowhere. I stumbled upon it on Amazon Prime, thought the synopsis was somewhat interesting and went into watching it with extremely low expectations (the title is crap, the poster is crap, it has Clint Eastwood's son with wooden expression throughout the movie). But this movie turned out to be a trippy puzzle unlike what we are used to (Cube, Saw, Escape Room). Instead of wealthy people with kinky(?) sense of entertainment and insane philosophers, it has something to do with WW2. Unusual.
Low budget movie that takes place in a single room, yet won't bore you even for a second: Circle. It's a survival game movie where predicting the outcome of the game is half the fun. Blew all my expectations out the park. I watched a lot of survival movies of late and this is one of the (very few) best.
The movies that deserved all their hype: Arrival, It, Us, Annihilation. In Arrival I loved the design of aliens, their environment, the way the linguist tries to decipher their language and the final twist. One negative is how the movie deals with geopolitics - it's crude and laughable. For a movie led by kids, It (the movie) is really a solid one. It is polished like a huge budget superhero flick, but also, uh, literate and entertaining. Us is a beautiful, very slick movie that pops in your face. It has a couple of interesting twists and some funny bits. Refreshing break from the regular Hollywood fare(schlock). That said, Us is riddled with holes as if someone shot at it from a semi. But even with that it's fun to watch as Hollywood doesn't make movies like Us often (only on special occasions?). Annihilation is gorgeous. Period. The set design is a work of art and I love the subject matter. Again, H'wood doesn't dabble in this sort of stuff very often. The move signals the ending twist half-way through, but I am not sure it's even a twist. This movie doesn't end with a bang as it's all about the process. To me it is a meditation on research, often frustrating and unsuccessful (though, the linguist in Arrival was very much successful in her endeavor :) The soundtrack is unusual (and beautiful) for this kind of movie (although the movie itself is unusual). I love the sound design in all these four movies. Really attractive.
Among the memorable shorts (I watch a lot of them; I can recall many, but can't remember their titles) I saw are The Gun Fighter [0], Paradox (try solving the problem in the movie before it ends)[1], Thresher [2], Rakka [3].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWs4WA--eKU
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnfh3qcpBxA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqNdbHHWtBc
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjQ2t_yNHQs
Richard Brody is a guilty pleasure of mine. He's such a grumpy old man when it comes to film criticism. Reading his review of Avengers is like hearing someone kvetch on the subway, except with innumerable references to Godard, Brecht, and Marx. Every film concept, premise or plot has been done better, but just in a more independent, more obscure, more directed-by-Jean-Luc-Godard fashion. Occasionally he'll toss out a glowing review but it's often with a heavy layer of political commentary that I'm not entirely sure was necessarily intended by the filmmaker (not that this is a necessary condition for the film to be political in nature). See his Us Review for that
One level of auteur theory that I've wondered about is its political ramifications. For one, it's not a very communist theory. There's no real collectivism or equality in the idea of a singular mind behind a film. Which is probably why Godard (partially) rejected the theory later in his collaborations with Gorin. Also why Third Cinema purposefully distinguished itself from the tradition of French New Wave (a tradition of un-quality?) by categorizing it as the "Second Cinema".
Likewise, auteurship was and is a title mostly populated by white, male directors. Oh sure, there's a few notable exceptions: Agnes Varda, Claire Denis, Ousmane Sembène, etc. Nonetheless, it's important to question whether auteur theory succeeded due to the power already allocated to the canonically white, male director. And whether auteurship erases the contributions made by the editor and screenwriter, positions usually more diverse in gender and race (for instance, Marcia Lucas in Star Wars and Taxi Driver).
Personally I view auteur theory as a necessary weapon against the studio system and against the "tradition of quality", but not necessarily a theory that reflects the state of an actual film production. Truffaut, Godard, et al used it as a banner to wage war against the powers above them—producers, financiers, etc—but in doing so they also negated the work of those below them, the grips and gaffers, the cinematographers and editors. I don't believe this was their intention, but hey, they did make a theory about how filmmaking is all one dude's creation. Not exactly hard to see how that'd ignore other people's contributions.
I thought that Get Out and Us had at least some Hollywood funding, looks like I was wrong. For example “Cape Fear” and “The Fugitive” made in the early ‘90s were pure Hollywood movies that were interesting for grown-ups, too, I fail to see something like that filmed nowadays (both of them were remakes, too, proof that you can film a remake and still produce an interesting movie after all). I also miss smart action-oriented/thriller movies like “Enemy of the State”.
>There are some gems here and there (the last two Peele movies) but they are getting really far and few between.
What do you consider "Hollywood"? Get Out and Us were both independent movies, were they not?
Hollywood has always been Hollywood.