What I’m Watching: Get Out, Atomic Blonde

  • Get Out: ’60s-’70s horror movies could start with a girl walking alone in risk of being murdered, because it was the Golden Age of Serial Killers; now post-Trayvon you feel just as tense for a black guy walking in fucking suburbia, or at a roadside police stop, or at a white country house, just as justifiably.
    The “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” parents and sibling are spine-crawlingly uncomfortable. The black servants are weird as hell. Even if there was nothing scary going on, this is one of the most socially terrifying things ever.
    And when someone screams at you “GET OUT”, you get the fuck out.
    ★★★★★

  • Atomic Blonde: Based on the graphic novel “The Coldest City”. MTV-era music, good period props & sets. But the 21st C cancer of teal-and-orange film tinting part 2 is hideous and grossly offensive to my ’80s-era eyes. Occasionally a shot is in period hot blue and pink neon, or a weird gel like green & yellow, but not enough. ’80s colors POPPED.
    Charlize is a competent ass-kicker in the dancer-doing-fight-choreography style, not talkative or an especially convincing actress, her clipped South African accent can’t pass for English or anything but maybe Dutch or German. But this doesn’t require much more than action. Chick version of Arnie.
    The lesbian sex is perfunctory, unattractive, and uncommented on; that’s not plausible for anyone in that era, who would’ve used it as lethal leverage against a spy.
    The McGuffin of a list, the spy plot barely matters. It’s a bunch of cool scenes. The two fake ending scenes after the interrogation room are so brain-damaged stupid and unnecessary I have to assume they were written by Hollywood producers (who never had a bowl of soup they wouldn’t “improve” by pissing in it), not the original writer.
    ★★★½☆ mostly because the tinting so offended me.