Rob Henderson joins me to discuss Sinners, which critics and viewers are both raving about.
Substack has a new screen share feature, which we tried out. I wanted us to play parts of the movie and react to it, but Amazon prevents you from being able to do that. We do use screen share though to read and react to reviews of the film by Ross Douthat and Steve Sailer. The Sailer one in particular cracks us up. I had forgotten how charming his old man racism can be. He at one point goes on a rant about the history of superstitious savagery in Haiti, which he attempts to connect to director Ryan Coogler’s alleged ethno-narcissism. See also the Scott Greer review, which I bring up.
Unfortunately, while screen share looked good during the stream, it cuts off part of the screen in the video. Hopefully Substack is able to fix this. Nonetheless, we read from the articles out loud, so you can follow along.
Overall, this is a fun movie that is hard to take too seriously. I was expecting something a bit more sophisticated given how much critics loved the film, but it’s mostly a crowd-pleaser. The storyline is simple, the characters aren’t too deep, the bad guys are as cliché as they can possibly be (literally the Klan!), and one finds demographic sops to nearly every racial group, with the exception of Hispanics. The messaging is somewhat basic, though there is a hint of subversion in the fact that the zombies talk like woke libs.
We spend some time on the director’s bizarre fixation on cunnilingus. I count four or five different times it comes up. This leads to a discussion of the way movies and TV shows portray oral sex as received by women versus men.
Rob and I also debate what makes the movie appealing. Partly, as Douthat and Sailer both point out, people want to talk about a blockbuster film that isn’t some kind of sequel, remake, or spinoff. Additionally, we find black masculinity appealing, and here you get an unadulterated version in its natural environment. If such a premise sounds fun to you, you might enjoy Sinners. Even if not, you should probably watch it anyway since it’s nice to be part of a conversation involving a movie that is not about Marvel superheroes or part of some other long-existing IP universe.
