Barry Jenkins' 'Underground Railroad'

[usmc0331horn 968]

Drops tomorrow on Amazon Prime. Gonna be tough to watch I think but hopefully it is good.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pq5Usc_JDA

https://tv.avclub.com/barry-jenkins-outdoes-himself-in-the-transcendent-under-1846804108

Barry Jenkins outdoes himself in the transcendent Underground Railroad

In late April, a clip from Chelsea Handler’s 2016 series, Chelsea Does, in which a Confederate apologist compared enslaved human beings to farm equipment, went viral. What the man tells Handler isn’t that shocking to Black people educated in the South, but it’s still horrifying: “People were taken care of. Would you take a tractor that you just bought brand new and tear it up, misuse it? No, you’re going to take care of it, ’cause you just spent a pile of money on that. Those people produced their crops, worked their fields, so you’re not gonna mistreat something like that.”

Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu), the hero of Amazon Prime Video’s The Underground Railroad, is not a tractor. She’s a person who has never tasted pure, untainted freedom but nonetheless thirsts for it. No matter what the Constitution might’ve said at the time, freedom is the natural human condition and Cora is driven to escape her captivity. This puts her, like every enslaved person, in existential conflict with an evil institution. After all, a tractor or a piece of furniture won’t defy you, nor will it slip away at the first opportunity. Slavery could only function through the deliberate and ongoing dehumanization of a people. It was a torturous process that would begin anew with the birth of every Black child, but one that never fully succeeded, despite the chains and whips, because the human spirit is not so easily destroyed.

Edited May 13, 2021 by usmc0331horn

[4th&Five 41679]

Book was amazing.  I'm pumped.

[Michael Knight 13044]

Respected film critic Armond White didn't like it

 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/movie-review-the-underground-railroad-teaches-hatred-and-self-hatred/

Edited May 13, 2021 by Michael Knight

[4th&Five 41679]

[RPM 26417]

Imaginary history. Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter was more accurate.