Official Queen & Slim Thread

K.O.N.Y

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This is one of the dumbest films I’ve ever seen.

it looks amazing ... but...

the plot is dumb as hell and entirely avoidable.

Any woman like this deserves to be karate chopped in the throat. This woman is the worrrrrsttttttt

This is really dumb.

The writing is trash.

it’s like The Root wrote a black lives matter porno. Just basement level analysis and mockery.

it’s not even trying. I thought this was gonna be a serious film. It’s filled with cliches and statements made by high schoolers trying to pretend to be deep.

I’m offended I even saw this.

I almost walked out a few times.

the soundtrack is fire though.

it’s just one movie driving simulator
:russ:
 

☑︎#VoteDemocrat

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I AM NOT a republican or even a conservative...but this is a black conservative author's take and I feel this most accurately describes the film.

Sorry it had to come to this :wow:



nationalreview.com
Queen & Slim, a Meme Movie for Black Lives Matter Fans | National Review
By
5-7 minutes
queen-slim.jpg

Bokeem Woodbine and Indya Moore in Queen & Slim (Andre D. Wagner/Universal Pictures)
Black Hollywood’s new self-exploitation

Queen & Slim, the new Blaxploitation movie (more on that later), is primarily an attempt at myth-making. The advertising poster showing an unnamed black male-and-female duo striking a casually defiant pose sums up the film itself — in which the two main characters are never named. It’s an indication that in Millennial narratives, memes and iconography play a greater role than storytelling.

The story in Queen & Slim converts a lovers-on-the-lam format — Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith meet on a Tinder blind date — to an archetypal nightmare. The blacks are pulled over by a white policeman and, during the subsequent altercation, the couple wind up as cop-killers and instant folk heroes.

Screenwriters Lena Waithe (an intersectional media celebrity) and notorious novelist James Frey perpetuate the idea that black Americans are victimized by the police — a political notion that gained traction just as Obama was leaving office and the nation’s ethnic populace felt bereft of any real social advantage. Queen & Slim is part of the grievance industry that grew from that disappointment. The filmmakers presume that audiences automatically distrust police; race-based social paranoia is used to sell martyr chic.

Queen & Slim perverts the road-movie genre that is usually about social exploration, not bias confirmation. Every classic ’70s road movie offered a picaresque survey of cultural differences that illustrated the multiplicity of American life. (Bonnie & Clyde, Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Badlands, The Sugarland Express, and Thieves Like Us reflected skeptical concerns of their time.) But Queen & Slim poorly reiterates the post–Ferguson, Mo., canards from Michael Brown’s fictitious “hands-up don’t shoot” to the Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Tamir Rice mythologies.

Instead of urging viewers to question media accounts and move toward self-reflection, Queen & Slim uses marketing iconography to make up for what lead actors Kaluuya and Turner-Smith lack in charisma. Their partnership recalls Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s brief stint as hip-hop “Bonnie & Clyde,” a ride-or-die criminal fantasy. But this Queen and Slim are just stick figures.

Neither of these unnamed characters is more than a meme; their backgrounds are sketchy. Whether she declares, “It should be a sin to call a black woman crazy” or he hums along to gospel music on the car radio and says, “I don’t believe in luck, I believe things are destined,” they are essentially news-media stereotypes. The only character development occurs when Turner-Smith shaves her stereotypical dreadlocks for an androgynous henna crew-cut and wears a form-fitting tiger-striped halter and snakeskin boots, and Kaluuya dons a ’90s jogging suit. The mix of glam and mundane attire trivializes the post–Hurricane Katrina setting in New Orleans’ Tremé neighborhood — also recently seen in Black and Blue. These clichés are the stock-in-trade of debut director Melina Matsoukas, who hit the motherload of faux politics in Beyoncé’s Formation music video (its fashion-magazine version of Black Panther iconography is no different from the Ferguson-esque scenes here).


The interlude in which the couple visits the female’s Uncle Earl (Bokeem Woodbine), a war veteran turned pimp (“Iraq f***ed him up”), comes closest to believability — thanks primarily to Woodbine’s amusing portrayal of a frustrated tough guy. His pogo-stick tantrum is spot-on, as is his final impudent gesture in fur-collared finery. Woodbine’s authentic American-male hoodrat could be an Altman character (highest praise).


Since the advent-then-retreat of Obama, the media have formulated devious ways that teach blacks what to think and how to imagine themselves. That’s the real message of Queen & Slim’s criminal-victim meme. The unconvincing moment when these hostile partners fornicate is intercut with a pointless digression — a black youth infatuated with criminality (he takes the outlaw couple’s photo because “pictures are proof of your existence”) joins an anti-police protest where he kills a helpful black cop. Instead of investigating the fecklessness behind black police killings, the filmmakers exploit the blame narrative — a racial version of Thelma & Louise’s faux feminism. It may flatter Black Lives Matter dupes, but even they should be disappointed by such triteness.


Queen & Slim’s intersectional race-and-gender political points are not audacious and transgressive, like those in Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992), a wild, sexy road farce about a pair of AIDS-victim serial killers. Araki titillated his subculture audience while questioning its self-righteous presumptions. Most strikingly, Araki dared to challenge political correctness; Queen & Slim is the product of neo-Blaxploitation, minus genuine political observation as formerly seen in such radical entertainments as Sweet Sweetback, Blacula, Cool Breeze, and Thomasine & Bushrod. Queen & Slim exploits the naïveté of Black Lives Matter filmgoers who don’t know those cultural precedents.






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☑︎#VoteDemocrat

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Heres another accurate review:


nashvillescene.com
Queen & Slim Is Important but Uneven
6-7 minutes
Melina Matsoukas’ debut feature opens wide today

Nov 27, 2019 12 PM


Queen___Slim_.5ddea208b75df.jpg


View Gallery

What makes a legend? Just as in real life, it’s anyone’s guess what fictional characters will be lionized in popular culture. The times we live in feel urgent, but symbols often take time to become fixtures in the public consciousness. Occasionally, heroes are born in an instant, and that’s the case in director Melina Matsoukas’ Queen & Slim, which opens wide today.

It starts with an unpromising Tinder date in Cleveland. Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Slim (Daniel Kaluuya, best known for his Oscar-nominated turn in Get Out) sit in the booth of a brightly lit diner, and she’s all-around unimpressed. “It’s black owned,” he says in defense of the setting. Slim says a silent prayer before diving into his eggs, and Queen lets loose that she’s an atheist. It seems she’s his foil in every way. Where Slim is warm and self-effacing, Queen is cold and confident. Where he’s mild-mannered, she’s headstrong and outspoken. She’s a defense attorney — a realist. He’s a family man and an idealist. His license plate says “TRUSTGOD.”

As he drives her home, he’s pulled over. Like Sandra Bland, he failed to signal while switching lanes. The cop (locally beloved breakout country star Sturgill Simpson in his second film cameo of the year) is every bit the racist monster we imagine. Slim is obedient, careful; Queen loudly expresses her objections from the passenger seat. The two are caught in the place of tension that black Americans experience on a daily basis — how can you defend your rights while staying safe? How can you simply assert your humanity to someone who does not see you as human? They’re trapped. The cop shoots Queen, grazing her leg, and Slim gets the gun and kills him. They hit the road.

“Well if it isn’t the black Bonnie and Clyde,” says Queen’s Uncle Earl (a magnificent Bokeem Woodbine) when she arrives at his New Orleans home with Slim in tow. If you haven’t already guessed how the story will go, Earl makes it clear. Queen and Slim are on the run from the law, and their chances of making it out alive are, well, slim.

Turner-Smith is great as Queen, and her transformation is believable. She slowly lets go of her cynicism and opens up to the possibility of love. While not fully adopting Slim’s pacifism, she softens. Kaluuya gives a strong performance as a man who wears his heart on his sleeve. After playing the bad guy in Widows and a self-assured leader in Black Panther, Kaluuya shows a new, tender side, and it works.

It’s Matsoukas’ debut feature, but she isn’t a newbie by any means. As a veteran director of music videos, she’s worked with Beyoncé, Rihanna and Snoop Dogg, to name a few, and she’s directed several episodes of Issa Rae’s HBO hit Insecure and two episodes of Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series Master of None. As Queen and Slim drive south to Florida — where they hope to board a plane or boat to Cuba — Matsoukas and art directors Spencer Davison and Jeremy Woolsey create vibrant settings. The film has a dreamlike quality, and the phases of the duo's trip feel like vignettes that culminate in highly stylized moments. Individually, these sequences are gorgeously shot and reveal the characters growing and changing — Queen and Slim oscillate between fear and exhilaration. But because the same formula repeats itself, these scenes feel loosely strung together, and the slow pacing deflates the momentum. I wouldn’t call the film tedious — Matsoukas’ aesthetic choices are too sharp for that — but on the whole, Queen & Slim has more style than substance. At one point in the film, Matsoukas cuts between a sex scene and a minor character’s experience at a demonstration against police that has horrible consequences. There's clearly an intended meaning behind the choice, but I’m not sure what it is.

This is partly the fault of the script by Lena Waithe, who worked with James Frey on the story. Waithe made her name in Master of None, which she co-starred in and wrote for. (She was the first black woman to win an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for her work on an episode of Master.) Some of the dialogue in Queen & Slim feels true to life, and the journey is peppered with moments of connection. The couple argues about whether fat Luther Vandross was better than skinny Luther Vandross; Uncle Earl banters with his women (especially Naomi, who is played by a vivacious Melanie Halfkenny). But other moments feel forced. The couple repeats hackneyed lines to each other as they fall in love. (Queen says something to the effect of wanting a lover who will hold her hand while she licks her wounds. Eesh.)

The strongest moments in the film occur when Queen and Slim meet black Americans who support them. As they drive across the South, the dashboard-camera video of their encounter with the cop plays all over the news, and other black folks recognize them. Sometimes it’s with a knowing smile or a good deed. Other times, the couple are treated like celebrities. Once, they find surprising allies in a white couple (portrayed by Flea and Chloë Sevigny). These interactions feel fresh and powerful, and they articulate a sense of unity — a collective desire for justice that’s desperately needed and long overdue.

America needs a black Bonnie and Clyde, both in the world of the film and in real life, and in ways, Queen & Slim fits the bill. But Matsoukas and Waithe have better films ahead of them.


Queen & Slim

R, 132 minutes

Opens wide Wednesday, Nov. 27
 

GoldenGlove

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Overall I liked this. It was a black film, and reminded me of some of the old classic 90s hood dramas that we've all come to love.

I only had a few issues with some things in the story that just were corny. I also feel like they went too far making "Slim" (I don't even remember his name) a passive incompetent man in order to highlight the "Queen" who was your typical strong independent black woman, that is a control freak. Not really surprising considering who wrote the movie.

The gas station / teller scene was legit unbelievable, and I don't even know how that wasn't regulated as nothing more than a deleted scene. They really wanted to hammer home some weird notion that dude was just a naive dumbass, but we already could see he was in over his head at that point, the scene was stupid and unnecessary.

Everything else was solid, I liked the dialog between the 2... some well written lines that stitched together what the "point" of the movie was by the time you get to the end. I was super conflicted at the end, until they had the follow up scenes that were 100% necessary to wrap things up, because without them, then I'd really be like this movie failed me from a moral perspective.
 

re'up

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I think it would also be fair to say that not every "black" movie needs to be a masterpiece, or the most important work of the decade, it can just be art, flawed, imperfect. I can tell from reviews and images, it's meant to be a fever dream sort of gorgeous nightmare, not 100% tethered to reality, and is a bit of a folk tale of sorts.
 
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GoldenGlove

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I’ll be skipping this movie. Checking out the Issa Rae/LaKeith film instead.




Most actors (regardless of race) are British or Australian these days. They’re cheaper.

:heh:
You threw the other film in there like it's impossible to see more than 1 black film in theaters in a year

:dead:
 

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I think it would also be fair to said that not every "black" movie needs to be a masterpiece, or the most important work of the decade, it can just be art, flawed, imperfect. I can tell from reviews and images, it's meant to be a fever dream sort of gorgeous nightmare, not 100% tethered to reality, and is a bit of a folk tale of sorts.
yeah, it TRIES to be that, and fails.
 
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