Sinners

Driving, bold, but ultimately flailing, like Django and The Menu. You got the feeling it felt like it had said something profound, like we'd all endured something life-changing, and it savored it through several false endings, when really it was just a juicy thriller that passed in a flash. The ending, and false endings, also reminded me of Casino Royale, yet in spite of Sinners' allegory and Bond's ephemerality I look back on Bond as the thicker movie.

Sinners never lulled until the end, when it drew out its long anticlimax even past the credits, overly sentimental unto itself like a first-time novelist who'd put her whole heart and soul into the thing, spending more time on the dedication, foreword, preface, prologue, epilogue, appendices, acknowledgements, and self-interview with the author than the novel itself.

I suppose the allegory is that prejudice, like vampirism, is contagious: once you let it in, it sucks out your soul. It's a fair idea, but there are two issues for me. First, this is not the setting for me to really connect with (1930s Mississippi). The idea would hit better for me if it was jazz instead of blues, or some other kind of music... something between Sinners and Kpop Demon Hunters as far as genre used to tap the supernatural. Also 1930s Mississippi is, for me, as for many others, not quite idyllic. Also there's my race. Second, the execution is sloppy. It's a sequence of ideas, one rushing into the next, with shoddy connective tissue, like a soloist more concerned with chords than counterpoint, who just bangs around each triad in the progression with no concern for voice leading.

(Yikes, I must have interpreted Franzen as an excuse for verbosity. My sentences have been more convoluted like his ever since)

They say it's a horror movie... it wasn't scary. It was more of a thematic period thriller with some black comedy -- one of those recent movies like The Menu with some big idea and some shock value that gets everyone hyped and is not actually all that great in the end.

The Django similarities go beyond the setting and the goatee. Both movies have a hard time deciding on an ending, after a climactic shootout. Both try to inject a little arrogant fun. Both unchain after a character makes a stupid decision that probably nobody would make in reality (Waltz shoots Leo, the Chinese woman invites all of the vampires in [was that intentional?]).

Is this one of those Rotten Tomatoes situations in which few critics think it's all that great, but 97% think it's good enough, so it's 97%? Is that how RT works? If so, people need to know that. 97% just means the movie is almost universally accepted, does not mean it's really good. I don't believe Sinners is really good, but easy to accept.