Kingsman and Dear White People
For a while, Kingsman is My Fair Lady with grenades, as Colin Firth must teach the low-class Eggsy (above) how to hang with his fellow Oxbridge recruits.
You should know going in that Kingsman is silly on purpose. Its object is to be outrageous, it's determined to be daffy, it resolves to be ridiculous. It is also violent as in Wiley E. Coyote falls off the cliff.
The good people who made Kingsman: The Secret Service feel, in no uncertain terms, that spy movies have gotten all-too-serious. You should know that going in; this movie is silly on purpose. Its object is to be outrageous, it's determined to be daffy, it resolves to be ridiculous.
The violence is over the top and cartoonish, which is good, because there is more than enough of it. But cringing every time a character gets his arm broken in Kingsman is like crying every time Wile E. Coyote falls off a cliff. The language is patently ridiculous too; we've got computer geniuses and crusty upper class Englishmen dropping F-bombs like they grew up on the streets.
The Kingsmen are an off-the-books, super-secret, probably illegal but favorably well-funded group of super spies who take on the world's toughest villains and biggest problems. MI-5 they aren't. They're all code-named after "Knights of the Round Table," and the first we meet is Colin Firth as Galahad. He's busy recruiting ne'er-do-well Taron Egerton, because he knew his dad and owes him a favor-a big favor. For a while, Kingsman is My Fair Lady with grenades, as Firth must teach the low-class Eggsy how to hang with his fellow Oxbridge recruits, who sneer at him from their high horses. But of course, Eggsy proves better than them all when he refuses to kill his puppy, and graduates up to become Lancelot.
Meanwhile, Samuel L. Jackson plays perhaps the most ridiculous super villain in a long cinematic line of super villains. He's sort of a cross between Mark Zuckerberg and Spike Lee, with a lisp, who "can't thtomache violence" but is hatching an evil plan to remedy global warming by thinning the world's population down to his own friends and associates. He's accompanied by a henchwoman with Oscar Pistorius style prosthetic legs, except they cut people in half. Right in half, down the middle.
It's a call-back to earlier, more implausible James Bond movies (though I'd hardly call the last James Bond movie "plausible") wherein bad guys killed people with their hats and super villains tried to build mind-controlling death rays out of all the gold sequestered in Fort Knox. But in those movies were remarkably sanitized; shots were fired, but you'd never see a bullet wound, and certainly nobody ever uttered a four-letter word. As such Kingsman is an odd, sometimes uncomfortable combination of old-style silliness and 21st Century raunchiness.
On the other end of the ledger we've got Dear White People, a razor-sharp, carefully observed film that dips its toes alternately into satire and sobering social drama. This is "you have to laugh, you'll cry your eyes out if you don't" kind of humor, and it's intended to make you uncomfortable as much as it makes you laugh. Or perhaps even more.
Set at an Ivy League school called Winchester (but really seems like a stand-in for Harvard), this film is about the struggles of black students to find and secure their own identity in that kind of rarified air. The film follows several characters on campus. Brandon P Bell is the son of the dean and head of the primarily African American house on campus, that is, until activist Tessa Thompson wins an election against him, an outcome that surprises them both; she was just trying to stir the pot. Tyler James Williams doesn't really want to live in that house; he's a gay Star Trek fan with a three-foot Afro for whom "the worst part of high school was the other black kids."
Instead, he lives in a house with Kyle Gallner, son of the school president, editor of the school humor rag, which regularly feeds writers to Saturday Night Live. He's the only white lead in the film, and let's just say, he's not a nice guy.
Add to the mix one more character, Teyonah Parris, who wants to be a reality TV star, but finds she has to manufacture racial tension in order to get hits on her YouTube channel, which is in competition with Thompson's radio show, "Dear White People."
Did you follow all of that? "Dear White People" is a cut above most films that deal with race because it's not just about their struggle against a racist system run by whites and favoring white students, though there is plenty of that. It's also about their struggle with and against each other, a struggle to forge an identity out of (and/or within) their ethnicity, to manage the expectations placed on them as minority students in an elite college, and the effort it takes to reconcile the seemingly contradictory parts of themselves into a single identity. In other words, "Dear White People" takes on an incredibly complex and intricate range of subjects and handles it with a light touch that occasionally hits like a sledgehammer.
Willie Krischke lives in Durango, Colorado and works for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship with Native American students at Fort Lewis College. To read more of his reviews, go to http://www.gonnawatchit.com
