Antebellum - Midnight Screenings Review
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- Brad and Doug review the horror thriller Antebellum, and certainly have a lot to say about this one!
Antebellum is written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz and stars Janelle Monáe, Eric Lange, Jena Malone, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons, and Gabourey Sidibe.
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#Antebellum
#MovieReview
#ChannelAwesome
"Twelve Years a Slave" seems to give the best historical depiction of the misery of slavery. Less of the ultraviolence and outright horror, more of the just grinding day to day oppression and humiliation.
What about ROOTS?
The grinding day to day oppression is actually more historically accurate for the most part. That's not saying that violence didn't happen. Or that some places weren't worse than others.
@Ahanna Ngwangu No one is denying things like mutilation, flogging, torture, violent rape etc. happened. But exaggerating how often these things occurred has its own danger. People might look at historical accounts, see these things were rarer than depicted in some movies, and decide this means that well, slavery wasn't that bad after all.
@Ahanna Ngwangu What chris said. Particularly if the grinding day to day oppressive situation gets left out of things or hidden. Which is what tends to happen when people are displaying the violence when it comes to depicting slavery.
ChristophInns right, & if people assume slavery only entails such things, they might overlook the slippery slope into such circumstances (holy unintentional alliteration, Batman lol). I feel like it leaves room for the potential of understatement; seeing a horrific circumstance & thinking it’s not as bad as it truly is, only because the overt & obvious injustices aren’t in the forefront.
This movie literally steals Shyamalan's twist ending from The Village, lol
Which stole its ending from the twist in the YA book "Running Out of Time"
And the plot was pretty much stolen from a Boondocks episode.
@@Ennead13x I actually had to read that book for class way before The Village came out and when I did see The Village, I was like.. "waiiittttaaa minute.. why does this seem so familiar??"
@@Ennead13x That's the name of that book! I also read that for class ages ago, and I remember really liking it but I forgot the name of it.
There's an episode of Boondocks where they do a modern-day slavery storyline. I haven't seen Antebellum but I'm sure Boondocks did it better lol
& it's from that garbage ass 4th season . Which also, you remember that episode where Grandad gets a new phone & the phone grows an attachment to him ?
@@cam62cam811 yeah that season sucked ass lol
@@ruriktheburr yep . But that episode I was referring to you about, they made THAT into a movie called Jexi .
There's a movie from the early 1990s called Sankofa that had the same idea except it was more in the vein of magical realism;a vain black model is sent back to the Old South and is a slave mistress to a plantation owner. It's almost entirely African financed so they do take it seriously but there's still gravitas to it. I'd recommend it.
Oh shit! That might be the movie that I saw when I was young that this film seems to rip off from.
That's the name! I remember watching that as a kid. Gonna look for it tonight
I didn't like the movie when I saw it the first time. When it was called ”The Village”.
It's true, Gabourey Sidibe's character is INSANELY obnoxious and rude in this movie. It's amazing that the main character says that black women are only being seen as "angry", yet Gabourey's character manages to live up to every negative stereotype about black women. Tone deaf on the writers' part or intentional? It's hard to tell.
Less of a race issue and more of a weight issue I think. Fattist attitudes mean Gabourey will never get decent roles which is annoying because the womans talented af
@Brian Jones In particular, the scene at the restaurant where she's being an absolute bitch for no reason towards the hostess and the dude who hit on her was really painful to watch. They spent so much time on her character compared to the other friend, that I half expected she would end up on the plantation at some point.
Reading the plot summary, I'm surprised that it was a Hostel-style film in regards to what happened. The initial trailer made me think it was more of a supernatural film about the protagonist somehow being kidnapped and sent back to the past to live as a slave. Either way, not a film I would watch in any case.
I thought the same thing on first seeing previews of the film, that it was similar to Octavia Butler's 1979 book "Kindred" where a modern women gets time travelled and forced to live as a slave. But on reading up it on some more it seems to be a cross between "Get Out" and M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village".
@@ChristianMcAngus More of a cross between the Boondocks episode "Freedomland", the Westworld TV series, and The Village.
Agree
I read a review saying they wanted/expected Kindred and got The Village. And another calling it 12 Years a Slave but with no story, just the abuse.
The previews did make me think it was going to be something like that too, like The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen, except it was using the enslavement of African Americans during the 1800s instead of the Holocaust. But it ended up being a blend of Hostel and The Village.
The movie gave away the modern reveal in the opening scene. One of the female slave characters had a nose ring.
Honestly depending on the slaves origin it would not have been at all unusual. Esp slaves fom Caribbean ports as opposed to Africa. That said, yeah they didn't know that lol, they either felt good enough to throw in the Easter egg or more likely just forgot, like a certain Starbucks cup in winter fell lmao.
For me it was when Monae asked the young girl if she's "okay", that was a big hint too.
She was wearing a gold cross. I thought that was a bigger give away
I want to bring up the fact of how misleading the poster is for this movie, it looks like a cross between a rip-off and a sequel to The Silence of The Lambs.
Ah, a classic Midnight Screening.
So classic it’s not even at midnight ;)
@@spongylord7131 Whatever happened to Brian? I miss watching people talk about a 90 minute movie for six hours.
Feels like home
The Greendalewitch Brad moved out of state from the old gang.
@@Greendalewitch Brian Lewis retired. He said on Twitter that it just wasn't fun anymore
20:10 I now want the movie to just cut to Chris Rock in Slaveland. Not even playing a character, they just kidnapped Chris Rock and nobody cares
Lol i would watch that movie
@@theSemiChrist Give em 10 points!
Sounds like a modern version of "Westworld", only with real people than robots.
Confederateworld
Glad to see Doug on here, you and him have great chemistry. See if he can drag you out to ConnectiCon sometime once the plague ends!
Yes, loved they chemistry on camara to
23:14 Did anyone else think that they were filming this at night until the garage opened up lol. 😂😂
I did
So wokesploitation?
haha first time I heard that term, I'm so stealing that! Wonderful.
@@deraykrause4517 your welcome.😉
like that Black Christmas remake from last year.
@@geoffreysorkin5774 exactly
A very fitting term for these kinds of propagandized movies.
The poster is a blatant rifpoff of Silence of the Lambs.
dif color palette (obviously) but....yeah its the same thing. If it aint broke, reuse it.
It's so much so that I actually thought Doug and Brad just badly photoshopped that butterfly on top.
So the twist is they ripped off an episode of the Boondocks...
And the twist of The Village.
Yep.
It's sad that I guessed the twist ending without even watching the movie.
Same. From the final trailer I figured it out
Me three
Just hearing the base premise and considering the way the propaganda from certain political groups portrays the world today makes the twist obvious. Which is pretty sad.
Same.
I saw the twist from the trailer coming.
Live action Boondocks "Freedomland" Season 4 episode 7
Minus the satire and cleverness
So it's a "Get Out" ripoff that removes all the cleverness, atmosphere, and nuance?
It's an insult to even compare this to Get Out.
So they made a "checklist" movie without any character or interesting story. That it?
Get out was trash too 😂
Other than being a thriller with themes about racism, I don't see how this is anything like Get Out.
@@Deactorr A propagandized checklist movie. But yes.
I explained this movie as The Village, but with sadistic civil war reinactors.
That is exactly what this movie is!
I heard somebody describe it as what would happen if The Village copied Get Out's homework while watching Hostel. I can see that.
That is pretty much the entire plot of the movie.
So it's basically a mix of The Village and the Freedom Land episode from the Boondocks.
Pretty much
if nobody liked the twist in the village, what made anybody think it would work for this?
I liked the village.
@@cannibalbunnygirl yeah, it's not bad or anything.
the events of the film prove, without a doubt, that the whole idea of their town's failed, there is no getting away from the violence and brutality of man.
and it makes the people who've founded the town as they're jailers.
@@austindolan7182 I know! They didn't even realise what they'd done. They left the city to make their kids free...by lying to them, terrorising them and keeping them prisoner 🤦♀️
Man I miss the old gang. Doug is fine but needs more Sarah and Dave. Maybe a little Irving sprinkled in.
Needs more Rob.
Rusty Shackleford I miss Brian, next to Brad he was my second favorite person on Midnight Screenings.
@@DieHardAlien ugh
Brad and Doug is a strong pairing, but I agree Brian, Dave and Sarah are sorely missing
Dave shitting on religious movies was money
So it's nice looking garbage then.
Better than pure garbage i guess
Sounds like Midsommar.
@Brian Jones Haven't seen Antebellum yet, so I can't adequately compare the two. However, I'm getting vibes of similar pretentiousness from both.
Janelle Monae was very good in this film, I'd like to see her act more. And it's a gorgeous-looking film and shot very well.
But it feels like Get Out, without all the cleverness, nuance, or stuff to say.
I just paused at 5:38 and gonna guess what the twist is gonna be: The South won the Civil War and Slavery is still a thing in this universe.
I am curious if I am right on this one.
Edit: Alright, I was wrong. But that would have been interesting too.
Doug and Brad, my two favorite review duo, next to Doug and Rob.
My favorite is Brad and Sarah, but this is a close second.
Honestly it looks boring and just another film of “white bad” and using shock value to make a subpar horror movie
Antebellum: A film that I will never see and will just be instantly forgotten.
Queen Nikki
White and also Hispanic
The trailers absolutely make me think its a supernatural horror film possibly with time travel lmao
You might enjoy it then. Hope you don't get spoiled 😊
Thought this whole movie was an Outlander spoof. Like falling down a well and waking up in the Antebellum South would suck as a modern black person.
I don't normally put any stock in Rotten Tomatoes, but this movie currently has 22% from critics, which I... honestly did not expect.
Proves that critics won't give good reviews to a movie just because it has a "leftist agenda."
@@dreamlandnightmare Tell that to Cuties, lol
@@dreamlandnightmare I'm pretty sure all this example proves is that a broken clock is correct for 2 seconds out of every 24 hours.
Rotten Tomatoes has rated many of my favorite horror movies lowly (particularly Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and Saw), but the 28% for this film surprises me. From what I've heard and read about it, Antebellum sounds like the typical claptrap critics normally lap up. I can only imagine just how clumsy this movie's message must have been if even the critics aren't liking it.
Phase 12 >implying pedophilia is a leftist agenda and not considering that critics just give automatic high scores to any independent movie that won awards no matter the content
So they remade the village only dumber I think I'll pass on this one
2 bald men sitting in a car, talking about movies - this could be a YT series :O
Honestly, I thought it was from Jordan Peele.
I'm sure they were banking on people assuming that
Lol. Friggin Doug! "Its always 6 months earlier right What 6 month later what do you mean later what the fuck are you TALKING ABOUT!" That bit was hilarious
Aaawwwww, that's so disappointing 😞 I thought from the trailer that it was about a rip in space/time. And modern people were kind of quantum leaping into the past while the two times collided together. And they had to figure out how to get back.
“And they had to figure out how to get black.”
😉😁 sorry.. I couldn’t help myself.
Would an alternate title be *Black to the Future?*
It's nothing like that unfortunately. Your version sounds way more interesting.
So its The Village but with slaves
Honestly Bioshock Infinite did a better job at this kind of concept than this movie. And that's a f**king video game!
The “twist” is so obvious that it’s disappointing
The trailers made me think “The Village but with Civil War slavery”. Which seems accurate.
I imagine the concept behind the movie would be of interest for people into raceplay and BDSM stuff.
Into both and this review got me half stiff
Forgive me but... "Raceplay"?
Ageplay is when one or both partners roleplay being either older or younger than they are, so Raceplay is probably done the same way except one or both partners are pretending to be of a different race, or least that's my educated guess as to what it pertains to since this is the first time I've heard the term.
Soot Sprite
...Ick.
I mean, I don't want to kinkshame anybody since I'm also into some weird stuff but... Ick.
@@sootsprite6407 Not pretending to be another race, no. More like racial insults, a racialized power dynamic, etc as part of the activity.
Sounds like the opposite of Lars Von Trier's Manderlay, which is a well-thought and nuanced allegory of both slavery and interventionism, but hideous in its visual presentation.
Yeah, I couldn't get past the ultra-minamalist, stage-like production design.
@@dreamlandnightmare same with Dogville. It's a constant visual distraction how fake everything looks, and the background being this black void (no walls, sky, etc) makes it look like it takes place in purgatory.
@@blaisetelfer8499 I liked Dogville when I saw it but don't want to see it again (It's one of those movies). Didn't mind the production design but yeah it helped to feel like a tirimg experience.
'Boyz N The Hood' and '12 Years A Slave'... the 2 greatest films made by black directors
"Get Out" was a great premise done well. "Us" was a really stupid premise done well. "Antebellum" was a great premise done really really poorly. I didn't see the twist coming and I thought, "wow this would have been a really good movie with a different script". The writing in this movie was so bad it was like a parody of SJW talking points, which are already a parody at this point.
@Brian Jones You're right about "Us" being garbage, but I just enjoyed watching Tim Heidecker get killed so much that I think I gave the movie too much credit.
Deray Krause _”It’s free real estate!”_
@@TheRealNormanBates "Ya blew it" :)
The writing was the worse thing abt this movie. At times it wasn't as bad , but there was points in the film where I cringed so hard.
I had a ad for this movie while watching this and a quote from the “critic’s are saying” part is “It looks awesome” by The Critic Guy. Which I can’t tell if that’s a real critic or not
"this is like the one show where lighting makes it way worse"
Well it's not called Mid-day Screenings
Touché... 🧐
Ahhhhh......so the twist was like The Village meets Westworld meets Cabin in the Woods. Minus the robots or the monster running in the woods. Thats actually really clever.
My wife had an interesting viewpoint on it. Basically, it's a piss-poor version of The Village by M. Night Shamalamadingdong with white guilt and people forced against their will to be there.
I was told the premise and then guessed the twist.
Major spoilers if u havent seen the movie or this video. This is how I would have liked it to have gone. We open up in the modern age and things happen as normal but no skype call and no rude friends showing up. We go to the convention and get her ideas about modern day challenges of black people. Boost up the idea that things haven't changed and how its just morphed from slavery to other horror's. We get the line about ancestors haunting our dreams to see where we are now and maybe she says " my ancestor was a slave" she goes to sleep and now were on the plantation. We see the struggles and hell and then after a few days pass she is about to go to bed and says " tomorrow we escape." Then we cut to before she is taken and it's just a few hours before hand and we see her get kidnapped and her first few days at the plantation and jump to her making a plan for a revolt then smash cut to like " 1 year later" and the night she gets out. Change it so that it's not a privileged woman who was able to ride horses and do yoga who gets to escape, but the entire collective working together to leave. Dropping the idea that it takes one person, who is privileged to do everything, when it takes all of us to make a change.
Good to see Doug again .
These are the only 2 movie critics that should be way more popular on UA-cam.
Brad, sure. Doug, hell no.
Doug is the Ellen of UA-cam
100%
@@porgskilledluke7086 Excellent comparison.
Doug is too much a critic to entertain not to inform. He has the proper level of attention he receives.
Have missed seeing you two doing reviews together as yourselves.
It's been so long! I've missed seeing these each week!
This is exactly what I thought it was from seeing the commercials/trailers. The theme park aspect is a surprise. I am sad to hear it's so bad.
You guys aren't wrong. I love the concept of the movie and the cinematography was amazing but the story itself was underdeveloped felt rushed and you can tell the director was a newbie. But I liked it for trying. I give it a 6 out of 10
So disappointed they didn't go through with the story about a ghost dragging a black woman back to slave times. That sounded like the most horrifying ghost story like ever.
Keep in mind, Southerners kept illegal plantations in secret for years after the civil war while kidnapping freemen. It's a more realistic premise than US. And considering I have lived in the South and heared the craziest ideas, this is plausible.
I think the film would have worked if the people who wanted to do the Civil War reenactment really wanted to be as authentic as possible, with the Black characters being caught up in it, but with the antagonist that he just wanted to be "authentic", like some crazy enthusiast.
So not a peele movie
Wait... it's NOT a supernatural horror? That's the only thing that appealed to me in the trailer.
The whole hostel thing was my second guess.
Did anybody else think this involved time travel?
Regardless of the movie, it's great to see a Brad and Doug review!
Honestly, the twist reminds me of M. Night's "The Village". I love "The Village". "Antebellum" sucks.
There was an episode of Boondocks that had this premise. Definitely check it out if you haven’t seen it.
The Boondocks: S4 E7 Freedomland
Usually these things spoil the movie but the more Brad talks the more I have no idea what this movie is about.
I heard the double toasted review and even they didn't care much for it. Even they felt it was too exploiting and just rediculous at times. So I assure yall, you don't need to feel bad if you didn't like it. I know this black guy will be passing on this.reminds me of when I went to rent movies for my mom and "selma" had just came out I asked. "Want me to get you slema" her reply was "I lived that once already, I'm not interested in watching another movie about black people being beat,killed, and abused."
Nice to see God make an appearance in the review .
Thanks for reviewing this one. I was all types of confused as to what to expect just from seeing the trailer.
This was a case where the trailer was better then the movie.
Please review Cuties, too!
Yes another midnight screening❤️❤️❤️❤️
Every time a movie has a premise or plot twist that the writers clearly thought was brilliant but... um, isn't, I hear John Mulaney going "But one day, the boy and the scientist, they build a time machine WWHOooaa!"
Is it sad that just from the commercials I said it seemed like The Village, but for retrograde Southern Pride, and I turned out to be right?
This feels like the kind of movie white actors star in so that they can have one officially "woke" project under their belt and then go on to make actually good films which might actually tackle racism in ways that are actually intelligent and interesting.
Huh? Can u give an example of an actor doing that
23:20 god is calling you!
Another great collaboration between cinema critic and nostalgia snob
This sounds similar to the book that “The Village” is based on.
So Get Out meets Django Unchained, but without the cleverness whatsoever.
Awww man, from what you were telling in the beginning I thought it would turn out to be some kind of Shyamalan's Village but with slave village instead, not an illegal slave LARP. Disappointed :P
So Antebellum is a hybrid of Westworld, Get Out and The Village. Oh Goodie....
On paper that COULD work. But then again, what kind of dumbass would market a Slave Plantation theme park as a profitable business venture . . . besides the main antagonist of that Freedomland episode of The Boondocks
BigK13372 I mean come on. Westworld is underwater why not do the Zachary Hale Comstock method and put SlaveLand in the sky? Or to take the time travel idea, how does this sound. On the break of the Union winning the war, descendants in the future goes back with a time machine to bring all the slave owners and Confederates to the present to restart the Plantation utopia in like Rural Mississippi or Tennessee.
The light looks like an alien abduction!
“Why do I get the feeling no matter we say about this movie we’re gonna be wrong? If we like it, we’re gonna be too left. We hate it, we’re just gonna be two white critics who don’t get the struggle. If think it’s ok, we’re trying to appease both sides. We’re screwed anyway.”
Accurately phrased by any critic these days.
So basically this movie is "Farewell Uncle Tom" if it was made by Eli Roth and the writers 2019's "Black Christmas"?
Goodbye Uncle Tom, unethical production and questionable approach aside, is also a fantastic film. Oddly enough, there's a video of Eli Roth talking about it here.
Black Christmas was TERRIBLE
Bumblebee ! That’s basically what Michael is getting at.
"Get out" from "The Village" of "Us".
9:54-23:17 Keep forgetting that this guy is married.
It’s funny, I haven’t seen the movie yet, but from the first trailer, I kind of knew that the movie would have a twist and what that twist would end up being. So hearing you two talk about it and confirm that was great, but the thing is, I suck at figuring out twists. But I feel like this checks all the boxes for black trauma films and I really get tired of that because I feel like films about black trauma only show a couple forms of black trauma which almost dehumanizes us as a people because we only deal with these particular forms of trauma. That’s why i love Get Out because sure, the main character was dealing with trauma, but it was at least trauma that’s rarely put to film. Antebellum did nothing new, special, or even interesting. It just beat black people’s ass and had a vague inspirational message to it.
Love the wife/lord visit hahaha
Thanks guys so fun to watch y’all
That dilemma you mentioned in the beginning would normally be valid, but this movie is so bad that everyone agreed on it being bad.
Thank you lord
Well at least it isn’t some bullshit like the main character literally travelling back in time or some shit because “those who forget the past are doom to repeat it”.
But seriously, I remember a movie I saw when I was young that was basically that plot I talked about. Can’t figure out the name though.
But that’s what would have made it interesting!
After seeing the trailers (with the plane and contrail in the sky), I was thinking (like a lot of people) it was going to be something weird, like 2 towns in different points of time converging.
What would someone from 1820 think of today (the tech and society in general, much less the events of 2020)? What would people (from the left and right) do while trapped in the 1820’s, without the technological comforts to fall back on (no AC, phones, electricity, etc)?
You could make a series out of this... instead, _we get this._
I saw the movie and I thought it was more of a cautionary tale that this is happening somewhere in the world and if you are not careful and aware you cold fall victim to it. The Uber ride was significant because people have been kidnapped in that way and trafficked to other countries. The twist was apparent early on, yet it was an interesting concept even thought I initially thought it would be a scifi movie. It failed to be a well rounded movie with a strong reason of why or how this would be happening in the 21st century. It seems to be missing some elements of why are they doing this and who is in charge of this type of crime? I needed a back story of the antagonists. Where do they come from and how long have they been doing this? I think if we knew who they were and what they were it would have been more logical.
Maybe y’all bit off more than you can chew. Of course it’s a fantasy, but what kind? In the vein of Django unchained?
I figured out the twist in the first 20 min, this movie was boring...
I will say, my first response to seeing Confederate soldiers at the plantation was "Well then it's not antebellum" ("antebellum" meaning "before the war" that the Confederate army was formed to fight), so props(?) to the movie for knowing that much, I guess.
Plot twist: it's racist Westworld...
Westworld is technically already racist considering the treatment of the robots
@@BigK13372
I'm pretty sure they didn't know that the robots were becoming sentient. That's the difference. The government wouldn't allow this sort of thing to happen otherwise because, ya know, human rights. An operation that big wouldn't go unnoticed, either. Almost as if Antebellum is a stupid, stupid movie, or something like that... 🤔
James Oldfield And I’m pretty sure I wasn’t entirely serious in mu robot comment.
I mean, what do you think Westworld is: The Matrix . . . whose worldbuilding actually highlight the reason for the machines rebelling against humanity is due to years of being denied basic human rights after acquiring sentience.
@@BigK13372
They were in denial. They were stupid, not evil. I would say sadistic because they like hurting a facsimile of a human being who realistically portrays emotions, whether real or emulated, but not evil. Of course once the company found out they were sentient, they tried to wipe them all out, but the visitors were completely oblivious, and had fooled themselves into thinking they weren't bad people because they weren't hurting "real people" even though they were hurting facsimiles and enjoying it, which good people don't do. On the other hand, you had white hats that did the virtuous quest lines, helping people, killing bad guys, and didn't know they were gaining sentience, admittedly didn't care, either. Westworld's world and premise makes way more sense than Antebellum's does...
Hm, this sounded dumber than the Double Toasted guys were letting on. You guys are proving the hunch their review gave me about this movie.
Yeah I agree having already watched Double Toasted's Review
This movie should have started with the text
"Over 200000 black people go missing every year.."
It sounds like an interesting idea.