Jordan Peele knows what to do

Not long after Get Out became a certified hit, we started hearing rumors that its director, Jordan Peele, was being tapped to helm a remake of the anime classic Akira.

Boy is it good he didn’t do that.

Very soon after that, the Scarlett Johansson version of Ghost in the Shell came out, and tanked, likely putting the brakes on the project anyway. In fact, in IMDB, it’s currently still listed as “in development” and doesn’t have anyone associated with it publicly – though if you are an IMDB Pro subscriber I guess you can see names attached as rumors and the like. My guess is that it’s DOA, but maybe it’ll still go somewhere.

Whether it was made or not, Peele wouldn’t have had anything to do with that shit. There’s no quicker way to extinguish your heat than to take the money to try to turn some soulless studio remake into something better than it otherwise would have been.

And I’m sure Peele would have made Akira better than it otherwise would have been. But it still likely would have been a forgettable sophomore effort that hurt him more than it helped him.

Besides, Peele knows what he should do, and what he can do quite well: make scary, surrealistic horror movies starring black people, with a hint (or more than a hint) of comedy, and a hint (or more than a hint) of social commentary.

Of course, Peele is such an interesting talent that I suspect he will choose to go in a slightly different direction for his next film, just so he does not appear to pigeonhole himself. Whatever that is, though, I’m sure it will be well worth seeing and well worth talking about. And it won’t be an Akira or its equivalent, in any case.

Just about 11 hours after finishing Us, I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about it yet, to add my half-baked theories to the many that are already out there, that I’ve only just started to read about and listen to. But I do know I was in the presence of a filmmaker on top of and in command of his craft, manipulating us in all the right ways, and making us think, even if we don’t always know what it is we’re supposed to be thinking about. I think of Us in a bit the same way I think about Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, in that it throws a bunch of provocative ideas out there for us to consider, but does not really tell us what to make of them. Or it gives us five different possible interpretations, and we can choose the one we like best – even if none of them are completely internally consistent or can stand up to scrutiny.

All I know is I’ve been thinking about it almost non-stop and have the sinister version of “I’ve Got Five On It” running through my head in a constant loop.

Because Jordan Peele knows what to do, I certainly don’t fault him for his controversial statements this week about not seeing himself casting a white guy as the lead in one of his films. I don’t think I would have faulted him anyway, but having seen Us, I fault him even less. It’s clear that he is filling a niche that is otherwise missing in today’s cinema. “I’ve see that movie” is the reason Peele gave for his No White Guys policy. And truly, we had not seen Get Out or Us before we saw them. Whatever Peele’s third joint is, we won’t have seen that one either.

Jordan Peele knows what to do. I can’t wait to watch him continue to do it.