The cinematic equivalent of having a Black friend

For my March monthly viewing in Flickcharters Friends Favorites Fiesta, I was assigned Dan O'Bannon's 1985 The Return of the Living Dead, which I did not particularly love. When I wrote up my little blurb in our Facebook group, I felt like I needed to prove that I liked other campy gore effects movies, dropping the names of both Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Dead Alive. To be honest, I don't really remember how gory KKFOS may or may not be.

After the fact, I pondered why I felt like I had to list my bonafides, in order to prove that I wasn't just opposed to this sort of movie.

Surely no one cares whether I do or don't like campy zombie movies. The stakes of this opinion are not very high. Even if there's someone out there who thinks I "didn't get" that it was deliberately bad in some respects, well, so what. I can't usually control what other people think, especially in a group where I've met none of these people in real life.

However, I did continue to have to sort of defend myself by saying things like "it was lacking a certain something" and "it didn't hit my sweet spot." Making sure they knew that I had a sweet spot, and that under the right circumstances this sweet spot could be satisfied by campy zombie movies. 

It made me think a little bit better of people who protest they aren't racist, and to prove it they mention that they have a Black friend. 

Of course, if they are actually racist, well, I don't think better of them on that score. But I do think better of the instinct to prove you like something by talking about a similar kind of thing you like.

Maybe it would be easier to talk about this in terms of movies, while still keeping the racial component. 

Sinners has been an interesting movie to have in the zeitgeist. Because it is so clearly defined as a Black movie, liking it or not liking it could appear to speak volumes about the rest of your preferences, and indeed, about you as a person who either prejudges or does not prejudge people. 

You can be in one of two camps:

1) Liking Sinners, which proves you might like other Black movies and are, in theory, not a racist;

2) Not liking Sinners, which means someone could think you don't like Black people.

I'm in the former category, as you would know from the fact that I ranked Sinners as my #2 movie of 2025. And I do, on some level, feel like that opinion relieves me of the need to defend some of my other choices. My lowest ranked movie of the year, the Ice Cube version of War of the Worlds, obviously stars a Black guy, as well as some of the rest of his Black family members, though the rest of the cast is multi-racial. I thought the director, Rich Lee, was also Black, but I just looked it up and discovered that he is not. In any case, I didn't have to defend myself against hypothetical accusations of racism for hating War of the Worlds because Sinners was propping me up, at least this year.

I've got some other friends here in Australia who are in the other camp, who have lots of things they nitpick about the movie -- which I do acknowledge has some pretty significant pacing problems in its second half. They seem to feel less guilty about potentially being thought of as racist, or rather more secure in their own progressive core, because these guys don't worry too much about talking about all the other Black movies they love. However, I have an American friend who sends out his rankings to a group of people in an email, and this year he said, regarding his middling ranking of Sinners:

"And in 2025 the biggest question that I will get is “What is your goddamn beef with Sinners?  Are you a goddamn racist?”  I assure you that I am not a racist.  I just don’t really like it when actors play more than one role in a film…specifically, I REALLY don’t like it when the same actor play twins (except for The Krays and Dead Ringers)."

In starting off with a discussion of a 40-year-old zombie movie, I've worked myself around to something a bit more interesting here. Why do we worry so much about being misconstrued here? Do we worry that it's actually true?

No I don't think that's it. But it's more like a couple lines of dialogue I always think of from Glengarry Glen Ross, where Ed Harris and Alan Arkin are discussing the fact that Arkin's character, who proclaims his innocence, gets nervous talking to the police. Harris assures him it's not because he's guilty of anything or has anything to hide, in fact, just the opposite: "You know who doesn't get nervous talking to the police?" Harris' Dave Moss asks. "Criminals."

So an actual racist would never talk about his possibly fictitious Black friend, and an actual person who doesn't like campy zombie movies would never pretended he liked them. (Though, I suppose, if the Black friend were actually fictitious, that might say something ... usually in this situation, the person is just exaggerating the closeness of their relationship with some Black guy they know.)

Okay that's about enough of that. 

Sinners spoiler alert

As you would know from yesterday's post and four others this year, I've been considering zeitgeist movies in the year 2025.

Loosely, I'm defining these as movies where so many of the salient details are known by people, even those who haven't seen the movie, that they've entered the cultural lexicon. That includes major spoilers. (Thinking things like The Sixth Sense, The Crying Game and one of the movies I actually watched for my Audient Zeitgeist series, Old Yeller.)

Can a movie released only earlier this year already have reached that point?

I say this as something of a prelude to discussing Sinners, whose second half was dutifully hidden by people like me when they reviewed it, not so much by others. The prelude is necessary so I can be sure you've seen my SPOILER ALERT before I reveal the images from Sinners I'm about to reveal. 

Have you left yet, if you need to?

Good.

I just received an email from Cinespia, the organization that holds movie screenings in the famous Hollywood Forever Cemetery, two of which we attended when we lived there. Only two? Yes, I guess only two. Lolita and The Philadelphia Story. They no longer show movies that obscure -- I guess really I mean old, not obscure -- but that's a topic for another time, one I've actually been dying to write about. But not today.

Anyway, the latest movie they've announced showing is Sinners, and they've advertised it thus:

You can read the text or not as you choose. It openly mentions vampires. I'm more concerned about the images.

The first, of Jack O'Connell's character, is not much of a spoiler, if you are already discussing vampires in the text. This character is introduced as a malicious entity and if there are any vampires in the movie, he makes a logical first candidate to guess if you were guessing. 

But as you go clockwise, three more images over you get to Hailee Steinfeld's character, who is presented sympathetically for the most part, after an introduction to her character where you're not sure that will be so. And maybe you only know that's Hailee Steinfeld's character if you've seen the movie -- Vampire Steinfeld looks different from regular Steinfeld -- but I think it's quite the spoiler to reveal that one of your supposed protagonists ends up turned to the undead, even though of course you know that some characters you like will turn in any vampire movie.

So there are three options here:

1) It's sloppy work, and they should have thought about it more before producing these promotional materials.

2) They just didn't care.

3) They think Sinners has already entered the zeitgeist, and the only people attending this screening will be people who are seeing the movie for the second time anyway.

That last may be a reasonable assumption. Sinners is one of the most praised and talked about movies of the year. If you haven't seen it already, what's wrong with you?

And I guess you face a dilemma here. If you don't talk about the second half of the movie -- which I guess is not a surprise at this point -- then you aren't revealing why this particular movie makes a good showing in a cemetery. It would be like if you were trying to say "Oh, From Dusk Till Dawn is just about a couple criminals on the run." 

So I get it. It's just that any time people with the sacred responsibility of protecting us from spoilers play fast and loose with that responsibility, it gets my hackles up a bit. Next time, it could be a movie I haven't seen that gets spoiled. 

The part of Marvel that rubbed off on Ryan Coogler

Ryan Coogler doesn't seem especially likely to direct another Marvel movie. I don't believe there are any more stand-alone Black Panther movies in the works, and even if there were, Coogler himself probably figures that two is enough, and he doesn't want his career to be defined by becoming a Marvel company man.

But there sure seems to be a part of the Marvel experience that has stayed with him.

I won't say much about Sinners. Before I write my review, I'm trying to figure out how much of the plot is known from the trailers or from the press coverage in general. I can tell you that from the one trailer I saw a couple months ago, I did not remember key elements of the movie, just a general vibe -- which is what a good trailer should do. I can also tell you that I loved it.

I'll tell you one more thing that is important to know, though, and it's not a spoiler. In fact, it is a public service of sorts.

Sinners has not one, but two extra scenes -- a mid-credits sequence and a sequence after the credits.

Sound familiar?

Although there are surely other movies that do a thing like this, it was popularized by Marvel and most of the other movies that do it are trying to ride the MCU coattails in some way. In other words, it is very clearly a superhero or at least superhero adjacent move.

Sinners is only superhero adjacent in the sense that its director directed two superhero movies.

But he's pulled the Marvel move, and you need to know, because I was the only one in my screening who didn't walk out of the movie before the second sequence. 

Now, I'll also tell you that the first mid-credits sequence is a lot more important, to the story, than the second. The second is effectively not important at all.

But it does qualify as more movie that Coogler saw fit to make, and with a movie like Sinners, you want to see all the movie there is to see.

It's hard to determine if Coogler would have made this choice without having made Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In fact, as a sort of sign of respect of the passed Chadwick Boseman, I think the second one might be one of the few MCU movies that does not interrupt its closing credits with more movie. Because these sequences are often cheeky in some way, it's maybe not the tone for it if you are also, I don't know, honoring the passing of the star of the franchise.

Wait, I can check. Yes, confirmed. Only the words "Black Panther will return" after the credits end. (Though, presumably, not in a stand-alone movie.)

Maybe Coogler thought this decision shorted him two mid-credits sequences, and he had to fit them into his next movie.