Your white privilege is showing if you haven't been white-guilted into boycotting this whitewashed historical movie about a white knight. Also, eww, you're white.
I'll always take Ride With the Devil. Good white people who go along with slavery because it's always been that way, they don't want to think about it, and personal loyalties always trump morality. Until after years of war and seeing friends die and enemies die and friends turning into enemies who kill some more, begin to ask the question "If the way things have always been can produce such horrible atrocities, maybe we should change the way we do things?" And some white people say, "Nah! The problem is that we didn't do them enough!" and some people say, "This is truly fucked and I'm going to try and make things better."
But seriously read The Free State Of Jones because it is a really intetesting book and yeah it is focused on Newton Knight but it doesn't gloss over his troubling aspects. The utter fuckscrew that was the end of Reconstruction is especially well portrayed.
Nobody can say "special sauce" like Matthew McConaughey either. If he says something like "let's treat Johnny reb to some home fried special sauce" during a battle scene this movie may be worth seeing.
I would love to see a film, documentary or otherwise, that portrayed the complexity of the Civil War. Even just the complexity of Kentucky, which held slaves but did not secede. And yes, there certainly were white southerners who opposed and fought against slavery. And NYC was stronghold of southern sympathy. Etc, Etc. Fascinating stuff. I think this film looks pretty stupid.
I read the book "The Free State of Jones" and saw the movie. Both are excellent. Ijeoma Oluo is a prime example of why people are increasingly tired of accusations of "racism." She is complaining that there is TOO much interracial friendship and romance in the film. Gee, I thought that was a good thing. The truth is that real life is complicated, the Civil War and racial relations included. The "Free State of Jones" shows some of the reality of Southern dissent and interracial cooperation. It devastates the myth of "The Lost Cause." For that, Ijeoma Oluo and others should be grateful. As for the fashionable nonsense that any sexual relations between a white man and a slave woman was by definition "rape," let us remind you that many slave women were mated or bred to black male slaves against their will. Carrying her ridiculous argument to its logical conclusion, ANY sex a slave woman had was "rape."
What irony that this fine film may be done in, not by reactionary neo-Confederates or white supremacists, but by ignorant liberals chasing a fashionable fantasy that every story set in the slave era must be "Django" or "Nat Turner."
Racist white shaming, oh I feel so horrible now; But this isn't about me and my whiteness....it's about YOU, yes you, youu....YOU, you. oh isnt it so lovely to be YOU>>!
I wish I could get an answer to this...What kind of film would You make o 'author of this article? I feel the need to comment that many of the films with a nearly or completely black cast have the stereotypical characters, the shucking and jiving, the typical hate white people forever thing...how can you take yourself seriously. Are you a slave? Was your grandmother? Thats three generations..how about great grandmother? Maybe? Do you feel oppressed by me?
So close! Even got the "sometimes y"!
Because that's what really happened.
What irony that this fine film may be done in, not by reactionary neo-Confederates or white supremacists, but by ignorant liberals chasing a fashionable fantasy that every story set in the slave era must be "Django" or "Nat Turner."
"Kill the Messenger" (2014).
"War Against the Weak", Edwin Black.