Daniel Richtman is reporting that Jharrel Jerome is “in talks” to play the lead role of Mike in an untitled, racially-themed comedy from director Trey Parker and screenwriter Vernon Chatman.
Jeff Sneider reported about this last March. He noted that Parker and Matt Stone would produce alongside Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free.
Sneider: “Chatman’s script finds the past and present coming to a head when a young Black man who is interning as a slave reenactor at a living history museum discovers that his white girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his.”
This is an interesting plot hook? That a young black dude is…what, alarmed that ancestors of his white-ass girlfriend owned Mike’s ancestors during slavery? What is this supposed to be, an echo of Get Out or something?
Or a parody of the wokester currents that lay beneath Get Out?
Don’t look now but ancestral guilt is a totally meaningless notion. People behave according to the morals and ethics of the time that they live in…no more or less.
Remember the 2015 Ben Affleck embarassment when Finding Your Roots producer Henry “Skip” Gates, Jr. revealed that an Affleck ancestor had been a slave owner?
Affleck apparently feared that the wrath of outrage culture. Would it make a lick of sense for the p.c. crowd to scream “Affleck is descended from racists so he must be a closet sympathizer”? That would be a bone-dumb assumption, to put it mildly. But you know that at least some lefty wackazoids would have suggested this all the same.
HE excerpt: “‘Outrage culture‘ is running wild these days and Affleck, no dummy, is fully aware of the potential. Time and again the p.c. mob has read things in a cretinously simple-minded fashion and made absurdly broad conclusions as a result.
“For all Affleck knew, this ‘scion of racists’ idea could become an urban legend like Richard Gere putting a gerbil up his ass, and it could affect his financial and creative future.
“It’s nuts out there, really nuts. But Affleck didn’t want to characterize Twitter culture as stupid or deranged, which in itself could land him in hot water, so he decided to use the ‘really embarassed’ line, which is true, I’m sure, as far as it goes. Who wouldn’t feel shamed by this knowledge, but then again who was walking around during the early to mid 1800s with the moral convictions of a decent 20th Century person, let alone a veteran of our own time? Relatively few, I would imagine.”
Jerome is probably best known for his performance in Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight (’16). He played “Kevin”, the teenaged guy who gave that beach handjob to Ashton Sanders‘ Chiron.
