Earlier this year the Gold Derby “experts” embarassed themselves to death by all-but-unanimously predicting that The Brutalist‘s Brady Corbet would take the Best Director Oscar. This is because the GD members are easily intimidated sheep…no balls, no moxie, no backbone or belief, no critical integrity…a certain herd instinct manifests and then “baaaahh!”
Right now 14 Gold Derby-ites are spitballing their Best Picture preferences, and wouldn’t ya just know that seven of them have Sinners at the top of their lists?
Again, the Gold Derby guys know absolutely nothing. They’re on the Sinners train solely because of the social safety factor. They’re afraid not to predict a Sinners Best Picture win or at least a Best Director nomination for Ryan Coogler.
Friendo (speaking this morning): “But a Black director has never won a Best Director Oscar…how long can this continue?” HE to friendo: “The Best Picture Oscar that went to 12 Years A Slave in 2014 was obviously owned by the great Steve McQueen. 12 Years A Slave was and is an epic, humanistic masterpiece. Sinners is an under-lighted, sex-and-blood vampire exploitation film.”
HE can think of nothing better or more glorious than to die on this hill: A Sinners Best Picture win would raise high the banner for the progressive degeneration of cinema in the 21st Century…a process of decline which began to manifest in the ’90s and has been gathering more and more steam since….oh, 2010 or thereabouts, or the year of Ironman.
Posted on 4.17.25: Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a popcorn movie…a cheeseball thang…half-promising, half-wallow, aimed at the schmoes. And you’d better believe it’s been overpraised.
At first it’s a Mississippi folklore comic-book fable (great music, ecstasy dancing, sweaty sex, good cunnilingus), and then Coogler flips a switch and it becomes an ultra-violent schlock vampire flick that hits too hard and just bleeds, howls, groans and sweats all over the place.
Sinners is peddling comic-book country lore…impactful here and there, storied, mythical and not half bad during the semi-realistic first 40%, but once the X-treme vampire stuff kicks in it’s basically coarse, bloody, gut-punch schlock. Crimson geysers, ragged bite wounds, wooden stakes, burnt flesh. Primitive slop.
Young Miles Caton is a gifted Delta Blues singer-guitarist — Robert Johnson reincarnated. And hangin’ with 89 year-old Buddy Guy at the very end is a treat. The musical sequences in the juke joint are joyful and jumpin’. And yes, the sight and sound of a chorus of Irish vampires singing Irish folk tunes under the moonlight as the bloody-faced Jack O’Connell dances an Irish jig is wonderful (O’Connell is probably doomed to play surly villains from here on) — the most bizarre spectacle I’ve ever seen or heard in a monster film.
And the buffed-up Michael B. Jordan, playing twin criminal brothers from Chicago, is straight and sturdy enough. He also gets laid twice, or rather the brothers make out separately, one with Hailee Steinfeld (turning 30 next year), another with Wunmi Mosaku.
But the second half is just crude vampire mulch. Much of the drawlin’ dialogue is unintelligible…so slurry and mumbly that I knew early on that I had no choice but to resort to the Wiki synopsis. Skim through this sucker….Eugene O’Neill, it ain’t…crazy, cartoonish gruel…pulp mythology.
And Autumn Durald Arakawa’s cinematography is way too dark. That or the Westport AMC’s projector lamp is close to death.
Yeah, there’s an obvious racial current or metaphor…Coogler sprinkles in a few Klanners, fat rednecks and dumb crackers straight out of Mississippi Burning, and they all meet with just desserts. Jordan filling them with hot lead a la Billy Wilder‘s St. Valentine’s Day massacre is part of the grand finale…yeah!
Sidenote for fanatical bully contingent:
I’m a deepwater cinephile with the usual exacting standards…the standards met and fulfilled by thousands of filmmakers throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.
All the Metacritic and RT critics know there’s virtually no upside to slamming (or partially slamming) an ambitious Ryan Coogler movie that deals with deep-south racism and plays like a grindhouse flick from Sam Arkoff, and so they all put on their ballerina shoes before reviewing it.
I don’t play that tip-toe game.
Gold Derby wrongos!!
