This is not really a movie review…
But since AMERICAN HONEY filmed some of its scenes in Kansas City and Johnson County, I felt that I better touch on it—all 2:42 hours of it.
First off, the basic story line finds Muskogee runaway (newcomer) Sasha Lane hooking up with a traveling crew selling door-to-door magazine subscriptions.
Shia LaBeouf is their top sales guy as the crew now heads on through Oklahoma, Iowa, North Dakota—with stops in Kansas City and lovely Johnson County.
Selling by day and partying by night.
And yes, there is drama, sex and social empathy as these kids glide from brotherly highs to lonely valley’s of distress with magazine pitch techniques perfected by LaBeouf. This guy is smooth as silk.
“He’s not lying. He’s selling”
It’s like a band of Gypsies hitting neighborhoods….all living for the moment.
The movie gives the impression that it was filmed improvisationally. A documentary approach and style complete with the hand-held camera hipness which (almost) gave me a headache.
And for some reason director/screenwriter Andrea Arnold presents the entire production in a square TV format on the movie screen.
Maybe that adds to the hipness…….
If you’re looking for great KC or Mission Hills highlights you could be leaving the theater disappointed. But it is nice to see our skyline and a few neighborhood locations.
Keep in mind that this picture is definitely not for everyone. It IS quite specialized—hence opening here in only semi-exclusive engagements.
But strangely enough I was never bored or distracted throughout this entire 162 minutes long disillusioned road movie. Imagine that.
So was this an AMERICAN HONEY review?
You decide.
Jack, any thoughts on “Birth of a Nation?” I saw it a few nights ago and really enjoyed it.
Yes, I thought it was very well done and had an incredible chance of walking away with Oscars—including Best Picture.
After all Hollywood ‘needed’ it to make nice-nice.
But with everything that’s happened behind the screen I frankly don’t feel that old school tinsel town will support the movie. And that’s too bad.
“Birth Of A Nation”, according to this Black College Professor, is needlessly inaccurate.
Dr. Leslie M. Alexander is a professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University, where she specializes in 19th century Black culture and political consciousness. She teaches courses on slavery, resistance movements, and historical accuracy in film.
I have not seen it, I have had my fill of these “Hate Whitey” revenge porn flicks that transubstantiate crimes from 200 years ago, onto the backs of those folks, who, by way of NEVER owning slaves, or NEVER discriminating against blacks are still expected to apologize for the “Peculiar Institution”.
Common sense and exculpatory facts should obviously relieve anyone with room temp IQ from any sense of White Guilt, but, of course, that would not feed the fires of black hatred for whites. How would any Democrat ever get elected?
After making the movie “Django Unchained” Jamie Foxx got a gig on SNL. In his opening monologue, he said he had just made a movie that he loved, because he got to “Kill White People”. He received a thunderous ovation from the mostly white crowd. The National Stockholm Syndrome continues unabated.
I wonder how many people, how many cops, how many innocents will be raped, murdered and assaulted by way of the hatred stirred up by this movie?
those who can’t separate reality from a movie are idiots and sheep. I love Django Unchained and never once saw it pandering to ‘white guilt’. I just saw it as a great revenge movie. besides, chuck, a lot of folks who might subscribe to your take on it (which I almost agree with), conveniently forget it was a white man who made his revenge possible. it was long after I saw it that I heard about Foxx’s comment. okay, that’s on him.
What little is known about Nat Turner is from a book written by a white man claiming they were Nat’s words. Little is said about his religious visions which drove him as much as being a slave.
The new movie is just another in a long line of fiction, Sully, Pearl Harbor, to name a few.
If you want to look inside the history this is the film to see.
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/natturner/
Nat Turner was no Spartacus but his rebellion began for the very same reasons the slaves revolted against the Roman Empire.
Here is the article.
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-birth-of-a-nation-is-an-epic-fail/
I don’t have to experience any “white guilt” in order to understand the atrocities that were perpetrated on an entire race of people. Being bought, sold and slaughtered like cattle while their “christian” owners attended church each Sunday.
150 years later, the KKK/Aryan Nation still live in the open with plenty of support from the Alt-Right. Plenty of ignorance and bigotry to go around, even in 2016.
Slavery is a scab that must be picked at incessantly — not out of any real concern for those who suffered centuries ago, but to gain political advantage today. Our nation can nominally assuage its relentless shame with assorted forms of reparations from those who never were masters to those who never were slaves.
Generations of American schoolchildren have been marinated in the notion that the institution of slavery sprang fully formed in 1619 when 20 Africans slaves landed in Jamestown, Virginia. (Actually, they originally were destined for Vera Cruz, Mexico aboard a Portuguese slave ship before being intercepted by a British privateer. It is believed the 20 were accepted as indentured servants and eventually were freed.)
Any discussion of slavery in this country should start with the recognition that the North American British colonies were remarkably small players in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Of the approximate 12.5 million Africans taken in bondage to the New World, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Databases estimates only about 388,000 came to what is now the United States — and virtually all aboard European-flagged slave ships. That represents a little more than 3% of the Africans brought to the Western Hemisphere.
Baghdad, Iraq — The institution of slavery predates recorded history but the earliest references were recorded in the Code of Hammurabi in about 1760 B.C.
Mecca, Saudi Arabia — Beginning in the 7th Century, adherents of Mohammed founded a series of caliphates that brought all of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian peninsula under Muslim control. For eight centuries before the first European slavers arrived in Africa, Arab Muslims established a robust trans-Sahara trade that would eventually capture an estimated 18 million Africans. Slavery was not made illegal in the Arabian Peninsula until 1962.
Lagos, Nigeria — African slavery predated the arrival of the Arabs and Europeans and continues to this day. In some areas of Cameroon and Northern Nigeria, up to half the population lived in slavery. More than two million slaves were released by the British in Nigeria alone in the early 1900s.
Tripoli, Libya — Muslim pirates along the North African Barbary Coast didn’t stop with the enslavement of Africans, but also preyed upon Mediterranean shipping and coastal cities. An estimated 1.25 million Europeans and Americans were enslaved by these pirates, whose abuses forced Thomas Jefferson to send the nascent United States Navy to shut them down. The event is commemorated to this day in the Marine Corps hymn reference to their exploits on “the shores of Tripoli.”
Lisbon, Portugal — This Iberian peninsula country was by far and away the most prolific transporter of Africans to the New World and was, along with Spain, notorious for its ruthless in the treatment of those slaves.
Rome — It is estimated that 35% to 40% of the First Century B.C. Roman Empire population were slaves. They were drawn from throughout Europe and acquired by slave traders who followed the Roman army on its path of conquest.
London — While England played a key role in reducing the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the early 19th Century, it had previously been involved in selling Irish and African human cargo. More than 30,000 Irish prisoners were sent in bondage by King James II to work on English plantations in the West Indies beginning in 1625. In a single decade more than half a million Irish were killed and another 300,000 sold as slaves — reducing the population of Ireland by more than 60%. Many hundreds of thousands of Irish peasants were shipped to Barbados, Jamaica, and British North American colonies. Over a period of two-and-a-half centuries, more than 10,000 voyages by British ships also carried an estimate five million Africans in bondage to the New World — second only to Portugal.
Mexico City — Slavery was widely practiced by the Aztec and Mayan nations long before the arrival of the Spanish. Ritualistic human sacrifices and cannibalism were commonplace, with tens of thousands of slaves slaughtered each year. African slaves arrived in Mexico almost a century prior their appearance in what is now the United States. Violent slave revolts against their brutal treatment occurred as early as 1537 in Mexico, 82 years before the first Africans were brought to what is now the United States.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — Long before the first Portuguese settlement in 1532, indigenous tribes routinely enslaved one another. However, Brazil soon became by far the leading New World importer with more than 4.8 million African slaves toiling in the most brutal working conditions in this nation’s plantations and gold mines. Brazil also was the last Western country to abolish slavery in 1888.
It is a pretty good rule of thumb to conclude that wherever humans have existed, so has slavery. It was far more brutally practiced throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, where the death rate was so high the slave population could not be sustained without continual importations from Africa. In the U.S. there was a near balance of male and females so the slave population crew by natural reproduction after the trans-Atlantic slave trade was banned in 1809.
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates caused a firestorm among his colleagues in the African-American studies ranks when he shared the facts of the relatively low number of slaves transported to British North America and primary role of African slave traders.
“People wanted to kill me,” Gates said. “Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we are raised in: evil white people and good black people. The world just isn’t like that.”
This is a message unlikely to resonate among those with a vested interest in fostering racial discord in this country.
OK, ok…I get it.
But WHAT does all of the above have to do with the (partial) KC filmed “AMERICAN HONEY?”
Blame Chuck! He started it!
Just kidding, Chuck. 🙂
Nothing. But if you didn’t know that the question about The Birth of a Nation was gonna cause The Birth of Chuck’s Anger in this post, well you haven’t been paying attention.
Anger?
Those are facts stated above. I didn’t bring up “Birth Of A Nation”. I commented on a comment.
Facts are facts.
I am sure “American Honey” is a fine movie. One thing we all know for sure, whether or not we all will admit it, is that no one will get killed after watching “American Honey”.
“Birth Of A Nation” is meant to inflame hatred of whites by blacks and it will do just that. You may not want to admit it. But you know, I know, we all know, exactly what that movie is all about.
Chuck is too big of a supporter of mine for me to sit back and read criticisms of him. On any issues involving blacks, he has more insight than any of you non-believers. I can always count on Chuck to open the floodgates of protest when there is some statement that addresses the history of slavery or racism in America.
Anyone who views Lincoln as anything other than the worst President in American history is an illiterate lemming. Chuck gets it. Why can’t the rest of you?
Other than that, nice piece Jack.
That is an interesting nom de plume for you to shoulder Stomper. It is even more anonymous than usual.
Lincoln was a tyrant.