American Fiction
A novelist who's fed up with the establishment profiting from Black entertainment uses a pen name to write a book that propels him into the heart of the hypocrisy and madness he claims to disdain.
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⭐ Featured Review
""American Fiction" has a great premise, one of the best in any movie this year. And I overall liked it and think it was well made, so I'm rounding my score up to reflect that. But it somehow didn't completely land for me, in a way that I find hard to explain. I think it was the domestic drama part of the film that didn't completely work for me. The movie spends a lot of time on all the ways that Jeffrey Wright feels overwhelmed by his life's responsibilities, and it sags in some of these parts, and makes the movie feel a little bit like a slog. And I don't k..."
💡 Did You Know?
In a 2023 interview with Esquire, Cord Jefferson explained his approach to a key scene in the film and how the actors elevated it in unexpected ways: "We've all seen that scene of the writer pounding the keyboard frantically, then taking a big sip of coffee and getting back to it. That's how you depict somebody intensely writing. But I thought, 'We can't have that. It's tropey and silly, and it doesn't get the audience's minds going.' So why not have these characters manifest in front of him? When I wrote that scene, I wrote the language to be very silly. It had to be ridiculous so that everybody could see how stupid this book is and what a sham it is. Then we got Keith David and Okieriete Onaodowan, who are both such tremendous actors. All of the sudden, it wasn't silly anymore. They made it seem like the book might be good. I love what the scene became in their hands: suddenly you're questioning whether or not the book is good, which is evidence that something as ridiculous as this book could become a hit."
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📖 Synopsis
A novelist who's fed up with the establishment profiting from Black entertainment uses a pen name to write a book that propels him into the heart of the hypocrisy and madness he claims to disdain.