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Jayemofficial
Reviews
Atlanta: Work Ethic! (2022)
Hilarious, sharp satire
This episode took an easy stab at a heavily critiqued celebrity: Tyler Perry. It's style of critique is similar to that of The boondocks season 3 episode 8 ("pause"). Instead of Winston Jerome from the boondocks we have Mr Chocolate; in enigmatic television and film writer who owns a large movie studio in Atlanta (much like the real Tyler Perry). It points out Tyler Perry's colorism he was so known for in his earlier works such as portraying light skinned people as good and dark skinned people as evil. It also pointed out his obsessions with using negative black sterotypes for drama and portraying black women as constant victims. (There is a hilarious scene where a dark skinned black woman literally eats a crack sandwich).
This was a perfect episode for a show that takes place in Atlanta, since Tyler perry owns a studio there. It's title (work ethic) comes from a Tyler Perry quote showing how he is able to write so many movies and television episodes in such a quick amount of time. Throughout the episode it shows the low quality of Tyler's work while still being a very Atlanta episode. We finally get to see Van with her daughter after her stint in season three of living in Paris. She struggles to protect her daughter from racial exploitation of Mr Chocolate (Donald glover in prosthetics giving cartoony comical performance) who wants to keep casting her in his shows in movies because he likes her sassy attitude on set. There is also a very meta element on the series. Overall it ties in perfectly with the final season which earlier dealt with colorism in the form of Earns Aunt.
Sex and the Teenage Mind (2002)
Worst teenage film ever
I'm saying that as someone who's seen all of the mainstream and a lot of the indies. 0 character development, 0 plot, 0 laughs. This is "the room" level bad and that third act was a big middle finger to anyone bored enough to watch this nonsense.
Ozark: Sugarwood (2017)
Kind of mediocre, kind of hollow.
I decided to give the first episode a try hoping to see what the hype was all about. It starts off with a slightly pedantic opening monologue about the American dream and money which is fine coming from a financial advisor protagonist.
Though i do find it a bit annoying when characters always have some deep screenwriter fueled philosophy on why they're doing why they're doing versus the kind of "I just needed a job and I'm good at it" approach.
Some of the early exposition in the show feels like something out of a freshman screenwriting class, characters announce their relationships and statuses to each other quite a few times.
"You're my best friend"
"You've been married for 20 years"
"She's fifteen years old"
"We both make a lot of money but you drive a Camry and i live in a nice house"
It's kind of like the writers done trust the audience to pick up on anything without completely spelling it out.
The last thing that bothered me was the introduction of the Drugdealer.
He feels like every other generic gangster antagonist in a movie, has monologues that feel like something a screenwriter thought was cool versus actual authentic sounding dialogue. To make the character more threatening they have basically made him omnipotent, able to kill many people throughout the entire episode without any detection what so ever. People are shot and thrown in barrels of acid. He throws a man off the roof of a luxury hotel and i guess just magically teleports out of there before anybody on any floors see him. The show never explains how he's doing the very obvious things he's doing completely undetected.
He then forces our protagonist to uproot his entire family to the ozarks, after making him pay His entire life savings. There is no explanation why this works either.
But Jason Bateman is one of my favorite actors and he's decent here though he's playing a somewhat uninteresting character so far. I hope the show gets better because there is potential.