Monday February 25, 2019
‘Best Picture’
“Once you realize Green Book is really just Nick Vallelonga's attempt to make a film out of the nifty road-trip stories his dad shared with him as a kid, the movie's myopia is somehow harder to be mad at. It's boneheaded, perhaps, but it's not malicious.
”Rather, that's how I feel until I remember the sickening ways that the film fabricates Dr. Shirley's feelings towards other blacks, his lack of black cultural knowledge, his utter racial isolation—falsehoods, according to his brother. Then I'm taken aback. It's one thing to get historical facts wrong, or to massage them for the sake of dramatic coherence. It's another thing entirely to take something so essential as racial identity—as the inner life of a person of color—and revise it. And to bypass due diligence. And to think, as a white filmmaker, that questions of this sort are things you can blithely make up or change outright.“
from ”The Truth About Green Book" by K. Austin Collins, Vanity Fair, December 2018—or nearly three months before this movie won best picture at the 91st Annual Academy Awards. Obviously, not enough members of the Academy read this piece.
Twitter: @ErikLundegaard
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