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Night Schoolis a half-woke movie.
Is it a warm, heartfelt film about overcoming learning disabilities?
But it also implies that adults with dyslexia need their asses beat for learn.
)Night Schoolpasses the Bechdel test, but with only the two white women characters.
The black women are still entirely defined by their relationships with men.
Even the gay one.
I think the girlfriend character has about as many objectifying butt shots as lines.
He talks about how the school is mah house, and how a PTA meeting was lit.
This is never cute; it is always off-putting.
Take the original, non-musical version ofThe Producers.Bialystock and Bloom hire a hepcat method actor to play Hitler.
The play becomes a hit because his slang turns Hitler into wacky fun!
We reached the apotheosis of PFWG with 1998sCant Hardly Wait.Seth Green plays Kenny Fisher, a.k.a.
They have no black friends and are clearly using the culture to try and shore up a frail masculinity.
Kenny drops the act when hes trapped in a bathroom with Lauren Ambrose and learns to be emotionally vulnerable.
Greens boys, on the other hand, stay wack.
They even drop the N-word around their black classmates and almost get beaten into non-dyslexia.
But even those idiots are portrayed asidiots, not racists per se.
Again, this is not portrayed as intentional and hurtful racism, but guileless admiration for another culture.
In real life, cultural appropriation is usually not a 24/7 caricature.
(ExceptKylie Jenner.)
To be conversant in culture as a white person is to be a little appropriative.
Style in America is defined by streetwear.
Pop music today is EDM, which is just house music done by straight white people.
Online vernacular relies heavily on the speech patterns of black women.
But the caricatures of PFWGs in film history hide that fact.
They use the big, appropriative troll to let us smaller appropriative goblins off the hook.
Killams brief black voice moments inNight Schoolare notable because theyre more nuanced than that.
He slips in and out of the voice, but its always fucked up when he does it.
