Saturday 1 May 2021

Two Distant Strangers (2020 Travon Free, & scr, Martin Desmond Roe)

How do you deal with the spate of killings of innocent black people by American cops? By turning it into Groundhog Day? It doesn't sound like it should work, but it does, horribly well, as Joey Bada$$ attempts to get home every day and he's always killed by the same cop, Andrew Howard, no matter what he does or the conversations he has with the man. At least it ends on a note of hope - somehow or another, he's going to change things and get home.

I quite liked the exchange with his girlfriend Zaria - "What would you do if you were shot dead every day?" "Shoot back." Intriguingly it's the one course of action he doesn't attempt.

It won the Oscar for the best short film. However it seems the plot was lifted in its entirety from Cynthia Kao's hilarious 2015 film Groundhog Day for a Black Man (with Burl Moseley), which is truly bizarre, considering the same thing had happened with the original.


Not sure...



No comments:

Post a Comment