Antebellum is an infuriating film that contorts itself in order to pull off an excruciatingly banal twist. It is ambitious, attempting to peel back just what Making America Great Again would involve, but stops short of having any insight into racism, nostalgia or indeed its own main character.Â
Janelle Monáe is wasted on the part of Eden, a slave on a plantation run by Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War. The slaves are gleefully tortured, branded, raped and murdered by the Confederates, who donât allow them to speak unless spoken to. Having rendered most of the cast mute, the first act relies on stylised scenes of empty brutality, never giving any interiority to either the slaves or the slave-masters. Presenting the Confederates as moustache-twirling pantomime villains with no motivations beyond an overwhelming hatred of Black people is increasingly tedious as the film goes on.
The Underground Railroad is available on Amazon Prime from 14 May 2021.
When Barry Jenkins first heard of the underground railroad as a child, he pictured Black men and women building, piloting and riding steam trains through the innards of antebellum America, whisking slaves away from the plantations of the South to freedom in the North.
“There was something magical about it,” Jenkins tells me over Zoom on a Saturday morning in March. “I still remember it as being one of the purest senses of pride for being Black that I’ve ever had.”
Learning, eventually, that the railroad was actually a metaphor for the informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by runaway slaves was like discovering “that Santa Claus and the tooth fairy aren’t real”, Jenkins says. It wasn’t so much the loss of a fantasy as an awakening to the enormity of what it took to flee slavery – a system so bloodcurdlingly wretched, and so deeply entrenched, that even a prosaic escape
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âItâs basically accent therapy,â says Audrey LeCrone, describing her job over Zoom. LeCrone is a dialect coach based in New Orleans who specialises in teaching non-American actors an American accent. Even for performers who clearly have a flair for the American accent, like Daniel Kaluuya â with whom LeCrone recently worked on Judas and the Black Messiah â a coach is vital.
âThereâs still going to be certain rhythms or pitch patterns that are strange and that have to be monitored,â LeCrone says. This is particularly true when youâre playing, as Kaluuya is, a notable historical figure as voluble as the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was killed by the FBI at the age of 21.
A frothy, frantic delight of a show, this darkly comic eight-episode murder mystery about a hard-drinking stewardess caught up in a Bangkok killing is pandemic escapism at its finest. Even before party-animal and black-out drunk Cassie (a deliciously scatty Kaley Cuoco) wakes to find wealthy one-night stand Alex with his throat cut and flees the crime scene, this glossy global caper taunts us with its heedless hook-ups, deliriously crammed bars and seamless, maskless air-travel.Â
Smart, sheenily stylish and formally daring, The Flight Attendant feels a long way from the brittle neo-noir of Sidney Lumetâs similarly premised The Morning After (1986). Cheerfully pillaging thrillers past and present to create its bouncy Hitchcock-lite feel, it summons a 70s Foul Play-style screwball vibe as Cassie turns detective to try to prove her innocence. This is nimbly updated with the genre-skipping and amateur sleuthing of Search Party (2016-), and a hint of the winking surrealism of
Between the Lines has been screening on BBC iPlayer (some episodes still available)
You may have been aware of a kerfuffle in the press and on social media a few weeks ago about an interview the television scriptwriter Jed Mercurio gave to GQ magazine in the run-up to the broadcast on BBC1 of the sixth series of his police corruption drama Line of Duty (2012-). Mercurio used language you wouldn’t want your mother to hear you using to describe a (young, female) journalist who had had the nerve to express disappointment in the programme’s fifth series.
His crossness might better have been directed at many of his dedicated fans: what I’ve noticed in reactions to recent series is the rise of an ironic, meta tone, treating the series as an endlessly comic, teasing challenge to viewers’ credulity – the oohs and aaahs at the latest scarcely plausible revelation mingling with oohs and aahs at the stodgy sexiness of Adrian Dunbar’s Superintendent Ted Hastings, with his hushed