Barry Jenkins broke television
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The
Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, was highly anticipated even
beforenearly every major outlet labeled it as epic, must-watch TV in their early reviews.
But for all the pre-release hype â and hope, on the part of Amazon, which is rumored to have poured as much as $100 million into the project with the aim of finally landing a show that can compete with the biggest hits on Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, and the rest â it is likely that lots of people will at some point
stop watching
The
Underground Railroad, too. That s partially because labeling what Jenkins has made as TV is somewhat misleading:
Review: âThe Underground Railroadâ Weaves an Epic Vision
In Barry Jenkinsâs dreamlike adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel, the railway is real and so is the pain.
Thuso Mbedu is a woman on the run in an alternative antebellum America in “The Underground Railroad,” arriving Friday on Amazon.Credit.Kyle Kaplan/Amazon Studios
The Underground Railroad
NYT Critic s Pick
In Barry Jenkinsâs transfixing adaptation of Colson Whiteheadâs âThe Underground Railroad,â Martin (Damon Herriman), a white man smuggling Cora (Thuso Mbedu) as she escapes slavery, rouses her before dawn to witness something ghastly. Along the road theyâre traveling, grimly called âThe Freedom Trail,â the trees are hung with lynched corpses. âYou need to see this,â he tells her.
USA TODAY
Barry Jenkins knows full well the traumatizing effect of film and TV depictions of the inhumanity of slavery.
But the director of Oscar-winning 2016 film Moonlight found compelling reasons to adapt Colson Whitehead s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, into a 10-episode Amazon series (streaming Friday) that conveys the resiliency of those enduring such brutality.
Jenkins, the writer, director and executive producer of Railroad, saw an opportunity to tell a story about an institution whose repercussions are still felt, from a perspective that has often been neglected. As I grew as a person, it became very clear that it was necessary for me to use my voice to speak to my heritage here as a Black person in America, he says. Yet I also know how fraught those images (of slavery) are, how fraught even acknowledging this history is, both within my community and outside it. And I ve never had that before working on a piece of art. It s
The Underground Railroad: A strange disorienting masterpiece theglobeandmail.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theglobeandmail.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.