Movie Reviews: The Hate U Give and Boy Erased

Jeff D Lowe11/21/2018 10:18 PM

Both of these movies came out a little while ago. One hit theaters with Oscar hype, while the other was lesser known. Were they any good on the big screen? Let’s find out…

KenJac (95/100): There have been a few movies this year that have touched on social issues in this country in a fantastic way (‘Blackkklansman’, ‘Blindspotting’, ‘Sorry to Bother You’) and some that have done so in a ham-fisted way (‘The First Purge’). This movie was the former and weaved a heartfelt story around what is a horrifying fear, and reality, for African-Americans in this country.

I really can’t say enough about Amandla Stenberg’s performance as Starr Carter. Getting that kind of development and depth from a character who also plays the role of the narrator would be difficult for even the most veteran actor, so to see it from a 20-year-old is extremely promising for her career. Russell Hornsby and Regina Hall also play the roles of concerned, and enraged, parents perfectly. Common, Anthony Mackie, and K.J. Apa don’t have a ton of screen time, but all of their characters represent a distinctive element to the conversation.

The arc for this movie is tremendously well done by director George Tillman Jr., and he and Audrey Wells did a great job adapting the best-selling Angie Thomas novel for the big screen. They establish all the main responses you see following most every police shooting, but do it with so much subtlety in respect to the actual story they’re telling that it doesn’t feel forced. The movie manages to elicit anxiety, outrage, fear, understanding and most of all love. As far as cinematography goes, I think they could have done with a bigger scale for some of the scenes towards the end. I understand the technical difficulties behind that, but it sometimes felt a little small.

It is an extremely honest and blunt look today’s social landscape that tells a moving story with a deft hand, never feeling preachy or forced. It is an absolute must watch by any measure, and could benefit from anybody who goes into watching it with an open mind. I’ll say that after my disappointment with ‘The Darkest Minds’ and ‘Everything, Everything’, I am now all on board the Amandla Stenberg train and cannot wait to see what she does next.

Jeff Lowe (94/100): ‘The Hate U Give’ is easily one of the surprise movies of 2018. As KenJac said in his review above, this movie joins a handful of others from this year that managed to do a fantastic job at touching on important social issues. They all have their own style and type of story and ‘The Hate U Give’ is no different. Director George Tillman Jr. and screenwriter Audrey Wells tell their story of class and race through the eyes of a high school student, portrayed by Amandla Stenberg in a breakout performance. It’s a gripping, compelling and powerful story grounded in the reality of the America we live in. Even so, the story is still simple and straight-forward enough to make it easy to connect with emotionally. It’s humanizing and smart and there’s a natural, nuanced feel to how the story plays out. This movie may not have received the hype or marketing that many blockbusters have received this year, but don’t doubt the fact that ‘The Hate U Give’ is one of the best movies of the year.

KenJac (83/100): In an era where we have a lot more media representing the struggle of LGBTQ people, ‘Boy Erased’ felt just above average. Based on the 2016 memoir of the same name by author Garrard Conley, it follows his journey after being sent to a gay-conversion Christian camp. It has an interesting angle that I found more compelling in a movie from earlier this year, ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’, but has some excellent performances from the main cast that make it an extremely gratifying watch.

Lucas Hedges plays the lead in Jared Eamons, and does a fantastic job as a teenager who is battling to find himself after getting caught in the black and white outlook set upon him by his Baptist preacher father (Russell Crowe) and mother (Nicole Kidman) regarding his sexuality. He loves his family regardless of their ignorant outlook and believes that he should be able to be who he is while remaining his parents’ son. Crowe and Kidman also do a fantastic job as parents who have lived their whole lives with such a set-in-stone outlook on how they treat certain people, only to have that outlook become complicated because one of those people is their son. Director Joel Edgerton also plays Victor Sykes, the “therapist” at the camp, and I didn’t find his performance to be too much of anything. He seemed more like the bumbling fool he played in ‘Gringo’, which may have been the point, but still.

I had some issues with their choice to set the movie in a non-linear fashion. The flashbacks were important to show some of Jared’s growth, but they became so frequent and long that they detracted the momentum that you felt from the scenes previous to it. There also just wasn’t that sense of emotional resolution that I felt like I was looking for, but that might just not be what Conley, or even most LGBTQ people for that matter, get at the end of the day. Edgerton did manage to create a setting of terror and oppression very well to help people like me empathize with a situation like that camp which we wouldn’t relate to normally. A question I saw floated around a little bit was if this movie shits on Christians or evangelicals or whatever. It doesn’t. Faith is presented as an intangible entity that some characters corrupted to exploit others and validate their prejudices, and others used to promote the overarching message of pretty much every religion which is love, tolerance, and respect for everyone.

The prospect of your own parents sending you to, basically, an internment camp because of who you choose to love is not a reality that a majority of us can necessarily appreciate. I think this movie does a great job in presenting it in a way where you feel that connection, but some of the technical aspects of it make it a little too clunky as an actual motion picture. If you go out to see it, definitely wait through the pre-crawl end titles because there is a hilarious bit of information there.

Jeff Lowe (74/100): ‘Boy Erased’ is a movie with an important topic that consists of solid performances, but, unfortunately, misses the mark just a hair. Don’t get me wrong, I think ‘Boy Erased’ is well made and achieves what it wants to do, but I just felt as though there was more we could have gotten out of it. Joel Edgerton is capable of fantastic writing, as we saw in his 2015 movie ‘The Gift’, but I felt as though the writing is where ‘Boy Erased’ lacked the most. Again, the LGBTQ centric plot and the hard-to-imagine concept of a gay-conversion Christian camp is important and the movie does a great job at putting those storylines and themes on display. However, there just isn’t enough of a “punch” in the dramatic writing to put it over the top. With a topic so hard for most people to connect to and understand on a personal level, the writing and character development for the leads in the story has to be superb. They did a great job at laying out the horrors and struggles of what he was dealing with, but I felt walled off from fully getting a chance to connect to the character. Lucas Hedges, as always, turned in a stellar performance, but he could only do so much with what was given to him. It was clear what his story was, but it felt flat and, at times, rather hollow. ‘Boy Erased’ is a movie that should make a loud, emphatic noise with the subject matter it is handling but, despite some good elements, is far too much of a whimper to make it great.

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So ‘The Hate U Give’ clears the threshold for being Officially Buttered while we still have to wait for Trillballins’ score on ‘Boy Erased’. Subscribe to Lights, Camera, Barstool and remember to rate all 2018 movies below.