You People

So, You People on Netflix. I have thoughts.  And none of them positive. 

(Reprinted in part from my Twitter multi-post).

First off, on a simple, artistic level how the hell did they get this many excellent comedic actors in a movie this unspeakably bad? David Duchovny, Julia Louis Dreyfus, Rhea Pearlman, Matt Walsh, Nelson Franklin, and Eddie frickin' Murphy, but not a single laugh between any of them.

But not only is it horrifically unfunny, its racial politics are also genuinely grotesque. Now, to be clear, I tend to roll my eyes when films and TV shows are criticized for being "woke" because normally such criticisms come from basement dwellers whinging about women or minorities having the audacity to, you know, be represented on screen, but this film is pretty powerful proof that there is a serious argument to be made against "woke" identity politics from a liberal, (centre-)lefty perspective. 

You People is clearly, by today's standards, entirely "politically correct" because it peddles in exactly the kind of bigotry and blithe stereotyping that is deemed socially acceptable by those on the far left. 

While being super careful to tip-toe around the merest suggestion that black people are anything but eternal victims with an absolute monopoly on historic injustice, the film is quick to make the Jewish characters the butt of every single joke. It seems more than happy to laugh off Nation of Islam leader Louis Farakhan's open Jew-hatred and the ensuing rise in black antisemitism that has directly risen from his "black Israelite" rhetoric, while also not-so-subtly erasing Jewish identity as anything other than being an overly privileged, if sometimes quite weird, subset of the world's most reviled race... "white people". 

David Baddiel's claim that "Jews don't count" is becoming truer by the day. 

Now, maybe I am merely being oversensitive. You People is just a disposable romcom, after all, whose biggest crimes are really more against comedy than good taste. But I am normally a big defender of comedy being allowed to push the boundaries of what is acceptable and firmly believe that self-deprecation has always been central to Jewish comedy, in particular. See everyone from Woody Allen to Sasha Baron Cohen to, of course, Larry David for examples that are often much more extreme than the lazy stereotyping on display here. And none of these are any more or less Jewish than co-writer and star Jonah Hill (who has also been very funny in the past for what it's worth...), so my problem certainly isn't that the Jewish jokes are coming from "outside the tribe" here.

Any yet, there's just something unbearably sanctimonious about this film; a sense of self-righteousness about its racial attitudes that is tone-deaf at best and genuinely, alarmingly hypocritical, at worst. It's really no wonder that after spending the previous couple of hours infantilizing black people, villainizing white people, and negating Jewish people, it's kumbaya, we're-all-in-this-together ending rings so very false. 

Avoid this bastard thing like the plague. It's really, really horrible. 

0/10