Syndication Block Edits, The Fallow Fields of an Elijah Price Warp

Searching for the shining face of God Jean?-- Burt Lancaster, Scorpio

In the sense that poverty requires patience before gratification is achieved, it took courage for Coronji Calhoun to allow himself to be exposed as the obese kid who gets picked on by everyone, including his mother, in Monster’s Ball, but like the late 20^th century Big Night, one of my favorite Tucci films, Forster intends for Monster’s Ball to be a rather convoluted allegory of the post-civil rights era in the American South. The Amazon app announced that it was free to Prime subscribers the same evening Bounce, the black programming channel—which as often as not airs blockbuster setups with Sylvester Stallone on flimsy pretexts—made Ball available to viewers during the conventional prime time slots we all had to depend on before we were cable subscribers. Your poor dowager had a momentary tug of war. She cannot quite afford a streaming device for her flat screen, but needed her other devices free, thus opted to trust that the syndication edits did not diminish the full effect by any significant degree, as they did with Unbreakable.  As her beleaguered pessimism makes rather self-evident, the dowager has been slowing down to a terrible degree, never envisioning the crack of the powder keg crumpling me in to this extent, and thus, utilizing free broadcast to catch Elijah’s appalling rationale for his genocidal miniatures to Willis’ David Dunn, was what I tuned in for, except that this last muted monologue, the darkest of all megalomania’s expansive graphic excesses, is what Bounce chose to edit, in my precious expending of my energies, exasperating, but not nearly as much as Thornton’s conflicted correction officer, harboring a suppressed appetite for the dynamics of diversity in his sweet tooth for bowls of chocolate ice cream? Both Hank and Leticia have ambivalent relationships with their progeny, Heath Ledger is actually dead, with no real world repairs necessary for a Glock’s trajectory penetrating the furniture. What is Sean Combs here but a misguided, regressive boy hoping to evade a truant’s penalty? As Musgrove, he is the softer underbelly to the brittle ruthlessness Jackson’s Elijah exudes. Forster admirers may disagree, but I do not see reconciliation in the story’s conclusion, not in Halle’s speculative glance as she looks toward the headstones in the yard.

Both Shyamalan’s perspective on graphic novel culture and Forster’s powerful parable are turn of the century predicates, and Jackson’s portrayal of psychological malignancy is one of the greatest theatrical feats of this young century in which I perish, but there are still African stoic majorities who insist on an inflammatory deafness. Though I cannot weigh in on what penalties Weinstein may actually deserve, the culture of silence surrounding Cosby's behavior was broken by blacks themselves. Ta-Neshisi Coates, not known for emulating the once titanic comedian he covered for the Atlantic, is on record believing Cosby is guilty, and yet, this black free press still feels whites were out to punish Cosby. No, to the extent that the prosecutor acted, it was to placate feminine fury.