Jack and I loved this edgy, cringy satire about black students at a mostly white Ivy League college. Director/writer Justin Simien is making a big splash in his feature debut and began racking up wins with the Sundance Special Jury Prize for Breakthough Talent early this year. Tyler James Williams (88 episodes of Everybody Hates Chris (2005-09) and 19 of Go On (2012-13)) and Tessa Thompson (new to me) star as Lionel Higgins and Sam White, ably supported by Teyonah Parris (played Don's secretary Dawn in Mad Men with radically different hair) and Brandon P Bell (haven't seen him before, either) as Coco Connors and Troy Fairbanks. I'm giving you their last names because I think the contrast between "Lionel Higgins" and "Troy Fairbanks" is both vast and humorous. Dennis Haysbert (of his 113 credits I remember liking best Love Field (1992) Waiting to Exhale (1995), Far from Heaven (2002), a lot of TV including President David Palmer on 24, and his Allstate commercials) lends his gravitas and booming bass voice to the role of Dean Fairbanks.
Simien has a twitter page for the movie and I read somewhere that he used quotes from it in the movie. However, now that the movie is out, the twitter feed is different and I can't get far enough down to verify.
Although a composer, Kathryn Bostic, is in the credits, nothing by her is on the album, and her own website features an alternate trailer with classical music. Here's the more oft-played trailer. They're both very funny, and, if you like them, you're likely to agree with Jack, me, and the Rotten Tomatoes critics, who are averaging 91%, as opposed to its less agreeable audiences, coming in at 71%.
Don't run out of the room before the credits are over, because there will be photos of actual events at actual colleges that relate to the story.
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