#Anonymous Content

[whileiamdying]

Great Books Don’t Make Great Films, but “Nickel Boys” Is a Glorious Exception

RaMell Ross’s first dramatic feature, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel, gives the bearing of witness an arresting cinematic form.

By Richard Brody December 6, 2024

It’s harder to adapt a great book than an average one. Literary greatness often inhibits directors, who end up paying prudent homage to the source rather than engaging in the bold revisions that successful adaptations require. And even uninhibited directors may lack the stylistic originality of their literary heroes. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that the director RaMell Ross, in his first dramatic feature, “Nickel Boys”—adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel, “The Nickel Boys”—avoids both obstacles with a rare blend of daring and ingenuity. Few films have ever rendered a major work of fiction so innovatively yet so faithfully. In a year of audaciously accomplished movies, “Nickel Boys” stands out as different in kind. Ross, who co-wrote the script with Joslyn Barnes, achieves an advance in narrative form, one that singularly befits the movie’s subject—not just dramatically but historically and morally, too.

The movie’s title refers to Black youths (teens and younger) who are inmates of the Nickel Academy, a segregated and abusive “reform school” in rural northern Florida—particularly to two teen-agers, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who become friends while incarcerated there, in the mid-nineteen-sixties. (The institution in Whitehead’s novel is inspired by the notorious Dozier School for Boys, but his characters are fictional.) Elwood, who is sixteen years old when he enters the facility, is being raised by his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who works on the cleaning staff of a hotel. He’s a star student, literary and politically passionate, in a segregated school. One of his teachers, Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), is a civil-rights activist, and he plays a Martin Luther King, Jr., speech on a record for his students. Elwood gets his picture in a local newspaper for participating in a civil-rights demonstration, but he’s only holding a sign; he longs to join in civil disobedience, but Hattie seems skeptical about the idea. Hitchhiking to a nearby college for advanced classes, he gets a ride from a flashily dressed, fast-talking Black man (Taraja Ramsess) whose car, unbeknownst to Elwood, is stolen. When the police pull the driver over, the innocent Elwood, too, is punished, resulting in his internment in Nickel.

From the start, Ross throws down a stylistic gauntlet: up until Elwood’s imprisonment, the action is seen entirely from his point of view—literally so, as if the camera were in the place occupied by his head, pivoting and tilting to show his shifting gaze, while his voice is heard offscreen. This device was famously used by Robert Montgomery in his 1947 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s “The Lady in the Lake,” but it was no more than a gimmick. In Ross’s hands, the device becomes something overwhelmingly expressive: the images, rather than merely recording Elwood’s emotions, register the cause of those emotions and allow the viewer to partake in his inner world.

The results can be puckish, as when Elwood’s reflection appears in the chrome side of the iron that Hattie is sliding across an ironing board. But Ross’s technique is exquisitely responsive to the story’s depth and range of experience. The viewer shares Elwood’s naïve bewilderment when the driver of the stolen car, hearing a police siren, tells him not to turn around; similarly, one feels the anguished anticipation when Elwood awaits transport to Nickel. At this point, an extraordinary scene tears a hole in time, bringing the history of Black American life rushing in to overtake Elwood’s own: Hattie, with an air of unusual formality and seething indignation, recalls in excruciating detail her father’s death in police custody and her husband’s death at the hands of white assailants. But she expects better for Elwood.

Once the police have deposited Elwood in Nickel’s run-down barracks for Black inmates, Ross extends the dramatic force of his method while expanding its intellectual scope. At breakfast, Elwood meets Turner, who’s from Houston and much more streetwise. The impact of this moment is heralded in a coup de cinéma that is a vast amplification of the story: a repetition of the breakfast-table encounter, seen, the second time around, from Turner’s point of view. Once the pair become friends, both of their perspectives share the film, to mighty effect.

Elwood’s wrongful detention is only the first of the Job-like litany of injustices heaped upon him. In Nickel, sucker-punched and knocked out by a bigger kid, Elwood receives the same standard and brutal punishment as his assailant. Nickel’s sadistic supervisor, Mr. Spencer (Hamish Linklater), who is white, administers beatings with a strap in the so-called white house, far from the barracks. An industrial fan is used to drown out the victims’ screams, but it doesn’t quite do so, and Elwood, with his view of the horrors obstructed, hears them in terror while awaiting his turn.

Hospitalized as a result of the beating, Elwood gets a surprise visit from Turner, who’s also a patient (having skillfully feigned illness). Turner warns him that there are still worse punishments menacing the Nickel inmates, ranging from the sweat box—a brutally hot crawl space under a tar roof—to actual murder. (Such deaths were covered up by burial in unmarked graves and an official lie that the child ran away without a trace.) Elwood, inspired by the civil-rights movement and knowing that his grandmother has hired a lawyer, is confident that justice will prevail. He even keeps a notebook in which he records unpaid labor and which he thinks will help get Nickel shut down. Turner has no such confidence, insisting that no one gets out of Nickel alive except by getting himself out. The two teens’ visual perspectives, alternating through the hospital scene, embody their diametrically opposed views of American society, of their prospects, and of the destinies that await them.

Through Elwood’s and Turner’s eyes, in scenes that unfold in long and complex takes, the movie offers a formidable fullness of incident, intimately physical detail, and finely nuanced observations. The corruption of Nickel’s administrators and the legitimized absurdities of their cruel regime come to light as they’re experienced by the two teens, as do Hattie’s struggles to stay connected with Elwood and to seek legal relief. Lyrical snatches of daily life—passing moments of grace on a job outside Nickel’s grounds or during free moments in a rec room—are haunted by traces of past brutality and flickers of menace. Ross stages the action with a choreographic virtuosity that’s all the more astonishing given that this is his first dramatic film. (His previous feature, from 2018, is the documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.”) His teeming visual imagination is matched by the agile physicality of Jomo Fray’s cinematography. As a first dramatic feature, “Nickel Boys” is in the exalted company of such films as Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust.” Like them, it comprehensively creates a new way of capturing immediate experience cinematically, a new aesthetic for dramatizing history and memory.

Early on, the action is set in historical perspective by means of flash-forwards. Eventually, there are revelations about the atrocities at Nickel; the grounds are excavated, and human remains discovered. One of the friends (played as an adult by Daveed Diggs) gets wind of these investigations, having in the intervening years made his way to New York, found employment as a mover, and started his own business. In this later time frame, Ross continues to rely on point-of-view images, but with a piercing difference. The camera now floats just behind the character’s head, depicting work and home, love stories and painful reunions, fleeting observations and a reckoning with the past, as if from two points of view simultaneously—one visual and one spectral, bringing absence to life along with presence.

The onscreen incarnation of Elwood’s and Turner’s perceptions isn’t only intellectual or theoretical. The moral essence of Ross’s technique is to give cinematic form to the bearing of witness. Where Whitehead’s novel describes his characters’ physical torments in the third person, with psychological discernment and declarative precision, Ross’s movie fuses observation and sensation with its audiovisual style. It suggests a form of testimony beyond language, outside the reach of law and outside the historical record. It is a revelation of inner experience that starts with the body and all too often remains sealed off there and lost to time—except to the extent that the piece of art can conjure it into existence.

The movie’s twin aspects of witness and of point of view have a significance that extends beyond the drama and into cinematic history. There were no Black directors in Hollywood until the late sixties, and no Hollywood films that conveyed then what “Nickel Boys” shows in retrospect: the monstrous abuses of the Jim Crow era and its vestiges. In bringing the historical reckonings of Whitehead’s novel to the screen, Ross hints at an entire history of cinema that doesn’t exist—a bearing of witness that didn’t happen and the lives that were lost in that invisible silence. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 16, 2024, issue, with the headline “Each Other’s Back.”

Directed by: RaMell Ross Screenplay by RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes Based onThe Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead Produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, David Levine, Joslyn Barnes Starring: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Cinematography: Jomo Fray Edited by Nicholas Monsour Music by Alex Somers and Scott Alario Production: Orion Pictures, Plan B Entertainment, Louverture Films, Anonymous Content Distributed by Amazon MGM Studios Release Dates: August 30, 2024 (Telluride) December 13, 2024 (United States) Running time140 minutes Country: United States Language: English

[gethighdropacidneverdie]

WHAT PRODUCTIONS??

[tv-moments]

True Detective: Night Country

Season 4, “Part 6”

Director: Issa López

DoP: Florian Hoffmeister

[cevans-is-classic]

I saw that you lost the ask😂

It’s okay! If you’re down for writing it though, I’ll definitely read it :)

Scream It

So the background for this is that I took it from a homelander story I write when I'm stressed out.

That story will never see the light of day but I figured why not use a scene from it anyway.

I edited it up and spruced it a bit.

I hope you like it 😅😅

[moviesframes]

The Marsh King's Daughter (2023)

Directed by Neil Burger

Cinematography by Alwin H. Küchler

[sebastiancroftupdates]

Congratulations Bash! 🤩

"Sebastian Croft has signed for representation with Anonymous Content

The British actor has signed with the agency in all areas. He continues to be represented by Greg Herst at UK-based CVGG and attorney Lucy Popkin at Goodman, Genow, Schenkman, Smelkinson & Christopher."

🔗 https://deadline.com/2024/02/heartstopper-sebastian-croft-anonymous-content-

[lettersoflustandlove]

If you're racist, which includes anything along the line of "that race of people aren't my cup of tea," please unfollow this blog

@lettersoflustandlove is a submission blog for all races. This blog will repost posts of all races, just like this blog will repost posts for all sexualities; this isn't going to stop

[graphicpolicy]

Impact Winter Gets Graphic Novel Collection Release This Fall

Impact Winter Gets Graphic Novel Collection Release This Fall #comics #comicbooks

Skybound, Image Comics, Anonymous Content, and Audible, have announced a graphic novel based on the #1 Audible Original of 2022, Impact Winter. The post-apocalyptic prequel from Audible series creator/writer Travis Beacham will collect Impact Winter #1, Impact Winter: Rook #1, and the upcoming Impact Winter: Evenfall #1 and will be available everywhere books are sold October 15, 2024.   Darcy, a…

[cosycryptid]

Modern AU where the party have a famous paranormal investigation and unsolved mysteries youtube channel. Steve is in the background of their first ghost hunting video because he wasn't going to let them go and stay overnight in an abandoned building without supervision. Their audience finds Steve's sarcastic comments and parental attitude towards the kids really compelling and most of the comments on that video are begging for him to become a regular in their on location videos. Before long, Steve is a reoccurring presence in their videos playing the skeptic/concerned parent role.

For example:

Dustin: I’ve connected the dots guys. This must be the work of a demon.

Steve: You didn’t connect shit. It's just an old creaky building.

Dustin: I’ve connected them.

—————————————

In an abandoned hospital.

Max: Hey this giant metal door has some kind of engraving on it.

Lucas: Oh cool, it looks like old graffiti.

Steve: Yeah that’s great, do you know what else it looks like? Rusty as shit. Now get back here and don’t touch anything because your parents are gonna be so pissed if they find out you had to get tetanus shots at 2am on a Saturday because I let you wander around an abandoned hospital with a bunch of shady ass camera men. No offense.

Camera man: None taken.

Mike (from the doorway): Guys! Will, El and Dustin found an operating theatre and there are a bunch of old scalpels and needles and stuff in there.

Max: Awesome, let’s go.

Steve: No! No! Let’s not go! Let’s stay as far away as possible from the room full of potential infections. Where are Dustin, El and Will? They didn’t go inside the room, did they?

Mike: See, I could answer that, but I don’t think you’re gonna like it.

—————————————

While exploring a ‘haunted’ hotel:

Mike: Hey look, all of Steve’s bitches are in this room.

El: There is nobody in there.

Mike: Exactly.

He turns to look directly into the camera with a sly grin and the others start laughing.

Steve: Yeah, yeah. You’ll be laughing when I drive home without you.

—————————————

At the same hotel.

Steve: Dustin. Your little light box thing is broken, it’s been flashing on and off for the past five minutes.

Dustin: Oh my God, Steve! That means it can sense a spirit. Why didn’t you say anything?! Did you not listen to my long and detailed explanation of how the equipment works?

Steve: I’m gonna be so honest with you. No, I didn’t.

—————————————

On their Mothman episode trip to point pleasant.

Steve, staring at the statue (we all know which one): Ok, but why is he kinda…

Lucas: Please stop talking.

Dustin: No sexualising the cryptids please, Steve.

Steve: If they didn’t want anyone to sexualise Mothman, then why would they give his statue such a defined ass and abs?

Max: I mean, he’s not wrong.

—————————————

Eventually, Steve gets peer pressured by the comments into starting his own channel. And since he still has no idea what he wants to do with his life, he decides to go ahead and do it.

At first his audience are super confused because his content is a hard pivot from the supernatural and unsolved mysteries content people are used to seeing him in. He mainly reacts to DIY haircare videos and gives tips on how to do what the people in the videos were trying to do properly without risking ending up bald.

He also makes wholesome baking videos, and has a side podcast with Robin, where they talk shit for 3 hours about anything they want - usually celebrities and assholes on the internet - as well as having a segment where Robin makes Steve watch a movie he's never seen and they review it. People who came from the paranormal channel still love his content because he’s funny and sassy and his videos are surprisingly helpful at times. He’s soon catching up to his friends in subscriber numbers.

Eddie and his band have a channel where they upload music videos, live performances and backstage/tour vlogs. They also make the occassional song covers where they take requests in the comments for metal versions of pop songs. Eddie also has a side channel where he runs D&D campaigns with other influencers (he hates that word).

One day he’s doing a Q&A and when someone asks which influencers he’d like to invite for his next campaign, he mentions Steve and says he’s been secretly watching his videos for a while and they’re kind of a guilty pleasure. He’s even tried some of Steve’s hair care tips because his hair was looking a bit frazzled under the heat of the lights on stage and it was getting in his way during performances. Now he swears by them because his hair has never looked or felt better.

Steve’s never seen any of Eddie’s videos but he starts watching them after that, he particularly likes the metal versions of pop songs because it makes the genre more accessible to him. Sometimes he makes joke song suggestions in the comments. Every single time, the song he suggested gets covered.

The boys are all insanely jealous of this new development because they’ve been fans of Eddie’s channels for years and have been bringing up references to some of his campaigns in their videos to try and get him to consider them for the next one, but so far have had no luck. Meanwhile, Steve, who doesn’t even know the first thing about D&D has his full attention. Steve was going to ask Eddie to consider asking them out of the kindness of his heart, but after they’ve given him a little too much attitude over it, he decides he’s gonna join the campaign instead just to spite them.

Cue Steve going from completely clueless to kind of a decent player and the two of them going from fascinated with each other to constantly flirting and appearing in each other’s videos.

[divorcedtom]

SEVERANCE 2.05 - "Trojan's Horse"

[tv-moments]

True Detective: Night Country

Season 4, “Part 4”

Director: Issa López

DoP: Florian Hoffmeister

[cevans-is-classic]

Bestie gave you seen sebastian’s new bald look? 😭 ofc i immediately thought at the scenario where her is going down on reader and she complains because there is no hair to hold onto

No I saw it and my only thought was "Rub it for luck" 🤣🤣🤣🤣

OMG, RUB IT FOR LUCK! Excuse me, I have an idea

[lettersoflustandlove]

Hello, wonderful souls! 🤍🌍

I hope you're doing well. 🌿

Could you help me amplify my family's story and bring awareness to our struggle? 🙏🏻

💬 Please reblog my pinned post or consider donating just $5—your support could truly make a difference in saving lives amidst war and hardship.

Your kindness and voice matter more than you know. Thank you from the bottom of my heart! 🤍🌿

🕊️ @mosabsdr | Every share counts. 💫

Hey everyone, a new wave of spam bots dropped

[ddarker-dreams]

hiya lock!! 💖 what are your thoughts on sunday hsr? i'd love if you wrote something for him someday!

hmmmmmmmmmmmm yandere sunday.... the inbox has made their interest in bird man known. here are some of my initial, basic thoughts:

he's controlling (surprise, surprise) but favors an 'organic' approach over clipping your wings outright. that would be an absolute last resort, prompted by your life being in mortal danger. he wants to help guide you to conclusions he's made long ago. this way, you're less likely to resist a philosophy you've adopted for yourself. it's a given that sentient beings don't want their free will infringed upon. recognizing this, he settles for the more time-consuming approach of overseeing your life from afar and uses direct course correction sparingly.

should you catch on, confronting him directly doesn't lead to an escalation like one might expect. he'll hear you out without twisting your words or using intimidation tactics. once you're finished, he'll present his own argument: haven't you been happier since he's entered your life? he'll acknowledge that 'happiness', qualia that it is, though difficult to measure, can still be tracked. there's a reason he's asked about your emotional state so often. since removing stressors in your life, you've been in higher spirits. isn't that a good thing?

issues such as privacy and autonomy don't do much for him. what good is freedom if it means wandering in the wilderness? isn't it better to be taken care of? hunger, thirst, physical ailments; alleviating these troubles has been at the forefront of civilization's development. this is his all-consuming empathy. it envelops you whole and chains you in place with velvety soft restraints. his sincerity is almost distressing; how can you challenge what he believes is in your best interest?

"a cornered fledgling will struggle against those trying to save it," he'll say. "this struggle is natural; a forgivable instinct. the rescuer must carry on despite this resistance. if they don't, aren't they complicit in whatever misfortune befalls the wounded creature?"

[bigidiotenergytm]

I'm going to make a one shot for the FMTD au, that's just a what if Heracles and Odysseus fell in love

gay pride everyone 🏳️‍🌈

[canisalbus]

I know you have your little umbreon/claydol sona you use to represent yourself occasionally, but I just keep envisioning you as some kind of conch snail delicately peeking it's eyestalks out cautiously, before throwing artwork on par with Italian Renaissance painters into the fucking wind

Real life footage of tumblr user canisalbus.