story nickel boy Absolutely terrible. directed by Rachel Ross The film is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s 2019 book of the same name and tells the story of Elwood (Ethan Harris), a young African American kid who has just been accepted into college, and his grandmother (Anjanu Ellis-Taylor) couldn’t be happier. When he first packed up and headed to school, he was stopped by the police, wrote down some fabricated false accusations, and was sent to Nickel Academy. There he met Turner (Brandon Wilson), apparently he had been there for a while. Turner befriends him and shows him ways to get out of trouble and survive. There, students must solve their alleged crimes, and once completed, they can leave. But, as you can bet, school administrators could easily find a way to prevent this from happening.
It’s a sad and deeply angry story, but the way it’s shot from Turner and Elwood’s perspectives is incredibly distracting. It took me completely out of the story and made it hard to really connect with any of the characters.
The first POV movie I watched was, The Blair Witch Project. It was really innovative for the time and it was scary, you never knew what was behind the character or what was going to happen next, just like the characters in the movie. It works fine for a horror movie, but what about a full-length drama?
you can definitely prove it nickel boy It’s a horror movie. There is no doubt that what these children have been through is horrific. The people in charge of that school are monsters, yes. But I wanted to see how the characters felt. I wanted to see how other characters felt and reacted when someone talked to them. Acting is reaction, and in POV, you only get 50% of the effect.
The cast is very good including Hamish Linklater As a teacher and Daveed Diggs As one of the older version of the character. I can only imagine how much praise the young actors would have received had it been filmed in a more traditional way.
Another thing that stood out to me about the movie was how off-screen the actors reacted to the characters they were talking to. When we observe the character’s point of view, they are less acting and more like reading lines. It’s like they have no investment in that particular moment off-screen.
The entire movie feels like a mash-up of self-tape footage.
