For movie night this weekend, we actually went to a movie in a theater, for a change: Sinners (2025), about twin brothers fighting vampires in the Mississippi Delta in 1932.
The first hour is quite naturalistic: Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan in a dual role) return to the Deep Delta from their gangster career in Chicago with a lot of money and Irish booze, buy the old abandoned mill from a klansman who says he's not a klansman, and organize a juke party. We get the sense of the vast emptiness of the cotton fields, and the terror of everyday life for African-Americans in the Jim Crow South.
You had to be very careful; glance at or speak to a white woman, accidentally bump into a white man, and you would be attacked. Gay people live with a similar fear -- hold hands with your boyfriend or display a Pride flag, and you could get attacked or killed. But at least heteronormativity ensures that most gay people are assumed straight, and can keep hidden in the riskiest situations. Most African-Americans could not.
Left: Michael B. Jordan
The brothers pick up Preacher Boy (Miles Caton), who is torn between the church and the guitar (which his Preacher father calls Satanic). After he agrees to perform tonight, they split up.
Stack and Preacher Boy go to town, where they recurit another performer, the elderly, alcoholic Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo).
They hire shopkeeper Bo Chow (Yao) to make up signs and fry the catfish.
They pull Cornbread (Omar Miller) from the cotton fields to act as bouncer.
The brothers are so intimate that I was sure that one or both would be gay, but heteronormativity is running rampant. Both of them, and Preacher Boy, get girlfriends, whom they have s*x with, one after the other.
1. Stack with his ex-girlfriend Mary, who is an octaroon (one-eighth black), so Jim Crow laws still apply to her.
2. Smoke with his estranged wife Annie (Wummi Musaku). She's rather old , so I thought she was his mother until they started doing things.
She's also quite butch, so I figured that the actress must be a lesbian. LezWatch says that she is cisgender, unspecified sexual identity, but she has played at least three queer characters.
3. Preacher Boy with Pearline, a married singer. Fortunately, her husband isn't around.
It keeps going like that. Bo Chow has a wife (we learn their favorite s*xual activity). Cornbread has a pregnant wife. Delroy Slim isn't married, but discusses the hetero exploits of his youth.
Left: Michael A. Newcomer, who plays a bartender in a white joint, is gay in real life.
Vampires after the break
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