Actually, I don’t think Three Billboards remotely cares if it is viewed as “woke”.

The movie wasn’t really about racism or violence, it was about anger. Most of the actions taken by the two leads were driven by anger, and any perceived redemption arc for either character was about them learning to let go of their anger, though the movie ends before it’s clear whether or not the lessons they learned…

Which is fine for me as how often do you think bigots really change? It made the film feel more real rather than some pablum where he reforms and sees the error of his ways

He gets fired and gets half his face burnt off. It’s not as though the film does not ‘punish’ him.

He made In Bruges, and that is fantastic. Maybe you should see it before you declare the fatwa.

this whole outrage as the new and undisputed form of social currency is wearing me thin, I tell ya.

Didn’t we used to mock old movies where everything was black and white, good and evil, and embrace it when they started being more nuanced and complicated? Now we’re just reverting back because people are just too fucking stupid to understand moral complexity or to be challenged in even the slightest way. These…

The idea that it’s “offensive” to suggest we might see our preferred cultural targets as anything less than one-dimensional monsters is a reminder that when people say they like art that’s “challenging” and “subversive”, they don’t really mean it.

So we just have to bitch about everything now, huh? That’s fun.

So, we complain about the trend of movies bowing to audience expectations, and then we slam movies for not being as woke (or the wrong kind of woke) as we expect them to be?

I know it’s your job to make snarky jokes aimed mostly at low-hanging fruit, and Maher qualifies as such around here since he says unapproved things about Islam and makes racially questionable jokes. Nonetheless - if you want to know why he interviewed Ken Bone, you only have to listen to the interview.