Here Are The Lessons The Obamas Don’t Want You Taking Away From ‘Leave The World Behind’
'Leave the World Behind' is a reminder to fortify your family and not surrender to the fear porn.
The new Obama-produced Netflix flick "Leave the World Behind" has captured the hearts of conservatives everywhere — but not Jason Whitlock or actor Siaka Massaquoi.
According to Whitlock and Massaquoi, the film was a “hot mess,” and conservatives have been played.
The right fell prey to the doomsday and racist messaging the film relayed after fears and tensions that COVID and the BLM riots induced — and all too easily.
“There’s two things. One: it was just another subpar Netflix movie, and two: we as conservatives got got,” Massaquoi tells Whitlock.
“They literally told us how we got got in the movie,” Massaquoi continues, noting that the actors drop some very specific, and nostalgic, lines.
In one scene, the film mentions that the first and second of “three steps” are isolation and then disinformation.
In another, a black character tells another not to trust white people.
“I’m sitting there going, 'This is just stupid, and they trapped us in the idea that, ‘Look, Obama did something racist.'’ They got us, everyone, conservatives, Republicans. They got us working the same thing that we laugh at the left for,” Massaquoi comments.
Not even the actors could make up for the poor film.
“I remember thinking the first half hour, 'I don’t care what happens to these people,” Massaquoi tells Whitlock, adding, “It sucks that something happened, but in storytelling we’re supposed to care about these characters.”
In addition, the dialogue was full of swearing to create drama.
“The writing was so subpar,” Massaquoi continues, “when the characters wanted to make a point, they dropped the F-bomb. That didn’t fit. Everyone cursed the exact same way.”
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Former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama are being blasted on social media over a new movie they produced in which a character warns against trusting "white people."
The scene is from Netflix's apocalyptic film "Leave the World Behind," which the Obamas co-produced through their Higher Ground company — an outfit that focuses on projects about race, class, democracy, and civil rights, Newsweek said.
The movie shows a mixed-race daughter telling her black father, "I'm asking you to remember that if the world falls apart, trust should not be doled out easily to anyone, especially white people — even mom would agree with me on that."
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The deal is that a cyberattack has driven the world into chaos. A white family is renting a home on Long Island — and the father and daughter from the above scene show up to the house after a power outage in New York City, tell the white family they're the owners of the home they're renting, and ask if they can work out a deal to take refuge in the house as well.
The social commentary aspect is that Julia Roberts — who plays the wife and mother of the renters — comes across as racist for seeming surprised that black people could own such a stunning home.
It's not as though the Obamas weren't aware of the racism element or the scene in which the daughter tells her father that white people shouldn't be trusted too easily. In fact, Barack Obama gave notes to director Sam Esmail on his adapted screenplay, according to Vanity Fair.
“In the original drafts of the script, I definitely pushed things a lot farther than they were in the film, and President Obama, having the experience he does have, was able to ground me a little bit on how things might unfold in reality,” Esmail told the magazine. “I am writing what I think is fiction, for the most part, I’m trying to keep it as true to life as possible, but I’m exaggerating and dramatizing. And to hear an ex-president say you’re off by a few details. ... I thought I was off by a lot! The fact that he said that scared the f*** out of me.”
More than a few notable people are reacting negatively to the don't-trust-white-people scene — and the fact that the Obamas produced the film and knew about script details:
Others agreed:
But there's another perspective out there regarding the scene — taken in context with the movie as a whole. Journalist Brian Krassenstein took issue with all the Obama bashing and said that both families begin to trust each other and work together by the end of the movie.
"The whole moral of the story is to show how ridiculous our preconceived judgments of one another are, both white and black," Krassenstein wrote.
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When an X user asked Krassenstein, "Can you imagine Trump and Melania producing a movie with the phrase 'especially black people' in it though. You have to see the double standard here, it’s so blatantly obvious."
But Krassenstein replied, "If the movie concluded the way this one did I would praise it."
Bloomberg on Tuesday reported that "Leave the World Behind" — which began streaming Friday — is Netflix’s No. 1 picture globally, sits at the top position in 85 countries, and is the Obamas' first "hit" film.
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