ALEX FARBA

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Summary: Highly overrated minor film that won the guilty conscience Oscar of 2017

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I finally caught up with this year's Questionable Oscar winner, "Black Moonlight" last night. in Budapest. Like everyone else I was curious to see what all the noise around this picture was all about.  It turned out to be a fairly attention holding film, amateurishly made, but well acted with a good story, and certainly not quite as bad as that piece of mainstream crap, LalaPaloozaland, which it snuck in over at the Oscars. A great film, No -- but a pretty okay one, okay, yes -- notable for the fact that it makes you almost forget that every single actor in the movie is Afro-American and obliges you to just concentrate on the story and the plight of Chiron, the central figure with a sexual orientation problem. But really primitive in terms of production values and, if you stay for the end credits you'll see that no less a Hollywood high roller than Brat Pitt was Executive Director -- (obviously trying to hop onto the Combat Oscar Racism bandwagon -- to maybe salvage his sullied private image for leaving wife Angela Jolie, mother of many, in the lurch?).

The film plays out in three parts; Part one, the neglected childhood of Chiron the child is very good and Mahershala Ali was riveting as the muscular drug dealer who takes a fatherly shine to the abandoned boy. His Best supporting Actor Oscar was very well deserved although he appears only in Part 1. The acting of the boy was also notable. Part 2, Adolescence, during which Chiron has his first, and apparent only, homosexual experience, is weaker, but still okay. In part three the one time teenage lovers are reunited years later in a tense overly drawn out conclusion that is well acted but badly cast and feels like a self conscious add-on. Adult Chiron looks absolutely nothing like his earlier versions and his first and only lover has since been married and fathered a child. The conclusion which is full of potential ends having no sense of closure conviction. One distracting device used in the picture is lengthy blackouts instead of cuts between scenes which reeks of low-rent more than stylistic decision. Altogether, a respectable low budget effort but nowhere near what is to be expected from an Oscar contender, let alone a winner. This was obviously a Guilty Conscience Booby prize. Sorry, but facts are facts and the mistaken winner attribution at the Oscar ceremony by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway was the perfect absurd touch to an absurd Best Film award.