All articles tagged with #social satire
Eddington, directed by Ari Aster and starring Joaquin Phoenix, is a darkly comic social satire set in a fictional New Mexico town during the early COVID pandemic, exploring themes of misinformation, social media influence, and societal division through exaggerated characters and bleak humor.
Adelle Waldman's novel "Help Wanted" is an acidic comedy that delves into the contemporary American class system, focusing on the struggles of workers at a big-box mega-retailer. The novel offers a finely honed account of the economic trap faced by the working poor, portraying the global economic prison with humor and anger. Through its portrayal of communal experiences and manipulation within a rigged system, "Help Wanted" serves as both a novel of manners and a systems novel, shedding light on the intimate link between these apparently disparate genres.
"The Blackening" is a slasher movie that doubles as a social satire, with a script full of comical self-awareness. The film is a highly barbed and witty riff on Black in-jokes, Black pop-culture referentiality, and Blackness itself. The movie culminates in the killer asking the group's members to save themselves by sacrificing the one of them who's "the Blackest." The very notion of being "the Blackest" is a self-destructive power trip. The film invites everyone in the audience to feel included in its diabolically socially competitive, naughty-clever games.