Gambi lives after all on Black Lightning, though he's still in hiding. I'm not sure I'm following this new story with Sange and Perdi people in South Freeland. The silver element is creepy, and I don't know why Looker hasn't aged for 30 years, yet Jefferson aged normally. I'm also tired of Tobias Whale constantly threatening and attacking Khalil; it's so repetitive and uninteresting.
On my day off I went to see both Widows and Green Book, which I had been waiting for.
SPOILERS BELOW
I knew that Widows was a darker, more serious drama than the Ocean's Eight heist movie earlier this year, but I didn't expect it to be so political as well. It's not just that the dead husbands were career thieves, and stole from criminal boss Jamal Manning. It's that the men kept secrets and mistreated their wives, leaving them stuck with the consequences of their actions. Veronica is given a 1-month deadline to repay $2 million to Manning, and that coincides with 1 month to a special election for alderman.
Manning is trying to go legitimate by running for office against Jack Mulligan, heir to a sort of political dynasty in the area. The oorrupt Chicago politicians are just as dirty and ruthless as gang bosses. Mulligan tries to court voters and make backroom deals, including secretly financing the deadly robbery at the beginning of the movie. Mulligan's father keeps trying to control his son's campaign and makes racist remarks. Meanwhile, Manning orders his brother to leave the widows alone for the moment, but brother Jatemme disobeys by following the women around and trying to hijack their heist to make himself rich. I really didn't enjoy Jatemme torturing and killing people for information. Such a sadistic bastard.
Veronica's interracial marriage with Harry is also a major theme; we get numerous flashbacks to their marriage, including a scene of their young son getting killed during a traffic stop. The grief causes Marcus's parents to fight and blame themselves about the tragedy. As to the other widows, I was somewhat confused that only Alice and Linda joined Veronica at first, and then it took a while before they hired the last woman as the getaway driver of the group. She's not even a widow and barely knows them, yet they choose to trust her. (I guess it's like Ocean's took a while to reveal that the Anne Hathaway character decided to join the heist.) I'm just a little disappointed that the ending was somewhat vague about the Alice character, after she gets shot. She obviously recovered but I wasn't sure if she was living a new life under the alias Jennifer, and who she was meeting with in the diner. Wikipedia claims that she's starting a new business, so I guess I didn't hear enough of the conversation due to being focused on Veronica showing up too.
As for Green Book, I enjoyed it a lot. It was funny as well as serious at some moments. Apparently the real tour was 18 months long, not the mere 2 months in the movie. That would have been more realistic for Don Shirley to worry that a married man shouldn't be gone that long from his family. The only part I didn't really like was the traffic stop while they drove home from the tour. The cop there was helpful to them, but Don Shirley had made a point earlier that discrimination and prejudice also occur in the North, not just the South, so I found it a little too optimistic that this traffic stop went okay just because they were back north again. That was my only complaint, though.
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