“The whole thing looks like it was shot on a first-gen iPad”

It should be easy enough to look past the trepanning of Percival Everett’s Erasure into a bowdlerized, palatable awards season entertainment. Sure, writer-director Cord Jefferson stripped out the novel’s abortion rights subplot just before an election year. Yes, he rewrote Everett’s unsentimental plot beats into something befitting a Hallmark Movie of the Month, and shrunk the riotous My Pafology mini-novella into a single, unimaginative scene. He even allowed Sintara Golden, author of the repugnant We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, to seem like the reasonable one. The jokes are bad. The soundtrack blows. The film just…sort of ends? Not to mention how the whole thing looks like it was shot on a first-gen iPad. (And the portions are small.) Yet books are not movies, though sometimes they’re both awful. One even forgives the tremendously undeserved Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, because they hand out bullshit Oscars almost all the time. But something odious happened when, rather than

It should be easy enough to look past the trepanning of Percival Everett’s Erasure into a bowdlerized, palatable awards season entertainment. Sure, writer-director Cord Jefferson stripped out the novel’s abortion rights subplot just before an election year. Yes, he rewrote Everett’s unsentimental plot beats into something befitting a Hallmark Movie of the Month, and shrunk the riotous My Pafology mini-novella into a single, unimaginative scene. He even allowed Sintara Golden, author of the repugnant We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, to seem like the reasonable one. The jokes are bad. The soundtrack blo