Picking Nits
No bodyguards; cash supply; McDonald's lawsuit; unexamined class tension
In the discussion (8)
Approx. transcript time · 01:37:01Read transcript
- The King of Zamunda wouldn't send his son to New York without bodyguards; outsmarting two bodyguards would have been a great wrinkle.
- Where did they keep getting cash, given the money clips and stolen suitcases, before bank cards?
- McDonald's would have sued McDowell's out of business quickly.
- Not a nit but a larger concern, implicit in Ebert's complaint and explicit in Armond White's: class and caste within Black life go unexamined, with Darryl xenophobic toward Akeem.
- The movie glosses over the problem: poverty is the joke, as with the landlord and tenant, and no jokes are aimed at higher-class people.
- A reply calls it a symptom of the times; movies were made for poor audiences who felt in on the joke, and the rich get jokes too, like Akeem not knowing how to use a mop.
- The social-climbing fathers are the closest thing to villains, while Darryl is the official bad guy and is rich.
- A dinner or repast scene with the Black Awareness Week community would have eased the class discrepancy.