Whatever the fuck the right thing is

Dear White People

Crit

What a thrilling, exuberant, ironic, ambiguous, ambivalent, messy, funny, sad, scary, discomfiting gem of a film. A population of stereotypes is dropped into an ecosystem of race and rhetoric, some grow, some shrink, but except for the 3 outright villains--2 of them white, 2 of them university administrators--everybody becomes a genuine, complex person, with a personal and political turf of his or her own. A clueless white person would be inclined to predict that Justin Simien, writing and directing his first feature, will become his generation's Spike Lee. But I won't.

Funniest meta-moment: hearing Dean Fairbanks, played by small-screen whore (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) Dennis Haysbert, warning his son not to be one of the hordes of young black men scrambling to get on TV.