I'm at a loss for how to explain a film like Karen so that it will read intelligibly a few years from now; so that future generations might fathom what the base concept even was. How would you explain how we got here, where it started, and how there are still people -- actual, sentient humans -- who try to argue that the name Karen is effectively an N-word-level "slur" now?
"Yeah so there was this era of online culture where we observed that quite many privileged middle-aged white women, usually named something like Karen, would throw gigantic fits over the faintest customer-service inconvenience, seeing 'blacks' in their neighborhood, being asked to wear a mask in the midst of a global pandemic (yes, this was an actual thing people got angry at), and whatever more left-leaning variants of this newfangled archetype got mad about. Then, because Hollywood is famously good at understanding Internet memes and not being remotely off-base, they made this film where... Wait, where are you going?"
In any case, we now have Karen: The Movie, plastering the words "CRAZY ENTITLED RACIST" all over its poster in the most effective display of subtlety since the Hiroshima bombing. It also uses "I want the manager" as its tagline - as in, it literally just puts the reference there and doesn't make it sound like, oh, an actual tagline
The script isn't much cleverer, dolling out played-out reference after played-out reference like someone took a bunch of Karen tweets, listed them, and wrote a Get Out wannabe around it. It might explain why some of these Karen-isms appear in the places they do. The movie is Pretty Sure™ that the Karen archetype likes to summon "the manager" or whatever, but has her say the famous line when she's warning a group of black restaurant patrons to keep it down, lest she alert the owner of the establishment.
In reality, the Karen usually inquires about the manager when she's mad at THE STAFF or the "poor" service provided (the scene might have worked if a waitress had refused to toss out the pesky black people and thus prompted Karen to call for the manager). This idea for a movie would've been galactically idiotic even if the filmmakers actually knew their "Karen" anecdotes inside and out. As it stands, this is a fundamentally idiotic idea, executed sloppily by people wanting to cash in on Internet trends and/or the popularity of Jordan Peele - whose films are both scarier and more (intentionally) funny than this. I don't know if these guys have ever seen a real Karen scenario play out themselves, or heard humans speak for that matter.
Like this wasn't embarrassing enough to anyone who actually understands meme culture, IMDb claims that this is the "third" film to ever (like, literally ever) be based around Internet memes. The trivia section reads: "This is the third movie based on a meme, with titles such as Smiley (2012), and Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever (2014)." (Yes that's where the sentence ends.)
First of all: f-ck you for reminding me of (A) the fact that someone made a Grumpy Cat movie, and (B) that painful transitionary period where we all had to accept that names like Tobuscus and Shane Dawson can now appear in actual film credits. Secondly, is it really so hard to look up films like Feels Good Man (now also known as the more marketable Pepe the Frog), which may be the most thorough and relevant "meme movie" ever made and certainly the most in-tune?
What about movies like Cuck, or TFW NO GF? And what of such web-savvy masterpieces as Ralph Breaks the Internet and Space Jam: A New Legacy, if those even count as films at this point? What even ARE movies now? What have you maniacs done?
