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‘Bushwick’ Trashes Southerners as Racist Killers

Talk about lousy timing.

Films can take years from inspiration to the big screen. Sometimes during that process the zeitgeist catches up to a project in amazing ways.

That doesn’t appear to be the case with “Bushwick.”

The thriller, which enjoyed a cushy spot in the current Sundance Film Festival lineup, leans on the notion that Texans want to secede from the country. That’s so 2016.

Today, it’s Californians who crave just that following the improbable Election Day victory of Donald Trump. Haven’t you heard of Calexit?

The film doesn’t just miss the cultural mood, though. It’s yet another cheap shot at southern America. “Bushwick,” according to early reports, paints the secessionist movement as racist, violent and willing to indiscriminately kill anyone who doesn’t believe in their cause.

Consider it Hollywood’s first bigoted response to the Age of Trump.

Brittany Snow and Dave Bautista (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) star as unlikely duo trying to survive after a group invades the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Variety offers some critical background:

Inspired by (sensationalized) reports that former Texas Gov. Rick Perry was advocating the state secede from the Union after the election of President Obama, the invading military presence in “Bushwick” turns out to be a consortium of soldiers from multiple Southern states looking to force the government’s hand in ratifying a multi-state secession. They’re focused on areas like Bushwick because the “ethno-diversity” there is believed to make it for easy targets to occupy.

TheVerge.com offers more insights, partly from a Sundance Q&A featuring “Bushwick” directors Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott.

Instead of Americans banding together to rise up against a foreign invader, Bushwick residents must unite to defeat an enemy who thinks principles like racial tolerance make their city weak.

The site dubs the movie a “cosmopolitan revenge fantasy.”

Want more anti-Southern venom? Here’s how TheVerge.com’s fleshes out the movie’s positions.

The secessionists deride New York City gun laws and spout white nationalist rhetoric, so they’re surprised when they encounter not only armed resistance, but a neighborhood willing to temporarily put aside its internal conflicts and fight together.

Bushwick goes out of its way to refute the neighborhood’s stereotype, though, as well as the idea that city-dwellers are godless coastal elites and not “real Americans.”

Naturally, the progressive entertainment site Deadline.com adored the concept.

It’s The Warriors meets a left-leaning take on Red Dawn, a look at politically inspired chaos instead of crime.

Sundance Film Festival founder Robert Redford recently told reporters that his iconic event, which just debuted the sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth,” isn’t political in nature. “We stay away from politics,” the film legend said.

Team “Bushwick” feels differently.

“We’re premiering it the day after Trump’s inauguration,” says Nate Bolotin of XYZ Films, which produced “Bushwick” and is co-repping sales with WME. “I feel like there’s a connective tie between them, and an opportunity to put a bigger spotlight on the movie.”

“Bushwick” does not currently have a release date.

20 Comments

  1. “Armed resistance”. “ARMED”. So what’s the point of the whole “deriding the gun laws”, then–are these filmmakers trying to say “Oh, those gun laws still let you keep your guns for self defense”? Give. Me. A. Break.

  2. My son went to grad school at UIUC for one semester before going back to Florida Atlantic where he felt at home. Not particularly into Southern identity, he said he’d never seen anything like the prejudice against Southerners. It went much farther than any prejudice against Blacks.

  3. Gee, are they going to make a movie about California seceding from the union? I read that there are “Calexit” groups trying to get that on ballot in California. Let’s have some footage of temper tantrums from West Hollywood.

    1. Is there somewhere I can send a donation to the CALIEXIT people? What a win for America, liberty and freedom if CA were to secede; the democrats would lose 54 electoral votes and California would be gone. Huzzah

      1. Interesting idea that. The federal government could stop funding the University of California and all the associated national laboratories that they manage: Lawrence Livermore Lab just to name one. UC gets boatloads of $$$ from the feds, as well as Stanfurd, Cal Tech etc. Also pull out the Army Corps of Engineers and let them manage the state manage the rivers and dams. You would have to make a special federal area for the Naval base in Coronado as well as Camp Pendleton though. We wouldn’t want those the fall in to liberal/progressive/communist hands.

  4. “cosmopolitan fantasy”….. i.e. the elite expressing their perceived superiority over the rubes….Wonder why Trump won?

  5. “We stay away from politics,” the film legend said. Remind me again what color the sky is in his reality.

  6. I get people might have guns hidden somewhere ; but where would the supposed “good guys” in this movie find more than a token amount of ammunition given our local gun laws? This shouldn’t be a movie , it should be a short , or perhaps the trailer would show all the actual shooting. Maybe this is a clever backdoor ad to allow Cabela’s to open as close to NYC as possible somewhere in Pennsylvania……

  7. Wait, so Texans are going to attack NYC because it’s “too diverse” – when the most diverse county and city in the US are …. in Texas? In this particular fact-free fantasy, is Texas seceding without Houston? Only someone who had never actually been to Texas could come up with such nonsense. Oy.

  8. My prediction is this will be the winner for first bomb of 2017, giving “Miss Sloan” a run for its money in how badly another lefty fantasy can crater at the box office.

    1. It certainly looks like an answer to the dare, “I bet you can’t make a movie that loses more money than ‘Miss Sloan'”.

  9. Typical. An actor only has to affect slight twang or drawl and I know he will wind up as the movies bad guy. The more the accent deviates from the General American, the worse the character.

  10. Um, actually this was a plot in a book from last year as well. Seceding Texans invading New York City.

    In Stephen Coonts’ “America’s Last Stand”, after the President declares martial law, Texas secedes and, among other things, a group of Texans sneak into NYC to steal gold reserves from a Federal bank. Coonts was making a much, much different political message though than the Bushwick people though.

  11. “Bushwick goes out of its way to refute the neighborhood’s stereotype, though, as well as the idea that city-dwellers are godless coastal elites and not “real Americans.””

    Yes, clearly this movie about violent, gun-toting, racist, redneck Southerners is all about avoiding stereotypes.

  12. Clearly the people chronicled in this movie are evil people! They are using a name with “Bush” in it. That’s enough for me.

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