Highland Park, the Movie.

[nain rouge]

For $4, Highland Park is now available for streaming on Amazon. Some of you may have caught wind of this film when they were shooting at the McGregor Library and other local locations - well, now you can finally watch it, pointing with glee at the Craftsman homes and familiar hollowed out art deco apartment buildings.

Starring Billy Burke from Twilight, Parker Posey of - er - Scream 3 fame, and the great Danny Glover, the film is a dark comedy about the woes of one Highland Park, Michigan. Sounds right up our alley, right?

Well, I hate to say it, but director Andrew Meieran "effed" up, to put it nicely. [[What I'm about to write may spoil the movie, so skip the rest of this post if you don't want to know yet.) Right off the bat, you know something is wrong when the film is set in modern times and yet both the mayor [[the former Highland Park High prom queen!) and the high school principal are white. Say, what? And as Highland Park rolls on, the hack job on history becomes more and more apparent. The city's only problem, the film pretty much states, was that the evil factories left for overseas. Forget white flight and all that junk, that doesn't fit the new neoliberal story line.

Look, I can forgive rolling in some facts about Detroit into Highland Park for the sake of storytelling - which also happens - but essentially "whitewashing" white flight is unforgivable and makes Highland Park about as realistic as a Disney fairytale. This movie, as Detropia before it, attempts to slyly rewrite history, blaming the fall of Detroit and cities like Highland Park on globalization instead of racism and crime. Predictably, the characters and background actors are a Hollywood-approved diverse cast, making Highland Park a quaint but hardscrabble town of the down on their luck.

If one was to remove the plot of Highland Park from Highland Park, you'd have an OK movie. Not great, but watchable. But as it is, it stands in a long line of fictitious history that is slowly rewriting the truth in the popular conscious. How do you like them beans?