Sinners in the Hands Of

Expectations, Tenacious D and my Inverse Mike Ford problem

Jun 20, 2025

Several weeks back, I mentioned the movie Sinners as a possible future Movie Night, and The Pip said “Oh, yeah, that’s good.” I was very certain that we didn’t take him to it, so asked how he had seen it, and he said “I watched it on TikTok.” Welcome to two thousand twenty-five…

Anyway, a smaller number of weeks ago, it popped up as a video-on-demand option when The Pip had initially declined a movie so Kate and I were going to watch something by ourselves. When I said that we’d be watching Sinners, he changed his mind, so all three of us watched it1.

If you’ve been hiding in a cave for several months, this is Ryan Coogler’s vampires-and-blues-music movie, starring Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers returning to 1930’s Mississippi to open a juke joint in a converted mill, having come into a bunch of money as gangsters in Chicago. They recruit their cousin Sammie (called “Preacherboy” because his father runs a church; played by Miles Caton, who is an actual musician not primarily an actor) and a collection of other local luminaries to stage a big opening night. Then a creepy Irish vampire shows up2, and everything goes to hell.

As I noted on social media right after watching it, I enjoyed this a good deal, but probably would’ve liked it more had I watched it in the theater right when it opened. It’s basically exactly what I expected based on the trailers I saw back in the winter— a smart and stylish period piece, with vampires.

The problem is that I didn’t see it right when it opened, and in between the release and actually watching it I read and heard a bunch of people talking about it as a Significant movie with Things to Say, and all that. Which raised expectations that the movie just didn’t stand a chance of living up to— again, it’s smart, well-acted, and looks great, but I didn’t find it especially profound or revelatory. So I ended up feeling mildly let down in a way that I probably wouldn’t’ve been had I just seen the movie without seeing the commentary beforehand.

I got a couple of slightly scold-y responses to saying that, which I was too busy to really engage with, but which annoyed me enough to keep it front of mind past the point where I otherwise would’ve let it go. Its arrival on streaming also prompted another brief flurry of discussion about it, which led to me watching its most-talked-about scene again, and realizing that there was another thing that put me off it a bit: my Inverse Mike Ford Problem:

The reference there is to the late, great John M. Ford, author of a number of much-loved but highly niche novels3. As a writer, he’s (in)famously a bit gnomic— it’s not unusual for the first pass through one of his books to leave readers saying “What the hell just happened?” If you care enough to go back through it a second time, there are plenty of clues you can use to piece together what’s really going on, but it takes a bit of work.

One time at a convention we were talking about his books, and Teresa Nielsen Hayden talked about the frustration of editing one of them, trying to get him to spell things out more. She recounted him saying “I have a horror of being obvious,” and replying along the lines of “Believe me, that’s not a thing you have to worry about.”

That stuck with me, and also Kate, who I think may have been the first to use the phrase “Inverse Mike Ford” about one of my personal problems with literature and movies. I have a horror of other people being obvious, which colors a lot of my reaction to works that I find insufficiently subtle.

And, on rewatching, man does that clip trip the Inverse Mike Ford reaction. Caton’s performance is really good, but the movie doesn’t let it build or stand on its own, instead cutting to Delroy Lindo (who, btw, is terrific as Delta Slim) talking about the blues, and then a callback to a bit of narratorsposition from the opening of the film, about some people’s music having the ability to transcend time and space. Which leads into the much-lauded long shot of dancers in the film’s 1930’s juke joint mixing with figures from both past (a variety of traditional styles from Africa) and future (rock guitar and several varieties of hip-hop).

As a series of visuals, it’s spectacular work, and deserving of praise, but the heavy-handed way it’s teed up puts me off in a way that really cuts against the power of the scene. I’d be a lot happier with it if it leaned into the weirdness more, and just had the past and future figures showing up without thwacking the audience in the face with a sign saying “This Is Our Important Theme! Pay Attention!”

A somewhat pettier and thoroughly subsidiary complaint about this scene is that I don’t think the song is All That. Again, don’t get me wrong, it’s a really good song and a terrific performance, but I don’t buy it as so good that it breaks the bounds of time and space. “Pale, Pale Moon” is way better, but in the movie it’s only fragmentary because they’re cutting back and forth between the (absolutely electric) performance and vampire stuff:

This is, of course, the problem with building a story around some work of art being The Greatest Ever: you’re setting yourself an impossible task. This issue plagues a lot of art about art— it also sinks the musical Hadestown for me— and always makes me think of a not-at-all-highbrow comedy act. It’s a big swing to take, and in this case just doesn’t quite connect.

These are, as I always seem to end up saying, largely Me Problems— some of the same commentary that went into raising unreasonable expectations also seemed confused about what was happening in Preacherboy’s big scene, so while I find it cringily heavy-handed, it’s clearly not overly obvious to everyone. The combo of the song being merely very good and the heavy-handed intro really undercut the scene for me, though, which probably contributes to the mildly-let-down feeling.

That said, it’s an excellent movie, and I’m happy to have paid to stream it. I’m also glad that it’s been so successful, and is hopefully lifting Coogler into the ranks of Blank Check Filmmakers, who get a free hand to implement their own vision, not just churn out IP slop. (It’s not a long list: Christopher Nolan is at the top, then (in no particular order) Jordan Peele, Rian Johnson, Paul Thomas Anderson, probably Greta Gerwig, maybe David Fincher. Quentin Tarantino would be there if he hadn’t George R.R. Martin-ed himself, and Steven Soderbergh doesn’t qualify because he doesn’t seem to need any actual money to make like three movies a year…) We could always use more smart, well-made films in fun (sub)genres, and I look forward to seeing whatever he does next.

That’s a Thing, that is. Weirdly, this will not be the only Mike Ford content to be posted here this summer— if you want to see the next bit, here’s a button to get it in your inbox:

And if you want to take issue with any of the above, the comments will be open:

Counting Atoms

Discussion about this post