Keke Palmer

Unlike Kelly, Gordy the chimpanzee doesn't dance across a movie screen awash in pastels. The striped sleeves of his cotton shirt are stained and dripping with ...

Whereas Park continues to make a meal out of his played out claim to fame. Park’s story as it relates to the alien’s and the Haywoods themselves is another murky plot point. They turn out to be Ricky Park’s (Steven Yeun) memories, a neighbor of the Haywoods. Park was a child actor on the sitcom. As an adult, he runs an amusement park staged to look like a town in the Old West. When he presents an arena show for his guests, Park suits up in a flamingo red outfit punctuated with a white cowboy hat. Only the alien presents a terrifying pair of lips to inflict its all-consuming kiss of death. Who or what caused the harm: an ex; his mother; his father; the United States of American Racists; all of the above? A man who’s so chill, such a Zen master of detachment, he remains clear-headed under the stress and duress of fending off an alien menace. The director doesn’t expand on her sexuality, or anyone else’s. NOPE is a strictly platonic, PG-13 movie, but rated R for the violence. Is this then a case of Mrs. Haywood’s revenge for having been written out of the script? Imagine a bedazzled, masticating hole at the center of a set of flying drapes; or, a many-ribboned kite coming unglued. The need for an explanation, to understand the Haywoods and the history of their family dynamics, is a frustrating and futile waste of mental energy. What Peele doesn’t withhold are regular glimpses of the alien itself.