Comments on the movie 'Selma'

On Tuesday afternoon we went to see the movie 'Selma', the historical drama about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965 to secure voting rights for Negroes in the deep South.  It was directed by Ava DuVernay from a script by Paul Webb. 

Poster for 'Selma'

Maybe the projection equipment at the AMC Lincoln Square sucks, but I suspect that the movie is just murky.  The colors are bleached out and dull.  

The cast is lead by David Oyelowo as Dr. King with Tom Wilkinson as President Lyndon Johnson and Tim Roth as Alabama Governor George Wallace.  These three actors inhabit their characters in ways that make you both forget and remember the roles they played in the civil rights movement of the 60's.  Oyelowo has internalized the cadences and sonorities of Dr. King the masterful black orator and strategist -- as well as his insecurities and wariness; Wilkinson leans into the skillful political manipulator LBJ with down home Texas twang and four-letter swagger; Roth gleefully wallows in the racist bigotry of Wallace at his most malevolent.

Oyelowo's accomplishment seems all the more remarkable since he doesn't use quotes from any of Dr. King's famous speeches (which the King family denied the movie makers).

In Alabama, Oyelowo is surrounded by a wonderful supporting cast portraying Ralph Abernathy (Coleman Domingo), Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo), Andrew Young (Andre Holland), John Lewis (Stephan James), Amelia Boynton Robinson (Lorraine Toussaint), Diane Nash (Tessa Thompson), Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) and others too numerous to mention here.

The pacing of the movie is deliberate and the major confrontations and meetings are staged at an epic crawl.  Digressions to less important plot elements and characters saps the film of narrative drive and focus.  The result is an enervating sprawl, rather than the invigorating cascade of events I recall reading about in 1965.  The key events depicted in 'Selma' had an enormous impact on the lives of all black Americans and their place in American society.  In striving to encompass all of the players and their roles the movie fails to sustain the viewer's involvement in their struggle and their accomplishments.  

Banner for 'Selma'.

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It is unfortunate that this movie is being released shortly after a 2013 Supreme Court decision (Shelby County v. Holder) dismantled the most effective elements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, allowing states to proceed with racially motivated redistricting, permitting states to enact onerous voter registration requirements and limit polling hours to suppress minority voting.

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It is equally disturbing to note that Ferguson, MO -- the scene of violent racial disturbances following the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer last August -- where over 67% of its citizens are black, is governed by a white mayor; a city council of 5 white and 1 black council members; and a nearly all-white (50 of 53) police force.  

As 'Selma' rightly points out, black (and some white) people risked and lost their lives to gain the right for black Americans to register to vote -- so they could vote and serve on juries and otherwise enjoy the all rights and responsibilities of American citizenship.  Why haven't the citizens of Ferguson, MO been able to avail themselves of those rights to shape a government that is responsive to their needs -- a government that looks like them?

It is clear from more recent demonstrations across America that the promises of the civil rights movement of the 60's have not succeeded in totally eliminating the racial divide.  Perhaps 50 years is not enough time to undo the damage of hundreds of years of slavery and oppression.  Perhaps the color of our skin or the color of our uniform cannot ever be taken for granted.  Black lives matter; blue lives matter; all lives matter -- in a country that espouses the belief in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all.  

Comments on 'American Sniper'

We went to see Clint Eastwood's 'American Sniper' on Saturday afternoon.  The movie stars Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle and Sienna Miller as his wife Taya Renae Kyle.

Movie Poster for 'American Sniper'

The screenplay by Jason Dean Hall is based on the autobiography 'American Sniper' written by Chris Kyle.  Kyle became known as 'the most lethal sniper in U.S. history' during his four tours of duty in Iraq during the Iraq war.

Growing up in Texas, Kyle's father instilled the belief that there were three kinds of people: 'sheep', 'wolves', and 'sheepdogs'.  Chris definitely aspired to be a sheepdog -- protecting the sheep from the predators.  His father also taught Chris how to shoot and hunt.  The 1998 U.S. embassy bombings by al-Qaeda in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam led him to join the Navy and become a Seal.  He meets Taya Renae in a bar near the Seal training base.  Three days after their wedding Chris leaves on the first of four deployments to Iraq.  Much of their marriage is told through telephone calls -- often while Chris is in the middle of battles and skirmishes and Taya Renae is either pregnant or coping with raising their son and daughter with an absent father.  

Following his final deployment and discharge Chris finds redemption working with wounded warriors of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.  In early 2013, he was murdered by one of the veterans he was trying to help.

Despite the chaos of war Eastwood is largely successful in clarifying the action sequences which pulse with adrenalin fuelled bravado.  He is less successful in depicting the stateside intervals between deployments and following Chris's discharge when he is uncommunicative and jumpy, suffering from PTSD.  Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller are both excellent in portraying the struggles of a long distance marriage often tattered by the incomprehensible gulf between the violence of battle and the anxious wait at home.
The almost entirely male supporting cast is convincing -- though largely undifferentiated -- as a collection of brothers in arms, aloof commanders, and Iraqis caught between the ever shifting allegiances of the war.

Banner for 'American Sniper'

Thoughts on the movie, 'Top Five'

We went to see 'Top Five' on Monday.  It's written and directed by Chris Rock and stars Rock and Rosario Dawson.  It earns its 'R' (for raunchy) rating with a delightful mix of stand-up black comedians throwing out jokes and the 'n' word in nearly every scene -- hell, in nearly every sentence.

'Top Five' movie poster.

Chris Rock plays Andre Allen, a stand-up comic who has become famous playing 'Hammy' -- a cop who wears a bear suit -- in a three-picture franchise.  Hammy's tagline is 'It's Hammy time'.  Bored with the easy success of the Hammy franchise, Andre has just completed a movie, 'Uprize', in which he plays the leader of the slave rebellion in Haiti during which over 50,000 were slaughtered.  The reviews of 'Uprize' have been brutal, especially the one from the New York Times.

Andre is being interviewed by Chelsea, a reporter from the New York Times (played by Rosario Dawson), who tags along with him as he goes through the day leading up to his bachelor party at the start of his three-day, televised wedding to a needy, greedy TV reality star (played by Gabrielle Union).  There are digressions to meet old girl friends, old stand-up buddies, old school buddies, the reporter's family.

The movie is a little disjointed and uneven, but the performances by Chris Rock and especially the radiant Rosario Dawson are wonderful.  The supporting cast contributes comedic riffs and put-downs and also a series of 'top-five' (usually six) favorite rappers -- at least I think they're rappers.

'Top Five' banner

Thoughts on 'The Imitation Game'

We went to see 'The Imitation Game' Friday afternoon.  It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the British mathematician whose team cracked the Nazi's Enigma encryptian code during World War II.  The movie was directed by Morten Tyldem from a script written by Graham Moore that is based on the book, 'Alan Turing: The Enigma' by Andrew Hodges.

Poster for 'The Imitation Game'

The movie jumps between three time periods:  Turing's unhappy teen years at boarding school;  Turing's wartime efforts to crack Enigma at Bletchley Park; and Turing's post-war arrest, interrogation and conviction for 'gross indecency' (homosexuality) in the early 1950's.  The '50's interrogation scene forms a rather awkward and confusing framing device for the Bletchley Park scenes, while flashbacks to boarding school and Turing's schoolboy infatuation with another boy -- complete with encrypted love notes -- provide context for the brilliant, but socially awkward, adult mathematician.

Cumberbatch brilliantly conveys Turing's arrogance and inability to relate to the team of linguists, cryptographers and mathematicians assembled by the British at Bletchley Park to break the Nazi code.  The team consists of a number of familiar faces: Keira Knightley as Joan Clark, the only woman on the team; Charles Dance (of 'Game of Thrones' and 'Jewels in the Crown') as Alastair Denniston, the autocratic naval commander in charge; Matthew Goode (of 'The Good Wife') as Hugh Alexander; Allen Leech (of 'Downton Abbey') as John Cairncross; and Matthew Beard as Peter Hilton.  Mark Strong plays the team's MI6 liaison to Winston Churchill, Stewart Menzies.  Rory Kinnear plays Detective Nock, Turing's police interrogator in 1950's scenes. 

At the end of the war the team was instructed by Menzies to burn all of the evidence of their work, never meet and never discuss their contribution to the Allied victory over the Nazis.  The activities of the team that cracked Enigma were not officially disclosed until 50 years after World War II, long after Turing had committed suicide in 1954.  Turing was formally pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II only in 2013.  Turing built a very primitive, nearly room-sized computer (named 'Christopher' after his schoolboy crush) which helped crack the code.  Following the war he theorized about the possibility of creating artificial intelligence -- what he called 'the imitation game'.  Turing's actual and theoretical work -- before, during and after World War II -- became the foundation of modern computer science.

There is much interesting history and science presented in 'The Imitation Game', but it is fractured and fragmented in a way that makes it difficult to take in.  Except for Cumberbatch's superb performance as Turing, it is not a movie that I would recommend to anyone who doesn't already have some understanding of Alan Turing and Enigma.

Thoughts on the movie 'Wild'

After sitting through the long, tedious movie 'Wild' my brain is almost as numb as my butt.  At 1 hour and 55 minutes, the movie isn't really as long as it seems.  It was directed by Jean-Marc Vallee from a script by Nick Hornby adapted from the memoir 'Wild: from Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail' by Cheryl Strayed and starring Reese Witherspoon as Ms. Strayed and Laura Dern as her mother.

Movie poster for 'Wild'.

Briefly, it is about hiking, extreme hiking, as therapy -- instead of the five stages of grief or the 12-steps of recovery.  Cheryl has lost her mother to cancer and her marriage to serial infidelity and heroin addiction.  So she decides to walk the 1,100 mile Pacific Crest Trail.  I lost count, but I think it took 94 days during which she encountered numerous catastrophes and became a better person.

The movie is scattered with quotes from Robert Frost, James Michener and many others.  The use of mumbled, incoherent voice-over and brief incoherent flashbacks leave the viewer confused and ultimately indifferent to Cheryl and her problems.

Witherspoon will obviously be in the running for the Oscar.  Laura Dern has already won the Gotham award for best supporting actress.  If you have a high threshold for boredom or a need to enhance your feminist credentials see this movie.  Otherwise, stay home and take a nap.