Ava DuVernay’s SELMA, a civil-rights drama starring David Oyelowo as Dr King

good advance word, mostly

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-ava-duvernays-selma

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6t7vVTxaic

yeah I've heard from two guys whose opinions I trust that it's closer to Bloody Sunday than Cry Freedom.

"DuVernay’s contributions to the screenplay are uncredited, but they’re central to the film. Paul Webb, on whose original script the movie is based, has the contractual right to sole credit, though his script was reportedly centered on Johnson and was significantly rewritten by DuVernay, who is responsible for the film’s fundamental shift of emphasis toward King. In the process, DuVernay, who was unable to secure rights from the King estate to his speeches (they’re held by DreamWorks and Warner Bros. for Steven Spielberg), wrote astonishingly faithful, albeit entirely original, imitations of his sermons and addresses.

Her writing is trenchant and decisive; it’s also dominant. The film’s best visual invention is centered on text: phrases taken verbatim from F.B.I. surveillance reports, put onscreen as if typed (with the sound of a typewriter added), to establish dates and settings and to apostrophize the action ironically about King and his activities...."

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/crucial-lessons-democracy-selma

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/12/29/selma-director-ava-duvernay-responds-to-critics-notion-that-selma-was-lbjs-idea-is-jaw-dropping/

I don't even wanna click that URL.

Ha, here's the one you really don't want to click

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-movie-selma-has-a-glaring-historical-inaccuracy/2014/12/26/70ad3ea2-8aa4-11e4-a085-34e9b9f09a58_story.html

Califano and other surviving folks from LBJ's administration are doing the grumbling.

Gary May’s Bending Towards Justice, published earlier this year, is the def account.

In fact, Selma was LBJ’s idea, he considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement, he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted — and he didn’t use the FBI to disparage him

History contradicts the first sentence. The others...well, so what? How does these points contradict the film (which I haven't seen)?

i'm curious how the film depicts LBJ. if it does depict him as "reluctant" to pass the VRA that would be a real misdeed. it's not like LBJ didn't have a million faults that one could point out without inventing some. but above all i'm excited to see the film with my mom.

faults and misdeeds, i should say

This is essentially a historical pageant in mostly good ways. (Of the few instances of stunt casting, only one involving a former TV hero of libs made me roll my eyes.) Oyelowo is the heart of it by mastering the cadences and carriage, conveying the guilt and mission.

(The Johnson attitude toward the VRA is dramatized as a combo of "Do this another way" and then "Wait." That is not inconsistent with what I've read.)

Charles Pierce says DuVernay's full of it: LBJ and MLK agreed on creating pressure points:

There are White House tapes, recorded in real time, that show King and Johnson working side-by-side to strategize the creation of public support for a Voting Rights Act. It is true that, having just wrangled the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress, Johnson wanted a breather before taking on voting rights. But, as soon as it became clear that King was not inclined to wait, Johnson, for whom the ballot was positively totemic, got on board with both big feet. This is clear from a fascinating tape from January 15, 1965 in which you can see King and Johnson, master politicians both, fencing with each other until Johnson offers the clearest statement he can on his support for voting rights -- and admits, tacitly, he can see the political power of what King was doing in the street.

and again I direct anyone interested to May's book, which is short and definitive.

Jason Bailey was on Chris Hayes's show to discuss this piece:

You see, there’s no such thing as accidental timing in Hollywood, particularly at this time of year. Califano’s Post piece ran on Friday, December 26; four days earlier, Politico posted an essay (with the Slate-ish title “What ‘Selma’ Gets Wrong”) by LBJ Presidential Library and Museum director Mark K. Updegrove, making basically the same argument. And then, on Monday, the first batch of Oscar ballots went out. Right on time, that very day, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and Entertainment Weekly covered the new “controversy.” And voila, like magic, people aren’t talking about how great Selma is — they’re talking about how it’s controversial, and maybe factually inaccurate, and gee, should the Academy honor a movie like that?

This is a town that runs on franchises and reboots, and this is nothing we haven’t seen before. The “accuracy” whisper campaign is one of the oldest tricks in the award season playbook, experimented with in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with controversial historical dramas like Mississippi Burning (a kind of reverse Selma, charged with unduly lionizing Hoover’s FBI in the Civil Rights era), JFK, and even Schindler’s List. But the key point was probably 1999, when Norman Jewison’s biopic The Hurricane, an early favorite, was hit with multiple op-eds and testimonials charging factual inaccuracy. It ultimately managed only a nomination for Best Actor (which Denzel Washington lost to Kevin Spacey).

The gay mafia strikes again.

those rancorous murmurs over Cosmos

The gay mafia wd've complained about the barely present Bayard Rustin (Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who I only recognized as BR by his makeup and hair).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-selma-distorts-the-truth/2015/01/05/90f2850a-9508-11e4-8005-1924ede3e54a_story.html

Often wrong-headed Richard Cohen joins in. He says RFK as attorney-general had earlier authorized FBI snooping on MLK, not LBJ as Cohen says the film suggests. Cohen also mentions various others who are critical of the movie

Johnson is shown first being briefed on King's "degeneracy" by Hoover and having no interest in using it. Then there is tactical friction between MLK and LBJ and a scene ends with a bark of "Get me Hoover."

so Cohen wrote a series of links instead of a column

Every motherfucking docudrama "distorts the truth." The brouhaha here is ludicrous if you compare it to stuff that, say, The Imitation Game makes up outta whole cloth.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/12/03/the_imitation_game_fact_vs_fiction_how_true_the_new_movie_is_to_alan_turing.html

That said, Selma is not a great film. The target audience is people who would not read Parting the Waters, ever. DuVernay said she had a young man come up to her and say "I never knew what 'MLK' meant."

(a young black man, that is, but most of the white audience for this film doesn't know the history in detail either)

Attacking a civil rights film for not being friendly enough towards white people...

precisely.

Slate has one of those "accuracy" columns on this film but I don't see the point of linking until it's been in general release.

if u want a president heavy in a civil rights movie and why wouldn't you, seems a shame to pass up the scene where jfk (bobby having failed) takes mlk out into the rose garden by himself to demand he renounce ties with stanley levinson because j edgar hoover is claiming that way secret evidence proves he is in regular contact w the kremlin, and mlk keeps saying implacably that he'd like to see the evidence. timeframe of this movie does not allow for it tho i get that, plus our dying king iirc. still looking forward to this, vaguely. morbs otm re: the happily swallowed distortions of whiter biopics.

My problem with biopics isn't usually related to historical accuracy at all but rather the fact that it's almost impossible to make a life narratively satisfying, and often results in many skilled actors' worst performances.

figure the best way to get around the first problem is to make a movie about an event rather than a life, which the title suggests this does, but yeah assuming the manner of a real person esp a famous person from the massmedia age does often seem to absorb a huge amount of actor-energy that in a different performance might be spent in a different way.

Well fortunately this film, like Lincoln, only covers a few months. xp

I realize that the bloody desegregation of the American South is a more loaded topic than statistical analysis in sports, but 3/4 of what was shown in Moneyball never happened.

Yes, more and more movies are taking that approach. Which is only moderately encouraging.

well in biopics of the '30s and '40s, they pretty much made it all up.

A voting supression film runs into the same problem as a slavery film or a holocaust film or a gulag film: It's about widespread opresssion, not personal triumph, therefore makes bad films if depicted 'truthfully'. Slavery wasn't one guy for 12 years. Holocaust wasn't one white guy saving jews. AIDS epidemic wasn't a straight guy heroically procuring drugs. And voting opression definitely wasn't a white texas democrat carreer politician heroically doing something to stop political discrimination.

This is essentially a historical pageant in mostly good ways. ... Oyelowo is the heart of it by mastering the cadences and carriage, conveying the guilt and mission.
― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Friday, January 2, 2015 10:24 PM (4 days ago)

That said, Selma is not a great film. The target audience is people who would not read Parting the Waters, ever. DuVernay said she had a young man come up to her and say "I never knew what 'MLK' meant."
― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, January 6, 2015 12:21 PM (9 hours ago)

Yeah, I'm basically between these two positions too, admitting I too didn't know or didn't remember every detail of the event. Accuracy claims probably neither unfounded nor totally relevant, since this is as much a movie that takes it to church as it is a historical pageant. There's a delicious dramatic (if not accurate) irony that, after hearing the perfect, impassioned words of countless noble black Americans and doing nothing, LBJ's dial is finally turned by the firm words of a ferociously disgusting white man.

That's literally how it plays out. Tim Roth's Gov. Wallace says, "Next they'll actually want to get paid." Cut to LBJ telling Congress, "We shall overcome."

It's true that as LBJ briefly mentions in that scene, Wallace made his rep in Alabama with anti-poverty politics. And then after he got shot, he courted black votes and got himself elected governor again in 1982.

Johnson is shown first being briefed on King's "degeneracy" by Hoover and having no interest in using it. Then there is tactical friction between MLK and LBJ and a scene ends with a bark of "Get me Hoover."
― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, January 6, 2015 12:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

interesting… this reminds me a bit of the way that "zero dark thirty" implied a causal link between torture and finding bin laden simply by having two important scenes follow one another. in a sense it allowed the filmmakers to have it both ways (in the usual hollywood fashion); a kind of plausible deniability in which causality is implied but not overtly stated. (this is what glenn greenwald, a smart guy who is not so smart about movies, missed—he assumed that a causal connection was being asserted when in fact it was just an implication that the audience could take or leave.)

not sure if "selma" functions exactly this way… just some thoughts…

still waiting for a really smart close analysis of ZDT, btw. can anyone recommend one?

well, you can try this one and the link at the top it responds to.

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/can-monitors-monitor-the-monitors-or-reality-as-an-extension-of-fiction-by-other-means

greenwald's piece was especially annoying because he'd already criticized the film a few times before actually seeing it.

yeah. once he saw it, confirmation bias pretty much guaranteed his response. the film has plenty to criticize, for sure, but greenwald seemed pretty steadfast in his inability to (or disinterest in) seeing any nuance.

http://www.vulture.com/2015/01/oscar-films-the-prison-of-historical-accuracy.html

i think he implies a kind of false dilemma (even though he walks it back a few times). sure, docudramas don't have to be--and frankly, can't be--completely historically accurate, but i think if the filmmakers want us to take them seriously they have to show a sincere and intelligent grappling with issues of historical representation.

and i get the sense that the question about "Selma" is not only whether it "downplays" LBJ's contributions (that is a legitimate debate that isn't likely to ever be fully settled) but whether it actually suggests that he was party to the FBI's surveillance and harrassment of King--a serious allegation that, if indeed the film makes or implies it, deserves to be reckoned with the historical record.

NB i haven't seen the movie :)

So, let’s also take a moment to soak in the irony of the fact that DuVernay specifically could not use any of King’s actual speeches in her film; those rights apparently have been licensed to DreamWorks and Steven Spielberg

does Godard know about this? (not that he's shown much interest in african-americans...)

well we know he helped set in motion the CIA assassinating JFK, i wouldn't put it past him

fuck yeah! he has no reason to lie

I enjoyed this until the ending, all that thickly laid corniness and shite music at the end really detracted from some good film-making and acting performances. Well apart from Tim Roth, who sneaked onto the set somehow.

yes i kinda cringed when we ended w/ a montage, doctored newsreels and John Legend

another good ref point: Judgment Days, which I'm reading now. Just when you think the FBI could not have behaved worse.

Hey, on YouTube, you can watch a Wallace made-for-tv movie (YouTube is a terrific archive of made-for-tv fare) with Gary Sinise as Wallace, and after watching it, it is hard to imagine anyone else in the role. I recommend it. Although it cuts out all of the Klan supporters I read about in a bio of Wallace. Seriously, Sinise looks like he was born with a cigar & drink in hand.

Can't wait to see Selma anyway.

Good to excellent except for Wilkinson's cartoon LBJ (might as well not include him at all).

I didn't think much to Tim Roth's cartoon Gov Wallace either, how does he still get the work after 20 odd years of shiteness? Not put in a proper acting shift since Vincent and Theo, last job was playing a young Sepp Blatter in a FIFA vanity project! It is a shame there were some dodgy casting decisions and that horrible montage at the end, this could have been so much better.

That is a fair review and I am glad you noted this "although the John Legend song blasting over the final footage is a menace".

it was like something from a shit tv movie, which this clearly wasn't.

cringed at Martin Sheen

Oprah was the producer, so she was gonna be in it

Dylan Baker is at best That Guy to Joe & Jane Moviegoer

I didn't mind Oprah; she's got presence.

My only prob with Oprah was that she was little more than just that: present. It's like, hey, there's Oprah, looking upset. I'm not sure she even had any lines beyond her (strong) registering to vote scene. Just another face in the crowd the rest of the film. As for Dylan baker, yeah, he's barely in it, too, but it's this relatively long psycho scene that's tonally inconsistent with the film. Probably could have been chopped, or reduced to a phone call with the pres about digging up dirt.

Reminds me, I also found the random time stamps a little distracting and unnecessary, too. But all minor quibbles. How much if any of this film was shot on location in Alabama? I've been to most of those sites, but there's no way to tell just by looking.

Oh, another surprise for me was that I had no idea what MLK's four kids ever amounted to, and I was saddened to learn that all sort of followed the cliche path of children of famous people, replete with "acting" careers and lawsuits and whatnot. Also just saw this:

Those revisions included rewriting King's speeches, because, in 2009, King's estate licensed them to DreamWorks Pictures and Warner Bros. for an untitled project to be produced by Steven Spielberg. Subsequent negotiations between those companies and Selma's producers did not lead to an agreement. DuVurnay is credited with writing alternative speeches that evoke the historic ones without violating the copyright.

Also, wow, did not consider that pretty much all the leads (MLK, his wife, Johnson) were Brits.

Thank goodness that John Legend/Common song won the Golden Globe, ensuring that we will be hearing it for years to come. Years, I tell you. However it goes.

I also found the random time stamps a little distracting and unnecessary

Well, they were used to repeatedly indicate that the feds had MLK and his aides under constant surveillance. Given that Hoover was the prime mover in that operation, his presence onscreen is sort of mandatory.

Oprah resonant in having the most powerful woman in US media the last 30 years playing someone blatantly disenfranchised.

i saw this; although it was by no means /bad/, i didn't think it really transcended the usual pitfalls of movie biopics (and it /was/ a biopic, to a somewhat disappointing extent). i was stirred at times, certainly, but also pretty bored at other times. i think this movie should be commended in depicting some of the debates within the movement, and it presents MLK in a /slightly/ less hagiographic way than previous films (mostly TV films, actually). but it still seemed schematic and decorous. maybe i just wasn't the audience for this; as someone wrote upthread, this is really for people who e.g. haven't read taylor branch. but i think that the film, in its inevitable screenings in middle-school classrooms across america for the next 25 years, could do a little harm in that it mostly reinforces the "great man" theory of historical change. to be sure, MLK was an exceptional man, and no responsible film could really depict them as just a normal dude. but the way this film has him speaking in private in the same assured, eloquent, preacherly cadences as he spoke at public events, in the way he has the last word—literally—in nearly every debate within the movement (and a superhuman ability to resolve those debates), the way his presence seems to hush those around him, etc. just struck me as symptomatic of the conventionality of the film.

i also think that the initial negative portrayal of LBJ—putting him in league with hoover, making it seems as though he had little interest in getting the VRA passed—in the first reels was designed to set up his change of heart/redemption. in other words they were giving the character an arc, and making him seem "complex." so my guess is that the filmmakers felt they were telling perhaps a small lie to get at a bigger truth. in that sense it seems no more objectionable, really, than the other elisions and compressions in the film (such as making a key member of SNCC appear to be part of the SCLC).

I didn't all get the sense the movie endorsed a Great Man theory, which as I take it requires one man changing history. The movie makes it clear the strands of the civil rights movements pulled him hither, often threatening to subsume him (and this idea is faithful to Branch and Kotz). But I do think this thick cartoonish LBJ was a mistake.

You know what my favorite scene was? The one in which the group arrives at that house and start shooting shit over breakfast.

But I do think this thick cartoonish LBJ was a mistake.

you've heard the tape of him ordering pants, right?

i've only seen clips of this but wilkinson's accent sounded like his mobster from batman

he sounded like a Southern sheriff in an eighties sitcom.

i like that they alluded to wallace's having been a kind of populist warrior (in a segregationist context) who then gravitated toward being a hard-core segregationist as a matter of opportunism.

i'm not sure the film itself can really be accused of subscribing to the "great man" theory but i think the revarance it displays to MLK and the way he's largely at the center of the movie tends to reinforce that. maybe i'm being the glass-half-empty guy. but in any event the film just didn't tell me anything i didn't already know and didn't really make me /feel/ much. which might just mean i'm not the right audience for it.

at least wilkinson got the jowls right.

I had the same reaction in the same sense that "nothing was delivered" and it's not a great movie.

docudramas are tough, i sympathize with any filmmaker who takes one on. on the other hand, it's often an easy way to get plaudits for what in other contexts would be apparent as merely average filmmaking (see e.g. "fruitvale station").

it ain't large-scale fraud like the Turing movie, and i have a pessimistic notion which one will win more Oscars. (if any)

yeah it's helpful to keep in mind how bad it could have been. that doesn't necessarily mean i'm feeling particularly grateful, though.

i assume we've done a "best biopics" thread. the one that comes to my mind as particularly outstanding is "an angel at my table," but there are plenty of classic hollywood biopics that are pretty damn good, even if they aren't much closer to reality than your average genre film.

am, how did you rate Lincoln among Hollywood biopics?

I wish I didn't hate Angel at My Table.

i wish you didn't, either

Well moreso I wish it had never been made.

sigh

yeah, sigh.

i guess i had mixed feelings about lincoln. i liked the details of political horse-trading, but the final reel was a mess.

still mad kushner fucked around with the votes there

if it weren't for his meddling we would've had President McClellan.

Charles Pierce on this "war movie":

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Seeing_Selma

Mark Harris closely examines the "liberties"

as the progressive media-watchdog group FAIR has noted, the White House tapes from 1965 demonstrate Johnson’s growing impatience with and mistrust of King and the protesters in the days and weeks before Selma; that is not a figment of DuVernay’s imagination.“He better get to behaving himself or all of them are going to be put in jail,” Johnson warned. “I think that we really ought to be firm on it myself. I’ve been watching it here, and looks like that man’s in charge of the country and taking it over.”

http://grantland.com/features/selma-oscars-academy-awards-historical-accuracy-controversy/

after the Watts riots (days after signing the Voting Rights Act, recall) and Vietnam started getting serious LBJ turned to more than usual self-pity.

that piece just made me think of Kushner saying of Lincoln "yes, i made up dialogue, i'm not psychic."

that mark harris piece was good.

this paragraph gets at an aspect of "selma" that's quite admirable in theory, but doesn't play very well on screen as drama:

“Your husband and I, we do not see exactly eye to eye on how to achieve progress for the black man,” he tells her (a line that positions him at exactly the same distance from King as LBJ). “But because we don’t agree … does not mean that I am the enemy.” In fact, he says, his image in white America as a dangerous menace could be of help: “Allow me to be the alternative to your husband — the alternative that scares them so much they turn to Dr. King in refuge.”

i mean, it's really hard to make lines that /talk/, and du vernay didn't really figure out a way. too much of her film feels like a waxworks, even (especially) in moments that are meant--all too pointedly, perhaps--to seem off-the-cuff.

yes, that one is expositiony ... except Malcolm is v much the lecturer in all the recordings i've heard, who knows how much of that is plausible in pvt too.

That's one of the best essays I've read this new year, even though, like am, I'm more persuaded by Harris' rhetoric than by the force of his argument.

it's true that malcolm x was one of those people who seemed to speak in impossibly well-turned sentences even when speaking off the cuff. so there's some warrant for those lines. but still, in general i think the film's staging/visualization was pretty conventional.

but he smiled! That's gotta count!

ive seen this LBJ

https://twitter.com/NickPinkerton/status/575759085850750977

How's the animatronic?

Best one I've seen, not in terms of the animation, but in terms of posing, is the Huey Long one in Louisiana's old state capitol. It delivers recorded speeches, from his desk, right next to the spot where he was murdered. The bullet hole is still in the wall!

dummy is a little stiff

Thought this was good not quite great. Pro: Oyelowo nailed it, the arguments about tactics were juicy and engaging, and the centrepiece bridge attack was phenomenal. Con: the dialogue was shaky in places, Roth and Wilkinson had distractingly bad accents and what the hell was happening with that Fink song in the final montage, just before Glory? No political movement in history had a better soundtrack and they plumped for that?

http://blackagendareport.libsyn.com/selma-black-history-according-to-opra

Read this roughly when the film came out, it stuck in my head. Got no interest in seeing the film, just curious what you guys think of the piece. It's short.

But Oprah loves the Kennedys, and so the movie leads the audience to believe that J. Edgar Hoover and President Lyndon Johnson set out to surveil and destroy King because of his push for voting rights. But Attorney General Robert Kennedy signed the order, while his brother, who was then president, was still alive.

tbf this was when hoover was blackmailing the first bros over judith exner, but i stand by my post upthread that's waiting for the mlk movie that includes

the scene where jfk (bobby having failed) takes mlk out into the rose garden by himself to demand he renounce ties with stanley levinson because j edgar hoover is claiming that way-secret evidence proves he is in regular contact w the kremlin, and mlk keeps saying implacably that he'd like to see the evidence

because it is as good as great-man history (not the best lens for civil rights history) gets: mlk is nudged up the chain link-by-link, from aide to aide to rfk to jfk, and each successively more powerful person makes the same demand of him and is rebuffed, until finally mlk is alone with the most powerful person there is, who makes the same demand, and is rebuffed--and it's not just a scene about "personal integrity" but a scene about who actually has power and where they are getting it from.

Having taken the kids to Black Panther on Friday, I proposed that we all watch Selma last night -- kind of a Black History Month double-feature. I hadn't seen it, but I thought it might resonate with them and I was right. Some of the talky parts and references were over the heads of yr average 9- and 13-year-old, but I filled in gaps where I could. And in the moments that mattered obviously I didn't have to explain anything. The beatings and murders are vicious and disturbing (in a way that the beatings and murders in, say, Black Panther are not). My younger son several times said, "That should be illegal!," with genuine outrage.

It's not a great movie, but it's pretty good and its conventionality and narrative reductions make it a good civil rights movie for kids. It's one thing to learn about segregation, as they both have. It's another thing to watch people being bludgeoned by the state.

too bad she's going on to make a terrible looking Wrinkle in Time adaptation, I think she's a more talented director than that lets on (maybe I'll be surprised but the trailers are painful)

Yeah I'm not optimistic about Wrinkle.