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

i din't find him a persuasive LBJ at all, no. Coulda been the writing.

Roth was good enough.

Any movie with a performance as good as Oyelowo's doesn't deserve Roth stinking it up imo. His American accent is a complete fail for starters. Even newbies like Matthew Rhys have mastered the accent, Roth has been at it for decades and still sounds like a posh schoolboy wonder prick auditioning for Bugsy Malone.

Brits are usually better with Southern accents. Geez, even Michael Gambon played a persuasive LBJ in Path to War.

Oyelowo is much subtler than the awards bait suggests.

I benefitted from not being American and thus intimately familiar w/ the real Wallace+LBJ

i saw a clip of oyelowo, goddamn. just his performance alone is enough to make me want to see this

I thought this was great, really powerful. Minor quibbles: Wilkinson is a great actor, how could he not land LBJ's accent? Second, I'm not a fan of name actors showing up in barely-there supporting roles (Sheen, Dylan Baker, Cuba, Oprah). Malcolm X was so dead-on in his cameo I was worried it would be revealed he was actually Brad Pitt.

Seriously, though, great stuff. The acting across the board is amazing, and it looked great, not at all like an overlit TV movie.

Agreed.

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

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