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

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.