Movie Reviews #10…
Selma. I suppose it would be politically correct to join many reviewers, including WABC’s Sandy Keenan, and call this the “movie of the year,” but I don’t have to be politically correct in these posts. Having lived through these events (the film focuses on those leading up to the Votings Right Act of 1965) and previous ones leading up to integration (they’re more important, but not covered in the film), I will still acclaim that this is a pretty damn good documentary (that justifies the lack of Best Picture and Best Director Oscar nominations in my mind, though). I’m not one to cry about quotas either because I don’t believe in them, especially when it comes to talent, but, akin to The Theory of Everything, there’s one actor here who should have been nominated for the Oscar corresponding to Best Actor.
I’ll also have to disagree with some pundits: this documentary doesn’t belittle LBJ. It shows him to be a savvy politician whose actions were determined by political realities. I have more of a quarrel with him about his prosecution of the Vietnam War than his against-stereotype promotion of civil rights (he was a Texas politician, for pete’s sake!). He knew that the future of the Democratic Party could reside in the black vote. (His prescience was limited, but he had no way of predicting the increasing importance of the Hispanic vote.) The GOP’s attack on the right to vote still continues for that reason—with voter ID reqs, shortened times for absentee voting, gerrymandered districts, and so forth. Vietnam taints Johnson’s legacy, not civil rights. The war on poverty—and now the growing divide between haves and have-nots—isn’t a black and white issue, it never was, and it’s our most pressing domestic challenge right now. Johnson’s War on Poverty only encompassed the first skirmishes in that war.
I also disagree with some pundits who say the film is great because it humanizes Dr. King. Sadly, it doesn’t humanize him enough. Like Gandhi, Dr. King insisted on non-violence, but there can be no denying that they both sought publicity for their causes, and that publicity usually involved horror and anguish among the general population in reaction to violence raining down on protestors. Is it fair to do the grim accounting, to ask whether Kent State was more egregious than what happened at the Birmingham Church? Probably not. Different issues ripped from the sixties and not completely resolved today—whether bitter nostalgia or damning indictment, we can still learn from both.
But reliving that horror and anguish represents my problem with this documentary. It starts with violence, and violence is emphasized throughout the film. Only incidentally does it show Dr. King’s human side, the struggle between his use of violence for publicity and his preacher’s tendency for love and compassion. His oratory went beyond the church pulpit, but that was its origin. That is what torments many changers of history. Those not tormented by this conundrum are just political hacks. Dr. King wasn’t a political hack. In a different way, LBJ wasn’t either. The two men used different tools to bring about significant change, struggling to realize that change in a peaceful fashion. That’s what we should remember them for.
Should this documentary receive awards and accolades? Maybe, for what it is. But the only artful part was the introduction of real film footage toward the end. That black and white display not only brought the message home, it was a metaphor for the problem of bigotry in America. That bigotry isn’t just white v. black, unfortunately—in fact, if we add all other issues involving bigotry, we’ve only made the problem worse. Anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiments, anti-LGBT attacks, religious intolerance, political polarization and rage, attacks on women’s rights—it seems like we keep adding to the list, not subtracting, a bad start for the 21st century.
If Selma is an indictment of America’s cultural wars, the issues it treats have to be generalized. People are no longer denied the right to vote just because they’re African American, for example. Yet the film doesn’t even hint at how bad it could become, because the Southern apartheid that existed after the Civil War in all its evil has since been generalized while becoming stealthier. As one of the Selma workers said, the poor might have the right to vote, but they still can’t exercise it. The problems are more insidious now because the enemies of democracy are smarter and more devious. People are kept from the ballot box because of the way they vote, not the color of their skin. The luster of Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, has been lost. B+ for documentary; C- for Hollywood flick. Not for the squeamish.
American Sniper. I never liked Clint Eastwood’s politics. He goes against Hollywood stereotype, more in the tradition of Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan. In these pages, I’ve often argued that an author’s politics shouldn’t stop you from reading a novel if the author spins a good yarn. Michael Crichton is an example, and he touched Hollywood too. But the same goes for movie directors. Once Eastwood got beyond spaghetti westerns and Dirty Harry, he became a better actor, and generally has been an excellent director. For the latter, he knows how to spin a good yarn on the silver screen.
To be fair, most of this story was already spun. It’s biographical and portrays part of the life of Chris Kyle, a Navy Seal who was unsurpassed as a military sharpshooter. Unlike Selma, this film delves a lot more into the main character’s mental anguish related to the contradictions of a deadly job with the needs of family and loved ones (if you don’t think King’s job was deadly too, consider how he met his end, the possibility of which hung over him most of his life).
Now, probably because of the box office success of this movie in its first weekend, wingnuts have come out of the woodwork against its “glorification of violence.” That charge is being led by Michael Moore (thankfully, no relation). What’s this? These idiots give a pass to violent video games, violence in the streets of our cities, and so forth, yet go after Eastwood for presenting a true story (emphasis on “true”) about a man who saved the lives of many of his fellows? Does Michael Moore suggest that we shouldn’t have fought the Civil War or fought for integration and voters’ rights in order to avoid the violence surrounding those issues? Kyle struggled as much with violence as Dr. King, but each used violence in his own way to make lives better. Did Moore not see the end of the movie where Kyle worked with troubled vets? Has Moore ever helped a troubled vet? Michael Moore is signing on to the stupidly biased idea that vets are the responsible villains in an unpopular war for political reasons only, a common idea among the wingnut fringe since at least Vietnam. No wonder he’s irrelevant.
In contrast, this isn’t a documentary like Selma. It’s vibrant storytelling on the silver screen. Moreover, after serving four tours in Iraq and saving many American lives, Kyle’s death after returning home is an irony for our times. (Michael Moore missed this message.) Bradley Cooper does a superb job as Kyle—definitely Oscar quality (his third nomination), although I suspect he will lose once again because the field is so strong. I have no idea if Mr. Eastwood, in grand Hollywood tradition, distorts history here, but Mrs. Kyle was happy with the result. I think Dirty Harry was too. A+. Definitely not for the squeamish, though.
Birdman. What? A second review of this film? No, simply a comment. How could the Golden Globes call it a comedy? How could it be nominated for Oscars? I thought it was a bomb. The bottom line: there’s too much incest in these award events. That’s precisely why I’ve stopped submitting my ebooks to contests. My reward comes from people reading my books. Hollywood should only pay attention to moviegoers, not other Hollywood pundits and their sycophants. Of course, I guess that would mean some terrible movie like Frozen wins Best Picture—it competes with Taylor Swift in popularity, after all. Maybe Boehner will feature it on his website next. Sigh….
And so it goes….
