Day: November 12, 2014

Ava DuVernay‘s Selma, which had its first hotshot media screening last night at 6 pm, is a better-than-decent drama in…well, some respects. It has human-scale currents (compassion, moral vision, racism, cowardice, bureaucratic cynicism and brutality). DuVernay does a fair-to-decent job of re-creating the fire and the pain of the Alabama voting-rights protests of 1965, although I’m more of a fan of the “Bridge to Freedom” segment in Eyes on the Prize, the PBS doc that first aired in ’87, than I am of Selma. And yes, David Oyelowo does a reasonably good job of bringing Martin Luther King back to life, although I have to say he doesn’t quite capture King’s wonderfully melodious voice or the soaring oratorical spirit of his speeches.

Last night’s response tells us Selma is going to get lots of knee-jerk love from journalists and politically-correct lefties who swooned over Lee Daniels’ The Butler (a decent, so-so film) and 12 Years A Slave (a masterpiece) because their socially progressive instincts told them to. Selma, after all, is about the struggle by the Rev. King and his followers to demonstrate in racist Alabama for voting rights — a hard, punishing crusade that ultimately led to President Lyndon Johnson pushing for and then signing the Voting Rights Act in August 1965. If you can’t stand up for a film like this then where is your liberal soul?

So this is a good story about a noble and courageous effort, and so to pan this film, which was produced by Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt‘s Plan B productions, or to complain about parts of it, is not cool. Who wants to stand outside the circle of liberal camaraderie as far as this film is concerned? Not me, brother. It’s easier to get with the program, applaud each other for being generous of heart and enlightened enough to look past Selma‘s shortcomings and celebrate its social-historical virtues, which are genuine and tangible.

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I’m not what you’d call an Avengers: Age of Ultron kind of guy. I purposely didn’t post the initial teaser for this sure-to-be-wonderful film, which will open on 5.1.15. I felt it was a better idea to steer clear and let well enough alone. But I need to put something up with half my day getting sucked up by DMV matters so here it is. This is going to affect my karma on some level. The cast includes Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen and James Spader.

I wasn’t sure until an hour ago if it was cool to post a Selma review. I was told last night that Paramount publicists, in defiance of the usual system in which any film that plays at a festival is fair game, were talking about a review embargo. In any event I only had time this morning to bang out the American Sniper review. Right now I have to get down to the DMV and pick up my temporary driver’s license, which I took care of a couple of weeks ago but which I didn’t walk away with because I simultaneously tried and failed to get a motorcycle operator’s license. I flunked the written test and was told, naturally, to come back and try again. The DMV guys said once I pass it I’ll get both licenses. That’s the DMV for you. With any luck I’ll be back in two or three hours. Or four.

Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper is a first-rate visceral combat flick — definitely a ride and a half in that respect — with a slight melancholy undertow and a not-so-hot domestic subplot. The several Iraq War combat sequences are major heartbeat accelerators — nervy, rousing, exquisitely shot and cut — and yet, oddly, Sniper never quite lifts off the pad. Well, it lifts off but then it comes back down. Up, down, steady as she goes, less up, down, up again. There’s something a bit rote and at times even flat about portions of it, and that means, no offense, that altogether Sniper is not quite blue ribbon. But it’s certainly good enough if you adjust your expectations and you’re not expecting something, you know, Oscar-baity.

I live in West Hollywood and TheWrap‘s Steve Pond lives a little northeast, about two miles away, but I can nonetheless hear him right now, telepathically if you will, the sound of his keyboard-tappings and his mildly disappointed thought streams…”It’s good but it’s not The One…Academy people are looking for deliverance, for The One, for the big bountiful year-end payoff…and this is just a very good film and in fact one of Clint’s best of the 21st Century. But a hot award-season banana it’s not.”

Sniper is basically one of those “our man grew up this way and then he met this girl and joined the military after 9/11 and then this happened and that happened” films. The subject is a guy — the late, legendary Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle— who lived quite large in a sense, which is to say mythically by killing 160 enemy combatants during his four tours in Iraq. It tells an intriguing and at times suspenseful tale but not my idea of a great one, and while it ends on a tragic note it doesn’t deliver anything you could call a knockout finish — it doesn’t hit you on the side of the head like a waffle iron, which is how I felt at the end of Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby.

But it’s solidly assembled and restrained and unfettered and Clint Reborn as far as it goes — his best work since Letters From Iwo Jima. There are only two things about it that drove me nuts, and that’s not bad considering my contrarian nature.

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