2014 drama
Rating: 14/20
Plot: Martin Luther King, Jr. and other Civil Rights leaders try to get equal voting rights in Alabama. A historic march from Selma to Montgomery winds up leading to the invention of rap music.
There's nothing wrong with this movie. The acting is fine. David Oyelowo has to be brave to take this role, and I like how he doesn't really do a King impression here. The movie shows the historical figure as a man rather than a saint or a guy with his own holiday. Oyelowo plays an actual human being, and I think the subdued performance with a script that doesn't really include all that many giant movie moments probably makes the movie better. I thought Tim Roth was really good. What I like best about this movie is the look of the thing. It's too glossy to be a documentary, but there's a dustiness to the South here, and the whole thing feels dream-filtered. I liked the colors a lot. And this is a story that I'm glad was told, but I didn't think the movie was all that engaging. It kind of tells the story exactly as you imagine it would tell the story. It's sad only because you know it's supposed to be sad, and its biggest moments are big only because you know they're supposed to be big. Frankly, I got a little bored with the whole thing, and I hope that doesn't make me a racist.
1 comment:
History by the numbers. King is such an iconic figure that seeing O-man portray him was VERY distracting, and sunk the movie for me from the beginning. O-man is black and short, and I guess we're supposed to take it from there. I never really bought any of the emotional stuff after O-girls vote-block at the beginning, and the movie really did do a disservice to LBJ, a President who did more for blacks than all the others back to Lincoln combined. The movie is fairly bleh, and it made me wish it had been a documentary about the subject, instead. A 13.
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