Lauren Grodstein is the author of the novels “The Explanation for Everything,” “A Friend of the Family” and “Reproduction is the Flaw of Love,” and the story collection “The Best of Animals”Although Oyelowo is both magnetic and hard to pin down in the central role, this isn’t a King biopic but a vertical and historical portrait of a moment. (Its often tremendous photography is by Bradford Young, cinematographer of the moment, who also shot J.C. Chandor’s forthcoming “A Most Violent Year.”) “Selma” probably covers too much terrain to remain fully coherent, but you have to admire its sweep, which encompasses scenes in the Oval Office and the Alabama governor’s mansion, showdowns between King’s mainstream civil rights movement and the black radicals of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, old ladies trying to register to vote in flyspeck county courthouses, and even a highly uncomfortable conversation between Coretta King and Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch). I briefly wanted the whole movie to be about that encounter, but only because I’m crazy that way. In fact, Paul Webb’s screenplay and DuVernay’s direction come close to the impossible, in capturing how a historical turning point was reached by a bunch of short-sighted people all looking out for their own interests, with at the center of the storm one man and one movement who (as they say) kept their eyes on the prize.
If you don’t know the history of the Selma marches from Selma in March of 1965 – well, it’s almost all in the movie. You don’t really need much of a primer. But here’s the deal: Segregation had been outlawed the previous year, and the white South was still reeling. White liberals all over the country who generally supported equality for African-Americans were generally willing to let things cool down for a while, despite the obvious fact that an entire set of local codes and regulations prevented the vast majority of black people from voting south of the Mason-Dixon line. King and other civil rights leaders wanted to make the point that federal action was required to secure voting rights, and settled on Selma, Alabama – a majority black city with an entirely white government – as the test case. After repeated failures in registering African-American voters, they launched a series of efforts to march the 54 miles of highway from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. The first such march, on March 9, was the one when 600 unarmed black citizens were viciously beaten and tear-gassed by state troopers and local deputies, captured in news footage that made Selma infamous around the world.
DuVernay and Webb appear eager not to leave anything out or elide any behind-the-scenes complexities of the Selma story, while also trying to provide snapshots of the leading characters. So while we spend most of our time near King as he plots and ponders, we also see Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) stewing in his office or conferring with Hoover (Dylan Baker), or notorious Alabama Gov. George Wallace (Tim Roth) nursing a highball before the TV, trapped between Washington, “the Negroes” and the local yokels making his state look bad. If you notice a pattern in the casting of “Selma,” it’s an odd one: In this consummately American story, the four biggest and most charismatic roles – the Kings, Johnson and Wallace – are all filled by English actors. Coming hard on the heels of “12 Years a Slave,” in which the principal actors were all British or Irish, is it time for a little direct action on behalf of American talent? Do our actors really suck so dreadfully they can’t play leading figures from their own history?
I would further argue that the scenes with Johnson and Wallace, although intrinsically interesting, drag down the drama somewhat, and that every minute we’re away from the firecracker atmosphere of rural Alabama detracts from the overall impact. “Selma” ends with the up-with-people conclusion still demanded from a studio film – well, they marched and now there is obviously no more racism! – and for a movie directed by a woman, it seems only half-aware of its gender politics. There are essentially no female characters except Ejogo’s Coretta King, who stands around looking beautiful and pained most of the time. That is no doubt true to the history of the civil rights movement, as to the white left of the time. I suspect that the number of times we see women bustling through the background with coffeepots and plates of food is meant as commentary, but if so it’s rather too subtle.
If “Selma” is limited by the kind of film it needed to be and by what its studio proprietors wanted to sell, it’s still the best and most intimate fictional portrayal of the civil rights movement, by a long shot. DuVernay clearly yearns to make movies that start conversations, not spectacles that sit there at the end of the year like cats on an ottoman, attracting glowing reviews and hardware. Although I imagine she’ll make better films than “Selma,” its best scenes are among the most memorable movie moments of 2014. As she showed in her masterful second feature, “Middle of Nowhere,” she understands the black family, the black home and the internal structure of black life as almost no white person ever could, and she throws open the doors to invite us in.
“Selma” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with national release to follow in January.While you might be familiar with the comedian’s work from her roles on The Kroll Show or Brooklyn Nine-Nine, what you might not know is that Peretti is a “direct vessel of god.” In her Netflix special, Peretti takes her absurdity to the next level with legendary jokes that deal with ego and hot girls who use the hashtag #nomakeup on Instagram.A lot of people assume I’m a lesbian; I’m not. I’m just sad, and it reads the same,” Murphy bluntly states as she begins her hilarious dive into a self-deprecating set. From there, things only get more twisted as she plumbs the depths of self loathing and explores the subtle racism of credit card companies.
So I was hoping you could first just describe to me Australia’s Imminent Threat policy. How exactly does that work?
This is a policy designed by the Western Australia state government, and what it means is that within three nautical miles of the shore, any shark that’s swimming near a populated residential beach can be caught and killed. Now, they say it’s if the shark is deemed to pose an imminent threat, but the definition of “imminent threat” is that it just needs to be a shark that they want to kill. So, for instance, even if everyone is out of the water and on the beach, the shark can still be deemed an imminent threat because that shark may return and kill someone later.Mark Wahlberg, of all actors, plays a college professor named Jim Bennett, who has a sports car, a shag haircut and a wardrobe of slim-cut blazers, and who gets in way too deep with dangerous gangsters. John Goodman gets to do both his patented bad-guy performance and his patented best-friend performance as the most dangerous of all possible gangsters, who for unclear male-bonding reasons becomes Jim’s guardian angel. “The Gambler” is not by any measure a terrible movie, but it’s an odd one to encounter at the end of a year so dominated by intense and heated discussions of gender politics, a vision of male depravity and decadence that also comes with a wide-eyed, boyish innocence. Maybe that’s not surprising, since this picture is a remake of an almost-iconic one with the same title made in 1974, which starred James Caan and Lauren Hutton, and marked the screenwriting debut of legendary Hollywood bad boy James Toback.
There’s no question that the original “Gambler” is better. It feels rooted in time and place in a way this new version can’t quite manage, and it wasn’t constructed as a vehicle for a movie star’s image makeover. But that’s not to say the peculiar 2014 rebuild, “Gambler,” directed with considerable flair by Rupert Wyatt (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”), doesn’t offer plenty of color and its own esoteric charms. Casting Wahlberg as a wisecracking, fast-talking intellectual who is as comfortable discussing “Hamlet,” Albert Camus and existentialism as he is plunking down 40 grand on a single blackjack hand certainly required bravado. Whether or not it pays off, the onetime Boston knucklehead is very likable in the part, and does not embarrass himself.
“The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld,” by Justin Hocking (Graywolf Press)“How’s my little Heat Miser?” said Sue, prancing into our bedroom.
.
Lauren Grodstein is the author of the novels “The Explanation for Everything,” “A Friend of the Family” and “Reproduction is the Flaw of Love,” and the story collection “The Best of Animals”Although Oyelowo is both magnetic and hard to pin down in the central role, this isn’t a King biopic but a vertical and historical portrait of a moment. (Its often tremendous photography is by Bradford Young, cinematographer of the moment, who also shot J.C. Chandor’s forthcoming “A Most Violent Year.”) “Selma” probably covers too much terrain to remain fully coherent, but you have to admire its sweep, which encompasses scenes in the Oval Office and the Alabama governor’s mansion, showdowns between King’s mainstream civil rights movement and the black radicals of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, old ladies trying to register to vote in flyspeck county courthouses, and even a highly uncomfortable conversation between Coretta King and Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch). I briefly wanted the whole movie to be about that encounter, but only because I’m crazy that way. In fact, Paul Webb’s screenplay and DuVernay’s direction come close to the impossible, in capturing how a historical turning point was reached by a bunch of short-sighted people all looking out for their own interests, with at the center of the storm one man and one movement who (as they say) kept their eyes on the prize.
If you don’t know the history of the Selma marches from Selma in March of 1965 – well, it’s almost all in the movie. You don’t really need much of a primer. But here’s the deal: Segregation had been outlawed the previous year, and the white South was still reeling. White liberals all over the country who generally supported equality for African-Americans were generally willing to let things cool down for a while, despite the obvious fact that an entire set of local codes and regulations prevented the vast majority of black people from voting south of the Mason-Dixon line. King and other civil rights leaders wanted to make the point that federal action was required to secure voting rights, and settled on Selma, Alabama – a majority black city with an entirely white government – as the test case. After repeated failures in registering African-American voters, they launched a series of efforts to march the 54 miles of highway from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. The first such march, on March 9, was the one when 600 unarmed black citizens were viciously beaten and tear-gassed by state troopers and local deputies, captured in news footage that made Selma infamous around the world.
DuVernay and Webb appear eager not to leave anything out or elide any behind-the-scenes complexities of the Selma story, while also trying to provide snapshots of the leading characters. So while we spend most of our time near King as he plots and ponders, we also see Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) stewing in his office or conferring with Hoover (Dylan Baker), or notorious Alabama Gov. George Wallace (Tim Roth) nursing a highball before the TV, trapped between Washington, “the Negroes” and the local yokels making his state look bad. If you notice a pattern in the casting of “Selma,” it’s an odd one: In this consummately American story, the four biggest and most charismatic roles – the Kings, Johnson and Wallace – are all filled by English actors. Coming hard on the heels of “12 Years a Slave,” in which the principal actors were all British or Irish, is it time for a little direct action on behalf of American talent? Do our actors really suck so dreadfully they can’t play leading figures from their own history?
I would further argue that the scenes with Johnson and Wallace, although intrinsically interesting, drag down the drama somewhat, and that every minute we’re away from the firecracker atmosphere of rural Alabama detracts from the overall impact. “Selma” ends with the up-with-people conclusion still demanded from a studio film – well, they marched and now there is obviously no more racism! – and for a movie directed by a woman, it seems only half-aware of its gender politics. There are essentially no female characters except Ejogo’s Coretta King, who stands around looking beautiful and pained most of the time. That is no doubt true to the history of the civil rights movement, as to the white left of the time. I suspect that the number of times we see women bustling through the background with coffeepots and plates of food is meant as commentary, but if so it’s rather too subtle.
If “Selma” is limited by the kind of film it needed to be and by what its studio proprietors wanted to sell, it’s still the best and most intimate fictional portrayal of the civil rights movement, by a long shot. DuVernay clearly yearns to make movies that start conversations, not spectacles that sit there at the end of the year like cats on an ottoman, attracting glowing reviews and hardware. Although I imagine she’ll make better films than “Selma,” its best scenes are among the most memorable movie moments of 2014. As she showed in her masterful second feature, “Middle of Nowhere,” she understands the black family, the black home and the internal structure of black life as almost no white person ever could, and she throws open the doors to invite us in.
“Selma” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with national release to follow in January.While you might be familiar with the comedian’s work from her roles on The Kroll Show or Brooklyn Nine-Nine, what you might not know is that Peretti is a “direct vessel of god.” In her Netflix special, Peretti takes her absurdity to the next level with legendary jokes that deal with ego and hot girls who use the hashtag #nomakeup on Instagram.A lot of people assume I’m a lesbian; I’m not. I’m just sad, and it reads the same,” Murphy bluntly states as she begins her hilarious dive into a self-deprecating set. From there, things only get more twisted as she plumbs the depths of self loathing and explores the subtle racism of credit card companies.
So I was hoping you could first just describe to me Australia’s Imminent Threat policy. How exactly does that work?
This is a policy designed by the Western Australia state government, and what it means is that within three nautical miles of the shore, any shark that’s swimming near a populated residential beach can be caught and killed. Now, they say it’s if the shark is deemed to pose an imminent threat, but the definition of “imminent threat” is that it just needs to be a shark that they want to kill. So, for instance, even if everyone is out of the water and on the beach, the shark can still be deemed an imminent threat because that shark may return and kill someone later.Mark Wahlberg, of all actors, plays a college professor named Jim Bennett, who has a sports car, a shag haircut and a wardrobe of slim-cut blazers, and who gets in way too deep with dangerous gangsters. John Goodman gets to do both his patented bad-guy performance and his patented best-friend performance as the most dangerous of all possible gangsters, who for unclear male-bonding reasons becomes Jim’s guardian angel. “The Gambler” is not by any measure a terrible movie, but it’s an odd one to encounter at the end of a year so dominated by intense and heated discussions of gender politics, a vision of male depravity and decadence that also comes with a wide-eyed, boyish innocence. Maybe that’s not surprising, since this picture is a remake of an almost-iconic one with the same title made in 1974, which starred James Caan and Lauren Hutton, and marked the screenwriting debut of legendary Hollywood bad boy James Toback.
There’s no question that the original “Gambler” is better. It feels rooted in time and place in a way this new version can’t quite manage, and it wasn’t constructed as a vehicle for a movie star’s image makeover. But that’s not to say the peculiar 2014 rebuild, “Gambler,” directed with considerable flair by Rupert Wyatt (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”), doesn’t offer plenty of color and its own esoteric charms. Casting Wahlberg as a wisecracking, fast-talking intellectual who is as comfortable discussing “Hamlet,” Albert Camus and existentialism as he is plunking down 40 grand on a single blackjack hand certainly required bravado. Whether or not it pays off, the onetime Boston knucklehead is very likable in the part, and does not embarrass himself.
“The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld,” by Justin Hocking (Graywolf Press)“How’s my little Heat Miser?” said Sue, prancing into our bedroom.
.
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