SELMA illuminates our present state of race relations by revisiting the past

I have this memory of being in first grade and just learning about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time. We had some kind of worksheet that gave us some basic facts about him, along with a drawing. I very clearly recall squinting at the date of his death: 1968.

1968? That made no sense to me. He was fighting for black people to be seen as equal. A year earlier I had played Abe Lincoln in a school play, so I understood about the Civil War and how black people were consider slaves then. But that war ended in 1865. Surely this information about Dr. King meant to say that he died in 1868. 1968 was only about 20 years ago. The Batman TV show I watched in reruns every afternoon was from 1968. You mean to tell me that when Batman was fighting crime, there were still major civil rights issues?

I told my mom there was a mistake on the ditto. She informed me the date was right, that he hadn't died all that long ago. I just couldn't process how people could still be so racist in so recent a past. I grew up in the midwest, where as far as I was concerned, everyone WAS equal. There were black kids in my class, no one treated them any different. I just couldn't process how racism had lingered so long after the days of Lincoln, and then how it seemingly had disappeared so much since Dr. King.

It's funny how it all makes sense to a child that everyone should be equal. Of course today I look around and all I see is how much further we have to go. 

It seemed so odd to me then because it wasn't my experience. It was so far outside the realm of what I knew, that I couldn't process it. I thought about that a lot during SELMA, a film deftly brings the experience of oppressed southern blacks into the audience's awareness.


Like THE CRUCIBLE, SELMA tells a story about the past with very direct commentary on our present. Some of the parallels are so of the moment that for a moment, you might almost think that it was conceived in direct response to incidents like the horrifying police brutality in Ferguson, and the abominable dismantling of the very Voting Rights Act that's origins are depicted in the film.

The film wisely doesn't attempt to be a full biopic on Dr. King and instead focuses on the marches Dr. King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in an effort to protest obstacles put in place to prevent black citizens from registering to vote in the South. Though they legally have the right to vote, a number of provisions have been put in place to achieve the end of disinfranchising black voters. In turn, this ensures that racist, bigoted elected officials remain secure in office, and also that blacks can't serve on juries, meaning that that the system shields racist officials and individuals even if they manage to be brought to trial for crimes against the black community.

Dr. King has appealed to President Johnson to step in and call for a congressional law outlawing these practices. Johnson has bigger fish to fry, and there's more than a suggestion that he doesn't want to piss off a large chunk of the Southern electorate by calling for legislation sure to be unpopular among angry reactionary bigots who will vote him out of office. He tries to pass the buck on down to the state level.

The film essentially becomes a chess match between King and Johnson, with King recognizing that their endgame needs to be to shine enough light on the injustice in Alabama that Johnson has no choice but to act. As long as these actions are taking place in darkness, Johnson can afford to ignore it. But if the eyes of the nation are fixed on Selma, Johnson is going to have to get his hands dirty somehow.

There's a simplistic view that activism is just about making a lot of noise. Hell, I think there are plenty of activists who think the best way to achieve their ends is to be loud and disruptive. There's not a lot of big picture thinking going on there. There are some brilliantly-written scenes that lay out this strategy. It's not just about making noise - King insists they work out a plan so that when Johnson caves, they can give him specific solutions that can be implemented as part of the law they will call for. They're not just doing pie-in-the-sky "raising awareness." It's very much a "Now that we have your attention, here are the solutions we want in a language you can understand."

There's a scene where King and his associates have to decide what the single most important aspect of the issue they need to address is. It's a moment of exposition, but it doesn't play totally as such. It feels like problem-solving, and in one efficent scene, the stakes and the solution are swiftly laid out.  We know what the law has to address, we know that King has an endgame, and we understand what it will take to get there.

There's another intriguing moment of gamesmanship where Malcolm X offers his own form of assistance in a meeting with Coretta Scott King. It's made clear more than once that politicians like Johnson see King as the more "acceptable" figurehead for the civil rights movement, as opposed to the more militant and aggressive Malcolm X. Malcolm X knows this and offers to be the "worst-case" alternative that sends the power structure running into King's arms. (As it turns out, he's assassinated before much can be done, but it's interesting to see the dynamics at play here.)

There's a pitfall cliche that a number of older films about civil rights efforts fall into - they're often centered on the acts of a white savior. It doesn't seem like a huge problem until you struggle to find such a film where the black protagnist is truly at the center: To Kill A Mockingbird, A Time to Kill and especially The Ghosts of Mississippi all fall into this trap. That doesn't automatically make any of those movies bad, but it's a trope that one should always be sensitive to.

I bring this up because in a way, SELMA addresses this "white savior" tendency. It's spelled out that the real victory will come when the struggles facing African-Americans are put on display for the white Americans. Then they will call for change and Johnson will have to listen. There is the unfortunate implication that white activism carries more weight than black activism. Particularly at that point in time, that's an unfortunate reality, and I would love to see film scholars more intelligent than I dissect this point in a little more depth. King definitely comes across as a man who is determined to use the system to change the system.

I don't recall any prior instances of Dr. King being depicted on screen, which means that David Oyelowo has to break ground as the first performer to personify this icon. That's no small task, though it might be aided in part by the fact that Oyelowo is still a relative unknown. We're not asked to accept Will Smith as Martin Luther King and so Oyelowo's challenge is to find a way to make the "behind closed doors" depiction of King feel like a piece of the great orator whose "I Have a Dream" speech every school child is familiar with. He pulls it off and perhaps the greatest compliment is that I cannot think of any other actor who could have done a better job.

It's hard to watch some of the sheer police brutality in some scenes and then realize that too many recent tragedies echo the same circumstances. Cops are show beating unarmed citizens, and at one point shooting another citizen dead long after they'd fled the scene of the riot and ceased to be a problem. You want to watch it and think, "Damn, that's horrible, but at least it's in the past." And then you remember that a Ferguson cop emptied his gun into an unarmed kid a hundred feet away and the case was never even brought to trial! The injustice these marchers face is far from in the past.

Even more so, it's a sad irony that the entire climax of the film comes down to Johnson calling for the Voting Rights Act that will shut down all of the red tape that has been disinfranchising black voters. In one early scene, we see just how capricious these laws are when a woman played by Oprah Winfrey goes to the registrar's office and he asks her increasingly arcane questions about how many local judges there are and what their names are. When she fails to answer a question that I'd wager most white voters would flunk, he uses that as a means to deny her.

Why is that said? Because just over a year ago, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court struck down some major parts of that act. This opens the door for future legislation to again restrict voting. For those who didn't quite grasp the full implications of this when the decision came, SELMA could be an eye-opener.

I'd put this on the list of 2014's must-sees, and I suspect that it'll become a tool for many a history teacher. I can't point out the virtues of the story without noting that this was no easy film to produce in the first place. This film not only faced the challenge of a comparatively small $20 million budget, but it also legally could not use any of the text of King's actual speeches. Every speech given is a line-for-line paraphrase of his actual words. (The script is credited to Paul Webb, but there was no WGA arbitration and interviews have made clear that DuVernay made considerable contributions there too.) 

This is a film as much about 2014 as any other contemporary film. I'm aware this is an intensely competitive year, but director Ava DuVernay deserves to be singled out by both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America for her extraordinary work here. SELMA is more than an "eat your vegetables" movie. It's an important film that honors some brave men and women who stood up for their rights and forced a nation to look hard at it's own shame.

My Top 10 films of 2014

Continuing yesterday's post, here's the main event! My Top 10 films of 2014.

Before we begin, I'm sure someone will bring up the fact that a film I called "the most brilliant and subversively political film you'll see all year," a movie I said, " might be the most cinematically daring film of this decade, if not this century," is not on this list. The truth is, I didn't think it was fair to these other twenty films to make them measure up to the opus that was TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION. I gave it four thumbs up last summer and if you're curious about why, check out this review, or buy my book on all of Michael Bay's movies - MICHAEL F-ING BAY: The Unheralded Genius in Michael Bay's Films.


1. Boyhood - I feel like these first three or four films are in a dead heat with each other. I give BOYHOOD the edge because it's a deceptively simple story, yet really quietly powerful. I've seen a few people snark about how the film has no point beyond just showing people get older. Some even say that it's no different than watching characters grow up over the course of a long-running TV series or a continuing film series like HARRY POTTER. I think that misses some of the point of BOYHOOD, which often seems to be about the quieter, mini-milestones of youth. It's a character-heavy story that doesn't burden itself so much with making each year fill a "character-defining moment" quota. After a lot of thought, I think it works because it puts the audience in the shoes of the parents, always aware that their child will continue to grow and evolve, and wondering what sort of young man he'll become. There's a moment with Patricia Arquette near the end that really drives home how much we've been following the story of her life as well as her son's. So let the naysayers cry about how there was "no story." That just makes me more impressed with how this movie provokes an audience to feel.

2. Nightcrawler - If you're in the middle of writing a dark suspense film, like I am, NIGHTCRAWLER is both essential viewing and also confidence-crushing. Working from his own script in his directing debut, Dan Gilroy pulls off one of the most intense films of the last year. At least two sequences will have your heart racing and the wonderful thing is that by the time each of those emerges, the film has taken so many risks that we truly feel like anything can happen. I saw this movie while I was working on a script that had a total sociopath at its core and I was struggling with how to depict that without pandering to the audience. The first two scenes alone were a revelation in unfurling that sort of character. Jake Gyllenhaal gives what is likely his best performance ever as the ambitious and slimy Lou Bloom. He makes your skin crawl even before he gets to the really nasty stuff. Unfortunately, he's so good that the Oscar buzz for his performance seems to be overshadowing the equally deserving Rene Russo. And in a year that was even slightly less competitive, I bet Riz Ahmed would be a dark horse contender for Best Supporting Actor buzz.

3. Whiplash - For my money, it's one of the best films of the year, capped off with a fantastic performance by J.K. Simmons as a band conductor at one of the best schools in the country. Miles Tellar plays the jazz drumming student desperate to earn his respect, to the point that he endures a lot of verbal and (technically) physical abuse. It's also a very small-scale movie. Though there were turns in the story that came as a gut punch to me, it's much more about character than plot. Any writer seeking to learn from strong character writing (and that should be all of you) really would benefit from studying this film. Don't walk into this movie with the misconception that a film needs to be an epic in order to be one of the year's best. Simmons deserves the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this one.

4. Selma - Like THE CRUCIBLE, SELMA tells a story about the past with very direct commentary on our present. Some of the parallels are so of the moment that for a moment, you might almost think that it was conceived in direct response to recent incidents. The film wisely doesn't attempt to be a full biopic on Dr. King and instead focuses on the marches Dr. King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in an effort to protest obstacles put in place to prevent black citizens from registering to vote in the South. This is a film as much about 2014 as any other contemporary film. I'm aware this is an intensely competitive year, but director Ava DuVernay deserves to be singled out by both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America for her extraordinary work here. SELMA is more than an "eat your vegetables" movie. It's an important film that honors some brave men and women who stood up for their rights and forced a nation to look hard at it's own shame.

5. Gone Girl - What I appreciated most about Gone Girl is that this was not a film that felt like it made a choice between having a complex, twisting plot and complex characters. There's enough real estate here for both. Usually in these kinds of films, the plot goes through so many contortions that the characters either don't have time to be fleshed out, or the film needs them to be cyphers so that later twists aren't telegraphed. Wild Things is a good example of this, a fun, trashy thriller with more turns than a roller coaster, but barely any pretension about its cast of characters. It's far harder to tell a story about complex people and maintain enough mystery about them to keep shocking us late into a complex story. Ben Affleck is quite good as a man suspected in the disappearance of his wife, maintaining his innocence even as the evidence piles up, but Rosemund Pike utterly owns this movie with her Hitchcock-blonde portrayal of that wife, Amy. If you've gone this long without learning of the many twists in this film, see it before someone ruins it.

6. The Lego Movie - We all wrote this off before seeing it, and we all ended up with egg on our face afterwards when this was as clever, fun and moving as some of the better Pixar films. Writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller remind us that even a questionable idea can be - wait for it - awesome with the proper execution. At this point, Lord and Miller could be announced on a remake of Birth of a Nation and I'd say, "Let's give them a chance before we judge."

7.  Birdman - the story of a washed up actor who saw his career plummet after walking away from the latest sequel in his superhero franchise twenty years ago. That actor, Riggan Thomsan, (played by Michael Keaton) is on the verge of a possible comeback via the Broadway play he's directing, starring in, and adapted. The problem is the show isn't very good and it's just had to recast one of its main players at the start of previews. The film's thoroughly character-driven from start to finish. As much as the three-act structure is there, this is not a movie where you'll be overtly aware of the structure. You will notice the film's technique of appearing to have all been shot in one take. Though the visual effect is seamless, I found it occasionally showy to the point of distracting. That doesn't change that this is a well-made, well-acted film.

8. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - Dawn is probably the best film this summer at building tension and character simultaneously, and that equation adds up to tragedy. Even if you went into this story unaware of how events have to turn to line up with later installments, you'd probably be struck by the inevitability of the events, specifically the war between apes and humans. After this, there's no excuse for fully CGI-characters to not feel as real as ones played by human actors. This is a movie that opens with some fifteen minutes in ape society and it's absolutely riveting. As it develops the conflict between humans and apes it's clear neither side really wants a war, but the ones doing the most saber-rattling are provoked into it out of the fear that if they don't strike first, they will be run over. Both sides have their justifications and once the die is cast, the saddest moment of the film comes when it's apparent there will be no way to avoid the consequences. It's rare to get this sense of tragedy in a summer movie. In fact, it's probably even rarer to find this sort of craft in a franchise that's some eight films in.

9. Interstellar - INTERSTELLAR is a hard movie to write about, even though it ranks among director Christopher Nolan's best. It's also one of his most emotional. The director has a rep for being cold, but the script - co-written with his brother Jonathan Nolan - wisely makes the emotional relationship between McConaughey's Cooper and his daughter Murph into its backbone. The sequence where he awakens from decades of cryo-sleep to catch up on years of recorded messages from his daughter as family as they grew up without him. I have some issues with the third act (I think Murph makes a critical realization WAY too fast considering what a logistical leap that it is, and then a later scene involving Cooper and Murph is too rushed and abrupt to be a fitting emotional catharsis for that relationship.) So much of this film works that if its ambitions outstrip its ability in a few spots, I can roll with it. Best seen on the biggest screen you can find.

10. X-Men: Days of Future Past - Not just my favorite comic book movie of the year, but one of my favorite comic book movies ever. The degree of difficulty on this was insanely high. There's the blending of two casts in what is essentially a crossover between the two X-MEN continuities, a complex time travel plot, and solid character arcs for multiple leads. On top of that, there's a coda that addresses some of the missteps of the past films and brings closure to a 15 year saga while putting us on a path to tell new stories with the younger cast. The fact that any of this feels effortless or simple is just a tribute to the fine work of credited writers Simon Kinberg, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn and director Bryan Singer. If you want to write superhero movies, you need to study this film.