Selma

[movie zombie]

I saw the movie today.
I was deeply moved and cried at various times.
I remember watching tv news in the 1960's and seeing the images.
what this film does in the beginning of the film sets the tone for just how bad it was and how degrading many were treated.
it then goes from there.
I am ashamed that all this went on in my life time.
please take the time to see this movie.

 

[JaneSmith]

Oooh, I want to see this.

 

[movie zombie]

I hope you do!

it is very well acted, directed, and explains a lot of how although it was legal for Black Americans to vote they were not registered to do so....so many ways they were demeaned/disrespected and thwarted in their efforts to be full US citizens.

sad, really really sad.

 

[zoebartlett]

My husband and I want to see Selma. We're big fans of David Oyelowo from his days on MI:5. One of my college course seminars years ago was on the Civil Right movement, and it was fascinating to me at the time. I can't wait to see Selma.

 

[VRBeauty]

I saw it this evening - it really does give perspective to the question of voting rights, not to mention civil rights. You're absolutely right, MZ, it's sobering to think that these events, and the discrimination that forced them, happened in our lifetimes (or, for others, not that long ago ). It's definitely a must-see movie.

 

[kenny]

Thanks for the info on the film.
I'll be sure to see it when it hits Netflix.

Haven't been to a theater in many years.

 

[VRBeauty]

Totally off-topic, but... I saw Selma at a Cinemark theater, and found to my surprise that admission was only $6.00 for me today. Turns out the Cinemark theaters in my area all have "discount Tuesday" when they offer most films for only $6.00 all day.

Now back to the topic at hand!

 

[momhappy]

We don't watch many movies and if we do, it's kid movies or date-night movies (and that's usually a comedy).

 

[AGBF]

Here is an excerpt from a review of "Selma" by Maureen Dowd of "The New York Times". It is actually less a review than an impression of her time at the movie theatre, but is still interesting.

"WASHINGTON — I WENT Friday morning to see 'Selma' and found myself watching it in a theater full of black teenagers.

Thanks to donations, D.C. public school kids got free tickets to the first Hollywood movie about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday weekend — an effort that was duplicated for students around the country.

The kids did plenty of talking and texting, and plenty of fighting over whether there was too much talking and texting. Slowly but surely, though, the crowd was drawn in by the Scheherazade skills of the 'Selma' director, Ava DuVernay.

The horrific scene of the four schoolgirls killed in the white supremacist bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church stunned the audience. One young man next to me unleashed a string of expletives and admitted that he was scared. When civil rights leaders are clubbed, whipped and trampled by white lawmen as feral white onlookers cheer, the youngsters seemed aghast.

In a delicately wrought scene in which Coretta Scott King calls out her husband about his infidelities, some of the teenage girls reacted with a chorus of 'oooohs.'

DuVernay sets the tone for her portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as patronizing and skittish on civil rights in the first scene between the president and Dr. King. L.B.J. stands above a seated M.L.K., pats him on the shoulder, and tells him 'this voting thing is just going to have to wait' while he works on 'the eradication of poverty.'

Many of the teenagers by me bristled at the power dynamic between the men. It was clear that a generation of young moviegoers would now see L.B.J.’s role in civil rights through DuVernay’s lens.

And that’s a shame. I loved the movie and find the Oscar snub of its dazzling actors repugnant. But the director’s talent makes her distortion of L.B.J. more egregious. Artful falsehood is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.

DuVernay told Rolling Stone that, originally, the script was more centered on the L.B.J.-M.L.K. relationship and was 'much more slanted to Johnson.'

'I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie,' she said.

Hollywood has done that with films like 'Mississippi Burning,' which cast white F.B.I. agents as the heroes, or 'Cry Freedom,' which made a white journalist the focus rather Denzel Washington’s anti-apartheid activist, Steve Biko.

Instead of painting L.B.J. and M.L.K. as allies, employing different tactics but complementing each other, the director made Johnson an obstacle.

Top Johnson aide Jack Valenti told Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, that L.B.J. aspired to pass a Voting Rights Act from his first night as president. Valenti said that his boss talked to him about it the night of J.F.K.’s assassination in the bedroom of Johnson’s house in D.C., The Elms, before the newly sworn-in president went to sleep.

On the tape of a phone conversation between President Johnson and Dr. King the week of L.B.J.’s 1965 inauguration, the president said that he indicated the time was not yet ripe to ask Congress for it, and he made it clear that they both needed to think of something that would move public opinion more than a presidential speech.

'Johnson was probably thinking, at least in part, of the spring of ’63, when J.F.K. was privately saying the public wasn’t yet politically ready for a comprehensive civil rights bill,' Beschloss said. 'Then came the May 1963 photograph of Birmingham police setting dogs against African-American demonstrators, which helped to move many white Americans who were on the fence about the issue.

'Once Selma happened, L.B.J. was, of course, horrified, but he knew that the atrocity would have an effect on white Americans similar to Birmingham that would make it easier for him to get a Voting Rights Act from Congress.'

...​

"

AGBF

 

[AGBF]

There were many folk singers who wrote songs that told the stories of events that occurred in the Civil Rights era of the 1960's. Among the best story tellers-narrators-not necessarily the best composers or singers-were Phil Ochs and Joan Baez. Each of them wrote songs that actually told, in verse upon verse, the story of an event. I am posting a ink to one of Phil Ochs' songs about a state other than Alabama (although he does have a song called "Talking Birmingham Rag" which is quite amusing, too). This one is about Mississippi. One of the saddest and most poignant songs ever sung, I think, is, "Birmingham Sunday" by Joan Baez. Maybe I will post a link to that, too.

Here is Phil Ochs song, "Here's to the State of Mississippi"...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU3o9Tl7zTk

Deb/AGBF

 

[AGBF]

Here is a link to Joan Baez singing "Birmingham Sunday"...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shgSLKb-onA

This is the story of the bombing that killed four little black girls who had gone to church that Sunday.

Link...http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/birmingham-church-bombing

 

[movie zombie]

deb, I've always known about the 4 little girls.....I was growing up at the time it happened.

what makes the scene so horrifying and made me cry is that the director made it so real that these girls were so very real leading very real little girl lives walking down a staircase and talking about who does their hair how and who they wanted copy. it is a short scene. it appears early in the movie. it sets the tone for the times. thinking of that scene right now as I write this makes me cry. we always read about the 4 little girls and it is black print on white paper. we understand and deplore what happened intellectually. but to "see" it and them as just living their lives and thinking this day was like any other, well, it becomes emotional.

again, I think everyone should see this film: it should be part of every history class taught in high school or earlier.

the problem is that those that should see this film won't.

sigh.

 

[telephone89]

I am very interested to see this movie. I have not been to the theater in a long time, and probably will not see this film in theaters. I cry at SPCA commercials, so do not doubt I will be soggy eyed for this. Being a Canadian our history is a bit different, but that doesn't make it any less important.

 

[partgypsy]

I should see it but I don't want to see it. I couldn't watch 12 years a slave either.
instead on MLK day I read accounts of the events leading up to the Selma march, including Bloody Sunday. I want to pick up from the library the March graphic novels.