Tag: Martin Luther King

(500) days of bad puns and other items of interest

It’s been a weird day for me, and not only because I’m a politically junkie and my side sustained a bit of a loss today (if you don’t know what I’m talking, well, let’s just keep it that way). Still, the movie news beat never stops and there are certainly days when Hollywood makes a lot more sense than politics, relatively speaking.

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* It’s official and Nikki Finke has claimed another “toldja.” Newcomer Marc Webb of “(500) Days of Summer” will, it appears, direct the 2012 Spiderman reboot that’s been bandied about since Sam Raimi stepped aside from the now never to be filmed “Spiderman IV.” Even though, as I’ve made clear here several times, I’m not a particular fan of Webb’s feature debut, I think Anne Thompson‘s analysis is probably correct:

Webb’s “(500) Days of Summer” is a deliciously commercial hit movie: witty, breezy, defying romantic comedy formula while not straying outside the realm of accessible entertainment. That’s what studios want: that sweet spot between “original and fresh” and “accessible and commercial.”… He will be eager to prove himself on a big-budget VFX franchise, so he’ll do what he is told.

All she left out is the gift they’ve given us pun-crazed headline writers and bloggers because of Webb’s spider-suggestive last name. I guess Eric Nid was too busy on other projects.

* You knew it had to happen: Here comes “Paranormal Activity II” — from the director of “Saw VI.” (Via Bad Guy Wins.)

* I don’t know why they waited until after Martin Luther King day to announce this, but a long-planned biopic on the single most effective civil rights leader in American history is underway, and veteran playwright and screenwriter Ronald Harwood is penning the screenplay with Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider coproducing. The more recent films in Harwood’s long career include “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “The Pianist.” His best known play, the semi-autobiographical “The Dresser,” was nicely filmed back in 1983. Harwood migrated to England from South Africa in 1951 and he’s proven himself a fairly able cultural chameleon over the years. I’m not sure it’s an inspired choice, but it’s not a a bad one. The tricky part now is choosing the director.

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* Some time back, I was not thrilled to report that Danny Elfman’s orchestral score was being removed from “The Wolfman” and was being replaced by a not at all promising sounding, possibly synth-driven rock, score. Well, as I’m still kind of looking forward to the apparently trouble-plagued film, I’m happy to report that Elfman’s score is apparently back in. Yeah, I’m kind of a traditionalist about things like that. I don’t like to hear futuristic sounds with my 19th century gothic chillers anymore than I want chocolate syrup on my pizza.

* It’s probably not at all fair, but I can’t help but think of this concept as “Tim Burton’s ‘Wicked’.”

* The zombie-centric romantic comedy (“zom coms”) is a subgenre that threatens to take over the planet, devouring us all. Latest to be bitten: “The Wackness” writer-director Jonathan Levine, so says Devin of CHUD.

* In China, Chow Yun Fat and the nation’s most venerated philosopher push out the Na’vi, writes Krystal Clark.

* Today we also had a trio of sad deaths of important contributors primarily to other arts whose work also impacted the movies film, singer Kate McGarrigle, and novelist Erich Segal famously of “Love Story” and less famously of “Yellow Submarine,” and mystery writer Robert B. Parker of “Spencer for Hire.” RIP all.

Just a couple of things… (updated)

I’m going to be spending this extremely rainy So-Cal MLK day doing some catching up with various movie-watching obligations, including some awards-type flicks I’ve been criminally behind on, but first a couple of random left over things.

* I expected a bit more fall-out, perhaps, from Ricky Gervais’s more-mean-than-funny gag at the expense of Paul McCartney and his recent divorce, but I guess I wasn’t alone in my mixed reaction to last night’s festivities as a show. Of course, my mixed reaction has nothing on the sheer, predictable venom of Nikki Finke’s nevertheless readable “live snark” of the event. She does have a point, exaggerated though it likely is, in underlining that — even among big show business awards — the Globes aren’t exactly known for their uncompromising integrity. Certainly, last night’s win by Robert Downey Jr., as talented and committed a performer as he is and has been for decades, does seem to follow her statement that “Stars win in direct correlation to their glamor quotient.”

One great line that a lot of us missed from the pre-show activities came courtesy of who else but the wondrous Tina Fey, remarking upon the unstereotypical Southern California weather last night: “No, it’s not rain. It’s God crying for NBC.” The rain, by the way, is expected to continue all week. I guess we know Who Else might be on Team Coco.

Also, one thing I forgot to say last night. “Sofia Loren.” I’m just impressed to see her, anywhere. Time may wear on, but that face is eternal.

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UPDATE: I forgot to add that the ratings for last night’s telecast were up from prior years, and I suspect Gervais’s presence did not hurt.

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Gandhi wuz robbed!

So, in the wake of yesterday’s surprise announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Barack Obama, it occurs to me that while there are several movies about presidents, there are very few, if any, about Nobel Peace Prize winners. Martin Luther King was the subject of a TV movie, but that doesn’t quite cut it. Let’s face it, if there was a Nobel War Prize, there’d be tons of movies about those prize winners. War and other forms of mass murder are so full of dramatic tension! Think of how many movies there are about Hitler, General Custer, and Jack the Ripper there are…and those guys never won anything!

The one film that came immediately to mind, however, was Richard Attenborough’s 1982 “Gandhi.” It might have won some Oscars and ranked in the top 250 on IMDb, but few cinephiles types, myself included, think too highly of it, despite Ben Kingsley’s star-making performance — but it’s one. However, it turns out that despite being the 20th century’s poster boy for nonviolence, Mohandas Gandhi never actually won the famed prize.

Oh, well, as we await a movie about such heroes as Nelson Mandella (I think one may be in the works…and it’s about time), MLK, Aung San Suu Kyi, Lech Walesa or such “give them the award to help them stop it already” villains as Yassar Arafat or Henry Kissinger, here’s an idea for a movie whose time may have come.

George Wallace

This review will appear on the very same day an African-American man will become President of the United States. While the media is constantly reminding us of the historic nature of that fact, what many younger readers may not realize is that only three and a half decades back, a man running on a more or less openly racist, and specifically anti-black, platform was a serious candidate for President — running in the very same Democratic party that would eventually nominate Barack Obama for the highest office on earth.

“George Wallace” is a savvy and darkly engrossing, if often slow and heavy handed, television biopic that takes a circuitous path in tracing the long career of the despised and beloved four-term Governor of Alabama and four-time Presidential candidate of various parties, George C. Wallace (Gary Sinise). We first meet Wallace in 1972 as the avid, middle-aged husband to a beautiful and very sexy young wife, Cornelia (Angelina Jolie). At the same time, a racist state trooper forces Archie (a “composite” character played by Clarence Williams III), a convicted killer and Wallace’s trusted African-America valet, to wear handcuffs at his mother’s funeral.

George Wallace

After his fateful encounter with four bullets that day, we meet Wallace again as the younger and far more liberal political protégé of anti-racist populist governor “Big Jim” Folsom (Joe Don Baker). Though Wallace is a skirt-chasing, semi-absentee father and husband to his steadfast wife, Lurleen (Mare Winningham), the real darkness only comes four year later when Wallace is defeated in his first gubernatorial bid by an opponent supported by the terrorist Ku Klux Klan. Seeing no alternative – losing an election is equivalent to losing his life – Wallace swears that he will “never be outn*ggered again.” He is true to his words and, within a matter of years he is the nation’s most notorious racist pol, blocking the doors of the University of Alabama rather than allowing a pair of black students to enter and “mix” with white students, and uttering his most quoted line: “…I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

“George Wallace” is a look at history from the side of a well-deserved loser, and for those portions of the picture where director John Frankenheimer takes a dispassionate, even satirical (though deadly serious) approach, it is strong stuff and very much in line with the liberal director’s professional and personal legacy. A genius at creating smart political thrillers, and a participant in history himself as the man who drove Robert Kennedy to the Los Angeles hotel where he was assassinated, the director – never a grand-stander – allows himself to directly reference his own past via recreating one of his signature shots.

A key scene begins with Sinise/Wallace making a speech as a black and white monitor shows his TV version – a near identical view to the shot that introduces the McCarthy-esque Senator Iselin (James Gregory) in Frankenheimer’s 1962 masterpiece, “The Manchurian Candidate.” It’s not just stylistic messing around. Having sold his soul for political riches, George Wallace is a man in two halves. At times, he seems to be working hard to persuade himself that racism is correct and we’re never sure just how much he believes his own statements.

It takes time for Wallace to realize that the peaceful message of his bitter enemy, Martin Luther King, is far stronger than the cattle prods and water cannons of Alabama’s police departments, or the combined hate and fear of his state’s white majority. Actually, it takes a long time, plus a deadly church bombing claiming the lives of four innocent schoolgirls, plus a crippling bullet in the spine causing ongoing physical pain, plus the loss of two loving wives, before he can begin to admit he might have been wrong and begin to ask for forgiveness – and even then, no one is really sure of how much genuine remorse Wallace ever felt. (An uncomfortable interview with the real George Wallace in Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary, “4 Little Girls,” speaks directly to that point.)

As powerful as some sequences really are, a lot of things don’t really work in this Emmy and Golden Globe-winning telefilm. It would be tempting to blame all of the problems with “George Wallace” on the script by veteran TV scribe Paul Monash and George Wallace biographer Marshall Frady, but, though I might quibble about the need to create the character of Archie, it’s actually a good piece of work overall and the cast is for the most part sensationally good. It’s Frankenheimer’s directorial choices that occasionally fail. Most annoyingly, he clings excessively to Gary Chang’s florid score, ruining several scenes with unneeded and lackluster music.

The director also missteps in his decision to allow actor Clarence Williams III — a charismatic performer best known as Prince’s dad in “Purple Rain” and Linc of TV’s “The Mod Squad” — to portray his fictional valet as perpetually near tears of suppressed rage and remorse. Though Williams is superb, this choice renders the man as a stand-in for African-American anger, rather than as someone whom the governor might believably mistake as his Stephen Colbert-esque “black friend.” It’s harder to fault much relating to Sinise’s award-winning performance as Wallace, but at times he, too, is allowed to slink into excessive morbidity. (There’s also the matter of a bizarre and distracting continuity error regarding Wallace terrifying withered legs in a bathtub scene later in the film, followed quickly by a shot in which Sinise’s very normal legs are visible.)

However, it’s absolutely impossible to fault any choice made regarding the performances of the two female leads. Mare Winningham’s put-upon Lurleen Wallace is no plaster saint, but simply a very nice person deeply in love with a questionable man. And, not at all surprisingly, a perfectly cast 21 year-old Angelina Jolie steals all her scenes in just the right way as Wallace’s (mostly) devoted, fun loving, and highly-sexed second wife. The superstar-to-be lends a bit of much needed air to the film’s dour later scenes.

The supporting cast is also mostly a help, especially Joe Don Baker as the larger than life, slightly corrupt, Big Jim. Later on in the story, Baker performs a terrifying emotional 180 as, ill and broke, he begins a scene begging for a raise in his ex-governor’s pension, and then with the slightest prompting launches into excessively, but fully justified, rage at how Wallace has abused his responsibility by playing on the very worst in his supporters. It’s a brief tour de force from an underrated actor.

Also, while it’s not really a big part, fans of “Deadwood” will get a kick out of William Sanderson as faintly sleazy Wallace “kitchen cabinet” member T.Y. Odum – not a million miles a way from the similarly monikered, similarly obsequious, hotelier, E.B. Farnum. (I shouldn’t even mention it, but fans of another kind of viewing entirely will spot Ron Jeremy making the briefest of appearances as a pro-Wallace Boston hardhat.)

All in all, “George Wallace” might be a too portentous for its own good, but it is still a solid, worthwhile historical entertainment. It was also the start of a late career renaissance for Frankenheimer (his next project was the acclaimed action picture, “Ronin”). For the long time director with the well-known liberal and humanistic values and a special skill at portraying righteous indignation, it’s an apt return to the concerns that drove one of the most singular and skilled directors in Hollywood history. It’s also a sobering reminder of just how long it has taken for the United States to merely start to put its long history of bloody racial injustice behind it.

Sadly, the film’s two-disc release only contains one extra: the 20-minute video short, “Vision and Conflict: Collaborating on the Wallace Saga,” which combines interviews with Frankenheimer (who died unexpectedly in 2002) with “making of” material from the original production and new interviews with Gary Sinise, Angelina Jolie, Mare Winningham, the director’s wife, Evans Frankenheimer, and others. The video combines some interesting glimpses of the filmmaker’s at times combative working style, with some very nice reminiscences from the stars, all of whom seem to have developed surprisingly close attachments to the late, underrated director.

Intriguingly, the right-leaning Sinise was on the verge of the forming a production company with Frankenheimer, which could have resulted in some interesting films, or at least some good arguments. And for everyone who has suffered through one or more of Frankenheimer’s less acclaimed films — I’ve managed to miss most of them, somehow — it ends with a very wise statement from Frankenheimer: “Sometimes the movie god smiles on you, and sometimes the movie god defecates on you, and when the movie god defecates on you, there’s very little you can except try and get out of the way.”

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