{"id":1643,"date":"2015-01-12T01:17:25","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T01:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bryanbuser.com\/365moviesbyday\/?p=1643"},"modified":"2022-08-10T22:53:44","modified_gmt":"2022-08-10T22:53:44","slug":"selma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/365moviesbyday.bryanbuser.com\/selma\/","title":{"rendered":"Selma (2014)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Selma<\/em>\u00a0has a movie that will leave many audience members clapping as the film concludes. It’s a feel-good movie and an important one for all generations to see. Older generations maybe we have forgotten\u00a0some of the critical details over the years. Younger generations may be being exposed to this for the first time, or at least the first time outside of maybe a textbook or one of those dry 45-minute, made-for-education documentaries. I am happy this movie received a PG-13 rating rather than an R one. It is an essential movie for everyone to see. I am not one who will ever cheer or hoot and holler at the end of a movie. That isn’t my style. I was talking with my mom the other day, and she said people stood and clapped at the end of Unbroken. I found Unbroken to be one of the most overrated, bland movies. Selma certainly isn’t that, and I was happy there were some cheers at the end of this movie. I think I’m just seeing it at a time in my life where, outside of a select few movies (including none in 2014…still some hope for\u00a0American Sniper,<\/em>\u00a0though) where I am just not going to be moved in the same things that\u00a0a\u00a0typical audience might be. My favorite movies these days are dark, psychological thrillers (Foxcatcher<\/a><\/em>) or movies about either wrecked relationships\/less than perfect\u00a0relationships (Blue Valentine,<\/a>\u00a0Take This Waltz<\/a>,\u00a0Revolutionary Road<\/a>,\u00a0All the Real Girls<\/a><\/em>) overcome diversity to find a way (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>The Painted Vei<\/em>l<\/a>). So\u00a0just where I was with my mental state, I had sort of had a mental block going in. I was confident I would like the movie, but I was by no means ready to\u00a0see it was going to win all of these Academy Awards for which it will likely receive nominations. The nominations it will receive. The wins, I think, could become hard to find.
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\"selma<\/p>\n

Let’s start with the lead performance. David Oyelow (Lee Daniels’ The Butler<\/a>, A Most Violent Year<\/em>) nailed it as Martin Luther King. This is a career-defining performance and, likely, the pinnacle of his career. I certainly hope not, but that’s how great he was. It really felt like you were watching King on screen in a similar way where you thought you saw Abraham Lincoln on screen in the movie\u00a0Lincoln<\/em>. I did happen to watch\u00a0Malcolm X<\/em>\u00a0a few weeks ago and I actually thought\u00a0Malcolm X<\/em>\u00a0was a little bit better than\u00a0Selma<\/em>. There was more character development in the Denzel Washington film, but as good as Washington was, you never could get past the fact that it was Washington on screen. With\u00a0Selma<\/em>, most people had never heard of or remembered Oyelow. He definitely had this working in his favor. I believe I have yet to list my five nominees for Best Actor (which is rather annoying because the Academy Awards will be announced a couple of days before I have the chance to see\u00a0American Sniper<\/em>\u00a0and, in particular, Bradley Cooper). I do think his performance will be outstanding, and I will end up having seven candidates that I will need to whittle down to five spots. I think Oyelow did best as King offered his thoughts and expressions with his nonverbal expressions. He was a man of peace and long-term vision. This is where he differed from Malcolm X (although I must say that I think much more positively about Malcolm X after watching the Spike Lee movie). I think, if you know me, I prefer peace over\u00a0conflict, so I appreciated the approach that Martin Luther King took.<\/p>\n

So the movie follows King’s life for three months in the summer of 1965. King and his supporters are trying to secure voting rights in Alabama, a place violently opposed to letting black people have the same rights as them. Blacks who legally had the right to vote were turned down simply because they were black. In the film’s second scene, Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) goes to turn in her voting application. A clerk denies her at the courthouse and first asks her to recite the Preamble of the US Constitution (which) she does. She is then asked how many sitting judges there were in Alabama, which she does. She then is asked to name them, an impossible question to answer. Even if she had memorized the names, the clerk would have just asked her an even more difficult question. He was going to make sure that she would get her application rejected no matter what. Though the 15th amendment had been ratified almost a century before this movie takes place, poll taxes, literacy tests, and various other unfair practices kept a huge majority of blacks (some 98% in Alabama) from voting.<\/p>\n

King, tired of seeing this, decides to take his cause to Selma, Alabama. This is where most of the movie takes place, although there are a handful of scenes in Washington DC between King and President Lyndon B Johnson (Tom Wilkinson –\u00a0Michael Clayton, In the Bedroom<\/em>). King consistently requests that President Johnson do his job and make it easier for blacks to register to vote. But Johnson doesn’t want to make that a priority. Instead, he focuses more on the Vietnam War and helping the poor than voting rights. This is unsatisfactory to King, so he and his supporters set up shop in Selma with the eventual plan to march to Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama, to publicize their protest of not being able to vote. It is King’s hope that national awareness will lead to increased\u00a0legislation, specifically some voting rights acts that would eliminate tests and taxes to keep people who should be allowed to vote from voting.<\/p>\n

Now I know I’m in the minority when I say that I did not love this movie. I liked it. And even though I didn’t know the exact details of these marches, I felt like I learned much about MLK going into this film. And while this film had much more drama than the very flat\u00a0Unbroken<\/em><\/a>, I wasn’t moved like I thought I would have been. Now, when you see this movie and say that you thought it had plenty of drama, I’m not going to argue (I would argue against you if you said the same thing for\u00a0Unbroken<\/em><\/a>). I could see people reacting to\u00a0Selma<\/em>\u00a0in entirely different ways.\u00a0Some will be moved, and some might think that they didn’t learn a whole lot that they didn’t already know. I\u00a0hope that the movie\u00a0moves you as it was designed to do. As I mentioned in my first paragraph, my head isn’t currently at a place where it usually might be, and perhaps, this is why I didn’t rate it quite as highly as so many others did. Directory\u00a0Ava Duvernay (Life Itself, Middle of Nowhere<\/em>) did direct a movie that honors its protagonist and tells an important in a dignified way. I never felt that a scene was too difficult to watch, but a few were tough. Once again, I am glad this was a PG-13 movie so that the younger people of our country can watch it sooner than later.<\/p>\n

Plot 9\/10 (Albeit a pivotal part of King’s life, the march from Selma to Montgomery felt a little limiting to me. You had the\u00a0pieces in place for a slightly larger story here…I didn’t want an entire biopic, but this seemed like it wasn’t enough)
\nCharacter Development\u00a08.5 (probably a few too many main characters, and they don’t change throughout the movie…maybe they did and didn’t get enough screen time)
\nCharacter Chemistry 9\/10 (similar to my statement above…just a little hard to get chemistry when there are so many different characters trying to be showcased)
\nActing 9.10 (it was legit.\u00a0Oyelow gave the performance of his career…Wilkson was great…Ejogo and Winfrey were perfectly cast…and I’ve always been a fan of Wendell Pierce…though he tends to play a similar character in most of his movies.
\nScreenplay 9\/10 (Paul Webb COULD grab the final nomination for best original screenplay)
\nDirecting 8.5\/10\u00a0(DuVernay won’t win, but a nomination is in order here…She’s on the cusp at 5 or 6, but she’s the only woman even being considered in the top 10 (sorry, Angelina Jolie, but\u00a0Unbroken\u00a0<\/i>was just a miss)…I think DuVernay gets the final nod, and this would be much deserved
\nCinematography 9\/10 (I did like the back and forth between the acted scenes and the shots of what was happening back in the 1960s)
\nSound 9\/10
\nHook and Reel 8.5\u00a0(a little slow for me…I never felt bored, but it was slow and not really in a methodical way which I am more appreciative towards)
\nUniversal Relevance 10\/10 (everyone should see this…it’s an important movie for young and old…I liked the PG-13 rating…I believe this film would be great for a high school US History class)
\n90.5%<\/p>\n

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