Posted on 01/19/2015 6:58:09 AM PST by SkyPilot
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I hardly think it worth while to redefine history with a movie. It makes Martin Luther King Day into a Martin Luther Thing Day.
MLK was a Republican. He believed in family. He was not pro abortion. He was not a welfare economist.
Today the Black family is broken. So is the white family. Not so much the Asian family or the Middle Eastern family, or the Latino family.
If MLK were alive today , he would be working to restore the black family, and to do that he would be making conservatives out of his people.
LBJ? He was actually one of the first Utopian fascists elected to the presidency, and he was likely responsible for the murder of JFK.
IMO, M-Dowd is protesting the negative depiction of one of her secular gods, Lyndon “Loose Brains” Johnson.
It’s ironic that the filmmaker, in his eagerness to elevate Martin Luther King to god status (where MLK has already been for decades), makes LBJ look more like the bullying arrogant lout that he really was.
Leaving out the juicier LBJ quotes, of course.
You the man.
It makes me sad to see liberals bickering with each other over race, and on MLK day too.
so sad.....LOL
The worst part is that these kids getting free tickets are from a mostly-illiterate population and most will never read further for any critical analysis of the subject matter. This isn’t just the case with blacks; many young whites are the same way. Movies today have reverted to what they were a little less than a century ago: propaganda tools for the illiterate.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd self-destructs
By Tammy Bruce
Published January 05, 2015
FoxNews.com
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/01/05/new-york-times-columnist-maureen-dowd-self-destructs/
I have often considered the theory that
LBJ had JFK killed because Kennedy wanted to pull
out of Vietnam, while Johnson needed the war to distract
from his Great Society scheme.
Kennedy was shocked at the murder of Diem as a result
of the power projected by the White house.
Maybe she ate a brownie before seeing the movie.
There are plenty of JFK and LBJ puffers out there in historical circles but the political priorities came first including winning elections and acting only if public opinion shifted in the right direction.
The white population was willing after the dogs and water cannons at Birmingham to accept the Civil Rights Act, after the violence at Selma the Voting Rights Act and after MLK’s assassination the Fair Housing Act.
But as the violence spread and deepened a backlash against the CR Movement deepened and LBJ’s “poverty programs” created further resentment against people on welfare driving around in nice cars and such. The popularity of a song called “Welfare Cadillac” was symbolic of the feelings among many whites at the end of the 1960’s.
I guess she was going for the idea that the filmmaker's storytelling skills rivaled those of Sheherazade's. To me, this was a rhetorical fail on Modo's part - the low-light of a badly written fake review.
Say, isn’t today Robert E Lee’s birthday? Odd.
Why does EVERY movie that has black people in it need to be nominated? Maybe it just plain sucks? Which wasn't the case for Django Unchained or 12 Years a Slave.
One would think the awards of American Black Film Festival would be sufficient.
Is there a American Scottish Film Festival ... No? What are you waiting for?
As they say in baseball....”WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR!” There will be cascade of Awards for Black Orientation Movies. A separate Black category in each award category would be helpful, you know like Affirmative Action in Hollywood.
Scheherazade was the name of the woman who tells the stories in 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights.
If Martin L. King, Jr. were alive today, he might say,
“That lady makes me feel ... that pitcher of that lady in her swimmin’ suit, you know, she makes me, uh, makes me feel funny down there, um, you know—down in my danger zone.”
Free Republic: puncturing lefty sacred cows for years and years and years.
(King was no Christopher Columbus.)
Social Justice Warriors...useful idiots.
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