Selma

We can all learn from this powerful film. It is well done, great acting, powerful events. Some more details than I knew.

Very well-done historical drama centered around the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches. Though Martin Luther King Jr. is arguably the main character, the movie isn’t called King and does give a lot of screen time to other historical figures, such as Hosea Williams (played by Wendell Pierce), Coretta Scott King (played by Carmen Ejogo), John Lewis (played by Stephan James), President Lyndon B. Johnson (played by Tom Wilkinson), and Alabama governor George Wallace (played by Tim Roth), with the film showing lots of other behind the scenes events relating to the marches, scenes set in both Alabama and in Washington.The movie is excellent and the first thing I would like to praise is the casting of MLK. Not only does David Oyelowo look like the man, even more to the point he sounds just like him, with his accent, his cadences, his presence…it felt at times like I was watching MLK, that the actor very successfully channeled his essence.The second thing I would like to praise as that while the film shows indeed why King is such a towering figure in 20th century history, it doesn’t lionize him so much as humanize him. In addition to showing his leadership, his bravery, his sacrifices, and his really astute political instincts, it shows King as a real man, a man who had doubts, who didn’t always know exactly the right path to take, a man who like most people struggled with balancing work/home life and with his relationship, a man very aware of the public threats against him very directly impacting his family. Similarly, the film doesn’t romanticize the civil rights movement in general, showing the leaders and members as real people with real concerns, people who didn’t always agree on the right path to take, people who had a few missteps but nevertheless triumphed in the end.Overall the film did a great job of casting the major historical figures. Several didn’t always look exactly like the people they were portraying but they again channeled their essence. After a time I accepted I was watching Governor Wallace and LBJ.Good period piece details as far as music, clothing, cars, hairstyles, really nailing the feel of the time.Really no complaints. I know some people have raised issues with how Johnson was portrayed (that in real life he was more supportive) and from briefly reading a few things before writing this, some think Jewish civil rights leaders were unfairly omitted. I can’t comment particularly on the latter, though I can see why from a narrative sense why Johnson was portrayed that way. The film is well done all around.

We all know the trajectory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life. It's at once a phenomenal achievement of an unbound spirit and intellect, and a reminder that America would rather kill its heroes than follow them.But this is a slice of Dr. King's life that occurred during the moments leading up to the historic crossing of the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama. It is more than a superficial documentary-style account. The movie goes into the lives and motives of the people involved, from the Black Americans who *simply wanted to vote* to the white Americans who opposed them, their dreams, and their accomplishments.David Oyelowo does a fine interpretation of Dr. King without attempting to parrot the man. He does embody what I think it missing from the heroic depictions of King, in that he was only a man, with great hopes and an unendurable oppression from the nation he and other Black people lived in, someone who had to "make it up as he went along," trying to find the lever that would convince the owners of power in America--white people, especially and overwhelmingly white males--to let just a little of that power pass down to the lives of Black Americans. To break the power of injustice we must offer our bodies in non-violent protest, but we must offer them in disruptive protest, says King (and others).And so we see a movement take form that is walking in public, marching in public, praying in public--and being beaten in public. King understood that what will connect injustice with people's response is the moral nature of the oppression, and laying down lives to *oppose and obstruct* is a great way to move the minds AND hearts of people.Yes, there were costs. Many people were beaten, some beaten to death. Many were injured by the opposition. One man was chased down and killed by the agents of the oppressors. It is not a pretty story, and while it has a temporary success, there is no happy ending--Martin himself will be shot to death in 1968 in a futile attempt to silence his outrage and courage and moral call to justice.But still, justice will compel us to act, and this movie reminds us that we are called to act not only in ways that seem grand but also in ways that seem too simple to be effective, and yet can topple unjust systems.Great movie, great actors--I loved seeing the faces of people familiar to us today portraying people from this era.

I did see this movie by the way. I didn't watch it on Amazon but someone in my house did and I know they enjoyed it. It's a really good movie

The film begins with the deaths of four young girls, aged 11 to 14. Their names are Carol Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson. They were murdered at their local Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama on 15 September 1963, dressed in the their Sunday finest. They lived in a Christian country and prayed to the Christian god but were marked for destruction because their skin was dark, not white. The Jim Crow bomb that killed them on the steps of the church that morning was a symbolic message sent to the black community. It said, in effect: “Cease and desist. Give up your struggle. Things are as they are and will not change. Peace will return when you go back to being quiet and dutiful citizens.”That was the game: democracy and rights for whites, knowing your place for blacks. Segregation was good for both sides. You have your patch, we have ours. But the dice were loaded, the game rigged and unfair and everybody knew it.In 1863, 100 years before the girls were killed, Lincoln proclaimed the black population free during a civil war partly fought to achieve this. The Confederacy lost the war in 1865. The slaves were freed. But freed to do what? They still lived in the South. Their families and kin were there. It was what they knew, even if conditions were harsh. Many did not want to move, or had nowhere to go.Freedom is fine in principle, but life doesn’t exist in a vacuum. An infrastructure for emancipation was needed. Re-education of the whites was necessary too, plenty of whom had learned nothing from the war. The South was defeated but not its ideas. Slavery was abolished but not the slaver mentality. The black man was now free to be neglected, to be unemployed, to live in poverty and shoddy housing. Free to sit at the back of the bus, to be excluded from hotels and restaurants, to be denied the right to vote. Free to have access to inadequate, underfunded schooling. Free to be intimidated, terrorized and lynched. Free to be unprotected by the laws and by those elected to enforce them.How long? That was the question. How long does this evil go on? If a civil war couldn’t destroy it, what can? It had to be answered. The dynamics of the game made it inevitable. Rosa Parks was tired that day, she would later say. She had worked all day on her hands and knees. She was exhausted and wouldn’t shift herself to the back of the bus. She refused. She had reached her limit of endurance and compliance. Elsewhere blacks sat at lunch counters even when service was refused. The mood was shifting. A silent momentum was building.Silent until a mighty voice began to be heard. He was a preacher at a Baptist church in Atlanta. He spoke from a pulpit that seemed like a mountaintop, a place close to God and all the angels. The voice boomed, the church shook with hosannas, hallelujahs, wailing. If he was their Moses, the Red Sea in Alabama ran from the town of Selma to the courthouse in Montgomery. He would lead his people to salvation there. He would give them the courage to defy hatred and bigotry. They would do it non-violently. They would symbolize civility in a place of brutality and barbarity. It would not be easy. There would be violence, injuries, maybe even death for some. But it had to be done. They had to make a stand and march. The time had come. The voice was heard. The question of how long had to be answered. This was their answer. History would begin in May 1965.This film is about that march and how it happened. It’s about the eloquent Baptist preacher awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964, and of others around him in the civil rights movement, including his wife Coretta and their family. He was the first President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a position he held from 1957 until his murder in 1968. He’s the man whose birthday (January 15) is now a national holiday in the U.S., a man named after the leader of the Reformation in Germany in 1517. He is of course America’s Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., a man in my opinion who is greater than the country that produced him.Key people in the movement surrounding Dr. King (and shown in the film) are Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Amelia Boynton, Diane Nash, John Lewis, James Orange, et al. Then there are others beyond his immediate circle, including the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, whose songs comfort Martin when he is down. One poignant scene in particular is deeply moving. It’s late at night and Martin can’t sleep, always so much on his mind. He calls Mahalia and asks her to sing to him over the phone. He knows his phone is bugged. He knows the FBI listens to everything he says. But he doesn’t care. She will sing to them too. The power of her voice may even teach them something significant and humane. She sings like an angel of course, and on the wings of that voice he is temporarily transported to Heaven.Annie Lee Cooper is another strong woman in the story. She is played by Oprah Winfrey, who was instrumental as an executive producer in getting the film made. Annie Lee is dignified and determined. She wants to vote and tries to register in Selma, but every time she is turned down on absurd, illegal grounds (asked to recite, for example, the preamble to the U.S. Constitution or to play a game of trivial pursuit with the local clerk in naming the counties in the state of Alabama — nothing but outright intimidation in denying a U.S. citizen her constitutional right to register to vote). These hicks, these rednecks, are the problem. But they’re everywhere in Alabama and throughout the South. The governor of Alabama, George Wallace, is a proud bigot. Jim Clark, the Jim Crow sheriff of Selma, is just as bad. He’s more than bluster. He’ll swing a night stick if he has to. Man or woman, doesn’t matter. If the person is black, that person is the enemy.Then there’s Washington, D.C., especially the egregious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson, the President by default in the wake of JFK’s murder in 1963. Johnson looks harried throughout, overwhelmed by events and people beyond his control: Vietnam, student unrest and demonstrations, the civil rights movement, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, the Black Panthers, etc., etc. He is under siege. He understands and appreciates Dr. King’s cause and supports it ethically, but will not commit politically. The Selma march is thus designed to force Johnson’s hand politically. Dr. King says only LBJ can sign federal legislation that forces voter registration in the South to be free and open. That’s the key: the vote. Without it the blacks will remain indentured to these white slavers in the South forever.Dr. King is played by the British actor David Oyelowo whose family emigrated to Britain from Nigeria. For several years he studied the accent, speeches and speech patterns of Dr. King in the hope and off-chance that a biopic of the great man might one day be made. When audition time came, if it ever did, he would be ready. It did; he was. He embodies the Reverend King as well as any actor can be expected. A wise choice. However, Martin Luther King, Jr. was iconic, larger than life. We have seen and heard his speeches on video and know how he sounded. No actor, absolutely none, can duplicate this. Impossible.I thought about King and James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), while watching the film. Why this connection? Because Baldwin had been a teenage Baptist preacher in Harlem. The novel is all about that experience, the church, and his domineering father. Baldwin knew what King was like because he himself had once been like him. He was a product of the church. He knew the cadences of sermons delivered from the pulpit, its rhythms of call and response with the congregation. Black Baptist preaching wasn’t just a church service; it was a revival meeting, a gospel show, a communion with Heaven that shook the rafters of the church. Soul. Exactly that. That’s what these people had, and Baldwin writes of it well in his remarkable book. One paragraph, please. Because after reading it you will understand where Dr. King’s power, charisma and eloquence came from.“On Sunday mornings the women all seemed patient, all the men seemed mighty. While John [the young preacher] watched, the Power struck someone, a man or woman; they cried out, a long, wordless crying, and, arms outstretched like wings, they began the Shout. Someone moved a chair a little to give them room, the rhythm paused, the singing stopped, only the pounding feet and clapping hands were heard; then another cry, another dancer; then the tambourines began again, and the voices rose again, and the music swept on again, like fire, or flood, or judgement. Then the church seemed to swell with the Power it held, and, like a planet rocking in space, the temple rocked with the Power of God. John watched, watched the faces, and the weightless bodies, and listened to the timeless cries. One day, so everyone said, this Power would possess him; he would sing and cry as they did now, and dance before his King.”Yes, power and kingship. King was powerful because he had the Power. It’s so obvious when you hear him speak and watch what such speech did to others. Which is why he was dangerous, or thought to be, and made people nervous. Whites, that is. Insecure whites with much to lose, or much that was appropriated by them, stolen from black slave labour as well as from the original Americans, the true inhabitants of the land.This is history yet it’s not, or not only that. A disproportionate share of the U.S. prison population is black (10 to 1, black to white, in some states). Unarmed young white men are not shot to death in U.S. streets by black policemen. That equation is reversed. Some black athletes now kneel (not stand) for the national anthem because they know it was written by a racist (Francis Scott Key) who damns himself in verse in the third stanza of the song, a stanza never sung in public (“No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave”). And even now in many states right-wing Republicans are doing their best to prevent persons of colour from voting via arcane, convoluted rules that are illegal but not yet struck down. So the march goes on because apartheid in America never truly goes away, the myth of race still embraced by some despite what science and the Human Genome project know and teach (to those who wish to learn).Truly fine film, utterly relevant, then as now. Progress has been made of course, but as with everything it has to be protected and passed on with dedication and vigilance.

This is a very good film, well acted and on the whole well directed except that I found one section rather slow. It's about the era in USA with Lyndon B Johnson as President when although legally blacks in the Southern States were entitled to vote, in practice in some States they were prevented from registering as citizens so that they couldn't vote or perform any official position eg on a jury or local council. It is an important piece of social history about Civil Rights. I think that everyone should watch this as part of their education. The prejudice is horrific and very sad. Not a light-weight film.

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally desegregated the South, discrimination was still rampant in certain areas, making it very difficult for blacks to register to vote. In 1965, an Alabama city became the battleground in the fight for suffrage. Despite violent opposition, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) and his followers pressed forward on an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, and their efforts culminated in President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. one of the best movies I've ever seen in many respects and definitely a movie that everyone should see ... just have the man-size Kleenex at the ready :_)

Breathtaking at every single level. I struggle to think of many films that can match Selma for power and impact - it is nothing short of a modern masterpiece. Moving, enthralling, humanity shown at it's very best and worst. The acting is brilliant, as is the direction and story telling, in fact every single thing about this film is brilliant. The film grabs you by the neck, heart and mind and never let's go. I honestly cannot praise this film too highly, not only the best film of it's year (how did it not sweep the Oscars?) but for me one of the best films I have seen in my whole life. WATCH IT.

Considering this film came out in 2014 good to see there are still sealed copies available. One thing to be aware of is that this is a German version meaning that the cover art and menus are in German. However you can select the original English audio.