Occam's Razor

Seeing double? I am, after seeing two movies in two days. Here are capsule reviews:

Selma

Having seen two of the 8 films nominated for Best Picture this year (The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything), it’s not hard to understand how the director and producers of Selma would feel overlooked for not having their film at least nominated. Some say that it is due to racism: when whites are largely responsible for nominating films, they tend to nominate films starring whites. But then again, it was only last year that 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture. Whether or not it deserved a nomination, Selma is definitely worth seeing and certainly feels on par with the nominated films. Then again, any film about Martin Luther King during the height of the civil rights movement, if made really well, would make a compelling movie. Director Ava DuVernay certainly delivers the goods with the help of a cast of thousands (at least in some of the protest scenes), but principally with David Oyelowo as King and Carmen Ejogo as his wife Coretta Scott King.

The movie had to be made with a lot of funding from African Americans instead of traditional sources, which some attribute to discrimination. Oprah Winfrey plays Annie Lee Cooper but also owns Harpo Productions. Her company doubtlessly paid for a large part of the film’s costs, since it shows up in the opening credits. The producers’ struggle to make the movie was doubtlessly easier than King’s struggles in and around Selma, Alabama in February and March 1965, which is the focus of the movie.

In a way this movie is a brave portrait of King, since it does not shy away from King’s alleged infidelities. It is not like his mistresses are in your face, but it is alluded to in a very grownup discussion between King and Coretta. It’s hard to see how King could find time to fool around, but it is clear that he was both great and flawed, which seems to be true of all our great heroes. Also flawed is the movie’s portrayal of President Lyndon Johnson. Very early in the movie, he is portrayed as wanting to punt on the Civil Rights Act in favor of more achievable goals. This is factually incorrect. Someday Hollywood will give Johnson his own movie because he is an interesting character, just not a particularly telegenic one. Selma does make clear that Johnson was a pivotal character in the civil rights struggle. Arguably, only Johnson had the power to get the Civil Rights bill passed, as his southern credentials (as well as his overwhelmingly Democratic congress) gave him the mojo to do this. Few blacks could actually vote in the south due to poll taxes and unreasonable voter registration requirements. This is the focus of the movie and the stage is Selma.

What Selma does brilliantly is connect us with the extreme discrimination and oppression in the south at this time. Your heart will race during many of these pivotal scenes. The focus of the movie is the crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge by principally black protestors. These events are now fifty years in our past and thus beyond the memory of most Americans. The movie makes it easy to run back the clock and to understand the extraordinary bravery exercised by blacks (and some whites) back then.

King’s portrayal is thus nuanced, which make him plausible instead of glorified. Along the way we get a host of characters, some best forgotten like Alabama Governor George Wallace, and some we should remember more than we do, like Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young. Like it or not you will get a close encounter with our nation’s ugliest side but you will also get a sense for the power of faith in action. King will bring down the walls of Jericho with the help of a lot of dedicated and very brave people. You should get an appreciation for King’s strategic and tactical strengths, and his ability to outthink his opponents. Short of being a reptile, you should be very moved by this movie.

3.4 out of four stars.

[xrr rating=3.4/4]

Lucy

Lucy is another movie that really deserved an academy award nomination. It will unfortunately receive nothing from the Oscars this year because it was not nominated for anything. Interstellar will probably win any awards issued this year for a science fiction movie, but really Lucy is the better science fiction movie. In my humble opinion, it’s the most mind-blowing movie in this genre since The Matrix.

And yet of course there are parts of this movie that strain credulity, with its premise being the biggest one. Morgan Freeman plays a professor that ponders what humans would be like if we could use more than ten percent of our brain. This is a lot of silliness, as we do use all of our brain, but perhaps not with 100% efficiency. Lucy (Scarlet Johannson) gets to find out when she unwittingly becomes a drug courier for a very special drug, reputedly a chemical created during pregnancy that stimulates creativity in the fetus. In higher doses Lucy will discover it will let her use 100% of her brain, and this leads to all sorts of magical powers and incredible abilities to use her brain and process information and discern truth. The bad men in Taiwan who put the drug into her body (and a number of other couriers) must take commercial flights with the 500 grams placed in a pouch sewed up inside their bodies. Some very well moneyed clients are waiting, which means that Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi) and his well dressed and well armed henchmen won’t let anything go wrong, and are willing to kill lots of people to make it happen. Lucy, once she is transformed by the massive drug overdose, wreaks her own revenge while trying to make use of her abilities to save her knowledge for mankind, while also certain that she will die soon from the cell replication the process spawns.

Johannson is a great actor and gives us a riveting performance as Lucy, while the director Luc Besson makes sure lots of people get killed in and around her for those of us who demand action, blood and gore. Lucy is not afraid to kill either, and with her new precognition she really can’t be beat. But things really get freaky as she uses more and more of her brain and starts to have supernatural and then god-like abilities. But can the knowledge she acquired be passed on before she dies, particularly when so many people want her dead?

This is a terrific movie for any science fiction fan plus you get tons of cool special effects to enjoy too. I’m frankly baffled why it wasn’t nominated for anything and why it wasn’t rated higher by reviewers. It’s a great film, the sort of movie where when you leave the theater you definitely feel you have been taken someplace new. And a bonus: Johansson can act. I can’t say the same about Keanu Reeves (Neo) in The Matrix.

3.4 out of four stars too! What a great double feature!

[xrr rating=3.4/4]