Selma

Every year when the Academy announces its nominees for Best Picture of the Year, there's always some bigot who goes online and comments "Of course that movie was nominated. It's the annual make white people feel guilty movie". They of course are talking about movies like 12 Years a Slave, The Help, or Amistad. Well my retort to that is every year there's a movie released where I have to watch Zoe Saldana hook up with a scrubby white dude like Brad Cooper or Spock! Are you kidding me? You've now convinced black women to hook up with white aliens over black men? This is a new form of genocide!

Well before black men are completely wiped off of the face of the Earth, let me take the time to talk about the latest 'make white people feel guilty' movie in Selma. Selma is about the historic march Martin Luther King Jr. led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to protest the unfair legislation individual states had in place to keep minorities from voting.

This was after the March on Washington and the passing of the Civil Rights Act but states were still creative in finding loopholes to keep blacks from voting and having representation in public office or on juries. So discrimination and violence were at an all time high during this time of transition and President LBJ had no intention of dealing with it any time soon; that was until King (David Oyelowo) got involved.

What's refreshing about this movie is it's not the typical look into MLK's life that we've always seen; it's more of a look into the man, the pastor, and the husband. You get to see him when he's struggling with decisions about the movement, his marital issues, and sometimes faith in himself. And Oyelowo does a solid job of picking up his southern accent without attempting to mimic his unique voice, which would have been a death nail for this movie. The MLK epic that came out in the 80's actually found an actor who was able to do both when it came to King's voice, and while that mini-series still holds up fairly well, there are way too many slow gospel songs and dramatic pauses in it; so it was time for an update.

The first act of the film is your standard civil rights movie but once the second act starts up with the brutal violence the protesters experienced you start to see what makes this film and this story so special. The director does a solid job of showing the violence without over dramatizing it and simply presents it for what it was, hate.

It's nowhere near the performance Denzel Washington gave in Malcolm X, which was one of the best performances ever put on film, but as the movie goes on you see Oyelowo morph into King. He almost inspired me to go put on my Sunday's best just so I could go out and get beaten with a billy club. The only real issue I had with this movie is that they treated some rumors about King as actual facts and that's not fair to him or his family but that's just a minor part of the story.

Selma is very good it's just that it's not great. I rate it as very FRESH and suggest you check it out, just leave during credits before Common starts rapping.