Selma (2014)
Directed by Ava DuVernay
"Selma," as in Alabama, the place where segregation in the South was at its worst, leading to a march that ended in violence, forcing a famous statement by President Lyndon B. Johnson that ultimately led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act.
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What critics compared Selma to
Set during the segregation days of 1962, Green Book is the story of an unlikely interracial friendship that solved America’s racism problem and, to quote Tina Fey’s Golden Globes opening monologue reference to Selma, “now everything’s fine.”
Even when the stories are more thoughtful about race than “Green Book,” in the films that are rapturously lauded with black protagonists in this century (“Selma”, “Ray,” “Hotel Rwanda” even this year’s “Blackkklansman”) we notice at the centre a black man who is not a (mere) common man of the people but a man who stands apart from his peers.
It’s obvious that Reiner made LBJ in response to Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), which demeaned Johnson as a begrudging participant in the civil-rights movement.
Now, she has the keys to Walt’s kingdom as “Mulan” is the most expensive female-directed film ever at $200 million, topping Patty Jenkins’ “Wonder Woman” ($175 million) and crushing Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” ($20 million), Dee Rees’ “Mudbound” ($10 million) and Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning “The Hurt Locker” ($11 million).
This includes popular and critical successes like Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station and Creed , Ava DuVernay’s Selma , Denzel Washington’s adaptation of Fences , and 12 Years a Slave , but also the scandalous rise and fall of Nate Parker’s ambitious Birth of a Nation , the restoration of Richard Wright’s Native Son film, the discoveries of Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground and of the teenage avant-garde filmmaker Edward Owens, and the release of the scholarly, multi-disc box set Pioneers of African American Cinema .
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Or that Selma’s Ava DuVernay recently turned down helming the forthcoming Black Panther?
How about the money-hungry producer, John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith, Shaun of the Dead , The World’s End ), or maybe the film’s pompous, uptight screenwriter Mervyn Cocker Norris (David Oyelowo, Rise of the Planet of the Apes , Selma )? Better yet, the play’s mastermind Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson, True Things , Saving Mr. Banks ), Petula’s seafood-loving mother (Ania Marson), or Mervyn’s cousin the amateur taxidermist Gio (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, The Last Letter From Your Lover , Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywaler ) could be behind it all.