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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

King:
A Filmed Record…
Montgomery
To Memphis

Directors – Sidney Lumet, Joseph L. Mankiewicz – 1969 – US – 181m

*****

Not-for profit documentary charts the career of non-violent, civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King and the role he played in that movement – plays at a free screening 6 for 6.30 start at Union Chapel, Islington on Wednesday, March 29th

An attempt to document the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King from 1955 to 1968. If you had any doubt as to the subject matter, it goes straight in with a pro-Black Power activist (not Dr. King) making a speech to an enthusiastic black audience. Then it cuts to Dr. King, talking about power – but not the power of the Molotov Cocktail. “But,” he says, “we DO have a power. As old as the insights of Jesus of Nazareth and as modern as the techniques of… Gandhi.”

Dr. King was a great orator, and removing his words, cutting them down (in an attempt to distil their essence) and posting them in this verbal review loses much of the qualities seen in footage of the great man speaking, his presence, his phrasing, the way he uses pauses and so on. He must have been incredible to watch in the flesh as an orator, and while it’s true that seeing his oration captured on film is, inevitably, not the same as the experience of watching him live, the footage of him speaking is both astonishing and compelling.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies Music

Respect

Director – Liesl Tommy – 2021 – US – Cert. 12a – 145m

***

Biopic of legendary singer Aretha Franklin’s career up to and including her live gospel recording Amazing Grace – out in cinemas on Friday, September 10th

There is much to admire in this sprawling biopic of America’s legendary Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin. Let’s start with the opening scene in which 10-year-old Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner), known to friends and family as Ree, wanders wide-eyed through a grown-up party with its mysterious intrigues at the house of her pastor father C.L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker) to sing for the assembled guests, one of whom describes the child’s voice as “going on 30”. There’s a wondrous quality to this, a child walking through an adult world she barely comprehends where her stock is already rising on account of her incredible voice. We too are intrigued by the promise of this world then blown away by her voice.

However, there is darkness in this Detroit house too: her mother Barbara (Audra McDonald) who will leave her for the last time then be announced dead in a phone call, the boy who will shut the door behind him entering her room uninvited and the resultant shame she can’t articulate, her authoritarian father who will tour her round numerous churches from age 12 and micromanage her singing career.… Read the rest