Movie Monday - 2/27/2018

James Baldwin was an American writer of novels and social commentary. The only book of his I've ever read was Go Tell It on the Mountain. We read it in my senior English class. Sometime before he died in 1987, he started a book that examined the assassinations of three of his friends, (Medgar Evans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King). He died before it was completed. I Am Not Your Negro is filmmaker Raoul Peck's attempt to tell that story. It was really good and, sadly, still timely.

In The Post, Meryl Streep gives a wonderful performance as Kathryn Graham, who as the publisher of The Washington Post, was the first female publisher of a major American newspaper. The film is set in the early 1970s when The Post and The New York Times were in a race to publish the Pentagon Papers, thus exposing the decades long massive cover-up of government secrets. Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson, Bob Odenkirk and Carrie Coon also star in this political thriller. It was good.

I really do not understand why Get Out was nominated for Best Picture and Daniel Kaluuya was nominated for Best Actor. It's a horror film, and except for the underlying theme of social commentary regarding racism, it wasn't all that and a bag of chips. Full disclosure, I don't like horror movies - most of them are campy, with thin plots and bad acting. (Maybe, that's the point.) I'm probably not in the target market for this movie either. That being said, it's getting great reviews from critics. I say see it, because YMMV, but I didn't like it.

MK out.