Day 230 - 8/18/09 - Movie #226
BEFORE: Played bi-weekly Monday night trivia last night - our team won with an astonishing 76 out of a possible 78 points! But then it was back into the lock-up for me... I went through the Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview, and out of all the movies being released this fall, I'm only moderately interested in 7 films for the whole fall season - so things are looking up, I'm hoping that I can stop adding films to my list soon, and the numbers can start going down.
THE PLOT: Based on the true story of the Attica Prison uprising of 1971.
AFTER: This was an HBO movie from a few years back - after a stock-footage tour through the late 1960's (the same cultural touchstones recently seen in "Ali" - Malcolm X, Martin Luther King) we see Kyle Maclachlan showing up for his first day as a prison guard - at Attica. This is a bit like showing someone merrily going on a cruise, only to pull back and reveal that the ship is the Titanic.
I'll admit I didn't know a lot about the Attica prison riots before watching this film - it was a tense standoff with guards as hostages, with the civil rights of prisoners a central issue. Once that ACLU lawyer Kunstler shows up, you know the standoff's not going to end anytime soon... It's also a tense, tough movie to watch, so I guess they hit the right tone. Samuel L. Jackson plays one of the head prisoners, Clarence Williams III plays another. With Williams, Maclachlan and Harry Dean Stanton, this is almost like a "Twin Peaks" reunion...
RATING: 6 out of 10 nightsticks
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