BEFORE: Right now, my life is still in a bit of flux. I was supposed to start training for a new job next week, but there's been a holdup in the company's H.R. department, possibly people are just on vacation. But you can't start a new job if the paperwork's not done, so I'm kind of on hold, waiting for someone I don't know to come back from holiday, and start processing new employees again, in advance of the coming school year. So I can't really quit the part-time job I have until I officially have the new one, therefore there's a new target date for the transition, which is now set for the end of the month. I suppose I can hang in at the movie theater for another two or three weeks, as long as this all is really happening - but I'm eager, I want to update my LinkedIn profile TODAY, only I can't do that. I don't want to get ahead of myself here.
This also makes it tough to determine if my movie-watching schedule is good, I've spaced things out mentally so I won't have a week-long gap in late September, but it's impossible to say if I'm headed for where I want to be then. I'm a week behind the original plan, but I think that's OK, it's just going to erase that big gap from the original plan, so I should be OK, right? Better try to watch five movies this week instead of four, just to be on the safe side. Then again, I've got "Black Widow" in my pocket, I can run that review any time, even on a work-day.
Andrew Young carries over from "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President".
THE PLOT: Based on newly declassified files, this resonant film explores the U.S. government's surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King Jr.
AFTER: The internal debate was over whether to watch this one now, or save it for next year's Black History Month (which I may personally re-schedule to May or June again, that worked out really well this year...). I've already covered politics and civil rights pretty well this year, so do I add one more film to that mix? Sure, why not, especially if that prevents me having to go back and re-number everything just to include that documentary about the 1999 Woodstock Festival. Let's avoid that at all costs.
But there's really not much new ground broken here, there's just two key points of information, and I'm wondering why it took an hour and 45 minutes to relay those two things. Seriously, this could have been knocked out in a half-hour TV special, or even a 10-minute short film. The first key point is that the FBI was spying on Martin Luther King, and other key civil rights leaders. Well, duh, the word "Investigation" is right there in their name, that's what they do, they investigate stuff, just try to stop them. And with everything we know about J. Edgar Hoover, it's not much of a shock to learn that he had an agenda, to gather information about certain people and label them radicals or communists or whatever he could think of to discredit them. In MLK's case, if he couldn't have him labelled as a communist, then he'd find evidence of extra-marital affairs and use that to expose him as a hypocrite who was unfaithful to his wife.
And the other key point of information here is that MLK was unfaithful to his wife - being something akin to the "rock star" of the civil rights movement, he also lived a bit like a rock star, in that he had groupies or followers or admirers, or whatever you want to call that, plus he spent a lot of time traveling around for the cause, so naturally he got lonely, and over time he found a way to deal with that. Maybe not the preferred way, maybe not the way that you or I would choose, but in the end we've seen time and time again ("Pavarotti", "Zappa") that a man tends to be less faithful as opportunity allows other options. So while we as a nation may not be shocked by this information, we may also allow ourselves to be a little disappointed. But, we've all been here before, right? JFK and Bill Clinton and even Franklin Roosevelt. Wait, what? Yes, I said FDR - I'm still having PTSD flashbacks thanks to Bill Murray in "Hyde Park on Hudson".
But Hoover, come on, I'm disappointed in you, too - don't we all know by now that he also had a secret life, and he was most likely a closeted homosexual, had mommy issues and was definitely just wound WAY too tight? For the sake of argument, let's assume those were three different things, and so he definitely had a LOT going on, plus he was also therefore a giant hypocrite himself. J. Edgar, it turns out that when you point the finger at someone else, you've got three fingers pointing back at yourself. Just saying.
The full FBI file on MLK isn't due to be declassified until 2027, which then leads to the obvious question, why make this documentary NOW, why not just wait another seven years and do it right? I don't really have an answer here - but the interview subjects all have to reference this, and say things like "It doesn't matter what's in the file, that doesn't change anything..." because they can all compartmentalize, and treat Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader, differently from Martin Luther King, the human being. But should they? I don't know. Right now our society has a big problem with this, and we've decided that we can't keep Andrew Cuomo, the politician, separate from Andrew Cuomo, the (potential) sexual harasser. Or we can't separate Bill Cosby, the comedian, from Bill Cosby, the rapist. We're not giving Harvey Weinstein a pass just because he produced a few good movies, do you know what I mean?
The cause of civil rights is apparently too important to start parsing out the good deeds from the bad, I get that. You don't negate the overwhelming progress that was accomplished by the few in the name of the many just because they had a few character flaws. But where, exactly, do you start to draw that fragile line? Humans will let you down, again and again, on a personal level, and progress is never easy. And we shouldn't let debate over the methods used cause any backsliding, that's for sure - but there's irony, perhaps, in learning that the methodology of the Civil Rights movement maybe wasn't as "black and white" as we thought it was?
Also starring James Comey (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Beverly Gage, David Garrow, Clarence Jones, Charles Knox, Donna Murch, Marc Perrusquia,
with archive footage of J. Edgar Hoover (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation"), Robert F. Kennedy (ditto), Dan Rather (ditto), H. Rap Brown (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite; The Rise of James Brown"), Arthur Goldberg, Merv Griffin (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Murray Hamilton (last seen in "Houseboat"), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Kenneth Keating, John F. Kennedy (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Coretta Scott King (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Stanley Levison, Gay Pauley, James Earl Ray, Ronald Reagan (also carrying over from "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Bayard Rustin, James Stewart (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), William C. Sullivan, George Wallace (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Roy Wilkins (ditto), Ernest Withers,
RATING: 3 out of 10 hotel rooms
No comments:
Post a Comment