West Side Story (2021)

Year 14, Day 246 - 9/3/22 - Movie #4,236

BEFORE: The timing really worked out here, because it's a long holiday weekend, and this is a LONG movie - 2 hours and 38 minutes.  Was the original film this long?  I guess it was about 5 minutes shorter, so it looks like Spielberg didn't add a lot to the remake.  Or did he?  I haven't really researched this.  

I did work at a screening of this film, back during Oscar season - it wasn't for DGA and Academy members, though, it was just for Steven Spielberg's friends - just his New York friends, and it turns out that Steven Spielberg has a lot of NYC friends, we screened it in both theaters, almost at the same time - that's over 700 seats, and Spielberg wasn't even there!  I remember getting a complaint from someone who got seated in the smaller theater, and said she was the 2nd assistant hairdresser on the film, and why should SHE be relegated to the back-up theater?  Well, I could have said, "Well, you should have gotten in earlier...." but I didn't say that.  I could have said, "Only the 1st assistant hairdresser gets to sit in the big theater..." but I didn't say that, I just kept quiet.  Probably for the best. I don't know what I should have said, maybe something about how Spielberg has too many friends, whatever would have gotten me off the hook - always blame the famous director, right?  

Corey Stoll carries over from "Driven".  

THE PLOT: An adaptation of the 1957 musical which explores forbidden love and the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks, two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds. 

AFTER: I put this one off for a very long time, because I kind of knew how split I was going to be on this remake.  Remakes in general kind of rub me the wrong way, because it's extremely rare for a remake to be better than the original.  Reboots are one thing, but remakes?  Why, we already had a movie version of "West Side Story", my mother showed it to me when I was very young - she showed me all the musicals, from "The Sound of Music" and "Fiddler on the Roof" to "The Music Man" and "The King and I".  Obviously she loved them and wanted me to grow up liking them, you know what happens when you show a young boy so many musicals - that's right, he could grow up to be a film producer, so you're really playing with fire there. 

It's been a few decades since I watched the 1961 "West Side Story", and since then I've watched several cast members appear on "Twin Peaks", learned that several actors and actresses have passed away, and watched a documentary about EGOT winner Rita Moreno.  Oh, and in the theater where I work, there's a movie poster for the original, signed by George Chakiris - so maybe that's where my sympathies lie.  But after 40 years or so, I've forgotten so much that I'm probably overdue for a re-watch, and instead I now find myself watching the remake from last year.

It wasn't easy to get here, I assure you - sure, I could have come here straight from that doc about Rita Moreno, but I didn't want to break up the Summer Doc Block.  If I had ended the documentary chain with "Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It", sure, this would have made a great outro, they re-wrote the role of "Doc" from the original just to put Ms. Moreno in here, playing Doc's widow. That's probably the biggest narrative change in this story, unless I miss my guess - and they gave her the song "Somewhere", which I think was sung by Tony and Maria in the original.  That might be heresy to some Broadway musical fans, but I'm OK with it. It's 60 years later now, and times have changed, and movies have to change with the times.  But yeah, this was hard to link to, if I didn't get here via Corey Stoll, I'm not sure how I would have done it - maybe through Ansel Elgort, even with a gigantic cast, for the majority of the actors in this film, it's their first major role.  Who told the casting director to hire so many unknowns?  (Ah, the IMDB explains that they're mostly theater performers, not film actors...)

Not that much, though, this remake is still set back in the late 1950's or perhaps early 1960's, when slums on the West Side of Manhattan were being torn down in order to make space for what would become Lincoln Center.  (This was all before my time, I didn't move to NYC until 1986, for college.). My wife watched this remake a few months ago, when it became available on HBO Max, and today she wondered why they didn't modernize the film, set it in 2021.  Well, we still have racism, sure, but it's a different kind - I think most Americans have accepted Puerto Ricans as Americans now, so they'd have to make the Sharks Mexicans or something, and that just wouldn't really work.  Besides, the fact that busloads of immigrants are being sent from Texas to New York is a recent development, that wasn't happening back in 2020 when this was filmed.  

So yeah, they had to keep this set back in the 1960's, but then I realized they had to spend a LOT of money to make New York City look like it did back then.  Sure, there are some parts of Brooklyn or the Bronx that probably haven't changed in 60 years, but a typical 2020 Manhattan street is going to require a lot of set dressing, classic cars, and probably post production as well to pass for a 1960's street. Much of this film was also shot in a studio in Brooklyn, and the fact that I couldn't tell when the characters were on a set and when they were on a real NYC street means that somebody did their job very well.  Probably a lot of somebodys, and again, a lot of money got spent to recapture that look of 1960's tenements and crumbling buildings.  It costs a lot to make a set look that bad, ironically enough.  

I think a lot carried over from the 1961 version - let's face it, if somebody was able to get Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins (3 type-A personalities, I'll bet...) to work together and make something that good, you probably want to preserve and respect what they did.  I think most of what Spielberg brought to the table here was blocking and framing, camera angles and such.  The guy who directed action films like "Jaws", "Raiders of the Lost Art" and "E.T." is the guy who knows how to translate actions into beautiful shots.  But the biggest improvement over the original is probably the singing, because here it's quite good, and not every actor can sing well.  Was Natalie Wood a great singer?  I'm not sure.  

I remember as a kid I would listen to the song "Gee, Officer Krupke", and even then I could tell some of the actors playing the gang members were just not great singers.  To be fair, it's a complicated song with some difficult key changes, and some of them just didn't get it right - go back and listen to the movie soundtrack if you don't believe me.  Here, I think most of them got it right, and it is NOT an easy song - my issue is really with Bernstein not making it easy for the singers, particularly the second line of each verse, what the hell kind of key change is that?  It's some diminished minor or something, just for a couple of bars - dumb it down a little, and the actors will be able to find the melody better if it's not all jumping around.  "Officer Krupke", by the way, is also a very adult song for a kid to grow up listening to, since it's all about whether people are inherently good or bad, mentally sick or socially corrupt, and whether each person is responsible for their own moral compass or should blame their upbringing or society as a whole.  But in a comic way, of course.  And one character mentions his sister has a mustache and his brother wears a dress, which is funny when you're a kid, but means something else when you're an adult, possibly.  

And there's a trans character, too - my wife confirmed that "Anybodys" was a character in the original musical, somebody born female who was dressing as a man - a tomboy who tried to become a member of the Jets gang, but couldn't get accepted by them.  This wasn't very obvious in the play or the 1961 film, perhaps, but now in the 2021 remake, they were free to bring this point a little more into the spotlight, it seems maybe the world finally caught up with this character in "West Side Story" and maybe we all understand them a little better now.  Maybe. 

Of course, we all know this story goes back to William Shakespeare (who practically invented cross-dressing as a story device) and "Romeo and Juliet".  Instead of two families feuding in Verona, Tony and Maria come from two rival races in NYC, the white Americans and the Puerto Rican Americans. Montagues, Capulets, Jets, Sharks - there's really nothing new under the sun, at least the original makers of "West Side Story" were honest about their inspiration.  In Verona they had balconies, in NYC they have fire escapes - no difference, really.  The only thing they really changed was the ending, and the method of the main characters' demise - SPOILER ALERT, it doesn't really work out in the end for our star-crossed lovers, but who does it really work out for?  Every story eventually follows the same pattern - boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy kills girl's brother in a gang rumble.  Am I right?

Maybe this story is even more relevant than before, because of all the gun violence in America.  When Maria picks up the gun here at the end and points it at each member of the Jets, she's really saying that the problem is within every single person who resorts to violence to solve their problems, or every person who thinks that there's something inherently wrong with the people with differently colored skin or who speak a different language.  Until everyone realizes that their hatred is part of the problem, not a reaction to the perceived problem, well, then, nothing's going to change.  Or I don't know, maybe write and pass some gun control legislation, it's worth a try, isn't it? 

But I still find myself on the fence, after watching the film - was it necessary?  No, not really, because a remake generally isn't necessary.  However, the kids today probably aren't interested in watching a movie made in 1961, so maybe it IS necessary.  And then the themes of racism, gun violence and non-acceptance of free love are more relevant than ever, so on another level, it WAS necessary to make this movie again, if for no other reason than to help fight against those things and highlight those causes to the younger audience of today.

So I say - everyone should watch BOTH versions.  Or do what I did, I started watching this on Friday night, after having two beers, which was probably a mistake.  I fell asleep about 45 minutes into the film, which was right around when Tony and Maria kissed for the first time.  I seriously wondered the next day if I should have just quit then and there, because up until that point, it's mostly a happy film - if you stop watching after 45 minutes, everybody just goes to the dance and has a good time, and Tony and Maria fall in love, and do you really need to know what happens after that?  Only watch the rest of the film if you're a glutton for punishment, I guess. 

Also starring Ansel Elgort (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose (last seen in "The Prom"), David Alvarez, Rita Moreno (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), Brian d'Arcy James (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Mike Faist, Josh Andrés Rivera, Iris Menas, David Aviles Morales, Sebastian Serra, Ricardo A. Zayas (last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Adriel Flete (ditto), Carlos E. Gonzalez, Ricky Ubeda, Andrei Chagas, Jacob Guzman, Kelvin Delgado, Carlos Sanchez Falu, Julius Anthony Rubio, Yurel Echezarreta, David Guzman, Sean Harrison Jones, Jess LeProtto, Patrick Higgins, Kyle Allen, John Michael Fiumara, Kevin Csolak, Kyle Coffman, Daniel Patrick Russell, Ben Cook, Harrison Coll, Garett Hawe, Myles Erlick, Julian Elia, Tanairi Sade Vazquez, Yesenia Ayala, Gabriela M. Soto, Juliette Feliciano Ortiz, Jeanette Delgado, Maria Alexis Rodriguez, Edriz E. Rosa Perez, Ilda Mason, Jennifer Florentino, Melody Marti, Ana Isabelle, Gaby Diaz, Isabella Ward, Eloise Kropp, Paloma Garcia-Lee, Leigh-Ann Esty, Lauren Leach, Brittany Pollack, Kellie Drobnick, Skye Mattox, Adriana Pierce, Jonalyn Saxer, Brianna Abruzzo, Halli Toland, Sara Esty, Talia Ryder, Maddie Ziegler (last heard in "Leap!"), Andrea Burns (last seen in "The Prince"), Mike Iveson, Jamila Velazquez, Annelise Cepero, Yassmin Alers, Jamie Harris (last seen in "A Series of Unfortunate Events"), Curtiss Cook (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Ron Stroman (last seen in "Rough Night")

RATING: 6 out of 10 paint cans

Driven

Year 14, Day 245 - 9/2/22 - Movie #4,235

BEFORE:Isabel Arraiza carries over from "The Little Things", and here are the links for the rest of September: 

Corey Stoll, Jon Bernthal, Saniyya Sidney, Lorraine Toussaint, Idris Elba, Daniel Adegboyega, Bobby Cannavale, Jennifer Saunders, Russell Brand, Taraji P. Henson, Annabeth Gish, Matt Smith, Adria Arjona, Lex Scott Davis, Cindy Robinson, Edwin Hodge, Frank Grillo, and Mykelti Williamson, that should get me to October 1.  Good luck trying to figure out what I'm about to watch!

THE PLOT: Intense thriller where politics, big business and narcotics collide, based on the real events of the John DeLorean celebrity scandal. 

AFTER: Everybody, please say it with me today - "This is a weird movie."  Not because it's got aliens or animated lizards or Eddie Izzard fighting Nazis, or even animated alien lizards voiced by Eddie Izzard fighting Nazis.  No, it's the fact that somebody made a movie about the John DeLorean scandal and decided to make that a comedy, when there's really nothing inherently funny about his story, not at all.  At least I think this was supposed to be a comedy, but it's very hard to tell, and therein lies the problem. Did someone realize how sad this auto designer's story was and said, "What this story needs, really, is some jokes..." and then that same person sort of forgot to write the jokes?  Or was this designed to appear to be unintentionally funny, like they hired a bunch of comedy actors and then just kind of hoped that everything would fall into place and people would laugh at it?  That's not how comedy works - I think being funny on purpose and succeeding is one of the hardest things, it's probably much harder than being dramatically important. And anyway, sad funny isn't really funny - and this film is just sad funny at best. 

For those out there who weren't around in the 1980s, John DeLorean was a car designer who worked for General Motors for a long time, had a hand in creating the Pontiac GTO, the Firebird and the Grand Prix.  Muscle cars - for those who weren't around in the 1980's, cars used to run on gasoline, not electricity, and they used to make a lot of noise and go FAST.  Some of them, anyway.  Then he worked for Chevrolet, redesigning the Corvette and the Chevy Nova, while adopting a celebrity lifestyle and owning shares of sports franchises like the San Diego Chargers and New York Yankees. But he quit Chevrolet to start his own motor company, the Delorean Motor Company, which produced cars called DeLoreans - most notably seen in "Back to the Future", when Marty McFly drove one around a mall parking lot, and that's really the furthest that any DeLorean had gone without breaking down.  

Maybe Johnny D. had good intentions, it's tough to say - he designed his car to be made of stainless steel, so it would be lightweight (to be faster or get better mileage?  I don't know, I'm not a car person) and it would never rust, like every other car eventually does.  Plus, they had gull-wing doors that opened UP instead of to the side, which I'm guessing meant that they would ALWAYS scratch the car next to them in the parking lot when the doors opened - jeez, at least if you're parked too close to another car with regular side-opening doors, you can open the door just a bit and try to squeeze out.  Not with the Delorean, it was open all the way or not at all, which probably led to a lot of arguments in parking lots.  Plus you could scratch up the car next to you when you got in, but then you had to sit there because the DeLorean wouldn't start, so that was probably awkward for everybody. 

DeLorean was a little like the Elon Musk of his day, but he was also like the Donald Trump of his day, too - like Musk, he tried to change the way the public thought about cars, tried to change their habits, consider an alternative to the Detroit companies.  And like Trump, DeLorean was always looking for investors and then diverting the money invested straight into his own pockets.  He built an auto plant near Belfast, Northern Ireland to make the cars, and got millions in financial incentives to build that, but the factory didn't produce as many cars as it was supposed to, and then the money started going missing.  (Did they check his resort in Florida? Just a thought.). And then DeLorean got caught buying drugs in an FBI sting operation, which was set up by his friend, James Hoffman, who was a secret FBI informant.  

This film suggests that Hoffman was trying to help the FBI catch a certain mid-level drug dealer, but when DeLorean needed a quick influx of cash to keep his company going, he approached Hoffman to make a quick run to Bolivia to pick up cocaine that he could sell very quickly, and turn $2 million into $30 million.  Well, sure, but what businessman in the 1980's wasn't trying to do the same thing with cocaine, like all the time?  Who hasn't fantasized about get-rich-quick schemes, most people don't actually act on the idea, because they don't have the seed money to begin with.  It turned out that neither did DeLorean, but there's a whole other story there - I think maybe he was never really rich, he just had like $50,000 that he kept moving around from one company to the next so his books always reflected that he had money coming in, when ha ha, the joke's on everybody else, because that's the same $50,000 just being moved around again and again!

DeLorean's gala parties always seemed to turn into fund-raising events for his car company - and he was hitting up celebrities like Johnny Carson to become investors, but eventually even those celebs figured out that there was no worthwhile product being made, nor would there be in the future.  That's very Trump-like, because how many scams did Trump pull, between Trump Air and Trump University and Trump Steaks, all were garbage companies that weren't delivering what they were supposed to, but people kept believing in his B.S. and buying into his brand, and then even after four years as the WORST President ever, still some people said they'd vote for him again, and it's only now, with proof of treason and hoarding secret documents are some people starting to realize that there's no decent or competent person there, not at all.  You can't fool all of the people all of the time, but you can certainly fool SOME of the people often enough.

There's another film about John DeLorean which appears to be part documentary and part fictional re-enactments, that's called "Framing John DeLorean" - I may track down that film one of these days, but it doesn't seem to be readily available right now.  Oh, wait, it is on Netflix and Hulu, but still, I can't link to it any time soon.  Well, if I do get to it, I hope that it will be at least more accurate, or at least funnier, than this one. 

Also starring Jason Sudeikis (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Lee Pace (last seen in "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day"), Judy Greer (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Michael Cudlitz (last seen in "Forces of Nature"), Erin Moriarty (last seen in "Captain Fantastic"), Jamey Sheridan (last seen in "Life as a House"), Iddo Goldberg (last seen in "The Zookeeper's Wife"), Tara Summers (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Justin Bartha (last seen in "CBGB"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Daniel Salinas Gonzalez, Yuji Okumoto, Tyler Crumley (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Asher Miles Fallica (last seen in "Tully"), Guillermo Valedon (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Bruno Irizarry (ditto), Valentina Portela, the voice of Jim Meskimen (last heard in "Scoob!") and archive footage of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 micro-cassette tapes

The Little Things

Year 14, Day 243 - 8/31/22 - Movie #4,234

BEFORE: This is going to wrap up August, so here's the format breakdown for the month: 

6 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Julia, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street, Zoo, Cry Freedom, The Little Things

1 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Running With Beto

2 watched on Netflix: The Harder They Fall, Operation Mincemeat

3 watched on Amazon Prime: Mayor Pete, The Tomorrow War, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

1 watched on Hulu: Summer of Soul
3 watched on Disney+: We Feed People, Wolfgang, Lightyear

1 watched on HBO MAX: Listening to Kenny G

2 watched in theaters: Jurassic World Dominion, Thor: Love and Thunder
1 watched on a random site: Conan O'Brien Can't Stop

20 TOTAL

Now that's a slow month - but I was holding back, trying to save some movies for September, so I wouldn't be as bored. Now, of course, I'm back to work at the second job, so now I don't know where I'll find the time to watch 22 films in September - now I'm wishing I'd really loaded up July and August. Oh, well. Denzel Washington carries over from "Cry Freedom" - and I'll get back to Kevin Kline later, in November, I think. 

THE PLOT: Kern County Deputy Sheriff Joe Deacon is sent to Los Angeles for what should have been a quick evidence-gathering assignment. Instead, he becomes embroiled in a search for a serial killer who is terrorizing the city. 

AFTER: Wow, this was a moody one - what can you say about a film where the lead character is a cop who's haunted by his past failures?  We assume at first that he's just super dedicated, but gradually we come to realize that he's maybe too focused on something that happened in the past - maybe a serial killer that he didn't catch?  Well, there is something but it's even worse than that, no spoilers here though.  But there's so much animosity from fellow cops when Joe Deacon returns to L.A. that surely there must have been a reason why he left - something that drove away his wife and his former partners on the force.  What is it?  

Deputy Sheriff Joe comes to L.A. to pick up a pair of boots, supposedly they're evidence in a past crime, and if he could just get those boots back to Kern County, the witness in a case would surely recognize them, and it's a slam-dunk conviction.  But then something keeps Joe in Los Angeles, and it's not the company - what can you say about a precinct where some of the cops are creepier than the serial killer suspects?  Or is that just Rami Malek having a creep-off with Jared Leto?  It's a bit tough to say - both characters, or maybe both actors, just seem more than a bit...off?  Maybe there's a fine line between a messed-up police officer and a messed-up suspect?  Is that where we're going with this one?  

When the call comes in about a homicide, possibly a serial killer targeting sex workers, Joe's reputation gets him on the scene, even if he's got no jurisdiction there.  The guy notices things, the little things, and those always turn out to be important. Like, what's missing from the fridge?  Who had a view into this apartment from another window?  And, umm, what was in the victim's digestive tract?  Thanks, I'd rather not know.  What is this, C.S.Ewwwww?  This film all takes place in the parts of Los Angeles that the movies and TV shows don't ever show us - the seedy neighborhoods, the strip clubs, the abandoned gas stations and the cheap appliance repair shops, the gangs that come out at night and the cars that patrol the streets with their lights off, looking for the lost and vulnerable people that won't be missed.  Yeah, you may want to sleep with the lights on after watching this. 

Deacon manages to land on a suspect, but it's someone who's never able to give a straight answer about anything.  Is he hiding something, or is he just the kind of guy who hates cops and other authority figures, but also follows murder stories closely?  Is he a killer, or just a wannabe?  If only some police person could break into his home to see if he's got a treasure trove of items from his victims - but that's illegal search and seizure, right?  And if he's just a normal (but creepy) guy, then why is he taunting the police at every turn?  Just for kicks? 

And why does this feel a bit like "Seven" meets "True Detective" with a bit of, I don't know, "Memento" thrown in at the end?  Not that anyone here has short-term memory problems, in fact it's just the opposite, everyone seems to have had an experience that they're trying very hard to forget, only they can't.  Is that what life is about, just focusing on the bad mistakes you made when you were younger?  God, I hope there's more to being an older person than this, I really do.  Why, there's going out for breakfast with friends!  Working the night shift and then sleeping all day, and memorizing the details of every rest stop on the California Highway system!  You know what, it's not worth it - I hear it's better to burn out than fade away.  I can't help but feel empty-ish after watching this, like I kind of wish more had...happened?

Also starring Rami Malek (last seen in "Papillon"), Jared Leto (last seen in "House of Gucci"), Chris Bauer (last seen in "Sully"), Michael Hyatt (last seen in "Like Crazy"), Terry Kinney (last seen in "The Game of Their Lives"), Natalie Morales (last seen in "Stuber"), Isabel Arraiza, Joris Jarsky (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"), Glenn Morshower (last seen in "Aftermath"), Sofia Vassilieva, Jason James Richter, John Harlan Kim, Frederick Koehler (last seen in "A Kiss Before Dying"), Judith Scott (last seen in "Flightplan"), Maya Kazan (last seen in "Frances Ha"), Tiffany Gonzalez, Anna McKitrick, Sheila Houlahan, Olivia Washington (last seen in "The Comedian"), Ebony N. Mayo, J. Downing, Sophia Castro, Calliah Sophie Estrada, Thomas Crawford, Jeff Corbett, Stephanie Erb, Lee Garlington (last seen in "Some Kind of Beautiful"), Dimiter D. Marinov (last seen in "Green Book"), Charlie Saxton (last seen in "Movie 43"), Adam J. Harrington (last seen in "Connie and Carla"), Kerry O'Malley (last seen in "Terminator Genisys"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 newspaper headlines

Cry Freedom

Year 14, Day 241 - 8/29/22 - Movie #4,233

BEFORE: OK, I'm back to work for the fall semester, and August is drawing to a close.  Can the fall weather and the pumpkin spice lattes be far behind?  Actually, there are still three more weeks of summer, no matter what peoples' schedules say - fall doesn't start unti September 21 or so.  But really, doesn't the summer end when you run out of documentaries to watch and you're just counting the days until new seasons of "The Masked Singer" and "Hell's Kitchen" start up again?  

Penelope Wilton carries over again from "Operation Mincemeat". 

THE PLOT: South African journalist Donald Woods is forced to flee the country after attempting to investigate the death in custody of his friend, the black anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko. 

AFTER: I know, deep down, this is an important film, and not just because it's directed by Richard Attenborough - the subject matter is important, Biko was a real guy who was probably killed by South African police while in custody, and they phonied up the autopsy and the death reports to make it seem like he died while on a hunger strike.  That's a bullshit story, right?  

Biko wasn't just an activist, he played a role in the development of the South African Students' Organization, and is credited with creating their ideology of "Black Consciousness", which was a theoretical way of life and value system that suggested to black Africans that they needed to reject any value systems that reduced his basic human dignity or were designed to make them feel like foreigners in their own home countries.  It seems simple now, but back then it needed to be stated outright that in struggling against the Apartheid policies of white minority-ruled South Africa, all black citizens should regard themselves as worthy of freedom.  It was the South African version the American philosophy "Black is beautiful."  In the early 1970's the Black People's Convention was formed to call for a focus on improving healthcare and education and self-reliance in the black communities. Biko endorsed the unification of Africa's black liberationist groups to concentrate the efforts to fight Apartheid, and he must have been doing something right, because the South African government "banned" him, which meant that he couldn't leave his district, could not speak in public or to more than one person at a time, and could not be quoted in the media.  Yeah, sure, that seems fair. 

So it maybe seems a bit odd that Biko formed a friendship with a white liberal newspaper editor, Donald Woods, who was unable to print anything Biko said.  It's kind of like the way certain state governments in the U.S. are banning books now, and while they mean well, censorship is still a terrible thing - but also, this process of banning the books just calls more attention to them.  Now people want to read those books more than ever, to find out what's so juicy and "disturbing" about them.  Knowing that Biko was "banned", that probably pointed out to Woods that Biko had something important to say that the government didn't want anyone to hear. 

Biko continued to work for change behind the scenes, and in 1977 he broke his banning order by traveling to Cape Town for a meeting with the leader of the Unity Movement, and he was arrested after being stopped at a police roadblock.  While in police custody, Biko was interrogated, handcuffed, chained and most likely beaten by the police.  A doctor who was obviously on the police's payroll stated that he saw no evidence of injury, and the police claimed that his death came as the result of a hunger strike, not from the fact that when they realized he was injured, they drove him not to the nearest hospital, but to one that was 740 miles away.  

The film obviously takes a turn with Biko's death, but then it keeps going for another hour and a half, some of which is devoted to Biko's funeral and the findings of the internal investigation into his death, which managed to absolve the police of any wrongdoing.  However, the rest of the film is devoted to Donald Woods and his family escaping South Africa (separately) and flying out of Lesotho to Botswana.  Yes, this is important in the long run, because Donald Woods needs to get out of the country and tell Biko's story, but still, it's a strange turn.  It would be sort of like if the last hour of the movie "Gandhi" were devoted to Gandhi's tailor trying to figure out what clothes he should be buried in, it's all kind of beside the point.  

What's worse is that there are multiple flashbacks to events in Biko's life that we're shown after his death, like Biko arguing with a magistrate over the importance of the Black Consciousness.  Why couldn't we watch these great scenes, filled with political debate, while he was alive, when they actually happened?  It doesn't really make sense for Woods to be seen remembering those events taking place, because he just wasn't there for them, so why are they shown in the wrong time period?  There's also a raid on a shantytown, following a students' strike, but it was unclear to me if this was taking place after Biko's death, or if it was another flashback.  The film also opens with tanks and soldiers busting up a shantytown, was this the same event as the raid seen later, or were they two separate events?  I couldn't tell. 

Basically, the whole second half of this film is a big mess - the focus is on Biko's white newspaper editor friend fleeing the country, how is this more important than allowing the film to focus more on Biko himself?  Isn't he supposed to be the driving force of the story?  And then there's a long list of the anti-apartheid activists who died in police custody over the years, along with their alleged causes of death.  Suicide by hanging, suicide by hanging, suicide by hanging, oh, wait, natural causes!  Then three people in a row died from six-story falls?  What kind of prison has a place where inmates can die from six-story falls?  Was the prison just poorly designed, or was there a loose step in a six-story staircase that the maintenance man just never got around to fixing?  This means that the activists were thrown off a six-story building by guards, right?  Then after a few of those, they go back to "suicide by hanging" - really, this is just flat-out ridiculous, but not in a funny way.  How was this allowed to take place for so damn long? 

I've traveled all the way back to 1987 to watch this film, which got three Oscar nominations but failed to win any Oscars.  And it was a box office bomb, grossing less than $6 million against a budget of $29 million.  Ouch. It wasn't Denzel Washington's first movie, but it was darn close to it, he was known as more of a TV star back then, for being on "St. Elsewhere".  Tomorrow (OK, the day after tomorrow...) I'm flashing forward 34 years to one of his most recent films.

Also starring Denzel Washington (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Kevin Kline (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Alec McCowen, Kevin McNally (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Ian Richardson (last seen in "Becoming Jane"), John Thaw, Timothy West (last seen in "Iris"), Josette Simon (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), John Hargreaves, Miles Anderson (last seen in "La La Land"), Zakes Mokae (last seen in "The Comedians"), John Matshikiza, Wabel Siyolwe, Juanita Waterman, Albert Ndinda, Shelley Borkum, Kate Hardie, Jim Findley, Tichatonga Mazhindu, Hepburn Graham, Andrew McCulloch, Gerald Sim (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far"), Peter Cartwright (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Gary Whelan (last seen in "Dracula Untold"), Fishoo Tembo, Peggy Marsh, Julian Glover (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Philip Bretherton (last seen in "The Fifth Estate"), Paul Herzberg (last seen in "My Week With Marilyn"), Michael Turner, Joseph Marcell, Judy Cornwell (last seen in "Two for the Road"), Gwen Watford (last seen in "Taste the Blood of Dracula"), John Paul, Louis Mahoney (last seen in "Captain Phillips"), Garrick Hagon (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Nick Tate (last seen in "The Great Gatsby" (2013))

RATING: 4 out of 10 soccer games (used as cover for political rallies)