BEFORE: I wish I could say we're having a quiet Fourth of July, but you know that quiet is always off the table. One of our two cats is hiding down in the basement, and I probably won't see her until breakfast time - as a former stray cat she may have been outside one July 4 and now hearing fireworks is triggering for her, I get it. When she heard the first explosion today she gave me this look as if to say, "Oh, is THAT today?" and she jumped off the bed and headed for safety in the basement, where there's a windowless room. We didn't grill burgers and hot dogs like a few people I saw on the block, but we had White Castle sliders delivered - anything so I don't have to leave the house after dark.
Martin Luther King Jr carries over from "Join or Die".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "MLK/FBI" (Movie #3,909)
THE PLOT: This documentary explores the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and his impact on civil rights through the present day.
AFTER: OK, this one's my fault, I didn't really learn anything tonight because I've already seen a few docs (and fiction films) about Martin Luther King - not just "MLK/FBI" and "John Lewis: Good Trouble" but also "Selma" and "Rustin" and "Malcolm X", so while the subject matter is still very important, I just feel like I've covered this already, and the whole point of docs is to learn something new from them. So going forward I will continue to use MLK as a link, because he turns up in quite a few docs each year - but I should probably steer away from docs about him, because I'm just not picking up anything that I didn't already know. But hey, at least my pattern is back - someone who appears in archive footage in one doc carries over to be the focus of the next one. That should continue tomorrow, too, as a big sports star was seen standing next to MLK while he was being interviewed...
It's a little strange that this seems to come from the same production company that made "I Am Chris Farley" and "I Am Burt Reynolds", these are mostly docs cobbled together from archive footage, although they DO still interview friends and family of the deceased, so they're not as bad as the one about Bob Fosse or the one about Tom Hanks, which both interviewed nobody. MLK and civil rights is a sharp left turn from comic actors - I still have another one from this series coming up in late July, but that's another comedian. I'm guessing that they did something special by releasing this film in 2018, which was the 50th anniversary of MLK's death.
OK, about that, maybe that's the one thing I did learn by watching this, because I'd never really heard before that maybe Martin KNEW he was going to be die, and felt it was likely that he'd be assassinated. Jesse Jackson talks about joking around a bit with Martin on that last trip to Memphis, and yeah, that's probably a bit of dark humor if you're joking about your own killing, but I guess whatever you have to do to keep your spirits up or maintain perspective. It puts some of the language used in his last (?) speech in a different light, like if he was talking about the mountaintop and how "I may not get there with you", that now sounds like he was maybe expecting something to happen to him.
There were still a few people in 2018 who had marched with Rev. King during the 1960's - Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and John Lewis for example, although Lewis is no longer with us. Israel Dresner, the rabbi who marched with King from Selma to Montgomery, was also still alive when they made this film, but passed away in 2022. Al Sharpton is interviewed here, but he would have been only 14 in 1968 so I think he was too young to march - he was one of those first people in the mid-2010's to really lose a lot of weight, like Al Roker, and maybe at the time that was a trend-setting thing to do, but if you remember those people as overweight then they kind of never really look right when they're skinny, or is that just me? Now with Ozempic and Wegovy of course all of your larger Hollywood comedians are slimming down, like Billy Gardell and Jim Gaffigan and Rebel Wilson. Kathy Bates, too - Anyone have eyes on Melissa McCarthy?
I'm off topic so I should probably just call a mulligan and move on - you don't need me to tell you how great of a person Martin Luther King was, or what he managed to accomplish that was well overdue. I know that the struggle continues, but come on, in 1965 it had been 100 years since the end of the Civil War, and still black people were being mistreated and lynched and had trouble voting in the South? Change was long overdue, and finally some advancement happened thanks to King and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968. This, of course, was back in the time when Presidents passed bills to enact social change, and not just to give tax cuts to the rich and take services away from the poor.
Anyway, this doc covers the Montgomery bus boycotts in the mid 1950's, the Emmett Till murder in 1955, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham campaign in 1963, the march on Washington in 1963 and the other march to Montgomery in 1965. It's a real time-saver if you've got a test in history class tomorrow and you don't have time to read the three chapters. Remember also that Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and was posthumously awarded both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Gold Medal. And of course we have a holiday in his honor every January.
Directed by John Barbisan (producer of "I Am Burt Reynolds") & Michael Hamilton
Also starring Carmelo Anthony (last seen in "Imagine That"), Nick Cannon (last seen in "Whatever It Takes"), Clayborne Carson, Israel Dresner, Rutha Harris, Jesse Jackson (last seen in "Scandalous: The True Story of the National Enquirer"), Malcolm Jenkins, Clarence B. Jones, Van Jones (last seen in "The First Purge"), Janice Kelsey, Shaun King, Mamie King-Chambers, Bernard Lafayette, James Lawson, John Lewis (last seen in "Running with Beto"), Diane Nash, Steve Schapiro, Al Sharpton (last seen in "Mayor Pete"), Nolan Shivers, Tavis Smiley, Minnijean Brown Trickey, Andrew Young (last seen in "What Happened, Miss Simone?")
with archive footage of Muhammad Ali (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Stokely Carmichael (also last seen in "What Happened, Miss Simone?"), Walter Cronkite (last seen in "A Complete Unknown"), J. Edgar Hoover (last seen in "The Real Charlie Chaplin"), Lyndon Johnson (also carrying over from "Join or Die"), Jacqueline Kennedy (ditto), John F. Kennedy (ditto), Coretta Scott King (last seen in "MLK/FBI"), Martin Luther King Sr., Rosa Parks (last seen in "Venus and Serena"), Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Malcolm X (last seen in "Mike Wallace Was Here")
RATING: 5 out of 10 honorary doctorate degrees
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