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    Detroit

    Can't see a thread on this..?

    Saw it last night, hugely impressed despite pre-match nerves. (Why nervous? Let's just say Ms Bigelow and I have previous*)

    I was well aware of the Algiers Motel Incident having read John Hersey's book of the same name a while back. I imagine people who aren't aware of it will be hit very hard by its impact, as the older couple behind me were last night.

    I like the fact that it doesn't overplay the historical reconstruction element ('ooh look! Retro furnishings!') and it also stitches the archive footage into its own sequences in ways that CGI etc have no doubt made possible. The one aspect of 'It's the 60s' that did leap out, pleasurably for me, because I love it, is the orgy of great mens' knitwear. ("So what did you take away from the film, Dr Felicity? That black lives matter?" "No- that 60s knitwear was the best").

    I gather there are some criticisms of it not being shot in Detroit; of bottling out on one or two issues (eg that the victims were robbed, too) but the only critical comment I made afterwards concerned the excessive focus on Star Wars-Boy(ega) but then that's what all feature films tend to do with historical material, and it was far less about his 'journey' than it might've been.

    * I thought Hurt Locker was amazing film making, the tension in the bomb scenes, but also peddled lazy towelhead stereotypes and had the same token kid-foreigner-you-can-like as The Green fucking Berets. As for Zero Dark Thirty , scripted by the US state dept...

    #2
    Seriously, has no-one else seen this?

    (might seem like a shameless bump, but I am starting to suspect it is being less-than-fully-marketed: not on in our local Vue, for example)

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      #3
      Didn't really do well here, despite good reviews (82% on RT). Hasn't even recouped half its production budget yet, and that's after six weeks. Dead in the water, basically. I remember hearing about it, but there wasn't much chatter and I don't know anyone who saw it.

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        #4
        Originally posted by WOM View Post
        Didn't really do well here, despite good reviews (82% on RT). Hasn't even recouped half its production budget yet, and that's after six weeks. Dead in the water, basically. I remember hearing about it, but there wasn't much chatter and I don't know anyone who saw it.
        I'm not into Bigelow.

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          #5
          Watched it tonight and found it deeply moving. It was stressful, angering and troubling. The scene in the motel, as drawn out as it was, made me so uncomfortable I couldn't sit still. Edge of the seat in the worst way.

          I read some criticism of it that said that without the context of the civil rights movement in Detroit prior to the riot, and the events surrounding the arrests at the beginning (apparently it was politically motivated), as well as the lack of focus on the individuals and black community, it amounted to little more than a pornographic depiction of violence on black men. And that sort of film feeds into a society where these events can still occur.

          There was also criticism of playing the police as a few bad apples as opposed to structurally racist and corrupt, and not enough was made of the black community's tireless drive for the truth.

          Some of that is fair, but at the same time you have to give your audience some credit and assume they watch a film like that with a degree of knowledge regarding the police/institutions and black community activism, if not the actual case itself. I mean, if you can watch that and *not* relate it to modern day cases and the BLM movement, well you've done well.

          I'm still stressed by it. I can't sleep. It's not necessarily the mark of a good film, but it was certainly powerful.

          Mint soundtrack too.

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