history

JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE – an icon continues

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John Lewis (on far right) in JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble traces the life of civil rights icon, US Representative John Lewis.  I usually don’t buy reverential biodocs, but when the subject is a freaking saint, I guess you have to go with it.  The rest of the title comes from Lewis’ mantra – if you see injustice, make good trouble, necessary trouble. 

John Lewis, of course, is a real American hero.  As a very young man in 1965, he had been leading efforts to register Blacks to vote in Selma, Alabama, including a peaceful march to the State Capitol in Montgomery.  On March 7, 1965, the march got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma when they were attached by local law enforcement and Ku Klux Klan members under the command of Sheriff Jim Clark.  Lewis was in the very first rank and was beaten, shedding his own blood on “Bloody Sunday”.  Two subsequent marches on the bridge and the LBJ speech that followed led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1964, the most important civil rights legislation since 1867. 

In John Lewis: Good Trouble, we see footage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  We see a young John Lewis being beaten in 1965, and we see an elderly Lewis in an anniversary march with President Barack Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

John Lewis: Good Trouble is well-sourced by director Dawn Porter, even though only a few of Lewis’ contemporaries survive.  When the first Black president was elected, Lewis says he wept for JFK, RFK, Dr. King and the others who hadn’t lived to see it.  Fortunately, Lewis has sisters sill alive who participate in the documentary.

We get an inside glimpse at Lewis’ childhood.  We get to see Lewis watching footage of himself at a pivotal Nashville sit-in that he had “never seen”.  And, this intimate portrait shows us some dry Lewis humor and some impressive octogenarian dance moves.

How did Lewis get to Congress?  John Lewis: Good Trouble shows us the race against his longtime friend and fellow Civil Rights icon Julian Bond. My day job is in politics, and I understand that, to win, you have to do what you have to do to win; others may find this episode bracing and unsettling. 

 John Lewis: Good Trouble is an insightful view of a man and of a critical point in American history.  You can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: behind the one percent

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CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Documentarian Justin Pemberton brings alive Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a critique of the concentration of wealth. There’s no more fundamentally important political topic than inequality, and this theme has resonated through the best of recent cinema, including Parasite and Knives Out.

Pinketty traces the economics of wealth from feudal times to the present, and Pemberton keeps all the economic history lively with plenty of eye candy. Capital in the Twenty-First Century covers a lot of ground – globalization and movable capital, deregulation and privatization, defanging of organized labor, China state capital, and the impact on today’s youngest generations.

Piketty’s proffered solutions are simple and intellectually sound (stopping off-shore tax dodges, taxing inheritance, incentivizing wealth to be invested in productive risk instead of moving around a closed-loop of financial instruments). But, given the political power of great wealth, this is a very heavy political lift.

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century pops along fairly briskly, but, as an entertaining popularizer, it’s no The Big Short or An Inconvenient Truth. Still, about an hour in, there’s a jaw-dropping psych experiment in which people benefiting from pure luck believe and act as though they are entitled.

During its Bay Area virtual run at the Roxie, you can stream Capital in the Twenty-First Century at Roxie Virtual Cinema, or at distributoe Kino Lorber’s new virtual platform Kino Marquee.

TOWER: a most original and important retelling of a story that we thought we knew

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TOWER
TOWER

 

Tower is a remarkably original retelling of the 1966 mass shooting at UT Austin.  Tower is a tick-tock of the 96 minutes when 49 people were randomly chosen to be shot by a gunman in the landmark tower 240 feet above the campus.  That gunman is barely mentioned (and may not even be named) in the movie.

Tower is director Keith Maitland’s second feature. What makes Tower distinctive and powerful it’s the survivors who tell their stories, reenacted by actors who are animated by a rotoscope-like technique (think Richard Linklater’s Waking Life).  Telling this story through animation, dotted with some historical stills and footage, is captivating.

Since 1966, we’ve suffered through lots of mass shootings.   The UT Tower shooting was especially shocking at the time and prompted the questions about what drove the “madman” to his deed.  But, fifty years later, what’s really important today is how the event affected the survivors – what was what like to live through this experience and how it lives with them today.  That’s the story that Maitland lets them tell us – and in such an absorbing way.

I saw Tower at the Mill Valley Film Festival.  It opens theatrically in the Bay Area today at the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley.

TOWER
TOWER