The Birth of a Nation: Strong delivery

The Birth of a Nation (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for violence, cruelty, rape and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.7.16

It’s telling — likely for all the wrong reasons — that the Nat Turner slave rebellion hadn’t yet been dramatized in an American film.

Having viewed a solar eclipse as a sign — of a black man's hand reaching to obscure the
sun — Nat Turnet (Nate Parker, foreground) gathers an increasingly large band of
equally enraged slaves, in order to begin a movement that he hopes will gather strength
and build, from county to city to state.

Aside from earning a chapter in the 1977 TV miniseries Roots — which got a few key details wrong — the event has gone unacknowledged by mainstream visual media.

Until now.

Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation was the darling of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, taking both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize; without doubt, its arrival is timely. But tapping into the current combustible zeitgeist is ephemeral; relying on that sort of serendipity has consigned many films (and books, and plays) into the basement of forgotten relics.

The question is whether Parker has made a truly good film: an honorable, balanced and historically truthful document that will stand the test of time, and resonate with future viewers. On balance, the answer is yes: This shattering drama falls somewhat short of the bar set by 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, but it’s worthy competition. Thanks to these and other recent entries such as Selma and Fruitville Station, we’re experiencing an alternate — and equally valid — depiction of events which, in some cases, have remained shamefully overlooked.

ALL drama is compelling, particularly when experienced from differing viewpoints. Variety — as ever — is the spice of life.

Granted, Parker’s Birth of a Nation occasionally is guilty of grandiloquent excess. (The angel imagery is a particular overreach, as is his tendency toward unnecessary close-ups.) The indiscriminate butchery fomented by Turner is glossed over; no matter how justified the rage, it’s difficult to condone the slaughter of children (a detail Parker simply disregards).

Non-Stop: Well-executed terror in the air

Non-Stop (2014) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for action, intense suspense, mild profanity, fleeting sensuality and drug content
By Derrick Bang

This is a taut, tidy and thoroughly engrossing little thriller ... although it won’t do a thing for people already nervous about flying.

The resourceful Bill (Liam Neeson) thinks up several quite clever ways to expose the
identity of the indivisual who keeps sending threatening text messages ... but the
unknown tormentor/terrorist eludes our hero at every turn. Eventually, even Jen
(Julianne Moore) begins to wonder if the situation is beyond Bill's ability to solve.

John W. Richardson, Christopher Roach and Ryan Engle have concocted a twisty, danger-laden mystery that Agatha Christie would have admired: a whodunit and howzithappening that makes clever use of the claustrophobic setting and modern smart phone technology. Granted, the premise is preposterous, and interior details don’t withstand much scrutiny, but director Jaume Collet-Serra and editor Jim May move things quickly enough to obscure the logical lapses.

I also applaud the casting and sidebar character development, elements usually overlooked in lesser action thrillers. Although this is Liam Neeson’s show, and he commands the stage quite ably, we also get solid work from a dozen or so supporting players.

Neeson and Collet-Serra also worked together on 2011’s Unknown, although that initially suspenseful thriller was undone by its sloppy script. If the improved work here on Non-Stop reflects learning from that earlier mistake, then it’s nice to know all concerned paid attention.

The premise is simple: Veteran air marshal Bill Marks (Neeson) boards a routine flight from New York City to London, and starts receiving cryptic text messages from some unknown sender who demands the transfer of $150 million into a numbered account ... or passengers on the flight will start to die, at 20-minute intervals. It’s immediately obvious, from what the sender knows, that s/he is on the plane.

Bill’s major issue is credibility: How can he possibly take such a crazy ultimatum seriously? And when evidence eventually suggest that this unknown terrorist truly has the means to carry out such threats, how can Bill get anybody to believe him?

Character back-story muddies the water, of course. Bill is a man under a cloud: an alcoholic carrying a heavy personal burden — details of which emerge slowly — and therefore a less than reliable judge of any given situation, in the eyes of his colleagues and superiors. Even his fellow on-flight air marshal, Jack Hammond (Anson Mount), finds it difficult to accept Bill’s story at face value.

Bill does everything by the book; he immediately confides in the plane’s captain (Linus Roache) and veteran flight attendant, Nancy (Michelle Dockery). Keeping the situation concealed from the passengers is essential, but that becomes progressively more difficult, as Bill’s invisible cat-and-mouse tormentor escalates the stakes.

The Great Debaters: Words with power

The Great Debaters (2007) • View trailer
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for violence, disturbing images, brief profanity and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.4.08


On top of his impressive skills as an actor and director, Denzel Washington has an unerring gift for spotting young talent.

Having shephereded his team through several early victories, Professor Melvin
B. Tolson (Denzel Washington, left) prepares for the next challenge by giving
study pointers to, from lft, Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett), Henry Lowe
(Nate Parker) and James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker).

He coaxed a haunting, painfully nuanced performance out of Derek Luke in 2002's Antwone Fisher, and now has done the same with young Denzel Whitaker in The Great Debaters, a stirring, fact-based saga that stretches the truth a bit, but nonetheless conveys a strong sense of time, place and destiny.

Washington also gives himself a plum role, which he delivers with his usual steel-gazed intensity. From his first appearance — striding into a classroom, standing on a table and intoning "I am the darker brother," from Langston Hughes' I, Too, Sing America — we scarcely can take our eyes off him. That we do is testament to the similarly powerful performances elicited from Whitaker and co-stars Nate Parker, Jurnee Smollett and Forest Whitaker (no relation to this film's younger Whitaker).

The Great Debaters is an old-style Hollywood underdog saga, given additional juice both by its setting — small-town Texas in 1935, at the racially combustible midpoint of the Great Depression — and by the conviction Washington brings to the material. Watching a quartet of kids from Wiley College rise to become an undefeated debating squad in the Jim Crow South is stirring enough; understanding that they do so in an environment laced with lynchings and the undisguised hatred of sneering white crackers, makes this one powerfully nervous picture.

Indeed, an atmosphere of latent menace pervades every scene, settling on us like the stifling humidity that cinematographer Philippe Rousselot (A River Runs Through It) captures so well.

Washington plays college professor Melvin B. Tolson, one of this film's two authentic characters; the other is young Denzel Whitaker's James Farmer Jr. In real life, Tolson fought on campus and off for racial equality and social justice; he eventually became a poet very much in the mold of Langston Hughes. James Farmer Jr. grew up to found the Congress of Race Equality in 1942, after which he remained a highly visible player in the civil rights movement.

The other members of the debate squad, notably Henry Lowe (Parker) and Samantha Booke (Smollett), are composite characters created from many other individuals ... which makes the "Henry and Samantha went on to greater glory" text crawl at film's end an insufferable fabrication. How is the average viewer to separate the authentic later accomplishments of Tolson and Farmer from those of "Lowe" and "Booke," when the text statements are presented with identical candor?

Movies really must stop lying to patrons like this. I expected better of Washington and screenwriters Robert Eisele and Jeffrey Porro, particular since they dedicated this picture to the actual Tolson's passion, dedication and teachings.