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Post by HELENA MARIA on May 28, 2019 22:43:11 GMT
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Post by quetee on May 29, 2019 21:24:14 GMT
There's a doc on Amazon Prime about them.
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Post by HELENA MARIA on May 31, 2019 10:16:35 GMT
A little bit longer this time
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Post by pacinoyes on May 31, 2019 19:47:26 GMT
A lot of people will compare this profound work to Ryan Murphy's let's merely re-enact the facts of The People Vs. OJ Simpson or Spike Lee's only partially successful (the first hour works) Blackkklansman. But I'm going to say it's much closer to the work of Sidney Lumet and John Sayles (or Charles Burnett).
This film addresses themes from the Emmett Till and Tawana Brawley cases - and never once opts for easy racism explanations - sides with the boys and the rape victim, sides with the kids and against the kids, with the prosecutors and against the prosecutors, in its humanistic and empathetic POV, it's somewhat remarkable and wise really, finding Art in the Artless.
Almost flawlessly told in how much information it conveys to you - and only botching it in episode 2 where it keeps cutting to multiple characters in court with so much at stake. Otherwise it's a mosaic, in no rush at all and episodes 3 and 4 are particularly contemplative and haunting.
Acting is aces across the board - and I was particularly taken with Michael K. Williams who to me is heartbreaking here. The star will be Jharrel Jerome who has the full, showy actor-ly arc as one of the 5 kids.
~8/10 ........tough watch.........worth it.
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Post by quetee on May 31, 2019 20:16:46 GMT
A lot of people will compare this profound work to Ryan Murphy's let's merely re-enact the facts of The People Vs. OJ Simpson or Spike Lee's only partially successful (the first hour works) Blackkklansman. But I'm going to say it's much closer to the work of Sidney Lumet and John Sayles (or Charles Burnett). This film addresses themes from the Emmett Till and Tawana Brawley cases - and never once opts for easy racism explanations - sides with the boys and the rape victim, sides with the kids and against the kids, with the prosecutors and against the prosecutors, in its humanistic and empathetic POV, it's somewhat remarkable and wise really, finding Art in the Artless. Almost flawlessly told in how much information it conveys to you - and only botching it in episode 2 where it keeps cutting to multiple characters in court with so much at stake. Otherwise it's a mosaic, in no rush at all and episodes 3 and 4 are particularly contemplative and haunting. Acting is aces across the board - and I was particularly taken with Michael K. Williams who to me is heartbreaking here. The star will be Jharrel Jerome who has the full, showy actor-ly arc as one of the 5 kids. ~8/10 ........tough watch.........worth it. I plan on watching this soon but please make sure to watch doc if you have Prime.
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Post by quetee on May 31, 2019 20:17:26 GMT
By the way, Trump to this day won't admit they are innocent.
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Post by quetee on Jun 2, 2019 1:11:47 GMT
Started watching this...yikes...
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Post by quetee on Jun 5, 2019 0:25:03 GMT
The person felicity Huffman plays in movie is getting so much hate she had to deactivate all social media and resign from boards.
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Post by stinkybritches on Jun 7, 2019 13:52:26 GMT
watch the Ken Burns' doc about the case, The Central Park Five (2012), if you haven't already. much better than this well-intentioned but overly heavy-handed dramatization.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 7, 2019 15:43:08 GMT
I actually liked the documentary far less than DuVernay's film (reviewed above in this thread) and found the documentary heavy-handed myself. By dramatizing and arranging the stories you get into multiple artistic levels and avoid the pitfalls and factual quagmire - in her film I get why everyone acted the way they acted, what happened because of it, how it affected their life, their neighborhood, their city etc.
In the Burns doc I got 2 hours of (rushed actually) facts only ........it was the exact opposite of the recent Ted Bundy doc and film - the Bundy Tapes documentary (which is a great film) captured what is unknowable through the facts, and the narrative film (which is a botch) misleads you by presenting some of those very same facts. Your eyes see something that deepens when you see it as opposed to when someone tries to tell you what they see or what you should be seeing.......in DuVernay's case it's the opposite - her empathy and humanism expand what you see beyond the facts.
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Post by quetee on Jun 7, 2019 18:23:04 GMT
watch the Ken Burns' doc about the case, The Central Park Five (2012), if you haven't already. much better than this well-intentioned but overly heavy-handed dramatization. how so? I didnt feel that way at all. This stuff happened.
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Post by quetee on Jun 7, 2019 18:29:30 GMT
By the way, Jharrell Jerome was amazing. Before watching this, I thought Sam Rockwell would win but now dont think so.
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Post by quetee on Jun 7, 2019 20:26:22 GMT
The person felicity Huffman plays in movie is getting so much hate she had to deactivate all social media and resign from boards. Being reported that her publisher dropped her.
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Post by ibbi on Jun 8, 2019 22:33:16 GMT
I don't know if Chernobyl has just ruined everything on TV for me, or if this is genuinely as ridiculous as it's coming off, but after being HYPED for this show I am struggling after 2 episodes to want to continue. How much did Ava Duvernay pay you to write what you have written pacinoyes ??? Or was it written for you, and just signed it?
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 8, 2019 23:19:38 GMT
I don't know if Chernobyl has just ruined everything on TV for me, or if this is genuinely as ridiculous as it's coming off, but after being HYPED for this show I am struggling after 2 episodes to want to continue. How much did Ava Duvernay pay you to write what you have written pacinoyes ??? Or was it written for you, and just signed it? I gotta tell ya ibbi, it makes me happy to know that my reviews carry more weight with (the wise and the discerning) users of this board than just seeing people come on here and say "forget pacinoyes - how is this rated so high on RT!!!!" I will have say that if you struggled through the first 2 episodes I don't know how much value 3/4 would have really since those are resolution episodes.......and I'm not even on Fosse/Verdon yet much less Chernobyl for Godsakes On the other hand I've been posting music videos of The La's lately like it's the old Oscar Buzz days and thankfully we will always have that common ground.
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Post by ibbi on Jun 8, 2019 23:36:46 GMT
I don't know if Chernobyl has just ruined everything on TV for me, or if this is genuinely as ridiculous as it's coming off, but after being HYPED for this show I am struggling after 2 episodes to want to continue. How much did Ava Duvernay pay you to write what you have written pacinoyes ??? Or was it written for you, and just signed it? I gotta tell ya ibbi, it makes me happy to know that my reviews carry more weight with (the wise and the discerning) users of this board than just seeing people come on here and say "forget pacinoyes - how is this rated so high on RT!!!!" I will have say that if you struggled through the first 2 episodes I don't know how much value 3/4 would have really since those are resolution episodes.......and I'm not even on Fosse/Verdon yet much less Chernobyl for Godsakes On the other hand I've been posting music videos of The La's lately like it's the old Oscar Buzz days and thankfully we will always have that common ground. You MUST watch Chernobyl ASAP. We'll call it an early birthday present! It's only 5 episodes, you can do it standing on your head! In all seriousness though, where does this side 'against the kids' or 'with the prosecutors'? I must have missed it in amidst the hundredth [poignant music playing] subtitle distracting me. Not that it should do the latter, but the interesting part of this to me would have been to see the cops and the prosecutors and their motives in more detail. We know these kids are innocent of this crime, focusing almost solely on them and their sad parents accomplishes what dramatically? I mean that Felicity Huffman character is a cartoon villain, and what's wrong with the Farmiga one? Like she knows her case is lame as hell, why's she so passionately into this? Bad acting? Bad writing? This show sucks! Ava Duvernay got outclassed by the guy that wrote The Hangover parts 2 and 3.
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Post by HELENA MARIA on Jun 12, 2019 23:09:57 GMT
Fucking loved it. Easily Ava's best work to date. 9/10
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Post by Viced on Jun 21, 2019 1:24:38 GMT
ibbi must be on crack, because this absolutely destroyed Chernobyl.
Well written, gripping even when you know how it's gonna end, characters that you actually give a shit about... some nice directorial flourishes. That Coney Island bit was pretty amazing...
Jharrel Jerome easily the MVP (and episode 4 the best episode)... and I'd say three of the parents -- John Leguizamo, Niecy Nash, and Michael Kenneth Williams -- are next in line. Though pretty much everyone was great...
strong 8.5/10 for me...
What a fucked up world we live in...
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Post by JangoB on Aug 5, 2019 12:13:43 GMT
pacinoyes , Pacino-San, you probably missed ibbi 's last reply to you on here but I also can't help but wondering where this series sides against the kids and with the prosecutors. It felt to me like DuVernay did everything she could to show the kids as the most innocent people imaginable. I mean, take the Central Park night in question - as I understand it (and as an American who's obviously closer to the story you probably can correct me if I'm wrong) there were quite a bit of attacks and robberies made during that night and yet the series shows the crowd of guys just sort of randomly running through the park, all smiles and hugs, as if Do-Re-MI from The Sound of Music is supposed to be playing on the soundtrack. Again, if I get it right that night was filled with violence so a more honest depiction of that certainly would've been better. I read that Santana actually took part in some sort of violence that night but the show just portrays everything about it in too sanitized a light. And Linda Fairstein is shown in as evil a way as possible. It's true that they give at least some nuance to Elizabeth Lederer with her expressing doubts about the kids and still having to go through with the case against them but I really don't see this series as having a balanced and multi-layered approach to the story. If anything, it all felt pretty damn black and white in its depiction of the events. Which is understandable since the injustice that has been committed against the boys was simply abhorrent and I guess DuVernay felt that the depiction didn't really need balance or nuance. But she just isn't a particularly interesting filmmaker to me so her direction itself wasn't quite enough to overcome the fact that the show felt pretty one-note. But I still liked it. It's really flawed and I felt that the story needed more than four episodes to fully tell this story - the time and character jumps felt jarring and some pretty important shit has been reduced to throwaway lines of dialogue. But the overall experience is pretty enveloping. Even though DuVernay does everything to simplify stuff and, in my heretical opinion, to drain a bit of the art out of it. Between this and "Green Book" I'm really starting to dislike Kris Bowers as a composer with his tendency to create really soapy and basic music. And I'm not sure whether I like Bradford Young's frequent shots with massive sources of light in the background but with barely any light on the actor's face in the foreground. There's a scene in Episode 3 where Kevin's sister visits him and tells him the story about meeting a guy and when they show Kevin we see these two massively lit windows behind him while his face is pretty much unlit. And Ashante Blackk is doing a pretty good job there in the scene - I just wish we could fucking see his face! Again, it's flawed but I certainly did like it and, more importantly, it did, imo, do a good job at portraying the horror of what the guys had to go through.
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Post by ibbi on Aug 5, 2019 12:47:48 GMT
pacinoyes , Pacino-San, you probably missed ibbi 's last reply to you on here but I also can't help but wondering where this series sides against the kids and with the prosecutors. It felt to me like DuVernay did everything she could to show the kids as the most innocent people imaginable. I mean, take the Central Park night in question - as I understand it (and as an American who's obviously closer to the story you probably can correct me if I'm wrong) there were quite a bit of attacks and robberies made during that night and yet the series shows the crowd of guys just sort of randomly running through the park, all smiles and hugs, as if Do-Re-MI from The Sound of Music is supposed to be playing on the soundtrack. Again, if I get it right that night was filled with violence so a more honest depiction of that certainly would've been better. I read that Santana actually took part in some sort of violence that night but the show just portrays everything about it in too sanitized a light. And Linda Fairstein is shown in as evil a way as possible. It's true that they give at least some nuance to Elizabeth Lederer with her expressing doubts about the kids and still having to go through with the case against them but I really don't see this series as having a balanced and multi-layered approach to the story. If anything, it all felt pretty damn black and white in its depiction of the events. Which is understandable since the injustice that has been committed against the boys was simply abhorrent and I guess DuVernay felt that the depiction didn't really need balance or nuance. But she just isn't a particularly interesting filmmaker to me so her direction itself wasn't quite enough to overcome the fact that the show felt pretty one-note. But I still liked it. It's really flawed and I felt that the story needed more than four episodes to fully tell this story - the time and character jumps felt jarring and some pretty important shit has been reduced to throwaway lines of dialogue. But the overall experience is pretty enveloping. Even though DuVernay does everything to simplify stuff and, in my heretical opinion, to drain a bit of the art out of it. Between this and "Green Book" I'm really starting to dislike Kris Bowers as a composer with his tendency to create really soapy and basic music. And I'm not sure whether I like Bradford Young's frequent shots with massive sources of light in the background but with barely any light on the actor's face in the foreground. There's a scene in Episode 3 where Kevin's sister visits him and tells him the story about meeting a guy and when they show Kevin we see these two massively lit windows behind him while his face is pretty much unlit. And Ashante Blackk is doing a pretty good job there in the scene - I just wish we could fucking see his face! Again, it's flawed but I certainly did like it and, more importantly, it did, imo, do a good job at portraying the horror of what the guys had to go through. As usual coming through with the common sense. I would love to hear more about how this cartoon is 'well written'.
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Post by pacinoyes on Aug 5, 2019 12:57:38 GMT
Whoa whoa hold on a second there JangoB - me and ibbi are all cool now because we loved the Dylan Rolling Thunder Revue AND Chernobyl (just finished it) and I have let him slide on that $5 bucks he STILL owes me (ummmmmmmm), nobody needs you coming between me and my buddy because - tramps like us baby we were born to run, ok? I see your point but again would refer to my post that compares this film to the documentary - so - "truth" vs. "dramatic truth" - the film at least has a POV and an arc - if Fairstein is a cartoon villain it still supports the filmmakers POV and the start is a little deceptive - they beat up one white person ("paybacks a bitch" - it's sanitized yes but not absent) and the dialog at the start ties into a lot later so it is at least cohesive "how come you always hungry"/"how come you never hungry" (hungry as a state of mind, regardless of food etc.) It just worked for me and it worked in a way I wouldn't think this material would in a film and that (sorry to pick on it again) Blackkklansman say specifically didn't by trying to impose a "real" truth on to the "dramatic truth" in a way the film couldn't support imo. Glad you liked the film though (in general)
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Post by ibbi on Aug 5, 2019 13:05:46 GMT
Chernobyl (just finished it) !!!!!!!!!!!!! TO THE CHERNOBYL THREAD, BATMAN!
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Post by JangoB on Aug 5, 2019 18:46:05 GMT
Whoa whoa hold on a second there JangoB - me and ibbi are all cool now because we loved the Dylan Rolling Thunder Revue AND Chernobyl (just finished it) and I have let him slide on that $5 bucks he STILL owes me (ummmmmmmm), nobody needs you coming between me and my buddy because - tramps like us baby we were born to run, ok? I see your point but again would refer to my post that compares this film to the documentary - so - "truth" vs. "dramatic truth" - the film at least has a POV and an arc - if Fairstein is a cartoon villain it still supports the filmmakers POV and the start is a little deceptive - they beat up one white person ("paybacks a bitch" - it's sanitized yes but not absent) and the dialog at the start ties into a lot later so it is at least cohesive "how come you always hungry"/"how come you never hungry" (hungry as a state of mind, regardless of food etc.) It just worked for me and it worked in a way I wouldn't think this material would in a film and that (sorry to pick on it again) Blackkklansman say specifically didn't by trying to impose a "real" truth on to the "dramatic truth" in a way the film couldn't support imo. Glad you liked the film though (in general) I haven't seen the documentary so I can't really comment on the differences between the two but it's clear that "When They See Us" struck a powerful emotional chord with you so good for it! I do like the overall POV here - showing the situations through the direct experiences of the boys and their families. I honestly just wish there were more episodes so that the returns from prison of the four of them wouldn't have needed to be jammed into 70 minutes because there was a lot of fascinating material there IMO. Especially with Santana and his changed household and subsequent breaking of the law again.
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Post by PromNightCarrie on Oct 13, 2019 18:58:04 GMT
Glad Jharrel Jerome won his well-deserved best actor Emmy for this. He was beyond amazing. This was so difficult for me to watch.
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Post by ibbi on Oct 13, 2019 19:30:33 GMT
Glad Jharrel Jerome won his well-deserved best actor Emmy for this. He was beyond amazing. This was so difficult for me to watch. It was difficult for me to watch too, PQC. Though I'm guessing not for the same reasons.
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