Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, but better options are on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue below [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the same name)
11/22/2023—Once again my trusty computer’s behaving erratically so if you don’t see any new postings from Two Guys in the Dark in the coming weeks please know we’ll be back as soon as the problems are resolved. In the meantime, for those who will actually be able to celebrate a day of harmony this year, I wish you Happy Thanksgiving; for everyone else, I hope you soon find peace.
Rustin (George C. Wolfe) rated PG-13 108 min.
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: If you know about Bayard Rustin or learn from various Internet biographies—a short one from the National Museum of African American History & Culture, a bit more detailed one from Stanford University’s The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, the most-extensive at this Wikipedia entry, you’d probably find it odd he’s considered a relative-unknown despite his long history of working for the betterment of Black people, but while being Black was enough of a social problem (not of his making) in his most-famous-period of the 1960s his situation was compounded by him not only being gay but also not closeted so he frequently avoided mass-media-limelights so as to not take attention away from important causes he was involved with.
We get to see his leadership (with A. Philip Randolph [Glynn Turman] who had his own earned-respect from African-Americans for, among other accomplishments, leading President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 to ban discrimination in the defense industries during WW II, then President Harry S. Truman to issue Executive Orders in 1948 promoting fair employment and anti-discrimination in federal government hiring as well as ending racial segregation in the armed services) in organizing the famous August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but Rustin’s other accomplishments were also noteworthy, winning him the Presidential Medal of Freedom (sadly, not until 2013, long after he died in 1987), so while I encourage you to see this docudrama, you should also read about him as his achievements go well beyond that famous March (remembered for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream,” speech which led to misunderstandings King was the March organizer; he worked on it with Rustin and other Civil Rights leaders of the time, but as we observe in this film the hugely-complex-logistics of this monumental event largely became successful due to the tireless energy of Rustin [Colman Domingo]). What we get here, though, smartly doesn’t try to pack in more of Rustin's life; rather, it focuses on a well-known-massive-demonstration of people demanding dignity and equality, a topic which—sadly—still is a currently-recognizable-need in a nation (and the larger world it’s part of) where injustice is far from being eliminated from the fabric of human interactions. Even though this film takes us back 60 years, it manifests relevance for audiences who are old enough to at least know about the March (if not Rustin, yet) as well as those who are just now learning all about this crucial chapter in American history in a detailed encounter that probably exceeds anything they’ve experienced (or yawned through) with schoolroom lessons.
While we see a little bit of angry Whites’ physical abuse of Rustin at times just because of his existence, we mostly meet him in 1960 when he’s asked to lead a large demonstration at the Democratic National Convention, a task he’s willing to undertake until rebuffed by House member Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (Jeffrey Wright) because the concept wasn’t vetted through him (leading to a distancing between Rustin and King [Ami Ameen] because the latter accepted Powell’s objections). Most of the rest of this film focuses on the opposition Rustin faced when—working with Randolph—he was organizing Herculean-efforts to plan a successful result of the March (intended to last for 2 days, people spending the night in tents, protesters encircling the White House), with disagreements coming from NAACP leader Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock), concerned segregationists would attack the attendees, and Dr. Anna Hedgeman (CCH Pounder), angry that Black women were not intended to play a more prominent role among the speakers in front of the Lincoln Memorial. (Rustin also faced verbal attacks from South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond who called him a “Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual,” releasing to the press his entire police record from 1953 Pasadena, CA when Rustin was convicted of “lewd conduct” with other males; there were also the implications during those years of a [nonexistent] sexual relationship between Rustin and King).
The other focus of the film is on Rustin’s relationship in the early ‘60s with a White man, Tom (Gus Halper), who becomes hostile to Rustin’s increasing attention to (and affection with) Elias Taylor (Johnny Ramey), a married Black man whose wife, Claudia (Adrienne Warren), finally calls the affair to a halt when Elias inherits a family church ministry, ⇒leaving Rustin with the task of making the March work, especially when hundreds of thousands of people do show up (I guess Wolfe figures there’s enough footage available of what happened that famous day to not have to repeat much of it for the film, although we do get bits of Mahalia Jackson’s [Da’Vine Joy Randolph] singing and King’s speech [by which point he and Rustin had reconciled, with implications that Ruskin had earlier been instrumental in encouraging King to his advocacy of Mahatma Gandhi-inspired nonviolent protests]). After the success of the March, Civil Rights leaders were asked to meet with President John F. Kennedy, but Rustin remained inconspicuous, helping to pick up trash after the crowd departed.⇐
So What? If you’re inclined to hesitate about spending your time with history lessons, I hope you’ll put that concern aside to let yourself learn from this film while enjoying its brisk pace and engaging acting, especially by Domingo who easily commands the screen in every scene he’s in (seems to be just about all of them as best I can recall). Then, if you’d like to see a bit of the actual Rustin here's a short video (3:19) from an interview he did in 1979 about the successes and failures of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, which he says was mainly about the need for the right to vote, the right to use public accommodations, and the freedom to send children to the school of your choice but didn’t truly address the economic and social problems of Black citizens which were still being bitterly fought for years after the ‘60s. While I can’t vouch for all of the presented historical-accuracies, with the understanding that despite whatever facts we have on file about all of the many Civil Rights leaders depicted here (even if briefly), film scripts need certain flashes of drama to keep the audience intrigued so if some of those more private conversations shown—especially between Rustin and Tom, Rustin and Elias—are fabrications (I’ve read both of these Rustin lovers are fictional creations, so whether they’re based on other actual Rustin paramours or just representative of the challenges a gay man, especially one with a public presence, faced during this era [as if it’s noticeably all that much better today]), what matters is how the difficulties of relationships such as these are honestly presented, giving further substance to the complex person Rustin must have been. As I’ve said before, learn your history from authenticated sources such as the ones I cited at the top of this review’s previous section, but then get inspired by how that history must have felt when the people involved were experiencing it even if everything you see on screen wouldn’t provide you with the best results if you had to take a detailed test about Bayard Rustin’s life.
Bottom Line Final Comments: The CCAL’s response to what happens here in Rustin is a bit more inconsistent than mine because the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews are at a supportive 86% while the Metacritic average score reverses that number to a considerably lower 68%, so I hope you’ll listen more to me and the tomato-growers than the MC snobs, but that’s left to your discretion. While Rustin was released to a limited number of theaters on November 3, 2023 (and still apparently remains in a few of them), I have no box-office information on it because the distributor, Netflix, usually doesn’t report such, so just know that Netflix streaming is your only sure bet to see this film, but even then you have to be a subscriber (if not, and you can tolerate ads, you can sign up for just one month for $6.99 [thereby allowing you to also peruse the rest of their large catalogue], or, if ads are intolerable to you, then you might consider $15.49 for that month’s experiment). I’m not going to hesitate in encouraging you to make a decision to see Rustin both because it’s a consistently-well-made-cinematic-experience and, more importantly, because, if you’re like me, you should find out more about this great champion of minority rights. While you’re mulling that over, take a listen to my usual-review-closure-tactic of a Musical Metaphor, in this case one of the great anthems of the Civil Rights era, Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come" (on his 1964 Ain’t That Good News album) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it18WSFrwXI, a video where the song’s connected to footage of another substantial look at a prominent figure of the 1960s in Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992) with insightful lyrics such as “Then I go to my brother / And I say ‘Brother, help me please’ / But he winds up / Knockin’ me / Back down on my knees […] It’s been a long / A long time comin’ but I know / A change gon’ come/ Oh, yes it will.” The full needed change still is in progress; we just all have to make the effort Bayard Rustin did to finally bring it to fruition.*
*In 2021 Rolling Stone named this song as #3 on their list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (you can go here to see how their opinions of the Top 10 in those 500 lists changed from 2004 to 2021).
SHORT TAKES
Here’s the trailer:
(No Plot Spoilers here because it’s a documentary fully based in real events, although the specific content of the many interviews isn’t likely recorded anywhere else.) If you didn’t encounter the Rolling Stones until after 1969 you may not even be aware of Brian Jones, although he’s the one who started pulling the group together in 1962 when he was just 19, first recruiting Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, then filling it through a newspaper ad with bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts. As we learn through archival footage and voice-over testimony from Brian along with many in Jones’ life (plus some more-lengthy contemporary interviews for this doc), Jones had a strong affinity for American blues music—he even took the band’s name from blues-master Muddy Waters’ "Rollin' Stone" (on his 1958 The Best of Muddy Waters album)—but was pushed out of his home at 17 due to his father desiring a more-settled-career for his son than as a popular musician (we get Dad Leslie Jones’ take on this also, after the fact). For a few years in the early 1960s Jones moved in with families of a string of girlfriends (or just the women themselves), getting at least 5 pregnant before moving on, but we get very little about these children in this doc; instead, the focus here is on the rapid rise of the Stones as a blues-influenced-then-more-of-a-rocker-band with Jones providing a lot of instrumental versatility in their early albums but with little singing, no songwriting, so as the hits were coming from the Jagger-Richards collaborations conflicts arose between Mick and Brian as to who was truly in charge of the group (with the huge success of "Satisfaction" pushing Jones further away from his bandmates’ development), although Brian apparently still got along better with Keith.
Some of those women in his life provide insightful interviews on Brian’s interpersonal aspects—Valerie Corbett, Linda Lawrence, Anita Pallenberg, Dawn Malloy, and actress/model/singer Zouzou—while Wyman gives extensive commentary on Jones’ professional work, with his increasing incoherence, lack of contributions through alcohol and drug use finally leading to his expulsion from the band in 1969 (to be replaced by first Mick Taylor, then Ron Wood, although they’re not part of this narrative), then death by drowning in his own swimming pool (cause never officially determined as to accident, overdose, suicide [or even murder]). While there’s nothing really surprising or revelatory about how Jones’ life is depicted, this film is useful—as is Rustin—in putting a spotlight on men quite influential in their time but, to some degree, are relatively unknown/forgotten to many now.
If you’d like to see … Brian Jones it might still be in a few theaters (supposedly opened domestically for just one day on November 7, 2023, although I’ve found evidence of it continued to be listed, bringing in a mere $41.5 thousand gross) you’d be encouraged to do so by the CCAL with 90% RT positive reviews, a 75% MC average score, so turn to streaming where there's a $6.99 rental at Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, etc. With such an aural focus here there’s lot to choose from for a Musical Metaphor, but I’ve decided to be a bit snide even speaking of the dead by using the Stones' “The Last Time” (on their 1966 compilation album Big Hits {Hide Tide and Green Grass), also on the U.S. version of 1965’s Out of Our Heads) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvIIM2AZg CA (from a [probable 1965] performance on CBS TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show) where (despite the original lyrics being about a romance on the rocks) Mick and Keith could be warning Brian (just as schoolmasters, parents, others had done earlier in his compacted-27 years) that “I told you once and I told you twice/ But you never listen to my advice / You don’t try very hard to please me / With what you know it should be easy / Well, this could be the last time,” which it was when he was no longer in the group he founded, then died less than a month later (even as his band continues to tour today).
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
An option for consideration: Lily Gladstone welcomes criticism of Killers of the Flower Moon.
We encourage you to visit the Summary of Two Guys Reviews for our past posts* (scroll to the bottom of this Summary page to see additional info about your wacky critic, Ken Burke, along with contact info and a great retrospective song list). Overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness beyond our control—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage. If you’d like to Like us on Facebook (yes?) please visit our Facebook page. We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it unto us! Please also note that to Post a Comment below about our reviews you need to have either a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post. You can also leave comments at our Facebook page, although you may have to somehow register with us at that site in order to do it (most FB procedures are still a perplexing mystery to us old farts).
*Please ignore previous warnings about a “dead link” to our Summary page because the problem’s been manually fixed so that all postings since July 11, 2013 now have the proper functioning link.
If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here at the blog please
use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work.
OUR POSTINGS PROBABLY LOOK BEST ON THE MOST CURRENT VERSIONS OF MAC OS AND THE SAFARI WEB BROWSER (although Google Chrome usually is decent also); OTHERWISE, BE FOREWARNED THE LAYOUT MAY SEEM MESSY AT TIMES.
Finally, for the data-oriented among you, Google stats say over the past month the total unique hits at this site were 48,541 (as always, we thank all of you for your ongoing support with our hopes you’ll continue to be regular readers); below is a snapshot of where those responses have come from within the previous week (with appreciation for the unspecified “Others” also visiting Two Guys’ site):
No comments:
Post a Comment