Sunday, January 17, 2021
It's a relatively quiet week in the land of Tucson cinema, but things are afoot—to be described in future posts)—that might bolster your desire to see some new cinema in the outdoors.
On the cinema news front, Legendary and Warner Bros. have settled their spat, resulting in Kong vs. Godzilla coming to theaters and HBO Max on the same day two months earlier.
The film now has a March 26 release date, the day after my birthday. I will consider this a birthday present, unless it sucks like the last Godzilla movie, in which case I will curse it and its creator's name with the ferocity of a rabid fox. A bad film will shift my loyalty and disposition quite easily. I'm a very fair weather friend in regards to cinema.
As of the writing of this post, no trailer for Kong vs. Godzilla is available. With only two months until its release, that's pretty weird and perhaps a little troubling.
Here's a review of a very important film, released in a very timely manner.
FILM REVIEW: MLK/FBI
Screening this week at The Loft Cinema as part of Open Air Cinema series
Up until the day he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the subject of a massive FBI investigation led by J. Edgar Hoover, an attempt to undermine his character in the eyes of the world and obstruct the Civil Rights movement.
Sam Pollard’s documentary, combining archived footage and recent interviews with the likes of James Comey, investigates some new declassified files, and well-known historical facts, to show just how archaic and disgusting Hoover and his cronies were in the sixties. From attempts by the FBI to label black Americans fighting for their rights as "communists," to denouncing King as a sexual degenerate, the film does a good job displaying how backwards the country’s government was then.
Watching this film, one can’t help but think about the horrible underbelly of racism that exists in our country today. Actually, calling it an underbelly might be wrong. It’s out in the open, especially in these last four years.