Selma, Lord, Selma

I watched this movie on the Disney Channel recently and was outraged at the portrayal of the murder of the young Episcopal seminarian, Jonathan Daniels. The movie showed him being shot while alone on a side street in Selma. In reality he was killed in Haynesville in an attack on a group of civil rights workers. Jonathan was killed by a shotgun as he pushed Ruby Sales out of the line of fire. A Roman Catholic priest was wounded in the attack. The Disney version does a great injustice to Jonathan's memory and to the herorism of the priest who was wounded.

I am a teacher in an alternative school in the Southeastern US. As part of Black History Month, I showed this movie to my students, then had them read other IMDb comments and make their own. Here are some of their comments. (Unfortunately, because of school policy, none of the students can be identified by name.)

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I think people should rent this movie because it is based on a true story and the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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This is a good movie because there is not a lot of blood and gore for young children to see (teacher's note: there is none at all). This is also a good movie because it is educational and good for inspiration in people's lives.

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The movie was very good...it had a great meaning to it.

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I thought this docudrama was a diamond in the rough for a Disney movie. Even though the story was not exactly what happened in real life, they managed to get some good acting and a respectable portrayal of MLK. The portrayal of Jonathan Daniels was off key, though they managed to portray him as he was somewhat. This movie gets 7/10 stars.

That's right. The Scene of Bloody Sunday happend just like that and it was a horrible sight to even think people in the past did such a thing, but it still happend and this movie shows the brutal reality. 5.3 out of 10 is not enough of this movie. See for yourself and the brutal reality of bloody sunday.

I LOVE THOS MOVIS AS A CHILD THEY NEED TO BRING IT BACK TO DISNEY CHANNEL THE ACTING WAS GREAT.

The director's first film Killer of Sheep was amazing. This film I don't know where I stand exactly. It seems to be a bit overly sentimental. I suspect you don't get that much freedom working for Disney and sometimes the more "you're supposed to feel this way" moments actually got pushed so far that they took on a bit of irony and maybe recovered some of their honesty. Maybe their flamboyance was the alienation technique to make you step back and think about what's going on. The music was what drew my attention to this idea. The first time you meet the racist cop the music is kind of silly to a point of seeming self aware. And the really unsubtle and unnatural way Burnett constantly works the word "freedom" into the film. Maybe I'm excusing bad film-making. I don't know.

It wasn't horrible. There was some style. It seemed like a lot of text though, nothing really with any kind of new life. I don't know how I feel about the characters either. I felt like the characters kind of floated through the narrative in a way that didn't let you really get to know them or understand their story. And I kind of hated the white minister, he just came off bossy rather than a person conductive to change (I would have been thinking some one more like Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men rather than the priest in On The Waterfront (who I also hate :)) maybe that's not who he was but I doubt very much the never-do-wrong guy that made it to the screen wasn't exactly a historical figure either. And were there no poor, African people that maybe took exception to being told to risk their livelihood for civil rights by the moral edict of a caucasian preacher? It seems like maybe there was some missing tension. But maybe that's how it was.

But anyway, a mediocre film by Burnett is still a pretty good film in some ways.

I like how he represented Dr. King. Maybe it wasn't warts and all, but right from the beginning he was a human being. There was no image of worship or him being on a higher plane. He was a man with a struggle and that was more or less it (as much as I suspect the other cooks spoiling the soup would allow).

And it was also a very effecting movie. I'm not a nationalistic person but the image of African people marching for their civil rights holding American flags was very beautiful.

It wasn't a failure but maybe it could have been better, especially considering the director involved.