Hacker Cinema
Selma
2014 · Film · 128 min
Directed by Ava DuVernay
"Selma," as in Alabama, the place where segregation in the South was at its worst, leading to a march that ended in violence, forcing a famous statement by President Lyndon B. Johnson that ultimately led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act.
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7 comments on Hacker News
It was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2017:
chiefly US slang
: aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
But we will only succeed if we reject the growing pressure to retreat into cynicism and hopelessness. … We have a moral obligation to "stay woke," take a stand and be active; challenging injustices and racism in our communities and fighting hatred and discrimination wherever it rises.
— Barbara Lee
… argued that … Brad Pitt is not only woke, but the wokest man in Hollywood … because he uses his status—and his production company Plan B—to create space for artists of color, with such films as 12 Years a Slave, Selma, and the upcoming film Moonlight.
— Giselle Defares
I don't think it's anything new. People used to call political activists' house to make death threats. It's a recurring theme in Selma, the movie about Dr. King.
I never had to deal with this as a community moderator, but these sort of virtue spirals can destroy communities if they're not nipped in the bud.
Movies seem to really be hollowing out the middle more. You've got a lot of very low-budget fliers and indie prestige stuff and a lot of $100M+ mega-movies, drifting now into attempts at Marvel-esque cinematic universe perpetual money-printing machines for increasingly dubious IPs.
I'm not sure I agree. Those two types have certainly risen, but if you look at films from last year, there a are still a ton of "middle" films with decent budgets (10-30M) and high praise from the critics - Selma, Spotlight, Carol, The Big Short, etc. I don't see a hollow middle.
Selma's historical gravity weighed down the movie making like concrete shoes.
Selma looks like an interesting movie, not sure I'm not the target market, aside perhaps from not being American.
Seriously, those are not content-free movies. You're just not the target market.
But you want to look at what got no awards while The Imitation Game cleaned up? Selma, a movie with way more relevance to America than TIG.
But I'm guessing you're not in the target market for that either.
(And also, as others have already pointed out, the content is bad.)
Go watch the Selma (movie)? That incident (where news coverage sparked public opinion, leading to political action) provides a great counter-example to the idea that news/journalism is a waste of time.