Tag: Forest Whitaker

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

The push and pull between new directions and tones and nostalgic fan service make for a frustrating “Star Wars” spinoff.

Rogue One PosterThe paradox of “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” is that it’s somehow tonally and thematically separate from the original “Star Wars” films but pays even more homage to the original trilogy than even “The Force Awakens,” amazing, since that movie is essentially a remake of “A New Hope.”

Its hero is not a wistful young farm boy but a cynical girl named Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) who has been in exile and shuttled around Galactic Empire prisons and work sites for years. The film’s first scene recalls the cruiser soaring overhead at the beginning of “A New Hope,” but “Rogue One” forgoes even the iconic opening crawl.

There are moments at which the film even diverts from George Lucas’s ideologies of good and evil and of the power of faith and religion. One of the film’s standouts is Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), an acrobatic yet blind protector who is not a Jedi but senses the Force in the world. When he chants relentlessly “I am one with the Force, the Force is with me,” it’s a noble yet bleak mantra as he marches into certain death and the unknown of the open battlefield. Continue reading “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”

Lee Daniels' The Butler

“Lee Daniels’ The Butler” is a “quietly subversive” film with surprising depth and nuance despite its massive cast and ambitions.

There’s a scene in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” where Martin Luther King Jr. is speaking with Louis Gaines (David Oyelowo), the Freedom Rider son of the film’s eponymous protagonist. Louis is ashamed that his father Cecil (Forest Whitaker) is a servant for a living, but Dr. King corrects him and says that the butler’s hard work ethic and dignity has a long history of slowly breaking down black stereotypes.

They’re “quietly subversive,” he says, which is a perfect label for “The Butler.” This loosely true story about a White House Butler who served through five administrations and 20 years is strongly melodramatic, but it views our nation’s most iconic racial history through a more critical, nuanced lens. Cecil’s complex persona goes against some of the themes depicted in modern race relations films, and it broadens Daniels’ scope to a film that is saccharine, suspenseful and silly.

It’s a fine line for any specifically “black” film to walk. We’ve come a long way from the days when Sidney Poitier was leading the charge in African American cinema, an actor who “The Butler” name drops directly. The Civil Rights era has been tread so many times that the genre itself has evolved to something of a post-racial state, even if the reality we live in hasn’t. Continue reading “Lee Daniels' The Butler”

The Last King of Scotland

When a leader commands as much conviction in his voice as Forest Whitaker does as Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland,” you don’t ask why the man thinks or acts the way he does; you just go along with the ride.

Director Kevin Macdonald and screenwriter Peter Morgan are more than happy to take us on this historical journey through 1970s Uganda, when Ugandan President and army general Idi Amin ruled the country with an iron fist. We see the events unfold through the eyes of Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), a stifled young man from Scotland looking to escape into the world and do some good.

It does seem to be a trend in historical biopics like these to view the most interesting character, in this case, Amin, from the outside and not as the protagonist. And although we get a richly complex character in Amin, the main story is about a boy who was once sheltered at home and was then ironically sheltered in one of the most dangerous places in the world. Continue reading “The Last King of Scotland”