Selma, the Hobbit hit screens

Movie Title: Selma

This movie is one of America’s best in the year 2014 as it critically examines the accomplishments of Martin Luther King Jr. without wrapping it in a grade-school civics lesson.

Selma ranks best in America simply because it focuses on one specific period in the life of Dr. King, which is the part on what he did for America; wondering explicitly what other citizens have left undone for the United States.

In this epic movie, Nigeria’s David Oyelowo stars as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Director Ava DuVernary’s film; screened in its entirety at the AFI Film Festival.

Oyelowo is a Nigerian born in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, in the United Kingdom, to parents ofYoruba extraction. His mother worked for a railway and his father for the national airline.

He began his stage career in 1999 when he was offered a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company playing roles in Ben Jonson’s Bolpone, as the title character in Oroonoko (which he also performed in the BBC radio adaptation) and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1999) alongside Guy Henry, Frances de la Tour and Alan Bates.

Oyelowo was the first black actor to play an English king in a major production of Shakespeare, and although this casting choice was initially criticised by some in the media, Oyelowo’s performance was critically acclaimed and later won the 2001 lan Charleson Award for best performance by an actor under 30 in a classical play.

To be released on the 25th of this month, the movie, Selma, mirrors the 1965 march from the city of Selma in Alabama to the state capital of Montgomery, which prompted President Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Acts.

The march was to protest and draw attention to the systematic and deliberate disenfranchisement of black voters in the South, a crime of power that happened long before King’s rise to prominence and continues as recently as Election Day 2014; it’s a story of the American past and the role a leader played in changing his era, but this isn’t the usual dry recounting of facts and soft-focused hero-building. It’s far more, and far better, than that.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Besides Selma, another movie that promises to entertain you within this yuletide season is The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.

Well, it is not called The Battle of The Five Armies for nothing and from a bravado opening sequence that sees furious fire-breathing dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) swooping down and unleash fiery hell on Laketown.

It proceeded into a second half which is essentially one long battle scene; it really does not let up on the pitched battles and one to one mortal combat.

Martin Freeman stars as Bilbo Baggins, alongside Ian McKellen as Gandalf and Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, in an epic fantasy that is set to culminate in a 45-minute battle scene.

Dwarves, elves, goblins and orcs are among those battling it out for their right to the treasure of Erebor; Jackson has promised that the final scene does not get monotonous: “We have a rule that we’re not allowed to go more than two or three shots of anonymous people fighting without cutting back to our principal characters.”

The Hobbit would be out by Wednesday, December 10th.

Movie Title: Unbroken

Not many people have the time to watch movies, some steal the time to do while many others can go a distance to get the latest.

Unbroken-Angelina-Jolie-como-directora_landscape

If you are one of those few who would go the extra mile to get the latest, Unbroken is definitely going to thrill you.

This movie, a World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, is Angelina Jolie’s second film as director, which is scheduled to be released this month (December).

Painfully, Jolie has announced her intention to retire from acting just as Unbroken is about to hit the market.

The movie is the true story of Louis Zamperini, a promising young Olympic runner from Torrance, California, who was called into service on a bomber crew in the Pacific in World War II.

Zamperini’s plane went down in the Pacific Ocean forcing him and two other survivors to drift for over 40 days living on rainwater and the occasional fish or bird they could catch.

One of the crash survivors died on the raft. Zamperini, who met Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics, and the other survivor (the plane’s pilot), were finally approaching land when they were captured by the Japanese navy.

Meanwhile, their captors did not inform America of the capture of Zamperini and colleague but kept them as prisoners for more than two years and thereafter declared both men officially dead.

With a screenplay co-written by the Coen brothers and adapted from a bestselling book by Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit), the epic drama features Jack O’Connell (’71) as Zamperini, who died in July aged 97. You cannot afford to miss this heroic movie when released on 25 December.

Movie Title: Wild

Another movie to watch out for in this festive month is ‘Wild’. In one of this Oscar season’s many road movies, Reese Witherspoon plays a former heroin addict who hikes the 1,100 m (1,770 km) of the Pacific Crest Trail.

Adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling 2012 memoir, Wild is directed by Jean-Marc Vallée with a script by Nick Hornby.

Still, Wild is never less than involving as it follows Witherspoon’s Cheryl from the Mojave Desert, in the summer of 1995, to the Oregon-Washington border more than three months later, deftly maneuvering between her past and present sufferings along the way.

The film gets some wry comic mileage out of her misguided early decision to strap on an enormous, unwieldy backpack, which is so heavy that a fellow hiker christens it “the Monster”. That may just be one of the many examples of how ill prepared Cheryl was for this particular trip, despite her tough, resilient attitude and cross-country training.

Slowly she plods her way northward, dropping expletives with every step, subsisting on oatmeal that she heats on a small gas-powered stove, fending off the occasional rattlesnake, and trying to stifle the inner voice that keeps telling her, “You can quit anytime.”

In Wild, her performance has been tipped for a best actress nomination at the Academy Awards.

The movie “Wild” would definitely be praised when released on December 5 for having a strong, well-written, flesh-and-blood female at its center, it is to the film’s credit that it wears this badge of honor with a lightness that in no way undermines its sincerity.

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