I Am Not Your Negro
⋆⋆⋆⋆ out of four stars
Rated: PG-13, disturbing violent images, thematic material, language and brief nudity.
Theater: Lagoon.
Novelist, playwright, poet and cultural critic James Baldwin wrote a letter to his agent in 1979, describing a planned book based on his years in the civil rights movement. It was to explore the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. He wanted to explore the ways in which these activists' lives banged against and informed each other. There were only 30 pages of manuscript when Baldwin died in 1987, and now Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has breathed new life into Baldwin's work in the documentary "I Am Not Your Negro."
Had Baldwin finished the book, it would no doubt have been a work of massive cultural import. Peck does more than just revive the manuscript, with the help of Samuel L. Jackson's narration. He brings it alive with photographs, archival news footage, Hollywood films and Baldwin himself, enhancing his words with his TV appearances and filmed debates.
Peck goes even further, stitching together a film that is completely contemporary; he liberates the text from Baldwin's era to show that his ideas are timeless, and that the battles have not been won. Through careful yet bold editing, Peck applies Baldwin's words to events such as the Rodney King beating and the Black Lives Matter protests. It's bracing, invigorating stuff: The editing keeps pace with Baldwin's words, from the self-reflective, sensitive manuscript informed by his personal history, to his fiery orations at the Cambridge debates or on "The Dick Cavett Show."
This Oscar nominee for best documentary is a film that crackles with electricity, from its daring visual design and storytelling to Baldwin's achingly brilliant mind. It races along — it feels as if it would take at least three viewings to absorb it all — and it when it ends, breathlessly, abruptly, you yearn for more. "The world was never white," he reminds us, a statement that reverberates to the core.
KATIE WALSH, Tribune News Service
The Space Between Us
⋆½ out of four stars
Rated: PG-13, brief sensuality and strong language.
"The Space Between Us" aims to be an epic story of young love on the level of "The Spectacular Now" or "The Fault in Our Stars." The cinematography often is gorgeous and the score is full of teary uplift. But none of that matters when little about the film feels authentic.
Set in a near future where a group of astronauts is on its way to Mars for a long-term stay, the film raises questions worth pondering. What if one of the crew were secretly pregnant? How would a human not born on Earth be different? How disorienting would it be for the child to be from Earth but not of Earth?
The baby, Gardner, grows into a bright and relatively happy young man (Asa Butterfield) in the antiseptic, artificial world of the Martian outpost. He may never experience his true "home," as his body isn't suited for Earth's atmosphere or pressure.
But he has developed an online friendship with an Earth girl named Tulsa (Britt Robertson), and that dovetails with the desire of an Elon Musk type (Gary Oldman) to reintegrate him into human society.
Breaking away from his minders, Gardner sets out to find both Tulsa and his father. But he shows little sense of the extreme dislocation someone in his position would feel.
A bigger problem, though, is Tulsa. The script turns her into a veritable superhero — she flies planes! She has wisdom beyond her years! — undermining any emotional credibility the film had been trying to build.
We're supposed to applaud as these crazy kids escape, but since the movie has squandered its intriguing premise, there's little reason to cheer.
CARY DARLING, Tribune News Service
