Movie Review: Shirley (2024)

Title: Shirley
Release Date: March 21, 2024
Director: John Ridley
Production Company: Participant | Royal Ties Productions
Summary/Review:

Shirley Chisholm was the first Black woman elected to Congress, representing a district in Brooklyn from 1969 to 1983.  In 1972, she ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.  This film focuses on the campaign’s behind-the-scenes dealings and the emotional effects on Chisholm and her family and friends.  The highlights of this movie are Regina King’s performance in the lead role and bringing awareness to Chisholm’s historical role.  Scenes that stand out include Chisholm’s visit to segregationist candidate George Wallace (W. Earl Brown) after an assassination attempt and a meeting with Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton (Brad James) mediated by actor Diahann Caroll (Amirah Vann).  The rest of the cast includes Michael Cherie as Chisholm’s patient husband Conrad, Lance Reddick, Terrence Howard, Lucas Hedges, and Brian Stokes Mitchell as Chisholm’s campaign advisors, and Christina Jackson as a young Barbara Lee.  Unfortunately, this movie is highly formulaic like a lot of biopics, and a much of the dialogue sounds unnatural as if the characters are narrating from a history book.

Rating: ***

90 Movies in 90 Days: The King and the Mockingbird (1980)

Every day until March 31, 2024 I will be watching and reviewing a movie that is 90 minutes or less.

Title: The King and the Mockingbird
Release Date: March 18, 1980
Director: Paul Grimault
Production Company: Les Films Paul Grimault |  Les Films Gibé | Antenne 2
Summary/Review:

Over 30 years in the making, The King and the Mockingbird is a surreal animated fantasy film known as an inspiration for Studio Ghibli founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. The film bridges Disney and Warner Bros animation styles with the later Ghibli style and is inventive in its own ways.  The basic plot involves an autocratic king who is deposed by a painting of himself and then pursues a shepherdess  from another painting who is actually in love with a chimney sweep.  All along he has taunted by a bird who unravels all the king’s plots.  The animation is as delightfully weird as the plot.

Rating: ****

90 Movies in 90 Days: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011)

Every day until March 31, 2024 I will be watching and reviewing a movie that is 90 minutes or less.

Title: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Release Date:  February 11, 2011
Director: Chad Freidrichs
Production Company: ?
Summary/Review:

The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments were constructed in St. Louis in the early 1950s as modern public housing to replace derelict tenements for the poor. By the mid-1970s, the Pruitt-Igoe complex was demolished.  The famous photo of the implosion of the buildings served as symbol to prop up the idea that public housing was doomed to fail, that modern architecture was implicitly flawed, and that the predominately Black residents of the apartment were inherently uncivilized.

This film deconstructs all of these myths.  The reality is that after completion, no public funds were ever dedicated to the maintenance and operations of the apartments.  White flight to the suburbs rapidly depopulated St. Louis to a greater extent than most U.S. cities, leaving very little tax base to provide funding even if they wanted to.  As a result the apartments became even more severely segregated than the slums they replaced.

The documentary is richly illustrated with historical film and photographs of Pruitt-Igoe and St. Louis over time.  But the strength of this movie is interviews with people who lived in the apartments as children.  Their stories share the joys of community and experiencing the modern comforts and amenities of the apartments when they moved in, as well as the horrors of the buildings’ deterioration and rise of crime.  Definitely a movie that remains relevant as U.S. cities still fail to address housing affordability and equality to this day.

Rating: ***1/2