The DVD includes gently animated and beautifully narrated versions of four books about important figures in black history.
Duke Ellington Forest Whitaker reads this tribute to one of the 20th century’s most celebrated and influential musicians.
Ellington Was Not a Street Phylicia Rashad reads Ntozake Shange’s story about growing up amidst many of the great figures of African-American history.
Ella Fitzgerald: The Tale of a Vocal Virtuosa She had an exquisite voice and unsurpassed musicianship to use it like a jazz instrument. Billy Dee Williams tells the story of how she got her sound.
John Henry Samuel L. Jackson reads the story based on the famous legend and folk ballad about the hammer-driving man who could beat anyone, even the machine.
Wilmer Fields was a superstar in the Negro Leagues, back when baseball was segregated. After Jackie Robinson broke the color line (as shown in the hit film, “42”), Fields received five different offers to join white teams. But he loved the Negro Leagues and never left. After his retirement, he fought to get the Negro League players covered by Major League Baseball’s pension and health care benefits. This new edition of Fields’ memoir, with an introduction by baseball historian John Holway, features a new interview with Fields’ son, Billy, who had his own professional sports career in basketball. Fields tells the story of the “dream come true” that “allowed a black country boy” from Virginia to play the game he loved with teammates he admired and trusted. Fields tells his story, from college football to military service in WWII to hitting .427 in 1956 and being honored as one of the “Black legends of baseball” in 1990. He writes about players like the legendary Josh Gibson and Sam Hairston, who became a White Sox manager. He writes about the game itself, the qualities that make a team and the dedication that makes a world-class athlete.
Rated PG-13 for disturbing violent images, thematic material, language and brief nudity
Profanity:
Some strong language, racist epithets
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Smoking
Violence/ Scariness:
Archival footage of social unrest, civil rights era and contemporary violence
Diversity Issues:
The theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:
February 3, 2017
Date Released to DVD:
May 1, 2017
Amazon.com ASIN:
B06WLH94HD
Copyright 2016 Magnolia PicturesDirector Raoul Peck has made a powerful and vitally timely film about James Baldwin — and about today. By juxtaposing Baldwin’s words with images from Ferguson and other contemporary conflicts over race and poverty, he underscores the impact and importance of Baldwin’s commentary.
It is shocking how little has changed. Peck makes that point subtly by going behind the grainy black-and-white images that are so familiar to us from the Civil Rights Era, so stylized that they seem almost as distant as daguerreotypes. Intensive research over a ten-year period led to the discovery of previously unseen archival footage, some in color, matched here with new contemporary material, some shown in black and white to make even more seamless the connection between past and present.
Still, there are some stunning reminders of what has changed, none more shocking than the sight of not one but two public intellectuals as guests on a night-time network television talk show. Yes, before the days when talk shows were made up of silly games and sillier reality show “stars” and Hollywood performers pushing their latest projects, people used to come on television and talk about ideas. We see James Baldwin and a Yale professor on the Dick Cavett show. Yes, the professor condescendingly whitesplains race relations, clearly thinking he is complimenting Baldwin by pointing out all they have in common.
It is good to be reminded that at one time there were public intellectuals who engaged with policy and culture so bracingly. Peck reminds us that Baldwin was a social critic who was fascinated with movies and the message they reflected and conveyed about our society. Through his eyes, we see Doris Day as an emblem of whiteness, John Wayne “heroically” killing Indians, movies ignoring race (and the stories of anyone who was not white) and movies fumbling in their attempt to portray race, like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” with its saintly slaves and “Imitation of Life” with the light-skinned girl who wanted to deny her heritage, and her mother.
The movie credits Baldwin himself as its author, and rightly so. Baldwin is a mesmerizing screen presence with his deep-set eyes and lacerating wit. But it is his words that make this film come alive, knowing, provocative, patient, but insistent.
Parents should know that this film includes some violent and confrontational images from the Civil Rights Era and contemporary racial abuses and protests, and some strong language.
Family discussion: What do the contemporary images tell us about Baldwin’s ideas? What would he say about today’s controversies? Would he say we have made progress?
If you like this, try: “Eyes on the Prize” and the books by James Baldwin
The sign on the office door said, “Colored Computers.” That was not a reference to IBM’s Big Blue or to a machine of any kind. In the early days of the space race at NASA, computers were people doing all of the complex, unprecedented math calculations by hand, and the “colored” computers were the African-American women who had more talent, more dedication, more integrity, despite less pay, less credit, and less resources than their colleagues. Twice marginalized, as women and as African-Americans, they were heroically dedicated, capable, and resilient. Their story, unknown until the book by Margot Lee Shetterly, is beautifully told in this heartwarming, inspiring film.
Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (singer Janelle Monáe, “Moonlight”) are stopped by a highway patrolman on their way to their office at NASA. They get out of the car, expecting the worst. In his own way, the white patrolman expects the worst, too. This is Virginia, just a few years after the state shut down the entire school system to avoid complying with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This is the same era depicted in “Loving,” the true story of the couple who challenged Virginia’s laws prohibiting marriage for people who were not of the same race.
This was also the era of the space race. President John F. Kennedy famously said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” But there was another reason to go to the moon. The Soviet Union was ahead of us in space exploration, and beating them had huge symbolic, morale, and political value.
And that meant that something was more important than the deeply institutionalized racism and sexism of the era — ability. These women and their colleagues were simply too good to be overlooked. And to contribute all that they were able, that meant removing some obstacles and indignities. It was not until Johnson’s boss (Kevin Costner) exploded because she was not at her desk when he needed her that he learned she had to go a quarter of a mile to the “colored” bathroom in another building. And it was her vital importance to the project, not any commitment to inclusion or justice, that led him to insist on change. John Glenn (a likable performance by “Everybody Wants Some!!‘s Glen Powell) refused to get on the rocket ship that would make him the first person to orbit the earth until Johnson personally verified the calculations.
Henson, Spencer, and Janelle Monáe are clearly thrilled to have roles of such significance and depth and honor their characters with performances of wit and subtle charm. When Jackson has to go to court for the opportunity to take the evening classes at a segregated local high school that will qualify her for an engineering degree, when Vaughan decides to teach herself computer programming to make sure that the first-ever mainframe being installed at NASA does not make her work obsolete, when Johnson explains that it may be unprecedented to have a woman in the top-level meeting but it is also unprecedented to send a man to the moon, we see the power of their intellect and the steel in their souls. A light-hearted girl’s night shows us the support they gave each other and how much it meant to each of them.
Johnson, Jackson, and Vaughan plotted a course for NASA to put men into space. They also plotted a course for all of us to do things because they are hard, because they are important, because we can do better.
Parents should know that this movie includes extensive portrayal of the racial and gender prejudice of its time, along with smoking and social drinking and some language.
Family discussion: Why did the women in this film continue to be so loyal to a system that constantly disrespected them? Why did Dorothy Vaughan want to learn how to use the IBM machine? What do you think of her reply to Vivian Michael?
If you like this, try: “The Right Stuff” and “The Dish”
There are always these first and only stories, where it’s like, the first black person to do this, or the first woman to do this, and we need those stores. They are super inspirational. But the thing that’s so exciting to me about this is that none of these women had to be the first or the only. Like the first white computer pool was five women, the first black computer pool was five women. Over time, each of those pools grew tremendously to prove over and over that women are very adaptive and have the right temperament, the right skill set, the right intellectual firepower for this work. That’s truly confidence-inspiring, because you don’t have to face the objections of like, “Yeah, well, there’s just one woman. We know that most women are like this.” It’s like, No, no, no. This is a revolution. The technological revolution that was the space race was carried out with two women and their mathematical talents, because of other women.
