Larry Mantle and KPCC film critics Amy Nicholson, Wade Major, and Charles Solomon review this week’s new releases including the animated feature, “Minions,” Rosamund Pike in “What We Did on Our Holiday,” the filmed-on-an-iPhone, LA-set indie, “Tangerine,” and more. TGI-Filmweek!
Filmweek: ‘Minions,’ ‘What We Did on Our Holiday,’ ‘Tangerine,’ and more
Larry Mantle and KPCC film critics Amy Nicholson, Wade Major, and Charles Solomon review this week’s new releases including the animated feature, “Minions,” Rosamund Pike in “What We Did on Our Holiday,” the filmed-on-an-iPhone, LA-set indie, “Tangerine,” and more. TGI-Filmweek!
Guests:
Amy Nicholson , film critic for KPCC and chief film critic for LA Weekly
Wade Major , film critic for KPCC and host for IGN’s DigiGods.com
Charles Solomon , film critic for KPCC and Animation Scoop and Animation Magazine
Filmmaker D.W. Griffith - best forgotten as KKK booster or memorialized as ground-breaking director?
After the successful bid to tear down the Confederate flag from sites across the country, petitioners in LA want an iconic filmmaker's name, D.W. Griffith, scrubbed from an East LA school because of his 1915 epic that glorified the Civil War-era Ku Klux Klan.
Film critics are torn over the matter.
KPCC critic Tim Cogshell argues "Birth of a Nation" did not just spur a resurgence of the white supremacist group, but it also fell short of a being a great film. Still it was Hollywood's first blockbuster and broke new ground in its technique and style.
Wade Major, critic for IGN’s Digigods.com and KPCC, is loathe to revise history by removing Griffith's name. Major says concealing all evidence of the Confederacy and the Civil War ignores how the North and South came together after the war - honoring the dead on both sides.
After "Birth of a Nation," Griffith sought redemption with "Intolerance" - a film showing the damage and dangers of racial intolerance. By 1939, after Griffith's career had fizzled, Los Angeles school officials named the East L.A. school David Wark Griffith.
This controversy is similar to one that has dogged the 1939 epic, "Gone with the Wind." Some have called for the film to be excluded from the canon of American cinema for its derogatory depiction of blacks during the Civil War. Major protests, saying director David O. Selznick worked "in careful and close consultation with the NAACP(National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) precisely because he did not want to face the same outrage that greeted Birth of a Nation."
With files from Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
Guests:
Tim Cogshell , Film Critic for KPCC and the Alt-Film Guide
Wade Major , film critic for KPCC and host for IGN’s DigiGods.com