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CHICAGOLAWBULLETIN.COM FRIDAY, AUGUST 4, 2017 ® Volume 163, No. 151 Serving Chicago’s legal community for 162 years alistically believes he can head off trouble by extending assistance In-your-face atrocities to the police, then is swept into the melee. The incongruously freckled, Alfred E. Neuman-faced Will Poulter (“The Revenant,” retold in ‘D e t r o i t ’ RE B E C CA “We ’re The Millers”) is terrifying L. FORD as the dominant corrupt cop K r a u s s . spotlight social failure The movie depicts the psycho- Rebecca L. Ford is counsel at Scharf logical torture, physical abuse and Banks Marmor LLC, and concentrates her practice on complex litigation, compliance, ultimate murder of three motel board governance and specialized occupants. All the dots of fear, Fi l m’s audience will feel the brutality, and employment issues. She is the former confusion, ambush and weaponry, executive vice president for litigation and directly connect “D e t r o i t ”to director could have still pushed it further intellectual property at MGM. She can be B i g e l o w ’s earlier war movies. reached at [email protected]. They also connect to today’s h e a d l i n e s . athryn Bigelow, the di- tattered papered walls among the These young men in their 20s African-Americans who have rector of “D e t ro i t ,”and patrons of the Algiers Motel, lis- were as boisterous and immature seen the film tend either to ap- writer-producer Mark tening to executions —staged and as the guys who ride the Red Line plaud “D e t r o i t ”for keeping the Boal are an Oscar-win- real —we the audience are also with open containers on game incident alive in memory or are ning team that special- intimidated and brutalized. days. But they did not deserve to repulsed by the spectacle of Kizes in combat, chaos and terror. T h e re’s no lifeline out of this be executed for being obnoxious. abuse. (No one discusses “D e t r o i t ” Previous movies collaborated on ghastly ghetto circle of hell. The patrons of the Algiers an- as entertainment.) by the two have featured gripping There is no hero to save us. We nex where the incident took place Bigalow may seem to have gone central characters through whom are on our own. were mostly black men. Signif- too far, but she didn’t go all the the audience experiences the ten- Responding to the raging icantly, pivotally, catalytically, way. She doesn’t share that the sion, anxiety and exhilaration of a streets, the Michigan National there were two young white wom- bodies of the murdered victims maverick Iraq War bomb diffuser Guard and state police descended en with them as well. were mutilated and sodomized or (“The Hurt Locker”) and a female on Detroit to join the city’s police Anthony Mackie (“C a p t a i n the extent to which the two white CIA intelligence analyst who force. Tanks rolled down its boule- A m e r i c a ,” “The Hurt Locker”) de- women were sadistically stripped hunts Osama bin Laden (“Z e ro vards, and a curfew was imposed. livers a quiet, forceful perfor- and sexually humiliated as part of Dark Thirty”). We stood in their Unable to motor through Motown mance as Greene, a seen-it-all the raid. shoes and we felt their pain. or hang out in the summer night, Vietnam vet. Algee Smith (“The Hersey wrote “The Algiers Set during the city’s riots of Motel Incident”to create a nearly July 1967, “D e t ro i t”is a fiction- contemporaneous record of the alized version of an infamously What then is the role of a remote, disturbing, a t r o c i t i e s . brutal and bloody police action He stood firmly in the “n e v e r that was memorialized through in- documentary-ish movie like “D e t r o i t ”in f o r g e t ”camp and famously opined terviews of participants, family that it is the memory of what members and other witnesses in spotlighting a social failure that is continuous? happened at Hiroshima, not de- “The Algiers Motel Incident,”a terrence, that keeps the world book by New Yorker writer and staying indoors and avoiding vi- New Edition Story”) provides a safe from the bomb. war correspondent John Hersey olating curfew (and inevitable ar- humanizing presence as Larry, the What then is the role of a re- who won a Pulitzer Prize for his rest), several young men gath- lead singer of the Dramatics, mote, disturbing, documentary-ish book “H i ro s h i m a .” ered at an alternative venue for whose story arc is the most com- movie like “D e t r o i t ”in spotlight- The tension of the movie is am- socializing. They checked into the pletely traversed in the film. ing a social failure that is con- plified by Bigelow’s diffused focus $11-per-night Algiers Motel, John Boyega (“Star Wars: The t i n u o u s ? on a few characters rather than a which was something of a party Force Awakens”) is sympathetic Bigelow reminds us that we live single one. Thrown against the s c e n e . as a security guard who unre- a hurt locker. Copyright © 2017 Law Bulletin Media. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from Law Bulletin Media..
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