Why all should see Selma

Selma is one of those film events not particularly great as a movie but extremely powerful to watch anyway as it evokes or unearths our memories of relatively recent history and helps us see once again the incredible but real bravery of those who fought for civil rights, voting rights in particular, in the South in the 1960s and, in particular, the courageous leadership of so many but none more so the MLK. The film wisely uses many extended passages of his oratory, beautiful and inspiring today still. Many of the reviews commented on the film's being unduly harsh on LBJ - so maybe I was expecting that the film really demonized him, unnecessarily (he had plenty of other demons) but I found the film to be a pretty fair treatment of the complex president - truly committed to civil rights it seems but also a victim of his own obsession with power and political dealing - he couldn't move as fast as King wanted him to, or at least he didn't do so, but I think that's always the case - political activists and the people pushing elected leaders faster and farther than they necessarily wanted to go. Sure he missed a chance to be truly brave and heroic, like King and his followers, but he came thru OK, standing up to Wallace. As to the freedom fighters - the movie helps us see the powers that they were up against in Alabama, the spirit they brought to the fight, and the astonishing bravery and dignity that the black people of Alabama, many of them very poorly educated, summoned in this fight to win their constitutional rights. The Pettus Bridge scenes are particularly powerful - made even more so by the smart use of actual b/w documentary footage near the end, played against the re-created march to Montgomery. Daniel Oyelowo does a great job as King; Tom Wilkinson a little less so as LBJ (couldn't anyone teach him a Texas accent?). Though touching on sanctimony at times and beset with a sometimes heavy-handed score - the bane of so many historical dramas I'm afraid, see Spielberg's Lincoln, e.g. - a movie all should see, espcially those for whom these events seem like a closed chapter in our sad history. They're not.