My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Sunday, October 23, 2016

Should you watch People v OJ Simpson or OJ: Made in America?

The ESPN documentary OJ: Made in America continues to fascinate and inform and what more could we ask of a documentary? Perhaps even more than the great Fx series The People v OJ Simpson, this doc reveals how the Simpson defense put the LAPD on trial than OJ, and how Cochran's brilliant if sometimes way over the top arguments led the jury to believe that they were fighting a history of racism and oppression and: If you don't stop it, who will? He completely took the focus off OJ and the evidence - and everyone in the courtroom knew that, you could see it on their faces. And in fact he was right: the trial caught the attention of the whole nation (even the world), dominating the news for about 7 months - in the dawning days of cable live news coverage and well before the Internet and social media - and we were not so interested in whether OJ killed Nicole and Ron but in the horrors revealed about race relations in LA and police brutality - a topic, amazingly, that we're focused on today as well. The documentary can catch the courtroom drama far more effectively than the Fx drama - the look on Marcia Clark's face after her tepid and technical closing argument; the dramatic scene of OJ trying on the gloves and showing the jury that the don't fit, his face stone-cold and mute - these are far more powerful when we see the actual footage. What the documentary can't capture is some of the internal debates and relationships within and among the legal teams (I assume these are based on Toobin's reporting; he was involved w/ both projects): the developing relationship between Clark and Darden, Darden's history with Cochran, the fights within the Dream Team about legal strategy, the fights w/in the DA's office about whether to rely on Mark Furhman (turned out to be the worst decision in the entire trial) and whether to ask OJ to try on the gloves (2nd worst). For these reasons, it's good to see both productions, for People v coming first  - but overall I'd say People v OJ is more about the legal strategies and Made in America is more about the national issue of race.

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