Friday, August 11, 2017

Detroit, the movie

We saw the movie. It was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who also directed The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty that we had seen. It is based on an incident that took place at the Algiers Motel in Detroit in 1967.

The ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are pretty good. The critics’ ratings are higher than the audience’s. I thought it was pretty good. The average audience rating of 3.7/5 suits me. It hasn't fared well at the box office so far.

It is a story in which three black teens were killed and several others tortured and humiliated. Pretty clearly the Detroit policemen behaved badly, but none are found guilty in court. It is easy to sympathize with the victims and blame the Detroit policemen.

The incident occurred in a tense place and time, but what amazes me is that the incident was triggered by a misunderstanding. I won’t say what it was about since the reader might consider that a spoiler. The Wikipedia article about the Algiers Motel incident mentions it, but does not use “misunderstanding.”

One difference between the movie and the Wikipedia article is who killed Carl (Carl Cooper in the Wikipedia article; no last name in the movie per IMDb). Wikipedia says nobody was arrested for Carl’s murder and responsibility for the death is unexplained. In the movie Krauss does it and plants a knife by the body. (There is no Krauss in the Wikipedia article. The names of the Detroit police officers per Wikipedia and the movie are all different.) The Wikipedia page on the movie does say, "It has been noted that the film's depiction of the Algiers Hotel Incident was far more extreme than accounts which were given by survivors in a 1968 New York Review of Books article."

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