Tag: Nelsan Ellis

The Stanford Prison Experiment was one of the coolest and scariest things I ever heard about, when I learned about it as a freshman in college. I don’t even remember in what class it was brought up, but the real life experiment was so fascinating I remember running home to wiki all I could about it. After all, doing my own research outside of Wikipedia seemed silly.

Hearing about it lead to hearing about all the creepy things people ended up doing in the name of psychology, before jerky standards were set in place. So now things like TSPE cannot take place for scientific knowledge, because you know, humans and shit. So instead of crazier and more ridiculous experiments, this is one of the top tier ones and I guess it will stay that way.

And although they can’t recreate this one for science, they sure can recreate it for film and TV. They did it in season 3 of Veronica Mars, they had that movie five years ago called The Experiment, and more!

But now, this film is about the entire enchilada. Nut just the test itself. But also the people behind it and what occurred before and after, for realsies, in Stanford.

How do you know someone went to Stanford? Don’t worry, they will probably …err, not talk about this.

In 1971, hair was everywhere and government oversight was only a legend. The 60’s were dead, so it was time to get serious. Dr. Philip Zimbardo (Billy Crudup) was a professor who wanted to simulate a prison in their own building. They would do it over the summer when not many students were around and offer to pay people $15 a day to participate in a two week experiment. After extensive interviews to make sure people weren’t crazy, they narrowed down the group of men and used a coin flip to determine who would be the prisoner and who would be the guards.

Zimbardo and his crew (Gaius Charles, Olivia Thirlby, and more), along with Jesse Fletcher (Nelsan Ellis), a guy he knew who went to prison to help “legitimize” the experiment, would monitor the halls 24/7. The men are kept to a strict contract, where the guards are in charge, the prisoners have very few rights, and there is to be no physical violence of any sort.

So the prisoners get brought in my volunteer police to arrest them at their homes to make it feel a bit real. They have to get naked, cleaned, and put into prison uniforms (which are closer to dresses to help break them down), and put into their cells. The guards try to break their humanity right away in order to maintain order and make it feel a bit more serious. The prisoners are referred to as their numbers not their names. They don’t get a lot of sleep. They are forced into exercise and other mental punishments, since they can’t just get beaten down.

And the prisoners break. They break quickly. Mentally and physically. It becomes quickly a torture job, as suddenly, the people who identify as guards feel they have to be mean and the prisoners feel like they are worthless.

And of course, even more dramatic and scary shit.

Some of the guards are played by Nicholas Braun, Moises Arias, and Michael Angarano, who plays the “worst” guard and calls himself John Wayne. He knows how to push buttons.

A lot more of the prisoners matter, and they are sort of led by Ezra Miller and Tye Sheridan. Other prisoners who play big roles include Johnny Simmons, Logan Miller, Ki Hong Lee, and Thomas Mann who joins later to fill in a spot after a prisoner has to leave.

Everything about this movie is real. Including the facial hair.

Want to see a bunch of male youths devolve into their primal forms and do bad things, but not on an island? Then this movie might be for you!

The filmmakers did an excellent job of really driving home the moments when people began to break under pressure. It is one thing to know that the prisoners were referred to as numbers, constantly having their number drilled into their head, and long amounts of time spent sounding off their number until the guards were satisfied. But it is another thing to see it happen. These, for lack of a better word, mental torture scenes are long, loud, and constant. Major props to everyone involved for making me feel sick to my stomach that things like this could have even happened.

From the prisoners, over half of the prison cast seemed to play an important role. There might have been 2-3 people who were just also there, but every single one of them had a personality that presumably matched reality and a lot of them got focus. We were able to see almost every single one of them break and lose any sense of hope. Seeing that is disgusting, but by golly, is it some fine acting.

For the most part, the guards were just lead by Angarano’s fine acting. Angarano has to play a person playing a role, not just some mean dude. It is sadistic and cruel, but surprisingly not physical. No, other guards devolve into physicality. He is just a mind fucker.

This can be a hard watch, but a good one if you want to learn some crazy shit about human nature, while also watching a lot of young new talented actors in the same film.

What is going on with Chadwick Boseman?

For the most part, he is relatively new to the movie scene. He has had a bunch of temporary roles in TV shows, mostly one offs. But then he got to play Jackie Robinson in 42. Then he got to play a highly sought after draft pick in Draft Day. And now? Now he is doing another biography, but this time not an athlete.

He is going to play James Brown, because of course, Get On Up is his story.

Damn Chadwick. James Brown and Jackie Robinson? Who will he play next, Oprah Winfrey?

James mother fucking Brown (Boseman). A cultural icon from the 1900s, a man who seemingly was around and performing forever, and in the news for sometimes less than glorious reasons. He came from humble beginnings, living in a small shack in the woods with his mom (Viola Davis) and dad (Lennie James). After that, he was working for Ms Honey (Octavia Spencer), a madame. After that? Prison.

That is where he met Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), not a prisoner, but a local singer, and James impressed him with his own unique sound. Next thing you know, he is part of a gospel group dabbling in that R&B, and eventually the dabble takes over and James Brown and the Famous Flames become a thing. The rest? Well, you know. Drugs. Wars. Marriage. Kids. Drugs. Friendships. Drugs. Egos. The story basically writes itself.

Featuring a bunch of people, who I will try to write in order of importance: Dan Aykroyd, Jill Scott, Craig Robinson, Fred Melamed, Brandon Smith as Little Richard, and two small cameos with Allison Janney and John Benjamin Hickey.

And this isn’t even his final form.

When I left Get On Up, I felt good. I didn’t know that I would. I felt nice too. Not sure how to describe the nice feeling, maybe sugar and spice? Hard to say.

Either way, if I can say anything about Get On Up it is that it is certainly entertaining. A lot of energy was put into the film, especially early on where it seems to go everywhere hard and fast. The movie isn’t told in a linear order, splicing in scenes from his childhood through a slight narrative of events, and finishing those events when the film felt like it. It also featured some breaking of the 4th wall, allowing Brown to narrate his own story to the audience and explain things.

But the real stars of the film are, well, the stars of the film. Chadwick Boseman and Nelsan Ellis. Holy shit. First off, Boseman, knocked it out of the park (its a baseball metaphor, get it?). When he was Mr. Robinson, I thought he did okay, but it didn’t seem like a lot of acting going on. He acted the shit out of James Brown though. He had the voice, he had the moves, he had the charisma. I was a little bit skeptical, but he did a really amazing job.

Nelsan Ellis? I don’t watch True Blood, so I don’t know a lot about him, but the amount of heart in his role was incredible. He looked so sincere about everything and my emotions tended to match whatever he was feeling versus Brown’s emotions.

Some aspects of the film were disappointing of course. All of the music in the film is actual James Brown recordings, so no we don’t get to hear Boseman try out that voice. Probably impossible, I guess.

It didn’t go a lot into his troubles with the law in the last decades of his life, but gave you enough to figure it out.

This film doesn’t make out James Brown to be a saint (probably because everyone knew he wasn’t) and mixes the good with the bad and a whole lot of soul.

The full title of this movie, for legal reasons, is Lee Daniels’ The Butler, but eh, technicalities.

This film is supposed to be a biographical film of Eugene Allen, a butler who served in The White House for 34 years until he retired in 1984.

I’d say your best possible experience with this movie would be treating it like your average fictional film, set through a back drop of history, almost like Forrest Gump.

I hope you came here to see pictures of butlers.

Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) came from very humble beginnings in the 1920s. He was living with his family on a cotton plantation in horrible conditions. After his father gets shot and his mother goes a bit insane, he is trained to work in the house, to serve and to serve properly. Eventually he leaves the plantation, gets a job at a hotel, gets discovered, and finds himself as a butler at The White House.

Yeah, butlering at The White House is probably the sweetest gig out there. Unless you mess up, you have job security for 30-40 years.

While at The White House, Cecil finds himself interacting with decades of presidents. He is there for Dwight D. Eisenhower (Robin Williams, his second time as President), John F. Kennedy (James Marsden) and his wife Jacqueline (Minka Kelly), Lyndon B. Johnson (Liev Schreiber), Richard Nixon (John Cusack), and Ronald Reagan (Alan Rickman) with his wife Nancy (Jane Fonda). For you patriots out there, yes, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter just get kind of skipped.

During these years, Cecil also has to deal with his family life. His wife (Oprah Winfrey) has bouts of alcoholism, and depression due to her husbands long hours at work. Their youngest child, Charles (Elijah Kelley) eventually decides to join the army for the Vietnam War. Their other son, Louis (David Oyelowo) is able to graduate high school and go down to college in Tennessee. There, he meets other “radicals” who want equal rights. He begins to participate in sit ins, protests, becomes a Freedom Rider, a marcher on Washington DC, and a follower of Martin Luther King Jr. (Nelsan Ellis). Basically, he is there for all of the major civil rights events. Well, the ones that don’t involve sitting in the back of the bus.

Most of the movie involves splicing the civil rights movements through the eyes of the son, with the servitude of Cecil at the White House during these nation changing events.

In case you wanted more star power, fellow butlers are played by Cuba Gooding Jr. and Lenny Kravitz, while Terrence Howard plays his wise crackin’, woman lovin’ neighbor.

I tried to find a picture of each actor as a president. This will do.

Like everything in Hollywood, most of the movie is fictionalized away from the source. Like, Louis, the civil rights activist. He never existed. They only had one son, Charles (who actually did go to the Vietnam War!). So, half the movie right away is fictional. Sure, the events all happened, just the make believe son wasn’t a part of them.

While the butler in question did exist, he also probably didn’t have the small conversations about civil rights with the various Presidents, but they make the film a lot more interesting.

Despite it’s inaccuracies, The Butler is incredible. Over two hours long, it spanned decades of American history and put it in such a powerful context, that it is hard to not feel emotional over it.

All of it is very dramatic and very sad at times, but as you learn by the end of the film, the journey is totally worth it.

The acting is phenomenal on all parts. I am willing to bet Whitaker gets nominated for Best Actor in this film, and Oprah potentially Best Supporting Actress. The line up of presidents was hilarious in its own right. All of these big name actors getting to play a US president, but only for a small part in a movie. Heck, they had a British actor playing Reagan, even better!

I think The Butler is going to be one of the few stand out movies of the year when it comes for Best Picture consideration. Its treatment of racism in the United States is spot on and informative. I am most excited for Forest Whitaker though, who has been in some less than great roles recently. Hopefully this gets him back on the right path again, like when he did The Last King Of Scotland.