Category: Emmy Nominee/Winner

During the 1988 Presidential election, director Robert Altman and cartoonist Garry Trudeau created a candidate, played by Michael Murphy, to run alongside the other real presidential hopefuls. I admittedly did not watch the entire series. The first two episodes didn’t really grab me, though its influence on future political dramedies is obvious, so I skipped forward to the last. Trying to look like a reality series, especially one in the late 1980s, makes for a very amateur looking and sounding production. Coupled really slow character development, it didn’t feel like it was going to deliver on the time investment. One prescient highlight involved Tanner’s daughter, Cynthia Nixon, being asked if she had any interest in going into politics.

In 2004 after being summoned to Tanzania by his close friend who is being tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Idris Elba is able to come to terms with the fates of his Tutsi wife and their three children. The film offers a very personalized account of what happened to families during those 100 days in 1994. Not for the faint of heart, it absolutely does not shy away from showing the atrocities and violence committed and its lasting impact on those who survived. 

When Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer, portrayed by Glenn Close, applies for an Army promotion, she admits to being a lesbian during her security clearance interview eventually leading to her honorable discharge. Close is great at what she does and even in this made for television movie, she portrays Cammermeyer’s struggle and honesty with a lot of heart. While the romantic side of the relationship is all but absent, her and Judy Davis, as Margarethe’s partner and later wife, have a warm chemistry between them and it’s great seeing the actors working together.

Legendary couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s tumultuous relationship reaches its final chapter when they star together in a 1983 Broadway production of Private Lives. Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter portray the actors in their twilight. Bonham Carter especially puts quite a bit of effort into embodying Taylor in her flighty but tenacious ways. Despite only focusing on a short part of their history, the script goes a long way in its short time to address the highs and lows they experienced together and how each of the actors’ personal demons were a lead weight on their relationship and themselves.

Don King is perhaps the most famous boxing manager and promoter in history; this film follows his rise from his earliest days when he convinced Muhammad Ali to participate in a charity exhibition. While I’m not particularly interested in boxing nor King, Ving Rhames’s portrayal of him is inspirational. The film provides plenty of opportunity for Rhames to narrate directly to the audience and in doing so, he creates a complete embodiment of the well-known self promoter. For me, it was also interesting to see another take on the events in Zaire during the Rumble in the Jungle.  

Made only two years after his death, this biopic follows the life of Elvis Presley from his early days in Tupelo, Mississippi to his comeback in the late 1960s. Kurt Russell plays the title character and he along with Shelly Winters as his doting mother work really well together in portraying that significant relationship. The film glosses over or ignores some of the seedier aspects of his life, but in general is a pretty good introduction to the life of the King. I was initially annoyed at how the setting for Graceland was simultaneously similar to the real place and yet got so much wrong, but then I reminded myself that there probably weren’t thousands of pictures of the house available to anyone at the drop of a hat when the film was made. 

This television miniseries chronicles the adult life of Martin Luther King Jr. as portrayed by Paul Winfield. Not unexpectedly, Winfield is joined by an incredibly talented cast, including Cicely Tyson, Ossie Davis, and Roscoe Lee Browne. The presentation of King here is a very human one but also doesn’t touch on any fallibilities he may have had. Winfield as an actor doesn’t make me immediately think of King, but he does give a committed performance here. One of the most glaring oddities is seeing Tyson give such a meek performance as Coretta Scott King, though perhaps unsurprisingly since the treatment of women in the film isn’t particularly glowing.

The life of cult leader Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple and orchestrater of the Jonestown mass murder-suicide, is expertly portrayed here by Powers Boothe. Jones somehow started off as a champion of civil rights, pushing for integration in his Indianapolis church and housing equality in San Francisco, only to lead those same people he championed to their certain deaths in Guyana. The miniseries is pretty comprehensive in its view, even including actual dialogue from the Jamestown death tape. There are great performances throughout the cast from a James Earl Jones cameo to Brad Dourif as a drug addict turned follower, but it’s really the charisma of Boothe portraying Jones’s downward spiral toward megalomania and paranoia that stands out.

Closing in on her 99th birthday, Anne Bancroft shares the details of her life as a child bride married to former Confederate soldier Donald Sutherland. Perhaps because she’s set to age many years through the miniseries, a late 20s Diane Lane unconvincingly portrays the woman as a teenager, but has a better feel for the role as the character ages and faces many hardships. The scope of the film reminds me of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman , which both feature Cicely Tyson, except the build up of the Civil Rights Movement in that other film is exchanged for the rantings of an aged defender of Southern mythology.