It’s Real, Raw and Funny Conversation with comedian DL Hughley. Each week DL gives his uncensored perspective on current news, social issues and Pop and Urban culture. Joined by his wingman “News Guy” Guy Lambert they “chop it up” on politics, social behavior, entertainment and more. Our contributors and guest are from various backgrounds with a wealth of knowledge and insight. When you put all that together it’s not just the truth it’s The Hughley Truth.
Chance the Rapper continues to show love for his city.
The 24-year-old Chicago native bought all of the Marshall tickets for the entire day at two different theaters on the day of the film’s release. He made the announcement via a press release that he wrote himself and posted to Twitter. He also teased that something special might be going down at the 3 p.m. showing: “Come to the one at 3 I’m good at surprises and stuff,” he said.
This isn’t the first time that Chance the Rapper purchased a whole lot of tickets for people to see a movie for free, either. He bought a whole day’s worth of tickets to Get Out showings back in February at one of the same theaters that he promoted this time around. It might be wise to start camping out at the Chatham 14 Theaters on 87th Street for all future movie releases just in case.
Marshall is now in theaters and stars Chadwick Boseman, Josh Gad, Kate Hudson, and Sterling K. Brown. You can watch the trailer for the film above.
Don’t look now, but Supreme Court justices are becoming popular culture avatars.
First, Ruth Bader Ginsburg transmogrified into the Notorious RBG and now a magnetic Chadwick Boseman plays Thurgood Marshall as a confident and charismatic young attorney buff enough to be an action hero in the energetic and audience friendly “Marshall.”
Directed by veteran Reginald Hudlin, “Marshall” shrewdly concentrates on a single highly dramatic case early in Marshall’s career when he was a kind of “Have Law Books, Will Travel” attorney for the struggling NAACP, criss-crossing the country with a briefcase full of legal tomes defending clients whose only crime was their race.
Hudlin, better known these days for his prolific TV work, has not directed a theatrical feature for many years, but he was clearly drawn to the Marshall project out of respect for the attorney who won the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case and in 1967 became the first African American appointed to the Supreme Court.
But the director, whose forte is comedy, was not going to make a dry look at a great man. Instead, working from a script by Michael Koskoff and Jacob Koskoff, he tells his story in crowd-pleasing broad strokes, in a sense crossing “Eyes on the Prize” and “Perry Mason” with some laughs thrown into the mix.
Star Boseman, with a “Black Panther” feature in his future, has made something of a career playing famous folks like Jackie Robinson (in “42”) and James Brown (in “Get on Up”). He’s introduced, muscular back to the camera, ironing his own shirt. But no matter how fit carrying around all those heavy law books has made him, this is a man not to be defined by his physique.
Nothing if not a passionate and committed advocate for equality under the law, Marshall, even at this early stage of his career, specialized in speaking truth to power. Unassailably confident, even cocky, he believes in taking charge and getting things done.
The year is 1941, Marshall is 32, and next on his agenda is a case in tony Greenwich, Conn., tailor-made for tabloid headlines, which it has been getting.
Wealthy white socialite Eleanor Strubing (Kate Hudson), a Bryn Mawr graduate no less, has accused her black chauffeur, Joseph Spell (Emmy winner Sterling K. Brown), of raping and then trying to kill her.
But though newspapers tossed around phrases like “lurid orgy” and “night of horror,” the uneducated Spell insists to Marshall that he never touched the woman in question.
Here’s something refreshing—a great-man biopic, simply titled “Marshall,” that’s more concerned with the man in his earlier years than with the greatness to come.
You get a hint from the opening music, a breezy jazz riff that might sound insufficiently serious for a full account of Thurgood Marshall, the civil-rights attorney who won a landmark victory in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and the first African-American justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. But “Marshall” doesn’t try to cover the glory days of a magnificent career.
Set in 1941, it’s focused on a real-life Connecticut trial in which the hero, a rising star for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, defended a black chauffeur accused of kidnapping and raping a wealthy white woman in Greenwich. And Marshall—a terrific performance by Chadwick Boseman —comes off at the outset as full of himself to overflowing. In other words, here’s an irreverent movie with a quirky ring of truth.
The film, which was directed by Reginald Hudlin, is adept at portraying the social and legal forces arrayed against the chauffeur, Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown), in a trial that gains national attention as an example of racism in the North. Spell has already been convicted in Greenwich’s court of public opinion. Now the judge, played by James Cromwell, and the prosecutor, played by Dan Stevens, ooze patrician empathy for the alleged victim, Eleanor Strubing (fine work by Kate Hudson ).
Chadwick Boseman and Josh Gad PHOTO: OPEN ROAD FILMS
To complicate Spell’s defense even further, bad blood boils up between Marshall and his local co-counsel, Sam Friedman ( Josh Gad, in another terrific performance), who is white, Jewish and innocent of experience in criminal trials. Dismayed by the need to have another lawyer on the case, Marshall is furious, and initially helpless, when the judge warns him that anything he has to say must be expressed through Friedman; coming, as he does, from out of state, the NAACP ace may not speak in open court.
An important part of the drama’s substance lies in the two men turning their fraught relationship into a partnership that foreshadows the national alliance between blacks and Jews in the emerging civil-rights movement. But that’s an abstract description of a prickly situation slowly blossoming into an affecting and funny bromance. Before this happens, it’s a case of role reversal in which Marshall treats Friedman like a white man might treat a Pullman porter. “Would you help me with that?” Marshall asks casually on his arrival at Bridgeport station, indicating a suitcase full of law books that Friedman promptly lugs to a waiting car. Once comity prevails, the co-counsels are co-equals in friendship and respect.
Kate Hudson in ’Marshall’ PHOTO: OPEN ROAD FILMS
Some of the writing on the fringes of the drama can be uneven. At Minton’s Playhouse, the legendary Harlem jazz club, Marshall runs into the poet Langston Hughes and the writer Zora Neale Hurston in a scene that plays like an over-earnest outtake from “Midnight in Paris.” But the trial sequences have a distinctive, authentic tone that clearly flows from one of the two writers, Michael Koskoff, having had a decades-long career as a civil-rights attorney with specific experience in racially charged cases. ( Jacob Koskoff, his co-writer and son, has prior experience writing scripts.) And the courtroom drama, exciting in its own right, is enhanced by re-creations—Newton Thomas Sigel did the elegant cinematography—of what the accuser and the accused say happened, of what might have happened and of what probably happened in this all but forgotten case that Thurgood Marshall tried long ago. “Marshall” is a movie that surprises at every turn.
