Rosewood

While Obama was well on his his merry way to making history last night I was was watching this dramatization of the horrific massacre of Rosewood of 1923. It was January when a group of whites, the majority members of the Ku Klux Klan burned this community of blacks in Levy County, Florida pretty much to the ground and killing well over half of it's 35o someodd residents. The official figure was of course never this high but the many survivors who testified 70 years later, most children at the time, in the restitution hearing attest to this fact. Now 85 years later we have the first African American President of the United States and when you see a docudrama such as ROSEWOOD you can certainly see what an amazing accomplishment this is. Granted, ROSEWOOD is an extremely flawed film but still manages to succeed despite itself. While the majority of the story is true they chose to throw Ving Rhames in there as a war vet and while his character adds some nice drama (good performance too!) it really serves no purpose. John Voight, Don Cheadle and Michael Rooker carry the weight of this piece though special mention must be made of Esther Rolle in one of her last film apperances and Bruce McGill who plays one of the dumbest, mean ass racists you'll ever see. My biggest complaint with ROSEWOOD lies with the direction and while John Singleton paces the film correctly it is simply presented in too clean a fashion as if we were watching something made in the 30's or 40's on a stage lot and this detracts from what ROSEWOOD could have been. Still, it is a stroy worth seeing and most certainly remembering if for no other reason than to show just how much American has changed in just under a hundred years.