Word: manly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Frank Darabont, "doing time" means taking it. As the adapter and director of two Stephen King prison stories, Darabont is a man with a slow hand. He wants you to share the agony of ennui felt by jailbirds whose only job is marking time while scheming to escape or waiting to die--just like the rest of us. In The Shawshank Redemption he managed to invest this anxious leisure with tension and transcendence...
...case with The Green Mile, reverently taken from King's serialized novel. It's 1935, and we're on a Southern prison's death row, where the only recreation is watching a mouse commandeer the corridor. Enter a new inmate, John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), a giant black man with a gift of preternatural empathy; he can literally suck the pain out of people. Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks), the chief guard of E Block, is in awe of this white magic. He benefits from it, uses it to help a friend and, eventually, pays...
...piece has some eerily effective moments. The sponging of a condemned man's head makes electrocution seem a sacrament: baptism and extreme unction in a single dab. The healing scenes will evoke tears, some of them earned. And there's a lot of sharp acting, led by Hanks' pained restraint. The two villains are vigorously portrayed: a sadistic, craven guard (Doug Hutchison) and a strutting, rabid inmate (played with a daringly lunatic, dark-star quality by Sam Rockwell), whose crimes are even worse than we feared. At the core, though, one finds a slacky, sappy film. The human mystery that...
...embodiment of Allah on earth, was actually a New Zealand-born petty criminal. Evanzz adds fresh--if overblown--detail to the Muslims' pre-World War II entanglement with Satahota Takahashi, a shadowy radical who persuaded Muhammad that with Allah's blessing "the Japanese will slaughter the white man." Evanzz even provides snatches of FBI tapes of Muhammad bickering with his wife Clara over his philandering, which produced 13 out-of-wedlock children by seven different Muslim women...
...metaphors and minor errors, such as Evanzz's assertion that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed with a shotgun, not a high-powered rifle, that undermine its credibility. Those seeking a definitive biography of the Muslim leader should turn to Claude Andrew Clegg III's 1997 study, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad, which covers most of the same ground but in a scholarly and far more convincing...