11/10/2022 0 Comments Monster walter dean myers reviewThe interesting questions Monster asks are lost in the kaleidoscopic editing. Later, the film interrogates this implication – just as the jury is prone to seeing a guilty black man, are film-goers quick to see an innocent student? But it’s too little too late. There are some lovely moments with his equally sweet, middle-class parents, although again, the implication that someone’s background prohibits criminal behaviour feels off-key. His vulnerability in prison and on the stand creates necessary tension as we long for his exoneration. In a courtroom full of clichés (“This is a monster,” yells the angry prosecutor), Harrison Jr is the film’s beating heart. The film skips between prison, flashbacks to the night of the murder and rather precocious montages of Steve’s photography, which seem to imply that anyone with such an astute artistic eye could never be involved in something so heinous. Steve’s tight-lipped lawyer ( Jennifer Ehle, on top form) believes his version of events immediately, although there doesn’t seem to be much evidence either way (a consequence, perhaps, of Mandler’s focus on style over plot). Sweet, middle-class Steve is accused of being a look-out for ne’er-do-wells James King (Rakim Mayers) and “Bobo” Evans (John David Washington, son of Denzel), on the night in question, which resulted in a shopkeeper’s murder. This is the first feature film from director Anthony Mandler, an established music-video director best known for his work with Rihanna, and his visual flourishes feel distracting. But where the TV series was forensic, this film is flighty and too prone to embellishment. The prosecution accuses Steve of acting as the look out to the crime which left a local business owner dead. Both are at once a mystery, an examination of judicial racial bias and a look at what imprisonment does to young men. In the opening of Monster by Walter Dean Myers, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon is on trial for his alleged participation in a murder committed during the commission of a robbery. Monster, based on the YA novel by Walter Dean Myers, is eerily similar to the vastly superior 2016 HBO series The Night Of, which starred Riz Ahmed as a Pakistani-American charged (seemingly) falsely with murder. “All I want to do is find a way to rewrite the story,” he laments. Born Walter Milton Myers in West Virginia in 1937, he was given away by his father to a couple, Florence and Herbert Dean, after his mother died when he was a small child. Steve is a polite, diligent film student in Harlem, and his dreamy voice-overs punctuate the action. “Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a movie,” says Steve Harmon (Kelvin Harrison Jr), a 17-year-old boy charged as an accomplice in a lethal armed robbery.
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