Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

BallWubba Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

aspie-andy A couple of weeks' ago I had watched this film on one of the True Movies channels. And I remember at the end of the film there was a passage that said something more or less like; "This was the first time a white man faced the death penalty for killing a black man since 1851 or some of year, I can't quite remember. And that at that time it was because a farmer had killed a slave of another farmer, and that it was no race issue but a property issue."It sickens me how those people back then just thought that black people were disposable commodities, or less than human. Another example is how when the US constitution was first established, it stated that a slave was considered three fifths of a man. Look up the Three Fifths Compromise to know what I'm referring to.

lastliberal Texas is a big, big state. There is plenty of room for racism to exist in any places at once. In 1998, there were two big incidents that made national headlines.Near the Louisiana border, in Jasper, Texas. James Byrd was being drug to his death by three white men out for a good time. 600 miles away, near the New Mexico border, in Tulia, Texas, the sheriff hired Tome Coleman to combat his town's perceived drug problem. As the trials went on in Jasper, a pre-dawn raid rounded up 46 black men in Tulia and they were sentenced to 750 years in prison on trumped-up charges.We will have to wait until Halle Berry has her baby to see the completion of Tulia, but we can watch the crimes in Jasper, now.Louis Gossett Jr. plays the Mayor of Jasper, and Jon Voight is the Sheriff. They have to deal with the impact of the crime and the trial on a town of 8,000. They are not only ill prepared to investigate such a heinous murder, but they have to deal with the Black Panthers, who arrive to march armed (legal in Texas), and the KKK. I cannot think of two actors who were better suited for the parts, and could have played them better.The overall message of the film is that these three men were not representative of the town - that blacks and whites got along. The truth was laid bare during the trial. They got along because the black citizens did not make waves. There was an undercurrent of racism throughout the community and it took an incident like this to get the town to look at it.It is a shame that it took a death to make things better, but James Byrd did have what is hopefully a lasting legacy on the town.

Lechuguilla In 1998 three young White men killed James Byrd, Jr., a Black man, by chaining Byrd to the back of their pickup truck, and then driving away at high speed down a back road in rural deep East Texas. It was a horrible crime, one that was quickly and easily solved. This film tells the story of that real-life event ... sort of.The best part of "Jasper, Texas" is the performance of Jon Voight, as sheriff Billy Rowles, who investigated the crime. The film also presents a credibly downbeat atmosphere of rural eastern Texas. That said, I was disappointed with the screenplay. The story begins on the day after the killing and, except for occasional flashbacks, moves forward, to chronicle the aftermath of the event, from the viewpoint of the town's residents. What was a terrible personal tragedy is turned into a speech-athon on race relations from: local politicians, the FBI, a citizen's task force, the Black Panthers, a White supremacy group, and others. The film's cast is way too large, and the dialogue is inflated. And throughout this talky film, there's the usual obnoxious behavior of the vulturous news media.We never really get to know James Byrd, Jr., ... the victim. He is almost irrelevant. Nor do we get any insight into the motivations of the three killers. The film thus mostly ignores the most relevant people, and chooses instead to tell the story of background people who talk endlessly around a sociology topic that has been talked to death. The entire film seemed academic, impersonal, and emotionally uninvolved.

romy245 I was a junior in high school when the true story behind Jasper occurred, but I don't remember much of it. Until I saw this movie, the horrific nature of the crime hadn't hit me, and I became disgusted with the racism that does still exist. While this was certainly no blockbuster, I found this movie meaningful and it really delivered a message to me.Also, not to make light of the story, I'm from Deep East Texas, and I have NEVER heard anybody from the area use that Deep South accent. I agree that we do have a distinctive accent, but I am somewhat offended that somebody else could review this movie and say that the accent was actually authentic--that is as far from the truth as you can get. We don't talk like the characters on "In the Heat of the Night," we talk like rednecks--and to us, that's not an insult.