Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Celia A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

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

phd_travel This movie was mesmerizing from start to finish. The most famous sexual harassment suit in history is the subject matter of this dramatic HBO movie. The way the story exploded onto the national spotlight and got how it became a political battle is so interesting. By casting the highly sympathetic Kerry Washington as Anita Hill in the role you can tell which side the movie slants towards. She gives a clear and dignified performance even through all the salacious testimony. Jennifer Hudson is a supporting witness on her side - another sympathetic actress. Greg Kinnear as Joe Biden is aged appropriately and his various decisions as head of the investigating committee. The actor who plays Clarence Thomas, Wendell Pierce is a bit too passive until his testimony before the committee. Mamie Gummer looks quite different with darker hair and plays an aide to Ted Kennedy played by Treat Williams.Highly recommended.

secondtake Confirmation (2016)A straight up re-telling of an historical case—the Supreme Court confirmation fiasco around Clarence Thomas as he denied sexual harassment charges from Anita Hill, a former aide.All is well and good here. I think for those who haven't heard of the case, or who want the details, this is a decent (and entertaining way) of learning some facts. However, I thin ten minutes on the web would give you the same gist. For those who have lived it, one way or another (as I have), it's a little too much the obvious facts, the history we already know. So it may live up to its intention to keep the incident alive 25 years later, but it isn't quite compelling movie-making. Certainly the LBJ equivalent (from 25 years earlier still) called "All the Way" is a better movie and has better acting and a richer plot. So it is what it is and don't expect too much. I think it's important stuff, and it energized a lot of women (before the current generation which is oddly passive about women's rights). See it along those lines.

Robert J. Maxwell In 1991 President G. H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, an African-American, for a position on the Supreme Court. A young law professor who had worked with him, Anita Hill, testified in an investigation that he had sexually harassed her. The allegations most remember are probably Thomas' asking bout a pubic hair on his can of Pepsi and he referring to a character named Long Dong Silver that he'd seen in a porn movie. Legal entanglements abounded, dominated by public relations. Thomas was confirmed.The movie clearly takes the part of Anita Hill without storming the ramparts. She's shown as a quiet professor at the University of Oklahoma who was contacted by the press in a routine inquiry about Thomas' nomination. She told the reporter of her experiences after a promise that her name would never become public. The reporter made the entire incident public and the result was an investigation in which Thomas angrily declared that what was going on was nothing more than a "high tech lynching." At the time, it sounded plausible enough to me, but I thought, well, so what? I was more interested in his politics than his putting moves on some woman in the work place.His politics and his performance as a judge didn't measure up. The American Bar Association denied him its highest ranking of "well qualified." Thomas claimed that he'd never had a conversation or given any thought to the controversial Roe vs. Wade decision. And since his appointment he's been invariably conservative and since 1998 has asked only one question from the bench. He's probably the least of our nine -- or rather eight -- Supreme Court Justices.Yet he was confirmed by a narrow margin with bi-partisan votes. I was curious about the Dems who voted in his favor. Here are the states those Dems represented: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia.It's too bad the movie makes such a pitiable suffering victim out of Anita Hill, although that's what she was. An attractive and intelligent black woman (Yale Law School) who may well have been subject to unwelcome and vulgar comments from her boss.Still, she's certainly not Mother Theresa or Roma Downey. In the film she comes across as a stereotype, the harassed, betrayed, victimized woman. And the actress, Kerry Washington, is believable but no more than that. She has little range. She's not particularly INTERESTING and when she shouts something in anger it sounds acted.As Clarence Thomas, Wendell Pierce is rather a blank coin. He denies everything. He's indignant. But he's even more of a cardboard cutout than Hill's character. His white wife, Alison Wright, stands staunchly by his side, showing no more animation than a figure in the President's Hall at Disney World.The only casting choice that stands out is that of the usually forgettable Greg Kinnear, who is Joe Biden, chairman of the committee. He looks a little like the younger Biden but his voice -- deliberately or not -- bears an uncanny resemblance to Biden's.Hill may be shown as put upon and Thomas as virtuous but if there is a man who clearly makes misjudgments, it's Joe Biden, who shuts down the inquiry before the witnesses have a chance to speak, and who does so because he's brow beaten into compliance by angry peers who want the whole blasted thing to disappear from the media because it's giving the Senate a bad rep.On the whole it's inoffensive and a little bland. I guess that's better than white hot agitprop.

MisterWhiplash The bottom line with Confirmation is that it's not complex as far as the plot goes, and this is particularly if you know the history. In fall of 1991 Thurgood Marshall retired from SCOTUS, and, feeling the pressure to nominate a black man to the court, Bush picked Clarence Thomas, a man who many felt wasn't qualified for the court (as Jeffrey Wright's character says at one point, "I have students who are better qualified than Clarence Thomas"). But when asked by someone from Senator Biden's office about whether or not he should be confirmed, Anita Hill couldn't hold back and be silent and told the truth: she was sexually harassed, as far as having to hear vulgar talk about sex (i.e. "Long Dong Silver" is a thing in a court of public record, I mean Jesus), and asked out on multiple occasions. It got out to the press, she had to go testify, as did Thomas, and all this before a seemingly immovable date for the man's confirmation.This all could have made for a compelling mini-series, or an even longer movie. What is a little disappointing about is that this is probably the best this kind of movie could be, but it's still not quite good enough, or I should say that the detail isn't exactly strong enough. Mostly I found that the depiction of Clarence Thomas not exactly weak but basic: for such a man who I may find reprehensible (from before and during his 25 past years on the court), Wendell Pierce gives Thomas as a person, and character in this story, some dignity, and Anita Wright as Clarence Thomas' wife as well. But what about anything else aside from his indignation and sad faces? What else was/is there to Thomas? Maybe that just wasn't the focus, and director Fumiyama (of last year's surprise critical hit Dope), wanted to keep it on the politics and especially the media - many figures who you might recognize from CNN and elsewhere in cable news pop up as younger selves - certainly keeps a good eye on that. But what does make an impact and what is certainly good to look past the flaws here, are a) Kerry Washington's performance, which is so unwavering in making Anita Hill a figure of sympathy but also aching empathy, completely stripping anything else except this woman and having to put up being solid in front of the committee. And b) how the story and movie treats the whole aspect of how equal rights were not there in 1991, and may still not be (or, to put it another way, despite the changes the struggle is ongoing), for women in this country.Like the recent People vs OJ series, we get a story that seems to deal a lot in race - Thomas' "High tech lynching" comment that struck an emotional chord for some but was seen as being disingenuous by others - and yet it's really about how women fit it, or certainly do not, in a world full of men. Images of women and how they talk and react, every little thing that they say, is under the kind of scrutiny here that men just don't have to face, at least not to this level. Confirmation is about the representation of a woman's image in politics, in the media, in the public at large, and what that does when up against a "street fight" as one of the raging white male Republican senators says. You can read a lot into what the hearings, as seen in this story, say about the national public character, and yet it's displayed for us to see in those hearings, and the behind-the-scenes fights and digging for dirt via the Republican senators, as opposed to spelled out all the time.Confirmation doesn't stretch entirely too far for it to be great, or quite on the level of Recount or Game Change as far as HBO original movies about hot-button/controversial political stories in this country from the modern age, but within what it tries to do, and from the acting from all the players that is never less than convincing (Kinnear, who plays a rather unsympathetic Senator Biden, who screwed up things in the hearing just as far as scheduling people to testify, is one of those), it works. I'd even watch it again if just to see how Washington pulls off the majority of her scenes.