This is your calling. You write some of the best film-reviewing ever; sometimes I read them 2-3 times and I'm not even a film buff. And.. I had no idea Ed McBain wrote the screenplay for The Birds -- remarkable! I always learn so much.
I always think of High and Low as the yin to the yang of The Bad Sleep Well (which is *devastating* btw).
Spike tries to copy the structure of High and Low with the first act in the apartment exploding into the chaos of the city in the second act, but he doesn't seem to care about his framing unless it shows off the artifacts of black culture. I mean, if that's what his aim is, then whatever. But, yeah. Big chunks of it are maudlin and even the diegetic music kinda sucks, and never mind how awful the actual score is.
I just watched The Great Debaters last week, and Denzel had more moxie as a director in that film than Spike has in this one. Spike seems bored.
Also: a shout out to King's Ransom and Ed McBain. It's one of the GREAT crime novels.
It hurts to see spike Lee turn into Bill Cosby. Not in every way, but in the “you damn kids with your pants hanging off your ass” kind of way. And Denzel is supposed to be playing the biggest hip-hop record producer ever? He’s sooo square! So who is King supposed to be exactly? There aren’t that many contenders … plus the product placement of his art collection as a signal to the audience that black bourgeoisie indifference is a “thing.” Jeez.
There’s almost no relationship to the original Kurosawa film.
In my opinion, Kurosawa it’s not indicting America by using Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom to tell a story of emasculation in post World War II Japan.
That his sympathies lie more firmly with the ex medical student junkie then with the bourgeois factory owner is born out, for me, in the final scene of the film. The kidnapper explodes with rage and fury in his cage, utterly defeated and humiliated. The bourgeois factory owner, seen from behind as he faces our anti-hero, is rendered mute by what he sees before him. He becomes a non-entity in the face of this new animal -
this hybrid of Western and Japanese culture, so totally foreign to King’s world. And now, to Spike Lee’s as well.
This is your calling. You write some of the best film-reviewing ever; sometimes I read them 2-3 times and I'm not even a film buff. And.. I had no idea Ed McBain wrote the screenplay for The Birds -- remarkable! I always learn so much.
My friend Christianne Benedict writes:
I always think of High and Low as the yin to the yang of The Bad Sleep Well (which is *devastating* btw).
Spike tries to copy the structure of High and Low with the first act in the apartment exploding into the chaos of the city in the second act, but he doesn't seem to care about his framing unless it shows off the artifacts of black culture. I mean, if that's what his aim is, then whatever. But, yeah. Big chunks of it are maudlin and even the diegetic music kinda sucks, and never mind how awful the actual score is.
I just watched The Great Debaters last week, and Denzel had more moxie as a director in that film than Spike has in this one. Spike seems bored.
Also: a shout out to King's Ransom and Ed McBain. It's one of the GREAT crime novels.
It hurts to see spike Lee turn into Bill Cosby. Not in every way, but in the “you damn kids with your pants hanging off your ass” kind of way. And Denzel is supposed to be playing the biggest hip-hop record producer ever? He’s sooo square! So who is King supposed to be exactly? There aren’t that many contenders … plus the product placement of his art collection as a signal to the audience that black bourgeoisie indifference is a “thing.” Jeez.
There’s almost no relationship to the original Kurosawa film.
In my opinion, Kurosawa it’s not indicting America by using Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom to tell a story of emasculation in post World War II Japan.
That his sympathies lie more firmly with the ex medical student junkie then with the bourgeois factory owner is born out, for me, in the final scene of the film. The kidnapper explodes with rage and fury in his cage, utterly defeated and humiliated. The bourgeois factory owner, seen from behind as he faces our anti-hero, is rendered mute by what he sees before him. He becomes a non-entity in the face of this new animal -
this hybrid of Western and Japanese culture, so totally foreign to King’s world. And now, to Spike Lee’s as well.