Word: film
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...detailed summary of the story, giving potential customers some concrete idea of what they're being asked to buy into. Well this time, forget it. What can be reported without hesitation is that there is another Jake, that he is played by Harvey Keitel, and that early in the film he catches his wife (Meg Tilly) in bed with his business partner and rubs him out. After that, you're on your own. In showing that what seems to be a crime of passion is actually one of dispassion, having much more to do with big money than a little...
What this film misses most is a character like Noah Cross, whom John Huston played with chilling false charm in Chinatown. The trail that led to him was as convoluted as the story line in this movie. But we knew all along the footprints had to arrive at his doorstep, and when they did, we confronted an unforgettable monster, whose political and economic immorality was of a piece with his sexual perversion. Dramatically he was an antagonist who functioned as a powerfully clarifying force, resolving, vivifying all the movie's ambiguities. There is just no one like him here, though...
...worked for Spike Lee last year with Do the Right Thing. The discussion then was all about whether or not the film endorsed a violent response to racism, not about the quality of the work. His new movie, Mo' Better Blues, is stirring a less commercially useful controversy, having been denounced by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith for its portrayal of a pair of scuzzy jazz-club owners as anti-Semitic stereotypes...
...almost everyone else in a Spike Lee movie is a stereotype too. That's what crude, careless sensibilities like Lee's deal in. He means to be affable here and pay some sort of tribute to the world of his father Bill, a jazzman who wrote the film's score. But despite firsthand knowledge, his story of how the career of trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Denzel Washington) is undone by pride, womanizing and unwise affection for a shiftless manager (played by Lee) is conventionally romantic, and so is his realization of its 'round-midnight atmosphere...
...sometimes writes good, quirky little exchanges, but precisely because his characters are so simplified, dramatic incident does not grow organically. So the film's movement is fitful and arbitrary -- all mood swings and unpersuasive melodrama. It makes you restless waiting for something to happen and restive trying to explain its emotional and narrative logic when it finally arrives. Lee needs to think things through. If he did, the A.D.L. would have nothing to say to him. And he might be a filmmaker worth conjuring with instead of an annual media sensation...