Category Archives: Old Made New

On Mascara and Christian Tele-Conservatism

May 13, 2006Old Made NewBrent

Inside Deep Throat didn’t. Equally revelatory and
entertaining, the film overcomes Tammy Faye’s uncomfortably screwy public
persona — she still flies the freak banner high here, but a little less
gloriously — by offering what will be for many viewers their first unprocessed
glimpse of Tammy Faye’s unfettered spirituality, which while so hard to accept
at face value in reductive media snippets here informs her character and comes
off as altogether genuine. Tammy Faye is thus resurrected, unlikely though it
may seem, as a sensitive, sympathetic and generally good-hearted martyr who
found herself in over her head, and paid with the sort of complete humiliation
that only a 24-hour cable news cycle world can dispense.

The film opens by detailing its subject’s childhood and her April Fool’s Day
marriage (a telling date, some would say) to an earnest young itinerant preacher
named Jim Bakker. After watching their successful local children’s TV show fold,
the two went on to launch The 700 Club, the first Christian talk show of
its kind. A dream of Jim’s, it was an afterthought as part of a deal with Jerry
Falwell for the pair to create and oversee another children’s show based around
their puppet characters — a sort of Mr. and Mrs. Bakker’s Neighborhood,
if you will. Both were successful, but it was the former that became a
phenomenal worldwide hit over satellite and cable outlets before Jim and Tammy
Faye were ousted acrimoniously.

The couple then started Praise the Lord, another Christian cable TV venture.
The response was huge; Jim and Tammy Faye were bonafide small screen stars, and
their dreams of a non-denominational Christian empire culminated in the
construction of Heritage USA, a sprawling, immaculately designed resort and
water theme park. Soon though, PTL turned into a never-ending telethon, with
Bakker claiming that he needed to raise three or four million dollars a week
just to stay afloat. Uncertain with the direction of it all and stricken with
panic attacks, Tammy Faye developed an addiction to painkillers. Proving tragedy
and comedy often come in threes, the PTL dream then came crashing down in a hail
of embezzled donations, bitter feuding, familial back-biting and, of course,
Bakker’s notorious sex scandal with Jessica Hahn, amusingly rendered here with
an interview and, umm, artistic footage from her Playboy home video.

Though the filmmakers have an obvious affection for their subject, The
Eyes of Tammy Faye is relatively even-handed in its presentation of opinion,
if not necessarily the most deep-digging piece of entertainment journalism.
Bailey and Barbato stock their film with production bells and whistles both
playful (sock puppet bumpers introduce scenes with thematic cards like “A Star
Is Born” and “Love at First Sight”) and grandiose (Falwell’s kiss-off press
conference in which he claimed the Bakkers were attempting to extort money from
PTL plays complete with slow motion and shrieking music of betrayal). There’s
also a terrific sense of humor and chiding juxtaposition throughout. In one
scene, Tammy Faye explains that she’s kicked prescription pain killers and all
other addictions — except for Diet Coke, which can’t be that bad since it’s a
habit she shares with President Clinton, who is then seen tersely sipping a
frosty one during his Monica Lewinsky deposition.

It may seem strange to call a film like The Eyes of Tammy Faye
explosive, but that’s just what it is — a fascinating, cathartic,
from-the-ground-up reconstruction of an American pariah, and a full-bodied,
three-dimensional look at one of the more outrageous personalities of the
opening salvos of a culture war that’s still raging in this country.

Charlotte Gray

April 29, 2006Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

Again, it’s an end-of-month archival expansion here at Shared Darkness, ergo this review of 2001’s Charlotte Gray, originally published upon its theatrical release. To wit:

Growing up in my cul-de-sac neighborhood, bordered by a
thick woodland with all sorts of inviting nooks and crannies, “playing war” was
a favorite weekend pastime. Us little boys would grab all manner of sticks and
brightly colored plastic weapons — later BB guns for those for whom the habit
died dangerously hard — and plunge into the woods for hours, engaging in
espionage and theatrics the likes of which make sense only in male adolescence.

There was one girl, however — the requisite tomboy sister of
the most gung-ho of the lot. She preyed on the expectations of the foolish, of
course, and almost always proved indispensable in capturing the flag or
locating the enemy fort or whatever the day’s mission was.

Watching director Gillian Armstrong’s Charlotte Gray, based on Sebastian Faulks’ best-selling novel and
adapted for the screen by Jeremy Brock, I couldn’t help but find my thoughts
returning to that girl, wondering if she was still taking gloriously unfair
advantage of the less fair sex. Rooted in fact, Charlotte Gray tells the story of an ordinary woman who finds
herself caught up in an extraordinary reality, a reality mostly explored — both
in fact, but even more so in fiction — by men.

Charlotte Gray’s
narrative as a whole, however, lacks punch and vim. With a budget of under $25
million, the film has insufficient means to truly convey on an epic scale the
consequences of Charlotte’s
actions. By necessity, then, it focuses on the personal rather than the
political. Yet Julien, though whole-heartedly sold by Crudup, lacks the
definition and shading of Charlotte;
we never grasp the full manner of his convictions, and the plot element that
keeps he and Charlotte together
(two abandoned children) is straight out of the stock dramatic playbook. Ergo, Charlotte Gray doesn’t totally get over
on the boys. But, oh, the crafty girl from my childhood? She now works in law
enforcement, no doubt targeting and taking advantage of those with misguided
expectations. Too bad she can’t give Charlotte and Julien a few pointers.
(Warner Bros., PG-13, 121 mins.)

Ali

April 29, 2006Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

Again, it’s an end-of-month archival expansion here at Shared Darkness, ergo this review of Michael Mann’s Ali, originally published upon its 2001 theatrical release. To wit:

The life story of boxer Muhammad Ali would seem to be a
no-brainer for big screen treatment. After all, it has nearly everything:
defining sports triumphs, personal tragedies, massive political intrigue, even
plenty of women. Yet like both the story of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Spike Lee’s curiously stalled Jackie Robinson biopic — two other tales of shaping
influences of middle-century America that happen to be about
African-Americans — the story of Ali languished for many years until an
obsessively detailed white director wielding huge critical clout from his last
film (Michael Mann, from The Insider) and
a proven black box office star willing to sign on for a lucrative sequel from
the financing studio (Will Smith, Men in
Black II) pooled their power capital and hammered the project through the
pipeline.

Ali is a vigorously, imaginatively
directed biopic, an immersive film experience that bristles with thoughtfulness
and aspires to illuminate not only how the time and conditions of America
shaped this robust public figure, but also how he in turn shaped them.

The force of Muhammad Ali’s personality is such that it
reaches across boundaries of creed and color, age and influence. The challenge
facing Smith then, by all accounts heretofore an actor of a uniquely
contemporary presence and connection, is monumental. And I admit, going in I wasn’t
sure he could pull it off. But the result is something magical — part Smith,
part Ali, completely engaging. Smith is a bona fide lock for an Oscar
nomination, and deservedly so; he nails the singsong, preacher-shaped qualities
of Ali’s speech patterns and famously taunting raps, capturing both Ali’s
gregariousness and uncertainty — how he would actually talk trash to make himself believe.

Equally amazing, if not even more so, is Jon Voight (below center) as
Howard Cosell, the sportscaster with which Ali shared a unique rapport.
Voight’s mimicry of Cosell’s famous cadence is pitch perfect, and the
interactions between the two characters include many of the best parts of the
movie.

Working from a story by Gregory Allen Howard and a
screenplay by the writing tandem of Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher
Wilkinson, Mann and his writing partner on The
Insider, Eric Roth, craft a shooting script that presupposes a good bit of
foreknowledge regarding Ali and those surrounding him. Particular diligence is
paid to the boxing sequences (shot high and tight, there’s a thump for every
blow, yes, but also a grunt for every lunge and a whistle for every lightning
bolt miss), but the rest of the film is often rather abstract and free form.

Ali
is, after all, about probably the most charismatic figure of the 20th century,
a one-of-a-kind starburst of unyielding determination, unfettered ego and
enormous native ability who was a genuine sports icon and media superstar before jabbering to the media had become a
means to an end, a way to increase one’s star or even become a celebrity.
Mann’s film gets this, but it also dwells on mood at the expense of structure.
While these digressions are artful, I sometimes yearned for a greater narrative
discipline, a streamlining and focus on what Ali himself thought, felt and
experienced. Certain segues, like from Malcolm X’s assassination directly to
Ali’s rematch with Liston, ring false; Mann’s desire to be as inclusive as
possible in his storytelling and to capture in particular Ali’s indomitable
independence disregards — or at best fails to convey — the ferocious curiosity that
in fact drove much of the decision-making in his personal life, including his
appetite for women (portrayed here by Jada Pinkett Smith, Nona Gaye and ER’s Michael Michele; Ali’s fourth and
current wife, Lonnie, falls outside the realm of this story).

Still, even more than most films perhaps, these criticisms
are a manner of taste; the acting and filmmaking of Ali make for an absorbing experience, and when push comes to shove
I can’t name another filmmaker whose Ali biopic I would rather see over Mann’s,
and certainly not starring an actor other than Smith. The structured
schizophrenia of their collaboration, if occasionally wayward, still bears some
undeniably tremendous fruit. (Columbia,
PG-13, 157 mins.)

The Shipping News

April 29, 2006Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent Simon

It’s an end-of-month archival expansion, and this only slightly redacted review of The Shipping News, from its theatrical bow in 2001, is now being added to the rolls. To wit:

A Beautiful Mind

April 29, 2006Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

Again, it’s an end-of-month archival expansion here at Shared Darkness, ergo this review of 2001’s Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind, originally published upon its theatrical release. To wit:

If genius presupposes the question, seeing the answer before the query or even the full diagnosis of the problem, we in movies rarely get a sense of that quicksilver interior monologue — the ambition, ideas and concepts that drive and motivate great inventors, scientists, mathematicians and writers. Most directors, after all, aren’t geniuses. Most studio execs aren’t geniuses. And certainly audiences aren’t comprised of geniuses — the grosses of Tomb Raider proved that.

Hence when films about genius are made, we’re usually fed cloying or melodramatic stories about compartmentalized brilliance — people with amazingly specialized knowledge but flagrantly miserable personal lives or relationships — the point of which, one assumes, is simply to reaffirm the humanity of those viewed as occupying the ivory tower. “See,” the filmmakers say, “this person isn’t really better than you — their talent comes at the expense of other desirable, mutually exclusive traits.”

Russell Crowe, the film is based on the life story of John Nash, a very real and very brilliant mathematician who battled schizophrenia and later triumphed, going on to win the Nobel Prize. Of course, his genius does comes at the expense of other qualities (talking to the opposite sex is an amusing weak point), but the grand point of the film is that it doesn’t necessarily have to, and Howard and Crowe convey this in a manner that is utterly lacking in condescension or vanity.

A West Virginia native who wins a prestigious scholarship to Princeton, Nash arrives on campus with the idea that there is a crystalline architecture to the universe that we all only briefly glimpse. He’s dogged in his pursuit of an original idea, and his theory of governing dynamics, refuting Adam Smith and centuries of philosophy, breaks bold new ground. Despite his BMOC reputation, Nash largely keeps to himself, socializing mainly with his English Lit major roommate Charles (Paul Bettany). After graduation, he accepts a teaching and research post at MIT, where he meets Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), a student who draws him out of his shell and provides a platform of continuity from which Nash can better relate to the outside world. While at MIT, Nash is contacted by William Parcher (Ed Harris) of the Department of Defense, and so also begins doing some secret code-breaking work for the Pentagon. But the stress and detail of his work proves too much, and Nash cracks. Without giving too much away, it suffices to say that the film’s advertising campaign involves a fair amount of ingenious misdirection, with the real arc of A Beautiful Mind simply being: genius, madness, Nobel Prize. Yet filmgoers are unlikely to feel ripped off or lied to, since Nash’s “diet of the mind,” in which he says he chooses simply not to indulge certain appetites, proves as exciting and interesting as any thriller plot element.

Akiva Goldsman’s script, adapted very loosely and liberally from Sylvia Nasar’s biography of Nash, is by far his best writing that I can recall, and one of the best screenplays of the year. The dialogue crackles and Nash’s fellow students and later co-workers Sol and Bender (Road Trip’s Anthony Rapp and indie staple Adam Goldberg) are particularly clearly drawn and delightfully witty (“He’s your son,” mutters an exasperated Sol of Nash at one point). If some of the other characters are more cloak-and-dagger, it’s with good reason.

Of course, Goldsman also has the advantage of two top-shelf talents. Crowe delivers another Oscar-caliber performance of courage, intensity and wit, his ferocious intellectual curiosity shining through. Connelly, meanwhile, is equally remarkable. Opposite Crowe you need an actress who can emotionally take charge of scenes (hint: not Meg Ryan), whether from a position of power or not, and Connelly absolutely does. Their exceptional work, along with Howard’s sterling, even-handed direction make A Beautiful Mind a beautiful thing. For an interview/feature piece on the film, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 135 minutes)

Swimming Pool: A Sexy, Quasi-Foreign Mystery

April 28, 2006Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

Ludivine Sagnier). A tailor-made distraction in human form, the lissome, seemingly carefree Julie couldn’t on the surface be more at odds with the prudish Sarah, who’s bothered as much by her young housemate’s pert breasts as by her drinking coffee from bowls. A feather caught up in the breeze of life, Julie whiles away her time swimming and sunbathing, sometimes in an art-deco bikini but just as often in nothing at all. She also exhibits a rapacious sexual appetite that she sates with the swarthiest of men.

If Julie represents youth’s arrogance and natural, anything-goes inquisitiveness, Sarah proves to be curious too; she spies on Julie, discovers her diary and eventually starts keeping a running sidebar narrative on her computer that she uses to infuse her novel with fresh blood. Against her better judgment, Sarah’s maternal instinct is also triggered when she finds a pair of Julie’s panties in the lawn and Julie doesn’t immediately return home one night. Julie, for her part, eventually comes into clearer focus as a much more complex figure than Sarah ever gives her credit for. So… maybe this odd couple has a few things in common after all.

Swimming Pool’s muted tone hearkens back to a previous metaphysical meditation on love and loss from Ozon — Under the Sand, which also starred Rampling, and told the story of an only marginally satisfied middle-aged woman whose husband simply disappears one day at the beach. On one hand, there’s a fantastic sense of the unknowable to this film, as Julie flings her way from one man to another: what’s the story here, and how is this going to play out? Still, paradoxically, Swimming Pool’s sense of drowsy contemplation seems to portend a curveball or two, a feeling confirmed when, at roughly 70 minutes into the movie, the story’s own galloping impulse for mystery really kicks in.

Concocted by Ozon with his Under the Sand collaborator — novelist and screenwriter Emmanuele Bernheim — Swimming Pool is, I’m willing to bet, influenced to at least some degree by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. It’s a film that is interested in creativity, identity, divergent personal and professional aspirations and the very real manner in which those components coexist and intermingle within each of us. The difference is that Ozon’s movie is in some ways even more slippery; though slow in tone, it starts out being about one or two very concrete things and then, after a few delicately played twists and turns (shocking isn’t the word, cunning is more like it) becomes something entirely different, something that it clearly always was, but just not to the naked eye.

A pro’s pro, Rampling expertly conveys hidden reserves of jealousy and desire that slowly come bubbling to the surface. Meanwhile, Sagnier (whom American audiences might have glimpsed as Tinkerbell in P.J. Hogan’s Peter Pan) is utterly amazing as Julie. Light years removed from her mischievous but juvenile role as the youngest link in Ozon’s musical murder mystery 8 Women (another worthy rental, I might add), Sagnier exudes a voracious sexual energy that makes her the physical, emotional and psychological centerpiece and linchpin of Swimming Pool. As adolescent fear and desperation slowly erode Julie’s brassy, exhibitionistic veneer, Sarah crosses psychological arcs with her; it’s a carefully choreographed dance, and Sagnier and Rampling execute it with perfection.

Sprinkled liberally with life’s intangibles, almost all of Ozon’s movies — and Swimming Pool most particularly — have a deep, engaging elusiveness, the swirl of an involving dream. Auteurs of the American independent scene would do quite well to pay attention to the director’s touch with surface and subtlety; Ozon can stage a skilled, playful interaction with the best of them, but there’s almost always a latent subtext playing in the scene as well, and it’s this very exact and exacting accumulation of details that brings into starker psychological relief the complexity of his characters. Ozon is attentive to their humanity and covertly plumbs their inner psyches. We understand his characters’ dilemmas — whether they’re explicitly voiced or not — sometimes even before the characters do.

For those who found themselves caught up in the aforementioned Mulholland Drive and/or Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s exhilarating Adaptation, Swimming Pool is well worth a dip. Alluring and inventive, though at the same time possessing the understated and relaxed rhythms typified by much foreign cinema, it’s a brilliant and very sexy mystery. During and after, you’ll be lost in thought — a feeling you might not experience that frequently this summer.

Unscripted

April 26, 2006Blu-ray/DVD Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

There’s reality television and then there’s the sort of small screen verité that’s captured — loosely scooped up, really — in Unscripted, George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh and Grant Heslov’s short-lived HBO
series. Given the show’s ruthlessly indifferent portrayal of Los
Angeles’ aspirant creative community as a den of backstabbing cajolers
in which only fitful personal progress is achieved (two steps sideways
and a half step back for every one forward), it’s not surprising that
this quote-unquote comedy was euthanized before it could ever really
find an audience.

If Entourage is the satirical hipster version of the City of Angels, the off-the-cuff Unscripted is a jazz-improv exercise, a tone poem that almost by its very nature sometimes connects and sometimes doesn’t. For the full DVD review, from IGN (and from last November), click here.

Metropolitan

April 19, 2006Film Reviews, Musings, Old Made NewBrent

I reviewed Criterion’s superb DVD release of this film earlier this year elsewhere, but I love it so that I want to touch upon it again here. A delightfully barbed comedy of manners, Whit Stillman’s witty, literate Metropolitan
is an undeniable high point of independent ‘90s cinema, one of those
movies I made a note — both mental and literal — to track down on DVD
when it finally saw release on the format. A pleasure, then, that
Criterion spearheaded the release with such a fine eye and attention to
detail, resulting in a fitting and long overdue celebration of this
1990 Oscar nominee for Best Original Screenplay.

A talky and
purposefully ostentatious vivisection of the particular ennui of
well-to-do youth, the film is set in New York City during a
Christmastime break of “not too long ago,” a hectic time that for our
young ensemble occasions all sorts of gala soirees at which they must
make appearances. With a “severe escort shortage,” scene newbie Tom
Townsend (Edward Clements) is drafted into action, joining, among
others, sharp-as-a-tack Nick Smith (Christopher Eigeman),
politico-in-training Charlie Black (Taylor Nichols), sensual Cynthia
McLean (Isabel Gillies) and the ostensible Molly Ringwald of the group
— a bit pretty, a bit dowdy — Audrey Rouget (Carolyn Farina). All sorts
of various crushes and cross-crushes exist, but the potentially jejune
is heavily counterbalanced with banter-filled talk of art, politics,
social criticism, activism and literature. Psychological perspicacity,
meanwhile, is achieved through the manner in which almost all the
characters put on small fronts over the course of the movie, and then
betray those in various, telling ways.

Stillman has described the script as “finishing started arguments that I lost,” and that truth lends Metropolitan
the weighted plausibility of to-scale conflict. The audience feels
invested in the silly problems of its subjects because Stillman
captures the particular fashion in which adolescents and
twentysomethings invest considerable psychological energy in group
mores and rules, and the highly punishable cost of breaking them. The
result is a highbrow film of, still, exceeding pleasure; you
literally bask in the all the glories and inanities of its oratorical
circle-eights, with Eigeman and Will Kempe — as the smarmy Rick Von
Sloneker, a young baron — in particular stealing the show. If the latter day films of director Wes Anderson
mean anything to you, check out their roots in Metropolitan, a gem of contemplation trumping limited means.

The Cinema of Hostility

April 17, 2006Musings, Old Made NewBrent

Reviewing Hostel on DVD recently had me thinking further about cinema of hostility, actually, and not just within the horror genre. No, my mind later wandered to all things underworld (though this time, not of Kate Beckinsale in leather). For all the refashioned pop flair of Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughn’s recent films, no one captured underclass British antagonism, resentment and its criminal acting out better than Alan Clarke.

In his day, working with the late Clarke was a sort of rite of passage for intense, up-and-coming British actors. A singular talent, the filmmaker delved into psychological torture and bellicose narratives long before they were in vogue, and his raw, unsettling visions often felt like found screeds from under a dirty, upturned rock. Clarke’s television work for the anthology series Play for Today included Psy-Warriors and Beloved Enemy, but his three best known works all delved into the psyche of violent young males.

In the late 1970s, Clarke was hired by the BBC to make a television drama about life inside a juvenile detention center. Its evocative, one-word title: Scum. A grim and graphic indictment of the British borstal system, the program was so relentlessly brutal that the horrified BBC banned its broadcast indefinitely. In defiance, Clark and his producer, Clive Parsons, refashioned the film as a feature, and loosed it upon an unsuspecting public in 1979. In it, a young Ray Winstone (Sexy Beast, The Proposition) stars as Carlin, a juvenile thug rising to the top of an inhuman prison hierarchy amidst violence and sexual assault.

The ferocious Made in Britain, released in 1982, serves as an English forerunner to both Romper Stomper and American History X. For those who think Russell Crowe and Edward Norton have the market cornered on charismatic racists, Tim Roth debuts here as Trevor, an eloquent teenage skinhead whose random acts of sadism send him on a snarling spiral through the English justice system. Scripted by David Leland, the film is an unsparing portrait of youth fueled by hate and rage, and ruled by a swallowed depression and despair.

1988’s The Firm, meanwhile, serves as a showcase for Gary Oldman, who gives a blistering performance as Bex Bissell, a middle-class family man who also leads a violent gang of soccer hooligans. While the real roots of Oldman’s nihilistic rage run deep to 1986’s Sid and Nancy, it was this telepic that first and best harnessed his quiet temper, and served as the underpinning for future brash turns in The Professional, The Fifth Element and even Air Force One.

Though Clarke was taken too soon, dying of cancer at 55 in 1990, his stirring work lives on, and is well worth a look for anyone who fancies uncompromising portraits of youth run amok — rampaging id hardwired to nervy ambivalence. All the above titles are available separately on DVD or via a great eponymous collection from Blue Underground released earlier this year, with still galleries and cast interviews from The Firm, both versions of the incendiary Scum and another bonus — the streamlined, 39-minute Elephant, part of the inspiration for Gus Van Sant’s film of the same name. In the latter, Clarke and producer Danny Boyle (28 Days Later) explore the political violence of Northern Ireland via the stark depiction of 18 separatist murders; Boyle also sits for an audio commentary. All the films are distinctly British, but still universal in their basic enmity.

The Spike Lee Joint Collection

April 10, 2006Blu-ray/DVD Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

You needn’t be a fan of Phish to imagine my disappointment when I opened The Spike Lee Joint Collection and discovered it was not a signature line of weed awaiting my review, but instead a compendium of five of the diminuitive but incendiary writer-director’s films. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

The Spike Lee Joint Collection is the latest in a line of sparsely packaged DVD sets, many from Universal, designed to pull in more cavalier consumers of film product who might not naturally or avidly follow the work of a particular director. Compiling Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Crooklyn, Clockers and Jungle Fever, it works here because of Lee’s undeniable stamp of personality and the deeply felt socio-political undertones — albeit sometimes forced — of each film.

Do the Right Thing, from 1989, is probably Lee’s best known film, or certainly right up there with Malcolm X, and it remains his signature work and the crown jewel of this set, interweaving in uncompromising fashion darkly funny and yet still very seriously held views of race, all of which come to a boil in New York City on the hottest day of the summer. As the white owner of a Bedford-Stuyvesant pizzeria, Danny Aiello headlines a fantastic ensemble cast that includes Rosie Perez, Ossie Davis, Giancarlo Esposito, Richard Edson, Bill Nunn, John Savage, John Turturro and of course Lee himself. This is the film that spawned Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” and when that jam comes on, I defy you not to at the very least bob your head along in rhythm. Me, I pulled out the breakdance mat and started doing helicopter spins.

Capitalizing on the commercial and critical success of Do the Right Thing, Lee made jazzy valentine Mo’ Better Blues the following year, partially inspired by the life of his musician father Bill Lee. Denzel Washington stars as trumpeter Bleek Gilliam, a smooth playboy torn between Indigo (Joie Lee, Spike’s sister) and Clarke (Cynda Williams). Washington is, as always, magnetic, but at 132 minutes, the movie is more than a little bloated, and its divergent, unhoned focus seems to bespeak a desire to simply get another movie out in the pipeline as much as anything else.

Lee rebounded in 1991 with Jungle Fever, a film for which he struggled for some time to get financing. Wesley Snipes is a married black architect and Annabella Sciorra his white secretary, and their affair provides a prism through which to examine the trials and consequences of interracial relationships. While I think that the infidelity angle irrevocably warps and distorts the putative issues on display in significant fashion, the performances here are top notch, and the reactions of friends and family of the characters are certainly telling and interesting, definitely rooted in reality. The main problem is that Lee himself seems to believe that interracial relationships themselves are inherently a matter of novelty and (misplaced?) passion, and thus skin-deep. In refusing to imbue in them a more realistic depth, he ultimately shortchanges his characters and story.

The sole feature here not rated R, 1994’s sweet and surprisingly moving Crooklyn is a throwback to Lee’s childhood, telling the ’70s-set story of a headstrong young Brooklyn girl and her family. For those who doubt Lee has a soft bone in his body, this is stirring evidence to the contrary. He pulls a real winner out of the casting hat with newcomer Zelda Harris, while Alfre Woodard and Delroy Lindo anchor the adult roles.

Adapted by Lee and Richard Price from the latter’s novel, 1995’s Clockers serves as an antecedent of sorts to the recent Freedomland, a morally gray crime tale suffused with issues of race and class. Stepping in for Martin Scorsese (who took a producing credit and went off to make Casino instead), Lee scores again in pulling acting neophyte Mekhi Phifer to the foreground as Strike, a petty drug dealer who locks into a battle of wills with his boss, Rodney (Lindo again), the worst sort of father figure one could have. Isaiah Washington is Strike’s big brother, Victor, who gets sucked up in a criminal investigation by Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel), and fellow cop Andre (Keith David) is the neighborhood enforcer who tries to lean on Strike to steer straight. While this film serves as the genesis of Lee’s famous (and famously jarring) point-of-view camera style — and also features the same sort of garish gangsta videogame parodied in Inside Man — it’s so crisply drawn and compellingly acted that you easily forgive it a few lapses in sense.

Nicely presented in three-way, gatefold packaging with plastic cases for each disc, The Spike Lee Joint Collection spans three DVDs, with one film presented on each side of a disc. Clockers and Jungle Fever share a disc, as do Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues. Crooklyn, meanwhile, rates its own DVD. The entire package then slips into a clear, plasticine cover with a replicated autograph from Lee.

All of the films in The Spike Lee Joint Collection are presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfers that preserve the original aspect ratio of their theatrical exhibition and generally offer a satisfying viewing experience. There are no problems with compression and grain is generally held to a minimum. Owing to Lee’s wide-ranging experimentation in film stock and camera technique, though, color consistency is sometimes an issue. The shadows in Jungle Fever (overall a very dark movie) are alternately muted and pitch black, and there’s some flickering in Clockers‘ interrogation scenes that makes for temporary distraction.

English-language, Dolby digital tracks anchor each film herein. There are Dolby 5.1 mixes for Clockers and Crooklyn, and Dolby digital 2.0 mixes for Jungle Fever, Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues. Dialogue is clear and consistent, and the jazzy rhythms of Mo’ Better Blues are in particular nicely captured. There aren’t a lot of rear channel demands on Lee’s films, which are mixed in fairly straightforward fashion, so these audio presentations are more than adequate. Alternate English captions for the hearing impaired stud each release, and there are additional Spanish subtitles on every film except Mo’ Better Blues, plus French subtitles on Jungle Fever.

Apart from contractually mandated credit information for each picture, housed on the interior of the gatefold packaging, though, there are no special features, just a branching menu and static scene selections for each movie. The package is clearly an attempt to move units based on the recent theatrical bow of Lee’s Inside Man, and as such there’s a ticket voucher for that movie inside, though unbilled on the outer packaging.

Overall, as with Universal’s recent The Gary Cooper Collection, this is a good way to pad the cumulative total of one’s serious film stash without putting too hearty of a dent in your wallet. The Criterion version of Do the Right Thing is obviously vastly superior, with its array of supplemental material. The outspoken Lee is always an interesting interview, and he has an authorial presence such that his complete absence here creates a weird sense of displacement. Still, if found for the right price, The Spike Lee Joint Col
lection certainly offers up more hits than misses, and is a boon for casual film fans who want to immerse themselves in the work of a passionate and talented, if not always completely on the mark, director. To purchase the DVD set via Amazon, click here. B (Movies) C- (Discs)