From My Collection: 25th Hour Movie Review

In 2002, New York City lay beaten and bruised, injured and left for dead but not without some bite left in her. Certainly the city was ready and willing to dole out punishment to anyone who intended harm again. It’s a lot like the dog Doyle at the opening of Spike Lee’s 25^th Hour. Someone has abused him, but he lashes out at Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), who only wants to help. Monty takes Doyle in and when the story picks up a year later, the dog is reasonably normal while the city is still reeling from catastrophe.

Summer of Sam Movie Review

I can’t say with any certainty what it was like to live through the summer of 1977 in New York City because I wasn’t born yet, but Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam tries to capture it, or at least some stylized and possibly fantasy version of it. It was one of the hottest summers ever in the city with temperatures soaring above 100 degrees, leading to brown-outs and an eventual blackout. There was a serial killer on the prowl, gunning people down as they sat in their cars at night. Lee’s movie makes it seem like all the killings happened during those few months, but in reality they started a year earlier and were well spread out chronologically with only a couple of the shootings occurring that summer, although Lee includes recreations of nearly all of them scattered throughout the film.

Classic Movie Review From My Collection: Do the Right Thing

Spike Lee’s first two feature films clearly established him as a filmmaker concerned with issues within the African American community (She’s Gotta Have It showed him also being particularly sensitive to feminist issues), but his third time at bat proved to be the magnum opus – the film that would tie together race relations on Stuyvesant Avenue in Brooklyn, a microcosm perhaps for the entire borough or even the whole city of New York. Do the Right Thing remains to this day one of his greatest accomplishments for the skill in direction and writing to bring together good entertainment value, social issues, sound filmmaking techniques, and a clearly delineated personal vision into one concise film.

25 Years Ago This Month: February 1988

This was not a particularly interesting month of movie releases. There are new films from John Hughes, Wes Craven, and Roman Polanski, and Spike Lee's sophomore effort, but nothing that really awed critics or audiences. And not a single thing that has really survived a quarter century later beyond the odd pick-up off a rental shelf (or queue in today's parlance).

*movies I've seen

Apprentice to Murder starring Donald Sutherland and Chad Lowe doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. I can't track down any reviews other than Kevin Thomas's in the L.A. Times (he gives it a mixed to positive review), it has only 221 votes on the IMDb, and it's not in the Netflix database. Talk about movies that time forgot!

The Serpent and the Rainbow is a zombie chiller from director Wes Craven and starring Bill Pullman. It's got a rotten rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but only just. The blurbs are mixed with some critics calling it Craven's best film to date and others calling it pedestrian or too trumped up with effects.

*She's Having a Baby is one of John Hughes' lesser efforts with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern as a young married couple and the trials and tribulations of trying to conceive.

My Collection: He Got Game Movie Review

Spike Lee’s He Got Game is a movie about America made by a man who loves basketball and the opportunity represented by this country. Stories of race relations have often driven Lee to make provocative films. Even when he’s not sharp, we see he has something interesting to say.

Lee is usually at his best when he keeps his focus on small communities in Brooklyn. He Got Game is set mostly in Coney Island, but the story has connections to the broader American community. The two main characters are diametrically opposed black men. Denzel Washington is Jake Shuttlesworth, a man with undying love for his children, but also a pent up rage that led to the death of his wife, for which he is now serving time in state prison. Ray Allen is his son, Jesus (pronounced like Jesus of the Bible), who is the number one high school basketball prospect in the country.

From My Collection: Inside Man Movie Review

I’m kind of a shameless sucker for heist movies. I love the team camaraderie and the way the films are usually structured, often beginning with an opening heist teaser, followed by a gathering of the team members, the training and planning stages and finally the execution. Spike Lee’s Inside Man turns a lot of the conventions of the genre on its head by beginning with the heist and allowing it to unfold with the audience in the position of the hostages and the police. We don’t know what the plan is, what they want to steal, or how they plan to make their escape. Hell, we don’t even know who is involved. It all gets pieced together slowly over time as the main detective slowly catches on, at which point it’s too late.

25 Years Ago This Month: August 1986

Amid all the garbage that opened in August '86, there was one stand out, and also the biggest money-maker of the month, in Stand By Me. Based on one of Stephen King's better stories, it is not incidentally one of the best coming-of-age movies from the period. It's one of Rob Reiner's best films and stars Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, Jerry O'Connell and River Phoenix all boosted their careers here.

This month saw Spike Lee's electric film debut She's Gotta Have It. It's not nearly as sharp as some of his later films, but at the time his was an important new voice in independent cinema.