#13 — Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) I first saw Do the Right Thing in the apartment of an upstairs neighbor when I was in college. We watched a rented VHS copy on a tiny little television–though a … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Thirteen
Black Dynamite (Scott Sanders, 2009). An inspired spoof of nineteen-seventies Blaxploitation films, Black Dynamite stars Michael Jai White as the title character, who dispenses justice on the mean streets while searching for his brother’s killer. Sanders gets the tone exactly right, mocking the conventions of the subgenre without lapsing into condescension. There’s a clear affection here, a conviction that no matter what else the original films may have been, they were also fun. How many movies can have claim major climactic sequences taking place on Kung Fu Island? Clever as it is, it’s a hard conceit to sustain over the … Continue reading Aldrich, Huston, Kore-Eda, Lee, Sanders
Summer of Sam (Spike Lee, 1999). Lee certainly wasn’t lacking in ambition with this film. It depicts the sweltering New York summer of 1977, marked by an ascendant Yankees ballclub, record-setting heat, and paralyzing fear over the unpredictable Son of Sam serial killer. Bringing his own distinctive flourishes to a screenplay by actor friends Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli, Lee piles more story and heavy import than just about any film could bear. Discotheques and punk rockers, gritty urban newscasts and brash bellowing neighborhoods, and it quickly collapses under its own weight. As with all of his more compromised efforts, … Continue reading Capra, Hopkins, Kieslowski, Lee, Pichel
Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, 2008). Colossally stupid. Based on a six-issue comic book series written by Mark Millar, the film revolves around a secret society of assassins with a knack for bending the laws of physics to their favor, most notably by sending bullets on curved trajectories with a flick of their wrist while firing a gun, as if they were bowling balls hurled down a well-oiled lane. If the filmmakers are going to disregard the basic principles of science so freely and frivolously, I suppose it’s silly to expect them to care a whit for things like logic and narrative … Continue reading She walks to work but she’s still in a daze, she’s Rita Hayworth or Doris Day
Coffee for Two 