Spike Lee's vibrant 'Highest 2 Lowest'

 

   Not many filmmakers would venture into territory that requires reimagining a film by the great master Akira Kurosawa. Korosawa’s 1963 High and Low, based on a 1959 novel by Ed McBain, may not be the director’s best film but it’s marked by troubling ethical questions and a daring approach that kept star Toshiro Mifune off screen for much of the movie's second half.

  Working from a screenplay credited to Alan Fox, director Spike Lee takes the dare, creating a vibrant  work that has been given a catchy altered title, Highest 2 Lowest. 

   The central question remains the same in both films: Will a wealthy businessman pay a ransom for a kidnapped kid? I won’t say more about the twist that  heightens the question's ethical dimensions. Know, though, that Lee sets his movie in the record business, building a story around David King (Denzel Washington), a successful record producer who may be aging out of the business that gave him fame, wealth, and power. 

  Early scenes take place in King’s jaw-droppingly chic Brooklyn penthouse, where he lives with his wife (Ilfenesh Hadera) and teenage son (Aubrey Joseph). 

  King’s apartment, which features art by important  Black American painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kehinde Wiley, serves as a testament to Black cultural expression and affluence. It's a home, to be sure, but it's also King's palace, the place from which he rules.

  The lofty security of King's apartment is disrupted by the policemen who arrive once the kidnapping is reported. John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze, and Dean Winters play the cops who coach a sometimes reluctant King about how to proceed with a life and $17.5 million of ransom money at stake. King needs the money to keep his company, Stackin' Records, from falling into hostile hands.

    Mifune’s character, by the way, jockeyed to purchase a controlling interest in a shoe company he had run for years, a much less glitzy endeavor.

   Jeffrey Wright provides strong support as Paul, King’s chauffeur and confidant, a widower who has had his bouts with the law but is dedicated to providing stability for his teenage son (Wright’s real-life son Elijah Wright), who happens to be best friends with King’s son.

  The motives for the kidnapping are intriguing. The vengeful kidnapper in High and Low was after money. In the new version, the kidnapper (A$AP Rocky) is an aggrieved rapper who calls himself Young Felon and who feels snubbed by King. 

  Sure, he wants money, but he also craves fame and notoriety, the whole showbiz spotlight.

   When the screenplay contrives to leave King’s apartment, Lee takes an enthusiastic dive into New York, setting an important scene (delivery of the ransom money) on a fast-moving subway train and staging a chase through a Puerto Rican Day street crowd where the Palmieri is playing. (Note: Palmieri died recently, leaving a gaping hole in the New York music scene.)

   The movie opens on a far different note. An original cast version of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ from the musical Oklahoma plays on the soundtrack, a choice that adds to the burnished glow created by cinematographer Matthew Libatique, whose camera masterfully explores Manhattan as seen from King's balcony.

   Washington, who hasn't made a movie with Lee in 19 years, commands the screen. Although a crucial   decision made by King feels underdeveloped, Washington's scenes with Wright are compelling. 

   Ditto for a late-picture scene with A$AP Rocky. King tries to establish his rap bona fides with a quick-witted younger man who isn’t buying. I'd see the movie for that scene alone.

  Highest 2 Lowest works best as a showcase for highly committed performances from the main cast and for Lee, especially when the movie hits the streets of New York. Few of the supporting actors are given stand-out moments, and third-act thriller tension doesn’t always match the gravity of the material's moral concerns.

   Shortcomings aside, The Highest 2 Lowest proves consistently engaging, and it stands as a work that Lee has made his own, smartly altering the story Kurosawa told to give it fresh spin. Lee makes the movie resound with the energy he finds in his characters and in the city that sets a big stage for their drama and dreams.

Spike Lee sends four vets back to Vietnam

Da 5 Bloods doesn't entirely gel but it makes its message clear.

Spike Lee, like his movies, operates on many levels. He’s a social commentator, a director and a storyteller. He's one of the few filmmakers who can be credited for creating a one-person genre. When you hear the words “a Spike Lee Joint,” you know that you’re probably entering terrain that’s part drama, part provocation, part corrective of the US historical record and part entertainment.

These ingredients can become seamless when Lee is at his best and can sometimes trip over one another when he’s not hitting his stride.

But it’s important to remember that Lee has created an aesthetic approach that practically constitutes a brand. He can poke an angry finger in your chest or flood a moment with tenderness.

So now comes Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, a movie about Vietnam, black contributions to the US military, black bitterness about the lack of recognition for those contributions and, if that weren't enough, a story about a search for buried treasure — in this case, gold bullion — that sometimes intentionally evokes memories of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Using news footage to set the tone, Lee opens with a montage that surveys the boiling racial landscape that defined America during the war. Among the clips: protests, Muhammad Ali’s resistance, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech at Manhattan's Riverside Church in which he turned his full attention to the war.

All of this is framed by a story with a rather straightforward plot. Four former infantrymen reunite in Ho Chi Minh city. Initially, their reunion is full of bonhomie and joy. Gradually, it becomes clear that the men, known as “The Bloods,” have more in mind than renewing old friendships.

They want to retrieve gold they buried during a harrowing mission and they want to recover the body of a fallen brother known as Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman). The movie paints Norman as a kind of warrior saint who held the soldiers in his squad together and tired to direct them toward higher purposes, perhaps using the gold to help black folks at home.

Of the four Bloods, as the soldiers referred to themselves, two stand out: Clarke Peters’ Otis, a down-to-earth steadying influence who learns that he has a greater connection to Vietnam than the others. A wartime relationship resulted in a daughter, now grown, who Otis meets for the first time.

Delroy Lindo gives the movie’s most vivid, conflict-riddled performance. An anti-immigration guy who wears a MAGA hat, Lindo's Paul easily taps into his anger. He's joined by his son David (Jonathan Majors), a young man who followed his dad to Vietnam because he knows that his father occupies a PTSD-world of trouble.

Norm Lewis’ Eddie and Isiah Whitlock Jr.’s Melvin fill out the foursome of veterans.

Working with three additional writers, Lee isn’t entirely successful at fusing all the issues that crop up and some of the dialogue carries the burden of exposition or of establishing -- or at least making reference to -- political dynamics embedded in the way the US fought the Vietnam War.

Flashback scenes to the war feature Boseman, who's powerful even in a small role. The other soldiers aren’t played by younger actors in these flashbacks but by the older cast. Lee does his best to keep the camera away from their faces, but the juxtaposition of a young Boseman and the older guys can be distracting.

The story also brings in a trio of NGO do-gooders (Melanie Theirry, Paul Walter Hauser, and Jasper Paakkonen) who have taken up residence in Vietnam to defuse bombs and dig up landmines. Jean Reno turns up as a shady figure who’s supposed to help the men smuggle the gold out of the country.

As the men move deeper into the Vietnamese jungle, they begin to squabble about the size of their respective shares. Mistrust develops and before all is done, Lee gives Lindo a wild soliloquy in the jungle as he battles with thick growth, his own demons, a venomous snake, and the historical weight of 400 yeas of American racism. In a way, this single speech does more to embody the damage these men have suffered than anything else in the film. Amazingly, Lindo pulls it off.

Will the men escape with the gold? Will they be double-crossed? Will others try to kill them?

I’ll answer only one of these questions. Others will try to kill them, resulting in gunfights and explosions of violence that reprise the war-time violence the men once experienced.

Those who expect every Lee film to speak its mind won’t be disappointed and those who are put off by the same trait will find much with which to quibble. Lee even manages to work Black Lives Matter into the film’s closing moments, giving the movie an even more topical boost — as if it needed one in this moment of intensely focused discussions of race.

No matter what the subject, Lee’s voice will be heard — and that may be why Da 5 Bloods is least interesting when it’s telling its story and most compelling when Lee does what he does best — shake things up.

A black cop infiltrates the KKK

In BlacKkKlansman, director Spike Lee tells an incredible true story about American racism.

As is the case with every state in America's often wobbly union, Colorado has no shortage of shameful racist history. In the 1920s and 1930s, Denver’s mayor — Ben Stapleton — was a known member of the Ku Klux Klan, as were other notable public figures in the state. The controversy over Stapleton's Klan affiliation continues: Some argue that Denver's Stapleton neighborhood, built on the site of the old Stapleton International Airport, should be renamed.

But Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman -- set in Colorado Springs -- doesn't derive its power exclusively from the state's shameful past. In telling the story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), a black Colorado Springs detective who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s, Lee turns a glaring spotlight on a moment that has relevance in the deeply troubled present. Post Charlottesville, it's no longer possible -- if it ever has been -- to give hate-group activities the security of historical shelter.

No stranger to controversy, Lee can be both a cinematic agitator and a gifted filmmaker. Often he’s both — and in the same movie. He's able to mix the stark strokes of agitprop with softer dramatic tones; he can allow for nuance and humor or he can ignore dramatic shading entirely. The approach makes sense when Lee works in areas in which clear racial lines are drawn, the most famous example being Lee’s incendiary Do the Right Thing, now 29 years old.

With BlacKkKlansman — co-written by Lee and three other writers -- Lee has hold of another story that allows him to address racial issues in a way that's volatile, telling and sharply attuned to the tragic absurdity of unleashed bigotry and ignorance.

As the first African-American member of the Colorado Springs Police Department, Stallworth (John David Washington) faced racism from some of his co-workers but found his niche as an undercover officer. His work in exposing the Klan began when he responded by phone to a newspaper ad seeking KKK recruits.

Eventually, Stallworth even spoke with white supremacist David Duke (Topher Grace), then Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Obviously, infiltrating the Klan required face-to-face contacts that Stallworth couldn’t make. Enter fellow detective Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). In meetings with Klan members, Zimmerman posed as Stallworth, another bit of deception because Zimmerman happened to be Jewish, not a favored group among Klansmen.

Early on, Lee connects Stallworth's story to period realities about race. Sent to a speech by Kwame Ture -- formerly Stokely Carmichael (Corey Hawkins) -- Stallworth finds himself in the awkward position of being a "spy" who’s not necessarily at odds with Ture’s analysis of America's racial situation.

Stallworth's presence at Ture's speech in itself qualifies as racially suspect: The Colorado Springs police worried that Ture would inspire violent protests among the city’s black population.

Let me leap ahead: Perhaps because he's both a storyteller and commentator, Lee concludes his movie with footage of what happened in Charlottesville, Va., the white supremacist rally that Donald Trump tried to address evenhandedly with his good-people-on-both-sides comments.

Let's be honest, there aren’t two sides to a story of bluntly expressed racism that, in BlacKkKlansman, is directed at the African-American students of Colorado College. One of those students (Laura Harrier) also becomes a romantic interest for Stallworth, a man grappling with conflicting identities. He understands racism as well as anyone but is also reluctant to accept his comrades as “pigs," lest he is branded with the same label. Initially, he doesn't tell Harrier's character that he's a cop.

Washington, son of Denzel Washington, handles the movie’s double-identity requirements with simmering anger and wit. He and an excellent Driver don’t become immediate soul mates, which seems entirely realistic. They’re both doing their jobs. Driver plays a Jew without a strong Jewish identity. He hasn't given much previous thought to racism.

This being a Lee movie — Jordan Peele of Get Out fame produced — you won't find many subtly expressed ideas; the defense for the movie’s lack of nuance becomes obvious: When dealing with Klansmen, nuance would not only be superfluous but a notably stupid form of moral temporizing.

And, yes, Lee uses the absurdity of Stallworth’s situation to give the movie a variety of humorous scenes. When Duke visits Colorado Springs, Stallworth is assigned the task of guarding him. He even convinces Duke to pose for a picture with him, the city's only black policeman.

Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen plays the scariest of the racist Klansmen, who — at one point — confronts Driver’s Flip Zimmerman with suspicions that he might be Jewish, a tensely comic scene that hinges on whether Zimmerman has been circumcised. These Klansmen are in no danger of being confused with MENSA members.

Lee also adds references that link his movie to the American movie past, strategically inserting footage from Birth of a Nation, the 1915 D.W. Griffith movie that lionized the Klan, as well as from Gone with the Wind.

Lee has taken dramatic liberties to be sure -- Harrier's character is an invention and Driver's character wasn't Jewish. Overall, though, Lee does justice to a story that would be impossible to believe if it weren’t true. Lee again puts the pedal to the metal in trying to acknowledge an ugly part of American life that shouldn’t be swept under any red, white and blue rug -- then or now.

Spike Lee issues call to disarm

A showy Chi-Raq breaks genre boundaries. Some of it even works.

Say this about director Spike Lee: At 58, the man's no less risk averse than when he was a much younger filmmaker.

Lee bravely models his new movie, Chi-Raq, on Lysistrata, a comedy by Aristophanes that dates back to 411 BCE, not exactly a period known for its hip-hop atmosphere.

Aristophanes' central conceit involved the efforts of Lysistrata to persuade women to stop having sex with their husbands and lovers as a way of forcing them to bring peace to a society enmeshed in the Peloponnesian War, a conflict that lasted for about 27 years.

Lee, who wrote the screenplay with Kevin Willmott, finds his Lysistrata (a dynamic Teyonah Parris) conspiring to withhold sex from Chicago gangbangers who are contributing to the horrifically high rate of homicide among young black men.

Using a splashy graphic (a map of the U.S. composed of drawings of rifles and revolvers), Lee opens the movie to Nick Cannon's Pray 4 My City, a harsh but hopeful rap anthem.

Chi-Raq, of course, is the name given to Chicago's mean streets, not the city of great architecture, abundant culture and commercial bustle, but the city where gun violence reigns and even the youngest children aren't excluded.

Lee effectively makes this divided-city point by contrasting images of stately downtown Chicago with neighborhood scenes that focus on a far less affluent kind of life.

Lee reduces the Greek chorus to a one-man show put on by Dolmedes, a dapper and sometimes sarcastic Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson's Dolmedes puts the story in perspective.

That perspective includes information presented early on about how fatalities from Chicago's murders outnumber American lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. The story, we'll learn, will be focused on Englewood, one of the city's more dangerous neighborhoods.

What unfolds is a movie of desperate parts, some successful, some less so. Part agitprop, part melodrama, part broad comedy, and part soulful lament, Chi-Raq exists in its own world. You'll either enter that world or turn away.

But if you stay, you'll see a movie that, in addition to everything else, offers a vigorous display of female power, particularly as expressed by Parris, who comes closer than anyone else to dominating Lee's large ensemble cast.

Lee employs many talented actors in what often feels like a wild, theatrical experiment. In addition to offering the opening song, Nick Cannon plays the leader of a gang called the Spartans. As if to absorb all the city's misery, pain and fury, Cannon's character has taken the name Chi-Raq.

Wesley Snipes appears as Cyclops, the orange-clad, one-eyed leader of the Trojans, a rival gang.

Jennifer Hudson plays Irene, the mother of a daughter gunned down by a stray bullet; Angela Bassett plays Miss Helen, a woman who surrounds herself with books and serves as the movie's voice of sanity.

In an unexpected turn, John Cusack turns up as a priest modeled on real-life Rev. Michael Pfleger, an activist who works out of Chicago's St. Sabina Church.

In a lengthy sermon, Cusack rips through a monologue that excoriates the society from whose soil Chicago's violence grows, as well as the community that must rise up to put a stop to it. It's an impressive piece of work that sometimes sounds like a hortatory condensation of Michelle Alexander's important book, The New Jim Crow.

Not all of the bits work and some are ridiculously conceived, notably a scene in which a general wearing Confederate flag underwear (David Patrick Kelly) mounts a Civil War cannon as he lusts after Lysistrata at a National Guard armory. Lee's at his funniest when he nails character, not when he tries to create comic situations.

It's difficult to imagine that Chi-Raq -- the first production from Amazon Studios -- will shatter any box office records. It can be too didactic for its own good, and it's possible that a straightforward story about the impact of gang violence might have been more powerful than Lee's ultra-stylized shout-out of a movie.

But Lee and Willmott, who wrote the satiric C.S.A.: the Confederate States of America, have gone their own way in arguing that the U.S. needs to wake up and do something about violence that is ravaging places that -- more than ever -- need a sense of community.

And at a time when we're again despairing over another mass shooting, this one in San Bernardino, Ca., there's definite value in shining light on Chicago's overlooked carnage

Whether anyone heeds Lee's call to disarm remains to be seen.

'Oldboy:' Reworking a cult classic

Spike Lee tries hand at a story that attempts to bring the shock of a South Korean movie to American multiplexes.

I wasn't a major fan of director Chan-Wook Park's Oldboy, but I admired its shocking audacity: Park's revenge saga featured the kind of violence that tends to delight certain genre enthusiasts. Among other things, the movie's main character ate a live octopus and extracted an adversary's teeth with a claw hammer.

Released in 2003, Oldboy was not a movie for the squeamish: It appealed mainly to those who were caught up in Park's revenge trilogy, which included Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005). Personally, I liked Lady Vengeance best.

I have no idea how Spike Lee's remake will play with those who are unfamiliar with the original. But for those of us who know Park's movie, watching Lee's version becomes little more than an exercise in comparative viewing.

Lee doesn't skimp on shock or violence as he brings Mark Protosevich's screenplay to life. The remake offers a mixture of new wrinkles and familiar ploys that should keep fans of the original guessing right up until the finale.

In this version, Joe (Josh Brolin) -- the main character -- is a hopelessly crude advertising executive whose offensive behavior is matched only by his alcoholic intake. After a particularly awful drunken binge, Joe awakens in what appears to be a shabby motel room. He has no idea how he got there. It eventually dawns on Joe that he's being held prisoner, although he has no idea why. He remains in this state -- being fed nothing but dumplings from Chinese takeout -- for 20 years.

While imprisoned, Joe -- whose room has a television set that mostly broadcasts advertisements for exercise equipment -- sees a newscast in which he learns that his estranged wife was murdered. His three-year-old daughter has been placed in the care of others.

Poor Joe: He's the only suspect in the crime.

When Joe's finally released, he dedicates his life to proving his innocence and wreaking vengeance on his captors. Of course, he must first find out who his captors are.

It's difficult to say more without spoilers, but it's worth knowing that Lee and Protosevich (I Am Legend) approach Park's story by offering variations on many of the same issues that concerned Park: namely perverse sex and brutal violence. Like Park, Lee gradually doles out revelations that are intended to rock Joe's already shaky world.

Lee brings an eclectic approach to casting. South Africa's Sharlto Copley (District 9) plays Joe's nemesis; Elizabeth Olsen portrays a social worker and former drug addict who tries to help Joe after his escape; and Michael Imperioli signs on as a bartender who has known Joe since the days when they both attended the same prep school.

Lee also finds a role for Samuel L. Jackson, who plays the man in charge of Joe's imprisonment. He also works in one of his trademark dolly shots lest we forget who's behind the camera.

Fans of the original will want to know that Lee replicates the hammer fight that became a signature of the original. The way Lee tweaks the story may be slightly more preposterous than the way in which Park brought it to its chasenting conclusion. The American version also has a tendency to over-explain things that remained more beneficially murky in the original.

But the main thing missing from this American version is the soulful, agonized performance of Choi Min-shik, who played the imprisoned man in Park's movie. The other actors don't compare as well, either. It's not that they give bad performances; it's more that the raw quality of the original (as difficult to take as the outré violent touches) isn't always in evidence.

What's left is a weird plot and dreary atmospherics as Lee dips into waters that reminded me not only of Park but of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg.

It would be wrong to deem Oldboy a total failure: I was interested in how Lee and Protosevich approached their task, but I never figured out why they wanted to take on the job in the first place.

Back to Brooklyn for Spike Lee

Spike Lee returns to Brooklyn for Red Hook Summer, one of the gifted director's least satisfying and most puzzling movies yet. This time, Lee focuses on the relationship between a teen-ager (Jules Brown) and his grandfather (Clarke Peters). The young man, who lives in Atlanta, is taken to New York by his mother (De'Adre Aziza) so that he can spend a summer with the grandfather he has never met. Not surprisingly, Brown's "Flik" isn't happy to be cooped up in a small apartment in Red Hook's projects. To make matters worse, Flik isn't the least bit religious and his grandfather is an old-school preacher. Familiar from both The Wire and Treme, Peters is a fine actor, but he's stranded without much of a script. Long scenes in the Lil' Peace Of Heaven Baptist Church tend to make you wonder whether Lee, co-wrote the script with James McBride, knew where he wanted to take a cast of characters that includes Chazz (Toni Lysaith), a no-nonsense girl who becomes Flik's friend. Lee makes a cameo appearance as Mookie, the character he played in Do the Right Thing. Some 23 years later, the savvy Mookie is still stuck delivering pizzas, which might be the strongest comment Lee has to make in this mostly languid movie. For the longest time, nothing much happens in a movie that shows Flik trying to film everything he sees with his iPad 2. Then, something dramatic does happen. The trouble is that Lee hasn't laid the groundwork for a major reveal that turns the movie into a blur of pain and emotional confusion. I won't disclose the movie's big twist, but it makes Red Hook Summer seem like an entirely different film from the one Lee began. Lee displays demonstrable fondness for this Brooklyn neighborhood and for some of its residents, but Red Hook Summer simply doesn't work.