- Adapted from the novel, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" written by Alex Haley, this is an amazing biopic of one of the most influential African American leaders to date. It follows the life and times of Malcolm Little through his transformation to Malcolm X and his departure from the Nation of Islam. Spike Lee's epic film captures the internal struggles, the spiritual, political and structural ch
Based on the riveting bestseller by Richard Price, this 1995 crime drama was directed by Spike Lee with such authority and authenticity that it has the hyper-real quality of a stylized documentary. Fully capturing the thoroughly researched detail of Price's novel, the film focuses on Strike (newcomer Mekhi Phifer), a young, ambitious "clocker"--or drug dealer--who works the streets of his New York housing project, selling drugs for a local supplier named Rodney (played with ferocious charisma by Delroy Lindo). Just ! as Strike is struggling to get away from his dead-end life of ! crime, a nother dealer is murdered in a fast-food restaurant and local detectives (Harvey Keitel, John Turturro) consider Strike the primary suspect. In cowriting the script with novelist Price, Lee uses this murder mystery to explore the plague of guns and black-on-black crime in America's inner cities, in which drugs and death are familiar routines of daily life. The film doesn't pretend to offer solutions, nor does it dwell on the problem with numbing insistence. Rather, this taut, well-acted film takes the viewer into a world often hidden in plain sight--a world where options seem nonexistent for youth conditioned to have little or no expectation beyond a probable early death. Lee and Price are deadly serious in handling this volatile subject (which incorporates racism, powerless law enforcement, and political indifference), but Clockers is also blessed with humor, insight, and humanity. It's one of Lee's most confidently directed films, signaling a creative maturity that ! Lee continued to develop throughout the 1990s. --Jeff Shannon
Jungle Fever
Spike Lee's 1991 story about an interracial relationship and its consequences on the lives and communities of the lovers (Wesley Snipes, Annabella Sciorra) is one of his most captivating and focused films. Snipes and Sciorra are very good as individuals trying to reach beyond the limits imposed upon them for reasons of race, tradition, sexism, and such. Lee makes an interesting and subtle case that they are driven to one another out of frustration with social obstacles as well as pure attraction--but is that enough for love to survive? John Turturro is featured in a subplot as an Italian American who grows attracted to a black woman and takes heat from his numbskull buddies. --Tom Keogh
Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee's incendiary look at race relations in America, circa 1989, is so colorful and exuberant for its first three-quarters that you can almost forge! t the terrible confrontation that the movie inexorably builds ! toward. Do the Right Thing is a joyful, tumultuous masterpiece--maybe the best film ever made about race in America, revealing racial prejudices and stereotypes in all their guises and demonstrating how a deadly riot can erupt out of a series of small misunderstandings. Set on one block in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest day of the summer, the movie shows the whole spectrum of life in this neighborhood and then leaves it up to us to decide if, in the end, anybody actually does the "right thing." Featuring Danny Aiello as Sal, the pizza parlor owner; Lee himself as Mookie, the lazy pizza-delivery guy; John Turturro and Richard Edson as Sal's sons; Lee's sister Joie as Mookie's sister Jade; Rosie Perez as Mookie's girlfriend Tina; Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as the block elders, Da Mayor and Mother Sister; Giancarlo Esposito as Mookie's hot-headed friend Buggin' Out; Bill Nunn as the boom-box toting Radio Raheem; and Samuel L. Jackson as deejay Mister Señor Love Daddy. A rich a! nd nuanced film to watch, treasure, and learn from--over and over again. --Jim Emerson
Mo' Better Blues
With Mo' Better Blues, the story of a young trumpeter's rise to jazz-world stardom, Spike Lee set out to counter Clint Eastwood's cliché-ridden biopic of Charlie Parker in Bird. But the final product, a slick, glossy drama (with hip-hop jazz provided by Gangstarr no less), is just as superficial as the numerous Alger-esque stories of music stardom to which movie audiences are accustomed.
Denzel Washington gives a typically charismatic performance as the trumpeter in question, as does Wesley Snipes as his sax-playing rival. And as with most Spike Lee films, there are numerous solid performers in small roles such as Bill Nunn, Latin-music star Rubén Blades, and comedian Robin Harris. One character, however, attracted unwanted attention: John Turturro's role as an unscrupulous music-industry exec. Critics called the Turturro character, who! is at once money hungry, swarthy, and perpetually shrouded in! darknes s, a classic anti-Semitic caricature. But the charge seems almost irrelevant in Spike Lee's cartoonish, overstylized world of impossibly hunky jazzmen, curvaceous hangers-on, and incessant bebop. --Ethan Brown
Crooklyn
Spike Lee's semiautobiographical, 1994 film about the good and bad times for a Brooklyn family in the '70s has passion and nostalgic good feeling, but it is also a mess of random reflections and arbitrary storytelling. The centerpiece of the movie is a little girl (Zelda Harris) who views the ups and downs of her parents' experiences (mom and dad are played by Delroy Lindo and Alfre Woodard), and who navigates the life of her neighborhood. Lee tosses in a lot of '70s detail (watching The Partridge Family) and other diversions (Harris's journey through suburbia), but he has no master sensibility controlling the flow of it all. The film is more wearying than anything, although bright spots include Lindo's fine performance as a tale! nted man suffering from irrelevance. --Tom KeoghConceived by a misguided government seeking to quiet the fears of an anxious public, the concept of the Family Fallout Shelter was Cold War paranoia at its finest, a massive bit of propaganda by architecture that has no more truth behind it than the absurd notion of duck and cover. Inundated with government-sponsored films, posters, booklets, traveling caravans and exhibitions, the American family bought into the idea, investing millions of dollars in home shelters of every conceivable material and design. Bomboozled: How the U.S. Government Misled Itself and Its People Into Believing They Could Survive a Nuclear Attack lays bare the buried truths of America's family fallout shelter obsession. Author Susan Roy charts the panic-fueled evolution of the shelter from a well-stocked basement pantry to a full-fledged (and often completely decorated) home addition, revealing through extensive archival photography, nuclear-era ! memorabilia, and previously unpublished media, a government an! d people in the grip of self-delusion. Fastidiously researched and sharply written, Bomboozled captures the absurdity and uncertainty of a culture that knew no better than to trust its government's message. Susan Roy is a writer and editor on architecture, design, and cultural history. The founding managing editor of Allure magazine, she has also held senior editorial positions at This Old House, SELF, Good Housekeeping and Avenue. She holds a master's degree in architectural history from Columbia University; Bomboozled is loosely based on the subject of her master's thesis, The Family Fallout Shelter During the Cold War.Itâs time to correct the madness.
Are you sure the beliefs you hold about the history of humanity are true? Have you ever wondered where biblically-based accounts and centuries-old traditions are rooted?
When the earliest civilizations began documenting the activities of humanity for posterity, they opened a field for recorded history upo! n which many would seek to play a part. Therefore, modern civilizations have trouble distinguishing recorded truth from recorded lies. Unraveling the truth of our origin is a task that calls for exceptionally sharp reasoning skills.
In BAMBOOZLED!, Timothy Aldred reveals the paradigm of deception to which generations of people have been taught to surrender their hearts and minds â" in blind faith.
Who gains from the mindless devotion of the populace, generation to generation?
Come aboard for a refreshingly exciting and unbiased view of humanityâs true origin! Examine ancient accounts of the early years and how they compare to the theologically faith-based views that have been used to control and manipulate millions of people for millennia.
Best of all, as never before, learn how to demystify and unravel biblical mysteries using good reason and accurate distinction. It is time to free your mind from over 2000 years ! of conditioned belief patterns. Itâs vital for living!FEARED! AND REV ERED, MALCOM X CRYSTALLIZED THE HOPES AND DREAMS OF BLACKS, DEMANDING HUMAN RIGHTS FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS DURING THE RACIALLY TUMULTUOUS AND DIVISIVE DECADES OF THIS 1950S AND 60S UNTIL HIS 1965 ASSASSINATION IN NEW YORK, AT THE AGE OF THIRTY NINE.Just as Do the Right Thing was the capstone of Spike Lee's earlier career, Malcolm X marked the next milestone in the filmmaker's artistic maturity. It seemed everything Lee had done up to that point was to prepare him for this epic biography of America's fiery civil-rights leader, who is superbly played by Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington, from his early days as a zoot-suited hustler known as "Detroit Red" to his spiritual maturity after his pilgrimage to Mecca, as a Black Muslim by the name of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Do the Right Thing climaxed with the photographic images of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King engulfed by flames of rage; Malcolm X explores the genesis and evolution of that rage ov! er Malcolm's lifetime, and how these two great figures--held up to the public as polar-opposites within the African American human rights movement (King for nonviolent civil disobedience, Malcolm for achieving equality "by any means necessary")--were each essential to the agenda of the other. Lee careens from the hedonistic ebullience of Malcolm's early days to the stark despair of prison, from his life-changing conversion to Islam to his emergence as a dynamic political leader--all with an epic sweep and vitality that illuminates personal details as well as political ideology. Angela Bassett is also terrific as Malcolm's wife, Betty Shabazz. --Jim Emerson