The Conical Glass: Summer of Spike: "25th Hour"

Friday, July 24, 2009

Summer of Spike: "25th Hour"

For my money, the most brilliant and idiosyncratic American filmmaker working today is Spike Lee. He is an amazing and versatile talent who puts his stamp on everything he directs.

Over the next couple of months, I have decided to watch the entire Lee oeuvre -- re-watching the masterpieces ("Do the Right Thing," "Inside Man") and taking a first look at the lesser films I never bothered with ("Girl 6," "She Hate Me"). As far as I've been able to determine from Lee's IMDB page, this is a complete list of his full-length, narrative, theatrical features:

She's Gotta Have It (1986)
School Daze (1988)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Mo' Better Blues (1990)
Jungle Fever (1991)
Malcolm X (1992)
Crooklyn (1994)
Clockers (1995)
Girl 6 (1996)
Get on the Bus (1996)
He Got Game (1998)
Summer of Sam (1999)
Bamboozled (2000)
25th Hour (2002)
She Hate Me (2004)
Inside Man (2006)
Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

Of course, Lee has also done a lot of documentary and TV work ("Freak," "4 Little Girls," "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts"), but I'm going to stick with the fiction films for now.

Each film will be rated on a scale of one to four stars. I will also choose the movie's Spikiest Moment (the scene which really lets you know you're watching a Spike Lee Joint) and say whether or not the Double Dolly Effect is used (the camera and the actor are placed on a dolly and pushed in order to make the actor look like he is floating or gliding -- if you've seen any of Lee's work, you know what I'm talking about; he discusses the technique in this interview).

2002's "25th Hour," starring Edward Norton as drug dealer Monty Brogan, who has been sentenced to a seven-year prison sentence, was the first major film made in New York City after 9/11/01. The entire movie takes place during Monty's last 24 hours of freedom before he has to report to jail upstate. You wouldn't think a drug dealer would be sympathetic, but the very first scene shows Monty rescuing a seriously injured dog! How can you hate someone who rescued a dog? As you get to know Monty's friends and his father, you feel sorry that he made such terrible choices and essentially threw away his life. The post-9/11 backdrop gives the film an additional sense of gravitas, as the camera focuses on Ground Zero and pans over the sidewalk shrines to the firemen and other rescue workers who died during the fall of the Twin Towers.

The secondary plot involving Monty's friend Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a teacher at the exclusive prep school that both men once attended (Monty was expelled for dealing pot), and his infatuation with one of his students (Anna Paquin) never really pays off. Not quite the masterpiece some have declared it, "25th Hour" finally achieves true greatness in its achingly powerful final 15 minutes.

My rating: ***1/2 stars (out of 4)

Spikiest Moment: The mirror scene in which Norton yells "Fuck you" to "this whole city and everyone in it" over a montage of diverse New Yorkers, from "the squeegee men dirtying up the clean windshield of my car" to "the Upper East Side wives with their Hermes scarves and their fifty-dollar Balducci artichokes."

Double Dolly Effect: Hoffman and Paquin, in the nightclub scene.

posted by 125records @ 1:24 PM

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