Thoughts

The story follows Timmy Chamalet as Marty Mauser, a young Jewish man struggling to get by in early 1950s New York City as a hustling ping pong player. The opening act shows him overseas in London almost winning a major table tennis tournament, but losing embarrassingly in the final round to a stoic Japanese man with far superior skill than him.

We lost Gene Hackman this past year, the legendary actor and star of The French Connection (1971), directed by William Friedkin. This film is dark and gritty, and exactly the kind of realistic action/thriller I live for experiencing. Hackman portrays Popeye Doyle, a tough-as-rocks narcotics agent on the tail of a big international heroin score.

The performances by Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright steal the show. Fantastic comedic and tense moments are offset by a majority of cringeworthy dialogue and the most awkward scoring choices I’ve ever heard. It felt like watching a soap opera at more than a handful of moments. Going off of that, the police dialogue had to be some of the worst I’ve ever seen. The redeeming moments are within the tense action scenes, led by the direction of Lee with Denzel on the move.

The story follows Kyle MacLachlan as a young man back from school in his small, idyllic American suburb when he stumbles across a severed human ear in a field. After taking it into the local police station, his curiosity gets the better of him as he sets off into the secret underworld of a town once thought to be innocent.

The film follows Jordan, portraying twin brothers, gangsters who have been holding out in Chicago, and are now returning home to the South to open a juke joint. The story takes its time getting us acquainted with not only the twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, but their friends and family who unite under the roof of their new bar for the turning point of the film, when the vampires come out…

This is Spike Lee at the absolute top of his game, weaving cinematic spectacle with hard-hitting rhetorical questions about the consequences of America’s greatest sin. The opening scenes are almost a celebration of many films before it, before quickly devolving into the horrors Malcolm would experience, leading to the tumultuous and eventually life-taking journey of religious and spiritual, and moreover, societal acceptance.