He Got Game and Mo’ Better Blues

So we should talk a bit about how my mind works. Along with trying to watch most of the Oscar contenders each year, the superhero movies I care about and anything else that catches my attention I have a ever growing list of older movies I try to watch for the first time.

Sometimes it’s just something someone recommended online. But in most cases it’s a director who does interesting flicks and I’m working my way through their entire catalogue.

I can give you the perfect example of how these are the actions of a crazy person. In 2021, Clint Eastwood released Cry Macho. Critics hated it. Audiences ignored it and I put it on my list.

I got to it last year in the run-up to Juror #2. The critics were not wrong. But still, I have seen Cry Macho and it is now marked off the list because with it I have seen nearly everything Clint Eastwood ever directed.

And so it is with Spike Lee, who’s films range from instant historic classics to ‘oh my God what was he thinking’ and back again.

Malcolm X fundamentally changed, well if not my life, then my perspective about the world around me. Movies can do that, if you let them, they can show you how different the world is for other people.

He Got Game works in some parts because Denzel Washington can do anything once you point a camera at him. That includes making you think basketball superstar Ray Allen is his son (even though Ray can’t act and doesn’t look a thing like Denzel).

However, He Got Game mostly doesn’t get to the lofty heights you would want from a Spike Lee movie. The reasons are myriad. Denzel is in prison but is allowed out by the state’s governor because his son is a high school phenom and the governor wants Denzel to get him to sign with his favorite college program.

Sure.

It’s not that I thought that was impossible — people in high office do insane things like this all the time it seems — it’s just that I thought it was a weird basis for this type of flick.

And Ray Allen couldn’t pull his weight as an actor.

He Got Game has some great moments though and a final moving bit involving both men playing basketball on different courts that shows that they are forever connected.

I began Mo’ Better Blues having just finished He Got Game. Game is from 1998, Blues came in at 1990. This was his follow up to the huge hit that was Do The Right Thing.

Denzel plays Bleek Gilliam a successful jazz trumpet player and band leader who needs to get to the next level and out of the bad contract his manager and child hood friend (played by Spike Lee) signed with a local nightclub. Wesley Snipes is in the band but he wants to be the guy out front and he wants at least one of Denzel’s two girlfriends.

I feel like if a guy in a movie in 2024 had two girlfriends people in the audience might riot. But in 1990 the sexual politics of the situation were that Bleek had two women, they knew about each other, and no one was particularly happy except for Bleek after hours.

It all goes along fine (mostly) until both women show up at the nightclub where Bleek performs on the same night wearing the same dress.

If you were involved in this situation in any way you would not think it is funny but I howled when Spike Lee’s Giant reminded Bleek that he had told him not to buy the same dress for two women just because they were in a rush to get out of Paris.

There is more going on here than romantic troubles. Lee always has a keen eye for details about life in New York and was also concerned with the problems of successful young people having just recently become a successful young person himself.

I didn’t much care for the first half of it and then the band played a song I loved and the thing Lee had been working for during the first half of the movie snapped shut and then … well I just floated away with it.

I really loved the second half of it because it shifts almost completely from the kind of story you would expect to something new and wonderful.

Also, I’m not sure if this is the first Lee ended a movie with an I Love New York montage but it certainly won’t be his last.

It’s likely that no one would point you to Mo’ Better Blues if they were suggesting you try Spike Lee movies. It’s stuck between his breakout Do the Right Thing and his mountaintop Malcolm X.

But if you, like me, start working through Spike Lee movies, or Denzel performances or however you do it in your house, be sure and put it on your list.