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A woman is hovering over the body of her freshly dead husband staring up at his murderer. 

“Damn you. Why’d you have to kill him?” She says. 

“He owed me money,” the killer replies.

And I cackled, gloriously, for a good while after that. 

Here try another one. Delivered by Robert Duvall playing Donald Westlake’s cool professional Parker (he’s called Macklin here because Westlake wouldn’t let the movie guys use the Parker name.) 

In this instance a man is claiming he doesn’t have the combination to the safe. 

“Take off your shoes. Every time I tell you to open that safe and you say “no,” I’m going to shoot off one of your toes.”

If you’re not sold by now you don’t like crime movies. You got no heart kid. 

Which is not to say that The Outfit is head and shoulders above the other 60s and 70s crime revenge thrillers. Cause it’s not. But it is, absolutely, on par with the best of the genre. 

Now, I promise you, you have seen this movie before. Hollywood has made 10 or 20 versions of this particular Donald Westlake story. Parker is betrayed, gets out of prison (or the hospital) and tracks down the bastards who betrayed him killing a bunch of bad guys till he either kills the top guy or goes out in a blaze of glory or both. 

In this particular version he’s called Macklin and the gangsters kill his brother Ed who was living a quiet life after the robbery went wrong. 

Late in the movie Macklin’s wife begs him to stop this crazy killing spree and go live the quiet life. 

“We can escape.” She says

“Ed tried that.” 

A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do baby. 

The Outfit has one thing that most of those other movies lack, the great Joe Don Baker as Macklin’s pal Cody. And Robert Duvall is very good though it’s strange seeing someone so unconventional looking playing this particular role. In this time in his life you would have expected Duvall to be one of the random gangsters or a friendly lawyer. 

He does not, under any circumstances, look like an action hero. The 1970s were a weird time though and Duvall is a great actor regardless of the role. 

This is what I love about chasing down old movies. Sometimes you open Al Copone’s vault and there’s nothing there and sometimes you find a bag full of stolen money, a getaway car and a couple of tough guys having too much fun on a big screen.

Always fun to go through a directors filmography and find the eccentric flick in the bunch. 

It’s kind of like discovering the crazy uncle in your family that no one talks about. 

IMDB claims that star Ellen Burstyn got the power to make anything she wanted after she starred in The Exorcist and she picked a script about a woman who’s life is upended after her husband dies and hits the road with her adolescent son. 

When she went looking for a director she reached out to Francis Ford Coppola who sent her to Marty. And this scene of the alleged meeting between the two of them is as good as anything in the movie: 

“While impressed with Scorsese’s talent after viewing Mean Streets (1973), Burstyn still hesitated to hire the director, fearing he could only direct men. When she asked Scorsese what he knew about women, Scorsese replied, “Nothing, but I’d like to learn.” Satisfied with his enthusiasm, Burstyn immediately hired Scorsese.”

Marty is not just the best director in the best generation of filmmakers but he is, and always has been, a hell of a salesman. 

How’s the movie? Great in spots, dull in others. Not funny enough to be a comedy and not dramatic enough to stick with you after the credits roll. 

Burstyn won an Oscar for this and she deserved it.

I liked the ending and I like Kristofferson as the hunk with a heart of gold. But this is very early Kristofferson and proto-Scorsese. 

Ask him about it and Scorsese will tell you it was a nice little picture and he got to have his first real movie set built for $85,000. 

There’s a Harvey Keitel scene where he holds someone at knifepoint and is so violent and scary that you fear he might come off the screen and slash you. 

Exactly the wrong thing for this mostly sweet movie but Marty is gonna be Marty man. 

Burstyn apparently wanted a gritty, realistic portrait of a woman struggling in America. But this material is Hallmark up and down the line. Scorsese does what he can with it but this is a movie where the final boyfriend is a cowboy who owns a small ranch. It was never gonna be Jeanne Dielman. 

Ultimately, it was exactly the kind of film I expected and is just not the type of thing I seek out very often. When I’m in the mood for something like this I would probably watch Sweet Magnolias again. 

Anyway, someday I’ll finish off the Scorsese filmography. New York, New York is out there … waiting.

When I was in college I got into a fight with a fellow student about The Spanish Prisoner. She hated it and I, being me, adored it. 

“It’s so dull,” she shrieked. 

And, honestly, I’ve seen David Mamet’s little crime movie three or four times now and she wasn’t wrong. I think it pays off if you pay careful attention and see how several little throwaway things turn into important moments later in the film. Once you see the full picture you understand why the pieces were placed down in each exact location. 

I think the word I would use is not dull but bloodless. For whatever reason, on a scale of one to ten everyone is emotionally at a five. Or less. And the main character, Joe Ross (Campbell Scott) an engineer who has invented “the process” stays there even when he comes across a murdered friend or finds himself running for his life. 

On the one hand, you might say, “Your whole life is on the line pal, show some emotion!” 

But there are those who don’t let things slip in public, no matter what is happening around us. Engineers are not generally thought of as founts of emotion.\

Also, a lot of the people in this movie are pretending to be something while in actuality they are professional criminals. 

Professionals don’t show you their cards or let emotions get in the way of the job. Am I overly defensive of the lack of emotion in a 30 year-old movie that no one but me ever liked? 

Maybe. Shut up.  

Initially, I thought, given its bloodless ways, that perhaps this was early in Mamet’s career as a director. But no, this was movie number five. Next, he will adapt Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy which is full of emotion but alas all the characters in it are British so the emotion is buried deep under waistcoats and manners. 

What you are seeing in The Spanish Prisoner is exactly what Mamet wants you to see exactly as he intended. I do imagine there were some tough budget constraints especially given how a knifing and a shooting are handled late in the picture. Both strike me as events that are shown this way because there wasn’t money enough to do it differently. 

Ultimately, I think, Mamet is most interested in presenting the con. Here’s the game. Now you try to figure out who is in on it and why. Elaborate con games were almost always at the center of Mamet’s movies. Too elaborate some of you might say. At one point you have to wonder how many people are involved in this given the comings and goings of various people in various scenes. 

Someone on IMDB described this as a heist movie since it is decidedly not the actual Spanish Prisoner con. 

They are wrong. 

If I break into your office and steal your things then I have committed a heist. If I fool you into giving me your valuables then I have conned you. And that is what happens here. 

The Spanish Prisoner is now more commonly known as The Nigerian Prince scam. That scam is this: I need some money to get my money (or myself) out of a hostile foreign country, if you will send me some cash you will be greatly rewarded when I am free. 

In the movie the scam is not that Steve Martin’s Jimmy Dell is a conman it’s that nearly everyone around Ross is in on the con and they all, working together, convince him to do something stupid. 

Your immediate reaction might be, “I would never do that.”

The terse review I read from a friend was, “Campbell Scott’s character might be one of the dumbest protagonists I’ve ever seen in a movie.” 

I think my friend is unfair. First, you know you are watching a movie about a con because you read the description of the movie. But Joe Ross doesn’t know that. He’s not on the lookout for hijinks. If a shady character told you (or Joe) to do something dumb you would probably say no. But if someone you believed to be an FBI agent told you to do it, I suspect you would obey orders without requesting a second opinion.

Ok. In no particular order here are some of the things I love about The Spanish Prisoner. 

During one scene a group of business people are told how much money their company will make if they institute the process. The number is written on a chalkboard so that the men can see the number and show us that they are impressed by the figure.

The audience, however, never sees how much money is involved. A million? 10 million? A billion? You get the information you need to know and not a tiny bit more. Also, no matter how inflation affects the viewer 30 years later, that imaginary number is always impressive. 

I had a hearty laugh at that.

Mamet dialogue delivered by Steve Martin. 

“Good people, bad people, they generally look like what they are.”

Martin never quite makes his villain work and he never played a villain again (at least as far as I can tell), but it’s fun to see Martin do something different. He should have played a few more criminals in the latter half of his movie career instead of starring in Bowfinger or The Pink Panther. 

Ricky Jay. Anytime Ricky Jay shows up I’m having a good time. Consider this line as given in Ricky’s world-weary, “I have no more copulations with which to give,” tone.

“We must never forget that we are human, and as humans we dream, and when we dream, we dream of money.”

That’s not quite as good as my favorite Mamet line of all time, “Everybody needs money that’s why they call it money!”

But it is razor close.

I like when two characters are done pretending and one of them gleefully tells the other to kill Joe. It can be exhausting pretending to like the mark of an elaborate scam.

How wonderful when the masks can finally come off.  

Finally, there is, in fact, two other heists in this flick. Mamet steals from Shakespeare, “I put a thief in my mouth to steal my brain.”

And from Henry David Thoreau, “Beware of all enterprises which require new clothes.”

The thing rolling around in my head since seeing Black Bag is how hard it must be to make something that feels as effortlessly cool as this. 

Steven Soderbergh is maybe not the best director currently working.

That’s probably Christopher Nolan or Ryan Coogler or David Fincher or Spike Lee or Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese or Greta Gerwig or Kathryn Bigelow or … or fill in your favorite. 

But Soderbergh is the director who makes the absolute coolest movies around. 

Sort of like how Elvis Costello was the coolest rock star of his generation. Other people had bigger hits or connected better but that guy was cool. 

No I can’t define it or explain it or defend it. It just is. 

Soderbergh’s credits are full of ups and downs and things I sometimes ignored. I really should watch The Knick someday. 

But check out Kimi and Logan Lucky for recent examples of this. And then go back to Ocean’s Eleven. They shouldn’t have ever made a sequel but the first one is incredible. 

Check out The Limey and Traffic and for my money the coolest crime movie ever made, Out of Sight.

Soderbergh remains one of the few directors to properly translate an Elmore Leonard novel for the big screen.

With Black Bag Soderbergh and Writer David Koepp hit the target in every scene. 

For the record, do not go in expecting spy thriller action. This is much closer to John le Carre than James Bond. Or, actually, it’s Agatha Christie but with spies. 

Tight, stylish and thrilling and capped by two exceptional scenes of intimate dinners where where the guests reveal too much. 

Smooth with a lot of talk but in each conversation everyone is working an angle and trying to see where to slip in the knife. 

I loved nearly every second of it and I love that it will pay off again with a repeat viewing. 

That’s because when we get to the end all the secrets are revealed there are one or two moments where I’m going to have to reconsider Michael Fassbender’s performance. What did he know and when did he know it? 

There is a moment three quarters of the way in where he seems devastated. Was he? Or was that an act? 

The rest of the cast simmers and shines with Cate Blanchett settling in somewhere between amused and dangerous for most of the flick. 

The main group of spies Rege-Jean Page, Naomi Harris, Tom Burke and Marisa Abela each bring a particular bit of strength to the film. 

Abela already proved her skills on HBO’s Industry and you can see why she got pulled in here. She’s playing a different flavor of that kind of character. I hope she’s not upset at being typecast cause I would watch her do this particular thing again and again. 

Also, and I really can’t stress this enough it’s a tight 93 minutes. 

Get in, shoot your shot, and get out. 

And if anyone causes a problem they might just end up in the trunk of a car. 

There is a brief discussion early in this flick about Hellboy’s striking appearance and whether or not he looks like the devil. 

One character is certain he knows the truth.  

“I met that son of a bitch. He don’t look nothing like you.”

Ahh if only the rest of the movie had been that good. Fans of Hellboy comics know that it is a genius work that melds horror and superheroes and folklore from all over the world. 

Creator Mike Mignola has never been satisfied with the filmed versions of his singular creations. The original Hellboy movie from 2003 was excellent and it was one of those movies (5 years before Iron Man) that proved that comic book movies that were faithful to the source material could really work. 

It looked right and Ron Perlman was the perfect person to play him. 

We got a second Hellboy movie a few years later with diminishing returns (still pretty great though) and the studio wouldn’t fund a third to cap it off with a proper trilogy. 

Mignola tried a reboot in 2019, starring David Harbor and contradicting at least one big thing that happened in the first movie. 

It failed. 

And now this. A smaller bite at the apple, that faithfully recreates a three issue comic The Crooked Man written by Mignola and drawn by the late Richard Corbin. 

This movie is so faithful to the comic it even sticks in a one page gag about the creation of withballs that was done using a character similar to The Crone from EC Comics. 

Sadly, the path from page to screen is fraught with problems and devils on all sides. 

Most of this just doesn’t work. The soundtrack is meant to be scary, I suppose, but it’s just generic and annoying. 

Jack Kesy does what he can but he’s just not the right guy for this character. 

And even at one hour and forty minutes this is way too long. I have long said that the perfect Hellboy movie would be a series of vignettes. You could take Mignola’s 20 page stories (sometimes much shorter sometimes a little longer) and just string the best of them together into an excellent film. 

Of course, I realized today that what I’m actually describing is television. 

Maybe someday, someone will look at the brilliant comic and come up with the budget and actors who can turn it into the X–Filesesque show it could be for a new generation. 

Bela Lugosi is about to wrestle with a giant, stolen, cloth octopus in freezing water.

His friend and director Ed Wood forgot the motor that makes the creature’s limbs work. So, Lugosi will, in a moment, through his old body on the ground and flap around to make it seem like he’s fighting for his life. 

But first, he needs to rant. 

“After I did Dracula, the studio offered me Frankenstein! But I turned it down, the part wasn’t sexy enough. It was too degrading for a big star like me,” Bela moans. 

Knowing that this could go on for some time, and will probably include a section on how Boris Karloff was a no talent hack, Wood gently chides his star. 

“Bela, I’ve got twenty-five scenes to shoot tonight,” Wood says. 

“Don’t let me slow you down,” Lugosi replies.

It is a perfect scene in a perfect movie about people who don’t give up even when they get dashed on the rocks of life. People who don’t give up, even when maybe they should. 

Tim Burton’s film, Ed Wood, is ostensibly about the infamous writer, director, and producer of notoriously bad movies, but while Wood drives the action, Burton clearly wants us to sit with aging, drug addicted, and lonely Bela Lugosi. 

Lugosi, having been a movie titan, is washed up, broke and in the final stages of his life. Wood is a fan and a wannabe director who believes that Lugosi can give him a shot at Hollywood success. Their friendship gives Lugosi a chance to act and to dream again. 

And Lugosi props up a guy who, very famously, does not have what it takes. 

“At Universal, they shot two scenes a day. Eddie can knock off twenty or thirty!  He’s incredible,” Lugosi says. 

Ed Wood was the last of the Tim Burton movies that I wished to see but still had not seen. If it’s not his best (my father wasn’t an actor but my father was very much the guy from Big Fish, so I’m particularly partial to that one) it’s near the top of the list. 

Ed Wood is amusing, though, rarely laugh out loud funny. Except, when I went back and read the script I started laughing out loud at the dialogue. 

Late in the movie Bela’s stand-in is doing an impression of him and it is the standard, “I vant to suck your blood.”

Bill Murray, playing one of Bela and Ed’s close friends, Bunny Breckinridge, has a better suggestion. 

“Let’s hear you call Boris Karloff a cocksucker.”

Ok, I howled at that one in the movie and I am howling now thinking about it. It’s interesting to me that the script is funnier than the movie, but I think there’s some genius of Burton and his actors in there. These aren’t caricatures, they are real people who lived and loved and died trying. They are funny people, but you want to laugh with them (not at them) even when they probably deserve to be laughed at. 

So in the hands of Martin Landau, Bela Lugosi is frail and sad and funny. He may be a joke to most of the world but to his friend Eddie he’s still a giant of the silver screen. 

The acting from everyone is great all the way down the line except for Johnny Depp as Ed Wood. 

Depp plays him like an alien who is trying his best to pretend to be a human. I don’t know if that is in any way how the real Ed Wood behaved in real life. But in this great flick about bad movies it’s note perfect.  

One more scene that moved me was Wood meeting his director hero Orson Welles. 

Seeing them together I was reminded that Welles had one of the greatest screenwriters, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and one of the greatest cinematographers, Gregg Toland, of his time by his side when he made Citizen Kane. His editor was Robert Wise, who would go on to direct 20 or 30 classics of his own including West Side Story and The Sound of Music.  

I certainly don’t mean to demean Welles but it does make me wonder what Eddie could have done with a little support. My immediate thought is, “probably not much.” But I hate to be cynical about people who were out there giving it their all.   

In their chance encounter, Wood finds he has a lot in common with the great auteur. Both of them are dealing with producers who want to change their movies, force them to hire people who are wrong for the parts, and generally get in the way. 

Sure, Ed is making schlock in 5 shooting days for almost no money and Welles is spending millions on studio pictures but it doesn’t matter. They’re both filmmakers.

They’re both legends.  

I am tempted to describe the plot of American Buffalo for you but I fear that the description won’t do it justice and will ruin your experience if you ever give this a try. 

A lot of the fun, in a work like this, is coming to terms with the plot through what is revealed in the dialogue.

So rather than walk that road let us try another path. This is a David Mamet play turned into a movie about three guys discussing a burglary. 

At this point you either know who David Mamet is and you are in or you know who he is and you are all the way out. 

But suppose you don’t know Mamet.

I can say some things. Yes there are things that can be said. 

He is a playwright and director who won a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glenn Ross. That play, later turned into a firecracker of a movie, was about real estate dealers trying to con and or seduce their customers and each other. It is colloquially known as Death of a Fucking Salesman and it is one of the greatest plays ever written. 

Mamet’s character speak in particular ways. Ways that could shock you. Yes, they could be shocking. Ways that are cryptic and almost always highly entertaining. 

A lot of folks can make a movie with billions in special effects or millions in interesting shots and movie violence. I love those too. But only a handful of great writers can take a couple of great actors and turn an hour and a half of discussions and dissertations into an entertaining work of art.

Ok, let me say this. I will say just this much and no more about the plot.

American Buffalo is about Don, small time businessman/low level criminal, who is worried he was taken for a fool by one of his customers. 

He enlists his gopher Bobby to help him plan a robbery and his friend Teach to carry it out. 

Don and Teach spend their day in what might be best described as a verbal boxing match and then as the robbery grows closer the tension and suspicion grow beyond reason and it all leads to a … well that would be telling wouldn’t it. 

Anyway, if you are a particular kind of movie viewer who can live within the confines of what amounts to a stage play filmed with movie cameras then this is for you.

If you need more than that visually, or action set pieces, then it’s ok, I give you permission to move along. 

Finally, I should note that there are three amazing actors (and only three) in this thing. Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Franz, and Sean Nelson. The quality of the work is not in question. 

I am, sad, just a bit knowing that Al Pacino played Teach for years on Broadway but didn’t have time in his schedule for it when the producers got ready to make the film. 

Now, should they have waited for Pacino? I know my answer. 

But as a Mamet character might say, “friendship, loyalty, these are nice things. Yes. But we are men of business. We do not wait.”

This book has the old power in it. 

Comics legend and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola returns to the pages and fills them with inky black legends and spooky folk tales from across the world.

As an artist Mignola’s work is so distinctive that once you see it, you recognize it on whatever and wherever he roams. Mignola plied his trade first in superhero comics co-creating the masterpieces Dr. Strange and Dr Doom Tragedy and Torment and Batman Gotham by Gaslight. 

He ultimately broke through at Dark Horse in 1994 by creating Hellboy, which as Mignola would tell you, was a vehicle for him to draw all the horror movie monsters, weird folklore creatures and other things he loved. 

Hellboy blossomed into a publishing empire and a collection of live-action and animated movies. Eventually, Mignola wrapped up his part of the Hellboy mythology and stopped drawing the title. He went into semi-retirement with his final Hellboy mini-series Hellboy in Hell in 2012. 

He returns to us with a new collection of stories, collected in the hardcover format, called Bowling for Corpses. The stories are set in a new fantasy realm that Mignola has dubbed Lands Unknown. It is as weird and wonderful as you could have ever hoped for.

One thing the movies never quite did, and maybe couldn’t do, was show off Mignola’s talent at short stories. Some of the best Hellboy stuff was just a few pages or an issue or two of some strange encounter Mignola’s heroes would have with evil or tragic mythological creatures. Someone could create a dang fine movie if they just took The Wolves of Saint August, The Baba Yaga, The Corpse and The Iron Shoes and stitched them together. 

Modern movies almost always demand a single narrative over the course of two hours but with Hellboy the fun is in quick hits and surprises.  

Bowling for Corpses is just this, weird beautiful short stories and hints at what is to come.

Hellboy has continued on with different artists doing stories during different points in his strange life and with various spinoffs. But as good and even great as those things can be it is special when Mignola puts his pen, inks and brushes to the drawing board.

If you are a fan, like me, then you probably already picked this up. But if not Bowling with Corpses is a great stand-alone collection of Mignola stories. A perfect little appetizer that could lead you to a whole world of amazing stories.

Also, rejoice! Mignola has already finished his second collection of Lands Unknown tales and is working on a third. 

Welcome back big Mike.    

The 6 minutes opening montage of musical guests performing on SNL is brilliant and inventive. 

The rest of the documentary sails along doing what you would expect from an NBC produced documentary about the storied franchise celebrating 50 years on the air. 

Which is, everyone (perhaps rightly) pats themselves on the back a lot. 

According to Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music the historic comedy variety show was the place to be for musicians who were about to break big and a nurturing home for talented weirdos and a cultural icon that was unafraid to bring in artists that polite society wanted silenced. 

Honestly, can’t argue with most of that. I’m just not sure how much credit should be awarded for having Nirvana on your show when they were selling 100,000 albums a week. 

Adele makes a stronger case by noting that her first appearance on the show moved her album from the middle of the charts to the top — and that it happened on the flight home from NYC to England. 

She says, years later and still astonished, that she never believed in overnight successes until it happened to her. 

You are in good hands knowing that Questlove directed the documentary. And if you haven’t seen his Summer of Soul you should really get on that. 

SNL is such a cultural institution that I can mark my life by its controversies. 

So I distinctly remember when Sinead O’Connor ripped up a photo of the pope but I had no idea that Elvis Costello had ever been in trouble with the powers that be for changing a song at the last minute. 

The documentary moves expertly through its themes pointing out how SNL embraced rap music in its infancy, was willing to go with avante garde acts and blends in a litany of musical highlights. 

I’m a little bummed there is no country music at all in the thing but that’s probably to be expected from a show that for fifty years has desperately wanted to be seen as cool by whomever was in high school at the time. 

Ignore me, I’m bitter in my old age, this is entertaining and wonderful. If you are an SNL fan you are sure to enjoy it.

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.