Female Film Critics 24/375
Spike Lee’s newest crime thriller Highest 2 Lowest, a re-imagining of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s classic High to Low (1963), is disappointing – in so many ways. Based on the novel King’s Ransom (1959) by Evan Hunter, using the pseudonym Ed McBain, it revolves around a Black Establishment music mogul known as having the “best ears in the business” who is targeted with a ransom plot.
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In the opening shots of Highest to Lowest, director Spike Lee clearly announces that he will put his unique stamp on this remake of iconic Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic High and Low. As cinematographer Matthew Libatique glides through and over New York City to discover the appropriately named David King’s lavish Brooklyn penthouse, Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ plays its entire length on the soundtrack. This amusing, unexpected homage to Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma is an ironic introduction to this Stackin’ Hits music mogul’s next few days after a kidnapper calls with an astronomical ransom demand for King’s teenage son Trey
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Fans of excessive violence and banal stereotypes will welcome director Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, set sixteen years after Gladiator, also directed by Scott. First, good news. Technically, every element shines from John Mathieson’s impressive cinematography reportedly often involving eight to twelve cameras filming simultaneously. Compositions, lighting, art direction, and editing contribute a professional gloss to events, obvious CGI excepted. In addition, the ensemble cast, to a person, commit fully to their two-dimensional characters, all familiar caricatures, lacking any complexity. They each telegraph their function immediately and often.
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Like an ancient road, Gladiator II, a sequel arriving twenty-four years after the Oscar-winning Gladiator, covers some familiar ground. Director Ridley Scott’s historical epic ramps up swords-and-sandals violence, delivering a visual spectacle of decapitation, dismemberment, and free-for-alls that include battles at sea.
Yet the story doesn’t have the same resonance as the original, where the honorable Roman general Maximus (Russell Crowe), betrayed and enslaved, fought for his freedom and to depose a corrupt emperor through combat in the Coliseum.
After Gladiator (2000) won an Oscar as Best Picture, Ridley Scott waited more than 20 years to return to Rome’s ancient Colosseum to film Gladiator II. While the first Gladiator focused on Roman General Maximus (Russell Crowe), this follow-up introduces Lucius who, as a sensitive 12 year-old in Numidia, was forced to leave his aristocratic family, go into hiding and ‘forget’ his identity. it’s a redemptive comeback for 86 year-old Ridley Scott after duds like Napoleon, House of Gucci, and The Last Duel. And it should nab a Best Supporting Actor nomination for scene-stealing Denzel Washington.
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It’s been 24 years since director Ridley Scott awed movie goers with Gladiator, his Oscar-winning Roman Colosseum sword fest soap opera. But It hasn’t been that long in screenplay years. Gladiator II is set 16 years after Lucius witnessed the death of Maximus. Bigger, louder and bloodier, Gladiator II is the epic battle for supremacy. It’s two hours and 20 minutes of posturing and pillaging leading to catastrophic carnage. Heads roll. Literally!
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Director Malcolm Washington’s adaptation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson infuses humor as an uplifting complement to the incisive and insightful commentary on racism, family ties, spirituality, and profound but endangered friendships. Set during the Great Migration, centered on the revered, inherited piano, the family’s and friends’ reactions differ. Boy Willie wants to sell it for, to him, a noble purpose: the dream of owning his own land as a free man. His sister, young widow Berniece, cannot fathom such disrespect for the spirits embodied in and carved into this venerated piano. Events and subplots punctuate their conflict: a potential romance, drinking and playing cards, a visit to a lively bar, and, most significantly, the presence of a credibly malevolent ghost that haunts their history.
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In 2002 Antoine Fuqua directed Denzel Washington to his Best Actor Academy Award. Since then the pair have worked together on several movies, including the middling The Equalizer series based on the 1980s television show of the same name. World weary ex-special ops officer Robert McCall tries to atone for his life of violence by helping those in need. This third film has him in Sicily taking out a group of Mafioso for “taking something that didn’t belong to them,” and ending up shot and under the care of the kindly inhabitants of an idyllic Italian town named Altamonte.
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As a first-time solo director, Joel Coen takes a sparse, stylized look at one of Shakespeare’s most compelling plays. Filming in austere black-and-white, he presents an abstract physical world that’s filled with deep, geometric shadows, sharp angles and bleak walls, focusing on an ambitious middle-aged couple, determined to usurp political power in medieval Scotland.
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Director Joel Coen goes solo as helmer for the first time with a stripped down version of Shakespeare in The Tragedy of Macbeth, starring his Oscar winning wife, Frances McDormand, and fellow Oscar winner, Denzel Washington as the Lady and Lord of the castle. The film was shot in just 36 days — in much the same way the Bard might have done it with all of the action filmed completely on a sound stage — but Coen was still able to fully convey the bleak tension and disquiet of the times.
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