I found Mo' Better Blues last night. As I
suspected, a Spike Lee film was relatively easy to find at the
video store near us since they tend to only stock movies with
some sort of recognizable name attached. Having Denzel Washington
and Wesley Snipes in it did not hurt in this regard either. Which
is a long way of saying that Round Midnight and Straight, No
Chaser do not fit this description and therefore were nowhere to
be found. I doubt I'll have time to get to a store with a more
complete selection before this thread shifts to other movies.
However, Mo' Better Blues was certainly worth
the trip. And the thoughtful comments posted by others here
helped as I watched the film.
My negative comments first - I understand why
Benear considers Spike Lee best taken in small doses. This was my
first Spike Lee film. Glenda made a comparison between Lee and
some of Woody Allen's films. There are strong similarities in
spite of the radically different details. And like Allen, Lee
strikes me as a director you either like or you don't. I happen
to like Lee's style, but Mrs. Riv commented, about halfway
through, ?So what happens other than: take a woman to bed, play
music, take a woman to bed, play music??
Not that I see anything inherently wrong with
such a cycle, but the point about the seeming aimlessness of the
movie at that time is well taken.
I agree with Benear's wish that Lee had stuck
to directing rather than putting himself in the film as well. I
thought, while I enjoyed the movie, it was somewhat self absorbed
- almost as though Lee suffers from the same self absorption he
explores in Bleek. I wonder what Lee would do if he couldn't make
movies? Maybe that is a question he *has* asked himself and this
movie was the result.
The showy techniques (such as the Indigo/Clarke/Bleek
argument) did not bother me. I like directors who use such
techniques if there is a good reason. However, it was somewhat
confusing in the Bleek recovery sequence to determine if what we
were seeing was reality, or a ?technique? to illustrate the state
of Bleek's mind, or a combination of the two. Lee did not make
consistently clean decisions in this regard.
And there were two times where Lee sacrificed
continuity in order to pull off one of these statements. Mrs. Riv
did not buy it at all that Bleek could be completely unaware of
his catastrophic loss playing ability until he got up in front of
an audience at Shadow's club. As badly damaged as his lips were
from the assault he would have had that revelation in the privacy
of his own room. But it was certainly more dramatic to place the
full revelation at the club.
The other discontinuity was at the end when the
Gilliam family was shown in the same house Bleek grew up in. It
is a nice summary of the main thrust of the film, but Indigo
obviously was well off in her own right (as evidenced by her own
apartment). Why the sudden shift to homey lower middle classdom?
Not that it couldn't happen, but Lee did not help the audience
into the shift. He was more interested making the point.
What I enjoyed most about the film was what
Glendajean referred to as illustrating the artistic process. In
this area Bleek's self absorption is appropriate. Lee did a
wonderful job of illustrating this absorption and its necessity
to the creative person. I thought Lee was asking the audience to
consider all our own absorptions. Do we make the same mistakes
Bleek made? Do we understand why it is so hard to see it in
ourselves when our ultimate goals are just as worthy as Bleek's?
And finally, it is obvious that Lee has a
finely tuned appreciation of jazz. Diva noted the well chosen
pieces Lee inserted as background. I noticed the way Miles Davis
was used as a jumping off place for Bleek's character. In
addition to the obvious (Bleek's trumpet playing style and naming
his son Miles), Lee used the cut All Blues from the album Kind of
Blue as background for the first time we see Bleek and Clarke
making love. Bleek was an innovator, just as Miles was, in trying
to incorporate other styles of music into jazz. We see pictures
of John Coltrane on the walls and his albums figure prominently
in the set dressings. Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley were
important collaborators with Miles in his ground breaking work in
the middle to late 50s.
I loved the conversation between Shadow and
Bleek at the party. It reminded me of other conversations I have
had about the relevance of live theatre to today's audiences. I
was annoyed when the other party goers stopped it.
Diva, do you know if any of the relationships
between Adderley, Coltrane and Miles were reflected in what we
saw between Shadow and Bleek?
As a last thought - having Bleek rip the way he
did into a hard bop solo at the time he saw Giant being yanked
out of the club by the thugs was a stoke of genius. In one image
it told us so much about this part of Bleek and Giant's
relationship and a little about the bop evolution in jazz.
