Sorry, this movie sucks

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Things get dull early an often in this in this mawkish jazz bio fiction written and directed by Spike Lee.Bleek Gilliam (Denzell Washington) is a happenin' jazz trumpeter that fronts a quintet packing them in at Below the Underdog. His problems include an incompetent manager, a stage hogging sax player and two girlfriends that he's playing musical mattress with. The real love of his life though is his trumpet and his music. The band's manager, Giant, has a dangerous gambling problem and proves to be an ineffective negotiator with greedy club owners and would be best jettisoned but Bleek remains loyal for as long as possible. It will prove to his undoing as an artist but ironically contribute to his growth as a man.As Bleek, Denzell Washington is all wrong as the ambitious trumpeter with a babe on each arm. He's too sweet a guy to be so self centered about his art, dispensing patience and love to those close to him with a low key remoteness. He simply lacks the fire. Wesley Snipes who plays Henderson the sax player would have been far more suited for the role but even he would have to mouth the flaccid throw away scribblings of Lee's torpid dialogue. As Giant, Lee hits the trifecta with an abysmal performance to match his writing and direction. Loosely attempting to mirror the grubby but sympathetic Ratso Rizzo to Bleek's Joe Buck he adopts a limp and even the "I'm walkin' here" moment from Midnight Cowboy. In this case you wish the taxi would run him over and be done with it.Lee's script is all tepid argument, heavy handed ribbing and veiled insult with some requisite clumsy editorializing that Lee has to inject to remain down. The scenes between the band members backstage and in rehearsal lack spark and are only surpassed in dreariness by the Bleek, Giant conversations that have an ad lib look and go in circles. Completing this travesty is Lee's pretentious visual style. Tracking shots, zooms and pans are wasted and without significance to scenes. They just wander.Blues is Lee's love letter to jazz (made implicit by the mountains of memorabilia plastered all over the sets) and it's all sentimental clap trap that lacks passion and verve. Jazz on film is better served by Tavernier's "Round Midnight" and Eastwood's "Bird" which get below the surface, reveal more sides of the form, the pain behind it in addition to offering infinitely superior lead performances by Forrest Whitaker and the real deal Dexter Gordon. This Spike Lee Joint doesn't even offer a mild buzz. It's some pretty bad homegrown.

I want to recommend Mo' Better Blues more, at least to a specific crowd, than I can exactly, even though it is a good film. Spike Lee, coming right off of his seminal Do the Right Thing, is highly charged and as striking as ever in his subjective camera and direction. But the characters themselves in his script, more or less, are fairly shallow conventional players in his elaborate show. But elaborate it is, and in the realm of it being a pure jazz movie is where I can recommend this the most. Quite simply, for jazz fans, this is where it's at as far as great soundtracks go, and on top of the sensational tracks that Lee has put together, with the given greats like Coltrane, Davis, and probably Rollins in there somewhere, there's also the final musical score provided by his father, Bill. While it's not as classic and specific for all the right reasons as Do the Right Thing, there's a sense here that Bill Lee reached a high point with the sophistication of his compositions, and had he not passed on could have gone even further with his son in creating memorable orchestrations. So at the least, as a jazz fan personally more than anything, this provides some many fine moments (Lee is also very good at using excellent Coltrane tracks for love scenes, or just talking scenes, or whatever).Unfortunately Lee doesn't have quite the same control over the sensibilities of his characters. There wasn't really much I cared about with the main character, Bleek Gilliam, played by Denzel Washington, because he's like one of those interesting yet purely shallow, self-absorbed archetypes that one's seen in many other musical dramas. There's also Wesley Snipes as Washington's rival in Bleek's quintet, where the ego rivalries flame up from time to time, usually in a macho, grandiose fashion. Then there's the 'romantic' side to Bleek, where when not practicing his horn he's practicing himself on two ladies, Cynda Williams and Joie Lee, and that he becomes a worse dog than he started out with (as Joie Lee observes, he's a "good dog" at the start, but still a dog, so perhaps one could make the point that it's the progression of a dog in the story). More intriguing, however, than the sexual mind-games that end up getting played on Bleek via his infidelities and the eventual match-up of Clark and Shadow, is Spike Lee's own Giant. Lee shows once again how limited he is as an actor, yet within those limits has carved a niche for himself in his early films that is atypical yet charming and always good for amusement. Here, as in Do the Right Thing, he does give him some dimension, and through the clichéd wormy-guy-who-owes-gambling-debts-to-gangsters sub-plot, there is truth there in how he plays it.In fact, the acting and Lee's own determined, headstrong direction is not the problem I had with the film. If anything, this is what makes the film quite watchable, even up through the end scenes when the script becomes more and more desperate to make us care about Bleek's fate as a musician &/or lover to Indigo (I didn't care, really, due to Bleek not really earning much human dimension despite him being kinda cool in a slick way early on in the film). The actors are always dependable to follow the emotional lines to a believable fault, which is obviously part of the atmosphere Lee has on this and many other films of his; we can't imagine these characters acting any other way, even if they're a little 'too' theatrical for their own good. And I will probably like watching parts of this on TV again if it comes on just to see those wonderful shots that Lee gets at times, like the circular spin around Washington as he practices playing trumpet with just his fingers miming at the camera, or when Lee is avoiding the hoods and tries to go swiftly past the car waiting for him, or even the very Scorsesean uses of red tinting in the lighting schemes and the usage of slow motion.So really, Mo' Better Blues has got a lot of things going for it, including a swift, cool sense of humor at times (I loved Robin Harris's bits of stand-up on stage, and the down to earth nature of the band members in smaller scenes), and a soundtrack I'd love to seek out if it were available. But it's also got some issues in how it deals honestly with making them palpable under the circumstances. Maybe that's part of it being a musical or other, but it seemed a little under-cooked despite the 2 hour plus running time. So it's surely worthwhile, if you're a die-hard Lee fan, but it's also something of a slight slump dramatically following the precedent set by the film just before (not that it's an easy film to beat as a director's best).

I am normally a Spike Lee fan. It takes some time to really get into his "mojo", but once you see the clear message and the ability to tell the story that is close to his heart, Lee is a genius. Unlike The 25th Hour or Bamboozled (two of my favorite films of his), there was no clear story in this film. I was able to understand the struggle between Washington and the choice to play well or be influenced by others, but for some odd reason Lee was never able to get the true feeling out. Washington did a decent job with what was handed to him, but you could tell that this was not Lee's favorite film. Not only did Lee direct this film, but he also wrote it. You could tell. The camera work was horrid and the writing only contributed to the decay of the film. This film was coming full circle and it wasn't going to be pretty. Lee was not 100% behind this film as he was with Do the Right Thing. Of all the films I have seen Lee direct, this was the brightest and more modest of his films. It was almost as if he created a Hollywood movie instead of one that was all his own. I don't know if he saw the money from Do the Right Thing and ran with it, or what … but this film did not demonstrate his true talent.For anyone out there that has seen this film, and perhaps stopped watching anything directed by Spike Lee afterwards due to this film, I suggest you give him a second chance. Don't get me wrong, I see exactly where you are coming from with this film and why you would want to put this behind you, but Lee does grow up. His work becomes more of his own, and you can see the transformation from a desire to make money to just wanting to make good films. It took me awhile to watch The 25th Hour, but when I did, it was sheer brilliance. Perhaps it was the actors, perhaps the story, but Lee crafted an amazing film out of one man's journey into the unknown. I guess that is what I was hoping Mo' Better Blues would turn out to be. This really dark journey into the life of a man that really never grew up, but instead all I got was Denzel being Denzel. He really is one of the most versatile actors of this generation, and I do consider him the Sydney Poitier of cinema, but this was not the film to showcase his talent.Another issue that I had with this film was the use of Spike's sister playing one of the love interests. I don't know about you, and your family, but I do not think that I could have filmed a sex scene with my sister. I don't care who the actor is or how much money I am getting paid, I would never do it. It is just something that I never wish to see, but apparently that is different for Spike. He went ahead and showed the full nude image of his sister without any remorse. It was sad and it even made me blush. Also, I need somebody to answer me this. What was Flavor Flav doing introducing this film? So, I am sitting there on my couch, ready to start the film, when suddenly there is a voice from the past spelling out the studio that made this film, then he acknowledges himself. That did not build for a strong remaining of the story. Again, I felt that Lee was going for money on this film instead of actual talent. Perhaps that is how he could afford both Denzel and Wesley in the same movie without any explosions.There were two great scenes in this film that made it worth watching through to the end. Don't get me wrong, this was a very bad movie, but there is always a diamond in every alleyway. The scene when Bleek accidentally forgets which woman he is with was mesmerizing. He continually went back and forth, weaving truth to confusion in a way that proved that Lee was actually behind the camera. It was a visionary scene that was probably lost in the shuffle due to the remaining poor scenes. The other scene that was worth watching was the way that Lee introduced and ended the film. By keeping the same pacing and direction, he was able to bring this tragic character around full circle and give him the chance to change his life. Other than these two moments, the rest of the film was pure rubbish, not worth viewing unless you are about to go blind.Grade: ** out of *****

Denzel Washington and Spike Lee remind me of Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi when it comes to actors and directors.This is the first film they worked on together and it was a success. The storyline and music are all great and Spike continues to make good movie. I give this film ***8 out of ****.