25th Hour (2002)
Directed by Spike Lee
On the eve of a seven-year prison sentence, a New York drug dealer spends his final day of freedom confronting his past, his relationships, and the choices that led to his downfall in a city still reeling from 9/11.
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What critics compared 25th Hour to
25th Hour has moments of grace in being the first film invested almost entirely in the grim mélange of postures struck by the post 9/11 metropolis, but remains overlong, fatally overscored (by Terence Blanchard), and laden by a self-referentiality that unwisely harks back to Lee's lone unqualified triumph, Do the Right Thing .
This time he's delivered his best, most cohesive and most passionate film since Do the Right Thing.
25th Hour is Lee's best feature since Do the Right Thing, and part of what's so impressive about it is the way it gets us to think as well as feel -- about things we're almost never asked to consider, such as what it means to send drug dealers to prison.
This scene seems so typical of Spike Lee (it's like an extension of a sequence in " Do the Right Thing ") that it's a surprise to find it's in the original novel--but then Benioff's novel may have been inspired by Lee's earlier film.
The time-limited, pressure cooker environment brings to mind Lee's "He Got Game" and "Do the Right Thing", and the director showcases his admirable ability to capture moments of emotional substance through striking visual style (Hoffman's post-kiss scene is a classic).
(In this respect it resembles other horn-dog English teacher movies, like Wonder Boys and 25th Hour , in which Paquin also played a poetry-spouting nymphet.)
Though she knows how to work her wily magic (and here Paquin recalls her role in 25th Hour), Lili, a "chick" in Walt's sense of the word, manipulates her options, flirting with Bernard and Walt after she moves into a spare room at Bernard's.
Bernie attempts to strengthen his ego by turning Walt even further away from his mother by telling him about the affairs she began to have five years earlier and by suggesting that his sexually provocative student Lili (Anna Paquin, "25th Hour," "X2") board in his extra bedroom.
In that context, Dan Trachtenberg's 10 Cloverfield Lane, the follow-up to Matt Reeves's badly-underestimated Cloverfield (which itself pairs with Spike Lee's 25th Hour as the best elegies for 9/11 New York (Reeves's film even more in some ways, in its emulation of Japan's kaiju cycle)), is about the way the frightening underbelly of paranoid American fanaticism has suddenly gained legitimacy and voice in the mainstream.
This entertaining trick requires the moral sophistication evident in his moody and underrated 25th Hour and is reminiscent of two classic New York crime films from the 1970s -- Dog Day Afternoon, referred to by Frazier, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.
Make no mistake, Lee is still in his typically outspoken form, he's still using film in the manner I described when reviewing 25th Hour -- "like a wild-eyed protestor dousing himself with gasoline and striking a match."
I like all the main players in this one and thoroughly enjoyed the last Spike Lee film that I saw, 25th Hour.
This is also a welcome return to form for director Spike Lee, who's been in a slump for a few years, whose last watchable film was, arguably, "25th Hour" in 2002.
Director Spike Lee ("25th Hour," "She Hate Me") seems to be swinging between his own less and less compelling projects and studio fare such as this, and he just about hits this one out of the park.
It’s a refreshing movie that gets your adrenaline racing and continues the potential Spike Lee reignited with 25th Hour four years ago.
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The movie culminates with a beautifully directed sequence that recalls, oddly and pleasurably, both Spike Lee's 25th Hour and Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry.
The Trojan War from 3,200 years ago is simplified in the old-fashioned 1950s epic Hollywood style through German action director Wolgang Petersen ("Das Boot," but since then a Hollywood action film director with films such as "The Perfect Storm"), and the screenplay is written by David Benioff ("25th Hour") as inspired by Homer's The Iliad.
Screenwriter David Benioff ("25th Hour") strips Homer's epic poem down to the human tragedies wrought by battles fought for pride, greed and lust while director Wolfgang Petersen ("The Perfect Storm") and his cinematographer Roger Pratt ("Iris") fetishize their Achilles, Brad Pitt, with more gusto than they do the woman whose face launched all those boats.
I don?t know if German-born director Petersen, whose more recent credits include Outbreak, Air Force One, and The Perfect Storm , and writer Benioff, who broke onto the scene two years ago with the Spike Lee-directed adaptation of his own novel 25th Hour, intended for this to be a tribute to those extremely expensive, showy, and badly acted classics of the 1960s like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, or whether it happened by accident.
Combining Homer's "Iliad" with screenwriter David Benioff's ( "25th Hour" ) Hollywood-infused imagination, the film is set in approximately 1200 B.C., at a time when Greece had conquered most of the immediate area.
Screenwriter David Benioff ( "25th Hour" ) takes many, many liberties with his source material, some of which are creative and shrewd, like using the mistaken-identity battlefield death of Achilles' look-alike cousin to imply how legends of the warrior's immortality spread in this version of the story which is devoid of gods, demigods and such mythology.
Screenwriter David Benioff previously penned Spike Lee's 25th Hour (adapting his own novel), and that film, with its subplot involving the effects of 9/11 on its New York characters, remains one of the few movies produced since that tragedy to bring real-world issues onto the screen.