Cornered by the DEA, convicted New York drug dealer Montgomery Brogan reevaluates his life in the 24 remaining hours before facing a seven-year jail term.
Director: Spike Lee
Stars: Edward Norton, Barry Pepper, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307901/
Watched online, mediocre print. Clearer picture but subtitles also out there.
This is the first SL film I've seen without any black principal character. EN does a rant that's racist, but goes after every ethnic group; the rant is almost incidental to his character.
I noticed the music again. Not the soundtrack, but the relentless underscore: Music by Terence Blanchard. Not the first time I've noticed this jazzy music, and it's not a good thing. It's like SL is trying to replicate the Duke Ellington score of Anatomy of a Murder ('59) (recall that he stole the poster of that film for one of his own). I'm not sure that was a great score, but it was groundbreaking to have a jazz score back then. Not so now.
The film seems to want us to sympathize with this drug dealer who's young, small, and sorta "pretty" going off to prison. I didn't catch what drug(s) he was dealing, but he was not a small-timer. He had a big brick of cash and 2 bricks of drugs found in his home, and rode in a limo a couple of times. But we open the film with his taking a beaten dog to an animal hospital (he adopts the dog) so we get the aw shucks reaction. Then the bulk of the film time we get him interacting with his friends/family during his last day of freedom.
Unfortunately one of his friends looks like a clean-shaven version of him, so when we meet that friend, I thought it was him, and he was doing some shady big investment. I didn't follow whether the result was a win or loss for him. Then we see both together onscreen, so I learned they were friends. (Blurry print didn't help.)
We meet another friend (PSH) and the girlfriend and the father.
He expresses his concern about having his teeth knocked out by inmates so he can better "service" them. His sentence is for 7 years.
His dad narrates a scenario where he doesn't turn himself in (why was he free in the first place?) and makes a new life for himself in a desert town. Since we get the illustrated version, it's not clear to me whether he takes that option or goes to prison. The film ends with them still in the car, not in the desert.
Not a journey worth repeating.
Rated 7.7 (160,985)
distr. Buena Vista, dir. Lee; 6
