When deciding to adapt Akira Kurosawa's High and lowSpike Lee put the bar in itself. This thriller from 1963 is one of the best of the Japanese author, a study in strong social contrasts that develops in two discrete actions: the first a tense chamber drama that plays in the Hilltop house of a wealthy manufacturer, the second a extensive procedural complaint that descends from this high hole into the Sordi criminal undergradding of Yokohama. High and low Fittings A perfect balance between style (particularly remarkable are Kurosawa's use of deep focus and elegantly choreographed long income) and substance. Apart from the cinematic Bravura, the history of the film, which is adapted from a novel by Ed McBain from 1959, is exciting: Even if you are surprised by almost every shot, you will be breathlessly involved in the tension, and in the moral and ultimately philosophical questions that confronted both heroes and bad guys. At the center of everything is a TISTANIC MOVIE Performance from Toshiro Mifune as an exaggerated shoe tycoon that is trapped in a kidnapping act.
A title card towards the end of Lee's's credits Highest 2 lowest It is clear that the film “was inspired by the master Akira Kurosawa”, and the existence of the film is an admiring tribute to an author Lee, who was called a favorite. However, this adaptation is best if it is the least similar to the original, and the director seems to know. Highest 2 lowest Taking energy and urgency when it spends time with its contradictory hero, whose uncertainty about his inheritance with questions Lee and Star Denzel Washington swings in their career at this point. The 68-year-old Lee and the 70-year-old Washington have been working together since the nineties when they made films as well-viewed Malcolm X; A portrait of a cultural legend in winter is exactly the film that the two decades later made together.
But when Highest 2 lowest Shifts between this close-up character study and the grand border of criminal thrillers, which also defines. The transition is not always smooth. Although it is eight minutes shorter than the original, Lee's version seems to be at least 20 minutes longer. Nevertheless, this busy, wasteful update of Kurosawa's strictly simple thriller Lee's Signature Shagginess intends. Highest 2 lowest Moves with a boast and self -confidence that may exaggerate what the script actually has to offer, but it is difficult to oppose the draw, to see Lee and Washington for the first time since then since In man In 2006.
In Alan Fox's screenplay, Mifunes was memorable name Kingo Gondo David King (Washington), who did not make his assets in shoes, but in ear candies. His record label, stackin 'hits, is legendary in the music business to find new artists who dominate the charts and the Grammys. It is a business in the old school that believes to take time to develop talent and stay careful with the changes that digital technology brought for the industry. A larger and more impersonal conglomerate is about to buy stackin hits, but at the last minute before the deal has been completed, David decides to risk all of his assets to take control of the company built by it.
On the same day, David received a call in his sophisticated high -rise with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge: his young son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) was kidnapped. Soon after listening to police officers, David agrees to pay the 17.5 million dollar solution -but then it will shine that the wrong child has nap. David's sponsor Kyle (Elijah Wright), son of the long -time friend and personal driver of the mogul, Paul (Jeffrey Wright, the real father of the young actor), is held in an unknown place until David hands over his assets. The fact that the decision also hesitates for a moment is understandably a source of the friction between Paul and David, but the latter will soon agree to pay, and a plan will be set up to deliver the money via a Uptown U -Bahn train, as can be seen from the highly specific instructions of the kidnapper.
The U -Bahn follow -up hunting is in the film material of a live show by the late Eddie Palmieri at the Puertorican Tag parade and tears them away on the piano, while hundreds of fans dance on the street. It is a pleasure to see Palmieri in one of his last filmed appearances, and Lee's camera (from the great cameraman Matthew Libatique) is never more confident than when it comes to offering a comprehensive look at the city that he loves. But the logical and spatial connection between the spectacle of the parade and the simultaneous development of the campaign on the train is weak, and the parallel processing of this sequence never quite the great feeling “only in New York” to aim at the merger Lee.
There are moments when Lees crazy style, his longstanding tendency to throw everything except the sink in the kitchen, serves the film well. This applies to the funny -selected needle drops of pop music from all epochs and genres: an opening assembly of recordings by Brooklyn Bridge and New York Harbor on “Oh, what a beautiful morning” by Oklahoma! Is exciting, and as a Washington character wrote Wrights to choose a psych-up song to play on their journey to a tense meeting, these two classic classics from 1979 “Ain't No Oto Stopin 'Now”. But for a film about a producer with “The Best Ohrs The Business”, the score of Howard Drossin is bizarre distracted and dated. A tender moment between David and his wife appears from the background music in a hotel elevator in the mid -1980s.
There are also some frightening moments in dialogue as if the script was shut down. When David's wife Pam (Ilffenesh Hadera, who has little to do, but looks worried in glamorous outfits), the police team puts on in the kings' apartment, strangely, they should be specific to where they should put the displaced objects on the dining table. (The vase goes to the left of the fireplace. Why? Czechow's weapon is damn: we never learn.) And while some of the Easter eggs embedded the youth basketball team Trey Trey and Kyle game, which plays by Kyle, former La Laker and Boston Celtic Rick Fox are played. Turturro, John's younger brother) breaks the fourth wall to emphasize his (and lees) negative opinion about the Boston Red Sox directly to the camera.
How High and lowPresent Highest 2 lowest ends (or in the case of the latter, in a scene of the end) on a single confrontation between hero and villain. I will not go into detail, not to spoil the sequence of events with which David solves the secret of the identity of the kidnapper, but when he finally appears, the villain of The Rapper Asap, Rocky, who previously acted on the big screen, but after this short but powerful pair of scenes for a large district. The first scene in which he and Washington pass is half the generation confrontation, half a rap fight; It is a duel between two different types of charismatic black masculinity, with Washington's ingenious but tingling patriarch with Rocky's damaged, abrasive young man from the bonnet. Here, too, the script does not fall in front of what the actors have to offer: the ideological differences that are at the game of men at stake and have to do with traditional methods of the music industrial intestine, compared to the rise of digital platforms, social media and YouTube streaming are said to be bald. But the electricity that flows between Washington and Rocky crackles.
Highest 2 lowest Lee's work may not be of his best work, but it is worth it on the big screen for his ambitious pictures and for the Casty Casting-Ned only from Washington and Rocky, but by Jeffrey Wright, who tacitly steals every scene in which he, as a widowed father of the pasted boy, an ex-Con-con-muslim racist question of the racist question is. The rapper Ice Spice, based in Bronx, as well as Rosie Perez, Anthony Ramos and Wendell Pierce appears for a memorable scene. But the most fascinating element of this film, which remains frustrated, is the autobiographical nature of its central character: a venerable flavor that thinks about the importance of his life work as an industry that he has changed for the better changes in its environment in a way that he neither agrees nor understand completely. The central question of the film, which is never entirely answered with the complexity he deserves, is whether Washington's agan still has the same passion for the art form that he did as a younger man. Like Lee, David King may not be with the price he once made, but he is far from it complete.