Tag Archives: Spike Lee

HIGH AND LOW (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)

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For the first 55 minutes HIGH AND LOW (Akira Kurosawa, 1963) is a sparse and minimalist chamber piece in which moral and ethical considerations are put into play, in dazzling long takes and expressive compositions. Mr. Gondo’s business associates present him with a plot to oust the current head of the shoe company they all work for. Sales have been stagnant.  The current president is old fashioned. They would make more profits by making more fashionable shoes with in-built obsolescence. If they all gather their shares they could take control of the company. Mr. Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) turns them down. What he doesn’t tell them is he’s mortgaged everything he owns in order to get 50 million to buy a majority share, take over himself, and build shoes that are both fashionable and good quality. As he kicks his associates from his house, Gondo gets a phone call saying his child has been kidnapped and they are asking for a 30 million ransom. If he pays this, it will cost him all he’s worked for since he was a 16 year-old apprentice, his plans for his future, possibly his home. He’s willing to do that for his son. But he will he do the same for someone else’s son? It turns out that the kidnappers have made a mistake and have kidnapped the chauffeur’s son instead. The two moments were the chauffeur gets on his knees, first to beg for his son’s life, and then, once again, when Gondo agrees to pay the ransom and the chauffeur realises the full extent of the sacrifice , were most moving. What is a life worth? Is the life of a chauffeur’s son worth the same as that of an industrialist’s son. What is loyalty? What are a person’s obligations and responsibilities and how should one act to meet them? It’s superb.

The second hour and a quarter turns the film into an exciting police procedural. Who did it? Why? How to find the culprit? In this half, the film descends from the heights of Mr. Gondo’s apartment to the lower depths. The transition is an exciting scene on a train shot with multiple handheld cameras of the exchange of the money for the child.

This is introduced by a wipe, and there’s something to be thought about in the way Kurosawa uses wipes, it’s not just a transition, it’s a move in time, space, mood.

There will be another wipe when we’re introduced to the perpetrator, the camera picks up his reflection in a pond, follows him, through a slum, and into his room where we finally see his face as he then checks out the newspapers and radio to find out where he stands in relation to the police’s investigation.

There’s another incredible scene in a heroin den that is as brilliant a piece of cinema as I’ve seen (the way Kurosawa frames, the balance between close-ups underlining individuals, and the more crowded shot symbolising crime and affliction, the frames within frames, the way the camera is often outside a window looking in, often also through a curtain or screen, the moments of showmanship (the light reflecting on the sunglasses). It really is quite extraordinary.

The film ends with a conversation between the industrialist and the perpetrator. I won’t spoil the film by divulging the reasons for the kidnapping but will merely note that Kurosawa films the reflection of one on the face of the other. Then in the last shot we are left with a pensive industrialist meditating on his own reflection, interestingly with his face not being visible either in the foreground or in the reflection.

It’s a great film. It was also the number one box office success of its year.

I also very much liked Spike Lee’s remake of this, which I will now see again but I don’t remember it being as elegant or as moving.

More images from film:

Lecture by José Arroyo on Jungle Fever in Three Parts:

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José Arroyo

Inside Man (Spike Lee, 2006)

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 Spike Lee in slick mode, working with different textures, the camera gliding, hand-held, in constant motion but controlled with particular effects in mind. A heist film where what’s at stake is not only will the crooks get caught but what are they after? What secrets are hidden in those bank vaults? Will the wealthy be held to account if the origin of their wealth accumulation involves crimes  against humanity.  Jodie Foster steals every moment she’s in, and this from Denzel Washington and Christopher Plummer. Smarter and better educated than anyone else in the room; elegant, charming, threatening, vaguely asexual; it occurred to me the role was an old-fashioned lesbian stereotype that her casting underlined but that her performance was embodying with particular charm and vibrancy, including that odd duck walk on vertiginously high heels. I liked it much more than I expected but at the end I also had a vague twinge that I had seen it before and forgotten, or maybe just skimmed though parts of it on Netflix…..

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 236 – Da 5 Bloods

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Listen on the players above, on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify.

Spike Lee’s latest joint sees four US Army veterans, the Bloods, return to their former battlefields in Vietnam in search of two things: the body of their fallen comrade and leader, Stormin’ Norman, and a cache of gold bars, intended during the war to pay the Lahu people for their help fighting the Viet Cong, but taken and buried by the Bloods for themselves. Set in the modern day, exploring the history of black oppression and racism in the USA, and released on Netflix among a backdrop of Black Lives Matter protests around the world, Da 5 Bloods could hardly be more relevant. But is it successful?

No, argues José. Spike Lee is in full-on propagandist, pamphleteer mode here, delivering lessons about racism and class, warfare and imperialism, black martyrs and heroes, but inartfully and clunkily. Although his direct address is striking and powerful, the Rambo-esque action adventure story to which it’s married lacks imagination and intelligence, and really functions only as a frame from which to hang the film’s essays. Its representation of the Vietnamese is at best crude and even arrogant, a scene with a man selling oranges and chickens particularly egregious, and its characters are thinly drawn, their relationships and development unsatisfying. Mike argues for one or two things he likes, particularly the way in which Stormin’ Norman is integrated into the story and the flashbacks to the war are put together, but ultimately cannot but agree with José’s disappointment.

Da 5 Bloods is an overpraised film that promises more than it delivers. But someone has finally managed to make a Vietnam film without using “Fortunate Son”, so there’s that.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Love theme from Les parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, France, 1964)

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I’m a sap. I know. But this gets to me every time. The music is by Michel Legrand. Catherine Deneuve is the young girl in love. The almost as beautiful Nino Castelnueovo is the young man who loves her back but is conscripted into two years of military service. You might note the influence of the MGM musical: –the streets were painted so that the colour scheme could become one of those largely unnoticed but crucial elements that create meaning and feeling in movies — perhaps excessively so: see how in the bar the drink on the table matches the background yellow. Vincente Minnelli was a particular influence on director Jacques Demy and you can detect it in the use of background, décor, costumes and particularly in the flowing camera movements. Everything is consciously put in the frame, everything signifies — that’s why we feel it so deeply. The end, when the couple seems to be floating on air, is particularly lovely — and significant — as the rest of the film is about how all those young dreams are crushed. For many years that type of shot with the camera maintaining equal distance from the characters whilst they seemed to move seamlessly, as if standing still on an a moving sidewalk, was often to be found in Spike Lee’s films but with lesser impact and effect. Seeing it on its first release and far away from home, Kurt Vonnegut wrote his wife, ‘I saw Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heartbreaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken[1].’ One of the great musical numbers of all time and a very wonderful film.

José Arroyo

[1] Kurt Vonnegut, Letters, Edited and with an introduction by Dan Wakefield, London: Vintage Books, 2013; p. 107.