Amazon.com Essentials:
Just as Do the
Right Thing was the capstone of Spike Lee's earlier career,
Malcolm X marked the next milestone in the filmmaker's artistic
maturity. It seemed everything Lee had done up to that point was to
prepare him for this epic biography of America's fiery civil-rights
leader, who is superbly played by Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington,
from his early days as a zoot-suited hustler known as "Detroit Red" to
his spiritual maturity after his pilgrimage to Mecca, as a Black
Muslim by the name of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Do the Right
Thing climaxed with the photographic images of Malcolm X and
Dr. Martin Luther King engulfed by flames of rage; Malcolm X
explores the genesis and evolution of that rage over Malcolm's
lifetime, and how these two great figures--held up to the public as
polar-opposites within the African American human rights movement
(King for nonviolent civil disobedience, Malcolm for achieving
equality "by any means necessary")--were each essential to the agenda
of the other. Lee careens from the hedonistic ebullience of Malcolm's
early days to the stark despair of prison, from his life-changing
conversion to Islam to his emergence as a dynamic political
leader--all with an epic sweep and vitality that illuminates personal
details as well as political ideology. Angela Bassett is also terrific
as Malcolm's wife, Betty Shabazz. --Jim Emerson
