MALCOLM X (1992) was a big fucking deal for Spike Lee. A big budget period historical drama, an epic really, that he had to fight to get hired on, and to finance, and to get permission to shoot in Mecca. And got recently freed Nelson Mandela to make a cameo in! It worked, and it was a phenomenon. So how the hell do you follow that up? He chose to make his most autobiographical film, though actually it’s more about his younger sister Joie, who gets a story credit and wrote the screenplay with Spike and their brother Cinqué.
So on May 13th, 1994, three days after Mandela was inaugurated as the first president of free South Africa, CROOKLYN came out, did pretty good, came in third after THE CROW and WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN. Probly felt a little anticlimactic for Spike. But it’s a great movie.
Lee still had editor Barry Alexander Brown, production designer Wynn Thomas, and costume designer Ruth E. Carter, so there’s a continuity with his earlier movies. But Ernest Dickerson, the director of photography for everything since his student film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, had retired from cinematography to direct JUICE and SURVIVING THE GAME. Those were big shoes to fill. So Lee hooked up with Arthur Jafa, a Howard-educated video artist who had been married to Julie Dash and was d.p. for her DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST. (read the rest of this shit…)
May 3, 1991
I think there is some subtle commentary about policing early in the movie, which I will go into, but for the most part it’s not about that. Instead this movie – which was only the fifth release from Disney’s not-for-kids label Hollywood Pictures – really is a fusion of the type of vibe of those two posters. It’s a gritty police/crime thriller about a cop whose partner gets killed, but in addition to going after the people he considers responsible, he and his wife take care of and then try to adopt the dead partner’s three adorable daughters. The amount of screen time and sincerity it puts into the second part is very unusual, so although this is in many ways not my type of movie, I respect its bold mix of genres. 
Joel Schumacher’s FALLING DOWN (1993) is a movie I’ve always hated for what I thought it was saying. Watching it again a couple decades later I think I was partly wrong. Maybe even mostly wrong. But I still can’t get all the way on board. I’ll try to explain why.
