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25th hour full movie9/25/2023 Lee’s movie shows no interest in making any case about whether drug dealers should go to prison. I hasten to add that there’s nothing moralistic or preachy about 25th Hour - or intellectual either. But would they also object to being asked to care about the people who do care about him? And if we do care about Naturelle, James, Jake, and Frank, how can we not care about Monty? I’ve heard some people object to a film asking us to think - and therefore care - about what happens to a drug dealer in prison. The film also concerns the four people who are most important to him - his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), his father James (Brian Cox), and his two best friends since he was a kid, a prep school teacher named Jake (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a Wall Street trader named Frank (Barry Pepper). The focus of 25th Hour, adapted by David Benioff from his novel, is how a Manhattan drug dealer named Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) spends his last 24 hours before going to prison for seven years. I suspect one reason this country has more than two million people in prison - we have the second-highest incarceration rate in the world, after Russia - is that the sort of people who wind up there, why they do, and what happens to them inside, are all things we don’t really want to think about. Moreover, taking on dissimilar projects he has always moved in exploratory directions, showing a lot of courage and initiative in his creative choices - even when they’re half-baked (as some are in Get on the Bus) or overblown (as in Bamboozled).Ģ5th Hour is Lee’s best feature since Do the Right Thing, and part of what’s so impressive about it is the way it gets us to think as well as feel - about things we’re almost never asked to consider, such as what it means to send drug dealers to prison. Newton Story - but the stylistic consistency is his own. I don’t mean that Lee hasn’t stubbornly stuck to the same stylistic tropes and mannerisms throughout most of his career - leaving them behind only when the occasion demanded it, as in his expert filming of Roger Guenveur Smith’s powerful performance piece The Huey P. But the only time I’ve been tempted to accuse him of falling back on the tried and true was when he made Malcolm X and attempted to adapt his subject’s autobiography as if he were Cecil B. ![]() ![]() I’ve complained a lot about Spike Lee as a filmmaker, before he made his remarkable Do the Right Thing (1989) and after. With Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Tony Siragusa, and Levani. For those who care about such things, there are spoilers ahead. From the Januissue of the Chicago Reader.
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