I want to recommend Mo' Better Blues more, at least to a specific crowd, than I can exactly, even though it is a good film. Spike Lee, coming right off of his seminal Do the Right Thing, is highly charged and as striking as ever in his subjective camera and direction. But the characters themselves in his script, more or less, are fairly shallow conventional players in his elaborate show. But elaborate it is, and in the realm of it being a pure jazz movie is where I can recommend this the most. Quite simply, for jazz fans, this is where it's at as far as great soundtracks go, and on top of the sensational tracks that Lee has put together, with the given greats like Coltrane, Davis, and probably Rollins in there somewhere, there's also the final musical score provided by his father, Bill. While it's not as classic and specific for all the right reasons as Do the Right Thing, there's a sense here that Bill Lee reached a high point with the sophistication of his compositions, and had he not passed on could have gone even further with his son in creating memorable orchestrations. So at the least, as a jazz fan personally more than anything, this provides some many fine moments (Lee is also very good at using excellent Coltrane tracks for love scenes, or just talking scenes, or whatever).
Unfortunately Lee doesn't have quite the same control over the sensibilities of his characters. There wasn't really much I cared about with the main character, Bleek Gilliam, played by Denzel Washington, because he's like one of those interesting yet purely shallow, self-absorbed archetypes that one's seen in many other musical dramas. There's also Wesley Snipes as Washington's rival in Bleek's quintet, where the ego rivalries flame up from time to time, usually in a macho, grandiose fashion. Then there's the 'romantic' side to Bleek, where when not practicing his horn he's practicing himself on two ladies, Cynda Williams and Joie Lee, and that he becomes a worse dog than he started out with (as Joie Lee observes, he's a "good dog" at the start, but still a dog, so perhaps one could make the point that it's the progression of a dog in the story). More intriguing, however, than the sexual mind-games that end up getting played on Bleek via his infidelities and the eventual match-up of Clark and Shadow, is Spike Lee's own Giant. Lee shows once again how limited he is as an actor, yet within those limits has carved a niche for himself in his early films that is atypical yet charming and always good for amusement. Here, as in Do the Right Thing, he does give him some dimension, and through the clichéd wormy-guy-who-owes-gambling-debts-to-gangsters sub-plot, there is truth there in how he plays it.
In fact, the acting and Lee's own determined, headstrong direction is not the problem I had with the film. If anything, this is what makes the film quite watchable, even up through the end scenes when the script becomes more and more desperate to make us care about Bleek's fate as a musician &/or lover to Indigo (I didn't care, really, due to Bleek not really earning much human dimension despite him being kinda cool in a slick way early on in the film). The actors are always dependable to follow the emotional lines to a believable fault, which is obviously part of the atmosphere Lee has on this and many other films of his; we can't imagine these characters acting any other way, even if they're a little 'too' theatrical for their own good. And I will probably like watching parts of this on TV again if it comes on just to see those wonderful shots that Lee gets at times, like the circular spin around Washington as he practices playing trumpet with just his fingers miming at the camera, or when Lee is avoiding the hoods and tries to go swiftly past the car waiting for him, or even the very Scorsesean uses of red tinting in the lighting schemes and the usage of slow motion.
So really, Mo' Better Blues has got a lot of things going for it, including a swift, cool sense of humor at times (I loved Robin Harris's bits of stand-up on stage, and the down to earth nature of the band members in smaller scenes), and a soundtrack I'd love to seek out if it were available. But it's also got some issues in how it deals honestly with making them palpable under the circumstances. Maybe that's part of it being a musical or other, but it seemed a little under-cooked despite the 2 hour plus running time. So it's surely worthwhile, if you're a die-hard Lee fan, but it's also something of a slight slump dramatically following the precedent set by the film just before (not that it's an easy film to beat as a director's best).
Unfortunately Lee doesn't have quite the same control over the sensibilities of his characters. There wasn't really much I cared about with the main character, Bleek Gilliam, played by Denzel Washington, because he's like one of those interesting yet purely shallow, self-absorbed archetypes that one's seen in many other musical dramas. There's also Wesley Snipes as Washington's rival in Bleek's quintet, where the ego rivalries flame up from time to time, usually in a macho, grandiose fashion. Then there's the 'romantic' side to Bleek, where when not practicing his horn he's practicing himself on two ladies, Cynda Williams and Joie Lee, and that he becomes a worse dog than he started out with (as Joie Lee observes, he's a "good dog" at the start, but still a dog, so perhaps one could make the point that it's the progression of a dog in the story). More intriguing, however, than the sexual mind-games that end up getting played on Bleek via his infidelities and the eventual match-up of Clark and Shadow, is Spike Lee's own Giant. Lee shows once again how limited he is as an actor, yet within those limits has carved a niche for himself in his early films that is atypical yet charming and always good for amusement. Here, as in Do the Right Thing, he does give him some dimension, and through the clichéd wormy-guy-who-owes-gambling-debts-to-gangsters sub-plot, there is truth there in how he plays it.
In fact, the acting and Lee's own determined, headstrong direction is not the problem I had with the film. If anything, this is what makes the film quite watchable, even up through the end scenes when the script becomes more and more desperate to make us care about Bleek's fate as a musician &/or lover to Indigo (I didn't care, really, due to Bleek not really earning much human dimension despite him being kinda cool in a slick way early on in the film). The actors are always dependable to follow the emotional lines to a believable fault, which is obviously part of the atmosphere Lee has on this and many other films of his; we can't imagine these characters acting any other way, even if they're a little 'too' theatrical for their own good. And I will probably like watching parts of this on TV again if it comes on just to see those wonderful shots that Lee gets at times, like the circular spin around Washington as he practices playing trumpet with just his fingers miming at the camera, or when Lee is avoiding the hoods and tries to go swiftly past the car waiting for him, or even the very Scorsesean uses of red tinting in the lighting schemes and the usage of slow motion.
So really, Mo' Better Blues has got a lot of things going for it, including a swift, cool sense of humor at times (I loved Robin Harris's bits of stand-up on stage, and the down to earth nature of the band members in smaller scenes), and a soundtrack I'd love to seek out if it were available. But it's also got some issues in how it deals honestly with making them palpable under the circumstances. Maybe that's part of it being a musical or other, but it seemed a little under-cooked despite the 2 hour plus running time. So it's surely worthwhile, if you're a die-hard Lee fan, but it's also something of a slight slump dramatically following the precedent set by the film just before (not that it's an easy film to beat as a director's best).