An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since it was directed by Spike Lee and since it was available on YouTube, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, apparently, it was a student movie he made while he was at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. It was also pretty neat to discover afterwards that Ang Lee, who was also one of his classmates at this university, was also the assistant director on this  movie. Well, even though it was heralded when it was released and even won a Student Academy Award, to be honest, I wasn’t really impressed though. I mean, it was a solid student feature, no doubt, but not really much more than that. Indeed, most of the scenes were some boring static shots. The acting was also most of the time rather weak (Donna Bailey was quite lovely but I’m rather partial with black ladies). On the other hand, I was myself a film student at some point, I worked as a production assistant on 4 student movies and, even though some of them were not bad, I have to admit that none of them could be compared to this one. Indeed, there was one thing that Spike Lee got perfectly right at the gate and it was this vivid depiction of New York, its dirty streets still full of life and, obviously, its black population. Even if the visuals and acting were not great, his unique perspective was already there and it was already quite fascinating. Anyway, to conclude, even if it didn’t blow me away, it was interesting to see what Spike Lee was doing when he was still a student and it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in this director’s work. 

6/10