Jack Galmitz

29 years after the fact, I watched this movie last night. It was the first movie with Johnny Depp I ever saw. He was good. I was surprised that I liked him in the role. The others, Joon and Benny, and the rest, were also quite good.

A great movie I had not seen before or even known about. Such brilliant performances by so many of the actors that it astonished me. My only misgiving was that it was a bit of a pile-up of tragic realizations one after another so that it felt contrived and too much. I suppose that comes from the form, the tragedy, the play, but still the acting was so realized that I overlooked the extravagence of the suffering.

Loved this new and romantic twist on the vampire mythology. And in Sweden no less. Beautiful and brilliant.

I saw this movie tonight and my opinion of it is the same as it was in 1989. I think Spike Lee moves clumsily from the factual to the symbolic; he has not provided an objective correlative for white society in the film and it makes of the violent ending a preposterous, gratuitous display that if it weren't so filled with rage it would be laughable. Sal's Famous Pizza shop in Bed-stuy does not operate as a symbol of Western Civilization throughout the movie as the ending would have us conclude. It is just a pizza place where most of the young people in the neighborhood come regularly and buy pizza with money that we have no idea where it comes from since no one works. And the fact that the youth are unemployed does not work as a symbol for high black youth unemployment. We see no discrimination in employment because we are for the entire movie on the joyful blocks of this contained world. They're all like kids with enough money to buy pizza all day. At the end, one of two of the characters who are most revolutionary, walks into the shop and Radio Raheem, one of the biggest baddest characters has his boom box blasting "his" music even though the owner of the shop has told him numerous times in the past not to come in blasting the music. That is the right, Spike Lee, of private enterprise and if your film was about socialism v. capitalism, well it might have been a meaningful confrontation. But it is not about that. It is about the fact that the Italian-American owner, who is suddenly not Sal a pizza shop owner, but the Lord of the Origins of Western Civilization, won't include, won't display photographs of the black heroes the black radicals want him to put photos of on his Italian-American Hall of Fame wall. These are men such as Frank Sinatra, Al Pacino, Joe Dimaggio who only represent Western, white Italians of fame. This section of the restaurant is really nothing but a personal shrine of the owner to his ancestry and it doesn't really work very well as a symbol of the origins of Western Civilization as having come from Rome or earlier Greece. Lee wants us to know that civilization actually originated in Africa, which is true, but he doesn't make any attempt to identify this fact with a structure in the movie. Frankly, the end turns turns into an ugly mess and Lee's lack of skill in moving from realism to symbolism makes the movie a failure and one which only heightens tensions between the races. I saw one of his other movies and that was also a cliche ridden movie about "jazz," naturally.

A beautifully rendered story of homelessness, not the literal homelessness of the young man who stars in the movie, although that is in there, too, but the existential homelessness of all things. It is quiet and subdued. When the horse the young man tries to save from slaughter bolts in rear and is struck and killed by a car and burst into tears and they weren't sentimental tears. It is not a sentimental movie. It is raw and real.

Loved the movie if you can love a movie about the last day of earth. Acting was of course superb as was the cinematography. The scenes perfectly fit the mood.