Double-Jointed

We stumbled on the book 25th Hour by David Benioff, who co-created HBO's "Game of Thrones," so we watched the movie version and then twinned it with Spike Lee's breakthrough.

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) (A-minus) - The 1980s culminate in Spike Lee's cultural howl, a defiant poke at race relations in Brooklyn during one sweaty summer day. Lee has a lot to say, and he crafts a smart script and is blessed with a strong, deep cast.

 

All of the action takes place within about a square block in Bedford-Stuyvesant in a 24-hour period in the middle of summer as the temperatures and temperaments reach a boiling point. Lee stars as Mookie, who delivers pizza for Sal (Danny Aiello) and spars verbally with Sal's jamoke sons, the aggressive Pino (John Turturro) and the clueless Vito (Richard Edson alert!). Mookie also bickers with his sister Jade (Lee's sister Joie) and his fiery baby mama Tina (the appealing Rosie Perez). 

Lee populates the street with a kaleidoscope of characters, including the real-life couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as, respectively, the town drunk Da Mayor and the town elder Mother Sister, as well as the firebrand Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) and the towering Radio Rahim (Bill Nunn), whose tricked-out boombox blasts Public Enemy 24/7. Lee sets all of these characters loose in his circumscribed tinder box and grows microagressions into macroagressions and into aggressions. Things will eventually go up in flames.

The racial tensions are unavoidable in this world. The local black residents resent not only Italian Sal but also the Korean couple who run a bodega across the street. Recriminations are already stacked high, and as Mookie and Pino keep pushing each other's buttons, Buggin Out has found a hill to die on -- the pictures on the walls of Sal's pizzeria are all Italians and none are black. That's all it takes for this to spill over into pointless violence.

Everyone here is at or near the top of their game, especially Aiello, Esposito and Perez. Lee is the connective tissue here, showing both strength and vulnerability (especially regarding his  responsibilities as a father and mate), and he has an appealing swagger, with his knock-kneed jock walk. The centerpiece of the film, around the midpoint, is the famous bigoted rants by the main characters, each going off on a different race/ethnicity, a profound expiation, a twisted cry of racial pride and hatred.

In the end, it is Mookie who is asked to "do the right thing," and whether he does so or not will depend on your perspective. It's a litmus test for the viewer, and it's a clever device that Lee slowly assembles during the two-hour run time. Not everything works smoothly here. The dialogue is occasionally stilted, especially in the way in which characters keep repeating each others' names when they interact. The one-person Greek chorus -- here a street-front DJ called Mister Senor Love Daddy (played by Samuel L. Jackson) -- can feel trite and played out. And the frequent references to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X wear out their welcome by the end. But there is no denying that Lee has a command of the story and his bustling cast, and he has created a funny and forceful polemic that is a joy to watch from beginning to end.

25th HOUR (2003) (C-minus) - There is something cheap and tinny about the production values in this leaden tale about a drug dealer spending his final 24 hours with his loved ones before heading off to serve a seven-year prison sentence. The lighting and sound are off, and crowd scenes come off as artificial.

And this is a reminder that Edward Norton was a thing back then but he never really became a bigger thing. Since "Fight Club" (1999) and this, he has to be grateful to Wes Anderson for helping him keep food on the table. (Most recently he's done voice work for a TV series called "Sausage Party: Foodtopia.") Norton doesn't have the heft to carry "25th Hour" as Montgomery Brogan, who suspects someone close to him squealed to the feds.

This would be an annoyingly myopic New York City film even without the added mawkishness of it being filmed in the aftermath of 9/11. Thus, we get super-Irish, overly proud first-responders and bartenders and constant visual nods to hallowed Ground Zero and the American flag. Lee just can't help himself as he leans hard into the patriotic pap, all of which is unnecessary when telling a mob tale. 

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is most effective among the cast as Monty's friend Jacob, a high school teacher who lusts after one of his students, coyly portrayed by Anna Paquin. Barry Pepper, though, is a cipher as big-shot trader Frank, who lusts after Monty's girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson). The book is full of clever dialogue and has a pretty zippy narrative at just over 200 pages; here, much of that banter is flattened by Lee (David Benioff adapted his own novel) or jettisoned for time, even if the movie drags on for two and a quarter hours.

Brian Cox is around to lend New York gravitas as Monty's father, whose bar might now be vulnerable to the thugs that Monty dealt with. It's all a reminder that this old-school Boston/New York hardscrabble working-class bullshit was tired back then, even before Martin Scorsese and Ben Affleck/Matt Damon beat it senseless. Not much works here. Even the corny, old-fashioned jazzy score by Terence Blanchard is cloying and intrusive -- leading up to a collaboration between Blanchard and Bruce Springsteen on an earnest late-career ballad playing over the end credits.

Lee has had quite the up-and-down career, and there were times when his style of filmmaking fell flat, like it did here. He would rebound a few years later with "Inside Man" and his monumental documentary about Hurricane Katrina, "When the Levees Broke," but his feature films since then have been underwhelming ("BlacKkKlansman," for example). There's a big difference between the Brooklyn-proud insurgency of "Do the Right Thing" and this limp offering 14 years later from a dewy-eyed 40-something storyteller trafficking in Homeland Security porn.

BONUS TRACKS

One saving grace for "25th Hour" is a club scene that is buoyed by better music. Here is Liquid Liquid with "Cavern":

 

And the starting and end point for all things rap, Public Enemy, "Fight the Power":