AN OUTSTANDING EXAMPLE SO THAT THOSE IN THE DARKNESS CAN SEE THE POWER OF THE LIGHT: A twentieth-anniversary DVD re-release occasions a tribute to Spike Lee's Malcolm X from the AV Club's Noel Murray, and if there's a worse set of Oscar snubs than what Scent of a Woman did to this film, I'm not aware of it.
This film proves the wisdom of the Roger Ebert quote, “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” This is an epic and elegiac work, anchored by a remarkable Denzel Washington performance (even by his own standards). If only for the pilgrimage to Mecca, with images so rarely seen in American film, dayenu. And then we get the "Change is Gonna Come" sequence, and his favorite dolly shot trick just works perfectly in setting Malcolm X as a man at peace with the ending he now foresees. Oh, do I love this movie.
One other question: Malcolm X caps -- great marketing device, or greatest marketing device in the history of modern film?
