Hacker Cinema
Malcolm X
1992 · Film · 202 min
Directed by Spike Lee
A tribute to the controversial black activist and leader of the struggle for black liberation. He hit bottom during his imprisonment in the '50s, he became a Black Muslim and then a leader in the Nation of Islam. His assassination in 1965 left a legacy of self-determination and racial pride.
5 positive7 neutralfrom 12 commenters
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13 comments on Hacker News
Hard disagree about declarative "X is Y". It's a failure of weakening attention span. There are plenty of excellent long movies:
- Once Upon a Time in America (1984) 3:49
- Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 3:47
- The Irishman (2019) 3:29
- Malcolm X (1992) 3:22
- The Godfather Part II (1974) 3:22
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) 3:21
- Schindler's List (1992) 3:15
- Gandhi (1982) 3:11
- The Green Mile (1999) 3:09
- The Deer Hunter (1978) 3:03
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) 2:59
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) 2:58
- Casino (1995) 2:58
- Braveheart (1995) 2:58
- The Godfather (1972) 2:55
- Django Unchained (2012) 2:45
What I most object to is lazy storytelling for lazy, second-screen audiences lacking in style and subtlety having a robotic, spoon-fed, infantile, unnatural, expository narration quality in every character like it's a commercial for an antacid.
That happened to Spike Lee, with his "Malcolm X" movie. The big problem was length. The completion bond company pulled the plug at one point. Lee found enough rich black people to bail out the production, and eventually released the 202 minute version. It was a critical success, but just too long to make money in theaters.
With the notable exception of "Gone with the Wind", few Hollywood films over 3 hours made money.[1] This is less of a problem today, because there are alternatives to theatrical distribution. Long-form mini-series are a thing, and home screens are good enough for epic movies.
IMdb says of Megalopolis, "It's 138 minutes long, but feels like it exceeds the three hour mark." The worst of both worlds.
[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/the-longest-hollywood-movies-ever-ranked/
I am incredibly in favour of unions in all industries, but this one I have serious doubts it will ever happen. I'm gonna be un-PC and reach for a metaphor involving slavery - not because I am comparing tech workers, of which I am one, to slaves, but because I think it's the best real-world example of how oppression is distributed by hubristic figureheads of feudalistic systems.
If you ever saw Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" biopic (or know about Malcolm X through other channels), there is a scene where he talks about the existence, during US Slavery, of "field" and "house" slaves, who tended to live in those same places they worked. Here is a real X speech that is very similar to what is in the movie, though the movie script distills it better for modern ears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo
Now if you take three groups at Amazon - warehouse workers, tech workers, and C-level executives, they all kinda slot into those roles very well, don't they? Again, not that we're slaves. But then, Jim Crow wasn't slavery either, right? Oppression comes in many flavours, some of them stronger, some of them weaker, but it has the same features, always, including the divide and conquer strategy. The axe's handle being recognizably wooden.
This is all very old stuff. Ancestral. Atavistic.
The problem runs deeper still. Even among the lowest working class, they have been fed on tidbits of heady turkish delight which says that if they do everything right, they can be one of the oppressor class. Like the midway lackey whose job is to walk around carrying a giant teddy bear that nobody will ever actually win, they are even given high-profile examples, lottery winners, pop stars from common backgrounds, tech "mafia" who live as monied dilletantes on megayachts, tipping their hats to Saudi princes and Russian gangsters.
In the end, the workers of tech are just well-kept poodles who will heel to their masters and be loyal to the point of abject moral failure, just like the house slave. Look how much better we are treated than him.
Fagedaboudit. If you want a just world, be a Socialist. Read Marx for real. And join the rest of the historically frustrated who will die watching humanity flagellate itself. If there's hope, it's in the proles.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
Paid overtime will fix scheduling. Scheduling is bad because the cost falls on the employees, not the employer. If crunches resulted in time and a half, double time, and triple time, scheduling would get fixed.
As I've pointed out before, film scheduling is an established discipline. Making a movie is much more complex than a software project. There are a lot of moving parts. Things get changed. There are people problems, weather problems, and transportation problems. Most importantly, if a film project goes into crunch mode, everybody starts getting paid overtime. This reduces the tendency to underestimate.
There are also third party estimates. Hollywood has something called "completion bonds". A completion bond is an insurance policy for the investors. Either they get a showable movie into theaters, or the completion bond company has to pay the investors. A completion bond costs about 5% of the cost of the film.
Completion bond companies do their own estimates. Estimation inputs are "script, budget, shooting schedule, (and) résumés of key crew." To survive, they need a net error near zero - they must overestimate and underestimate about equally. Consistent underestimation would put them out of business.
Since they do a lot of this, they have scripts and financial data from previous movies. They can look up "car chase, metropolitan area, 2 minutes screen time" for how much that cost the last 50 times someone did it. They also have director info, like "director X averages 2.5 takes per scene". All this info is collected across multiple film companies.
The completion bond company has the right to intervene if the project starts to go over budget. Worst case, they can fire the director and take over the production. This is rare, but it happens. "Malcolm X" by Spike Lee (1992) and "Bad Girls" are examples. "Malcolm X" was an epic movie, a bit too epic - it runs 3 hours and 22 minutes - and somebody had to say no to Spike Lee. "Bad Girls" (1994) was just a botched production, and the bond company put in their own director to try to salvage something. It still lost money, but did reach theaters.
That a completion bond company can fire the director puts teeth in this system.
It’s not a documentary, but Spike Lee’s movie about Malcolm X has some stirring scenes where the Panthers are marching with rifles.
It was absolutely a top-down change that was propelled by a bunch of people subjected to a moral panic while simultaneously isolated and not able to converse with others. The company I was at at the time in Colorado naturally had very few black software engineers.
Because I happen to be friends with the ones we did have since we were all on the team together I happened to know that they all thought it was stupid. Every single black engineer at my former company thought the master slave terminology was not a big deal and resented the performative nature of people like yourself who clamored to get it changed.
They found it very embarrassing, and patronizing.
Not that anyone in the leadership ranks cared what they thought. They were too busy performing for the masses clamoring to capitalize on a social media trend and the moral panic propelled by activist idiots.
Not a single one of these people would ever think for a second to invite a person to dinner who had been convicted a few years earlier of holding a pregnant woman at gunpoint after invading her home. Especially if that person was white.
Suddenly they all cared in a change that happened overnight. That's great that you were pushing for these things with Ferguson but I grew up in a mostly black community and I dealt with this my whole life rather than jumping on a bandwagon like you did.
The prescribed philosophies and practices don't help the situation they just make it worse and you would know that if you had grown up in a black community like I did. You didn't so you don't.
I know a hell of a lot more about race relations than people of any color who grew up in predominantly white suburbs. I got the s** kicked out of me in the early '90s in middle school after they did a screening of Malcolm x. I actually loved the film but several boys decided it was a great occasion to beat the s** out of a white kid in response to the racism they witnessed in the film. Those are the kinds of experiences that teach you that often times you are further dividing people rather than uniting them. None of you wokies get that.
White racism created a lot of cultural conditions in places like Ferguson. Those cultural conditions continue to perpetuate themselves in the absence of the racism that first spun them into existence. Your ideology ignores this and acts like the forces that spun those things into existence are still prominent. In a nation that elected a black president. It's nonsensical and opinion polls show this.
A bunch of activist wanted more money and more prestige at the universities that employ them and they're getting it. Congratulations your side one and the country is worse off because of it.
Ray, Ali, Color Purple, Glory, Django, Cotton Club, Boyz in the Hood, Friday, Malcolm X, Bad Boys, Barbershop, and of course, New Jack City.
Each of these movies did great and reached a wide demographic. As did Black Panther. The only difference is that Black Panther's marketing propogated this ridiculous myth that it was the first black superhero movie. (Sorry, Wesley Snipes, Will Smith, and Halle Berre... you're down the memory hole.) Or, even more absurd, that it is the first all-black cast that has done well at the box office.
Just shows how powerful marketing is.
More power to them... I've lived through several iterations of "'brand-new' microfiber technology that make cleaning up spills a snap!" I suppose I can live through endless repetitions of "the very first movie with a real-live black person in it!" Whatever....
This is one of my favorite movies of all time. Despite being 3+ hours, There isn't a single boring moment and Spike Lee and Denzel do a superb job at showing the transformation of Malcolm X. Now I have to go check out the autobiography.
Agreed, Malcolm X is one of the most fascinating individuals in recent history. The movie based on his autobiography is also quite good: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104797/
Braff pitched "Wish I Was Here" as a spiritual successor to Garden State:
> I was about to sign a typical financing deal in order to get the money to make "Wish I Was Here," my follow up to “Garden State.” It would have involved making a lot of sacrifices I think would have ultimately hurt the film.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1869987317/wish-i-was-here-1
Spike Lee isn't pitching the latest project as a continuation of Malcolm X
That's a fair point on VM's loyal fanbase that was lingering since 2007. But Braff's project leveraged Garden State as much as Lee's Leveraged Malcolm X and others of his past films. Your argument is biting its own tail: You're saying Lee's project was entirely driven by his name, but that's because Lee made it so. He could have made a more convincing video or written a better text giving more info (just like Braff did) but he didn't. My point is that he could have been more successful if he had put in more effort.
That's the whole point: Spike Lee's past films should outweigh Braff's effort with Garden State when it comes to convincing people about their respective ability to make good films, but it didn't.
How someone depicts rape or how stereotypical it is is irrelevant. The dangerous component here is the limitation on freedom of expression. This horse has been beaten to death 10 million times, but here's a distillation of the argument:
If you ban, for example, all simulation of racist themes, you eliminate a certain kind of harmful imagery, which is a good thing. But this also prevents one from educating people as to why racism is wrong, by showing a depiction and how harmful it can be. It would ban things like movies about the life of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr or Emmett Till.
As relates to rape, this would ban Lifetime movies which show the gritty horrible reality of rape and the subsequent damage it does to people's lives. That violent struggle is a stereotype of rape that hides non-consensual sex as a form of rape is irrelevant to the main point: this law destroys our ability to educate and our freedom of expression.