Editorial Product Review: essential video:Just as Do the Right Thing was the capstone of Spike Lee's earlier career, Malcolm X marked the next milestone in the filmmaker's artistic maturity. It seemed everything Lee had done up to that point was to prepare him for this epic biography of America's fiery civil-rights leader, who is superbly played by Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington, from his early days as a zoot-suited hustler known as 'Detroit Red' to his spiritual maturity after his pilgrimage to Mecca, ...
Editorial Product Review: :Mira Nair, the Indian director, scored an international art-house hit with her feature debut, Salaam Bombay!, a tale of life in the streets of seething urban India. Her next film was a surprising turnabout: Mississippi Masala is a cultural study and a love story set in the rural American south. The love story comes courtesy of Denzel Washington, as a rug cleaner, and Sarita Choudhury (from Nair's Kama Sutra), as the daughter of Indian immigrants running a small-time motel; ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:One of the very best films about the Civil War, this instant classic from 1989 is also one of the few films to depict the participation of African American soldiers in Civil War combat. Based in part on the books Lay This Laurel by Lincoln Kirstein and One Gallant Rush by Peter Burchard, the film also draws from the letters of Robert Gould Shaw (played by Matthew Broderick), the 25-year-old son of Boston abolitionists who volunteered to ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Spike Lee's incendiary look at race relations in America, circa 1989, is so colorful and exuberant for its first three-quarters that you can almost forget the terrible confrontation that the movie inexorably builds toward. Do the Right Thing is a joyful, tumultuous masterpiece--maybe the best film ever made about race in America, revealing racial prejudices and stereotypes in all their guises and demonstrating how a deadly riot can erupt out of a series of small misunderstandings. Set ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Director Norman Jewison's (In the Heat of the Night) 1984 adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play explores the ramifications of racism and loyalty through the prism of blacks in the military, revealed through a murder mystery set in the 1940s deep South. Howard E. Rollins (Ragtime) plays a military investigator assigned to the murder of a drill instructor (Adolph Caesar) in charge of a black platoon. Under pressure from his superiors to wrap his investigation up quickly, ...
Editorial Product Review: :This tedious remake of the classic Christmas movie The Bishop's Wife falls on its face by significantly altering the careful design of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert E. Sherwood's story for the original film. In Sherwood's version, a rather wooden, inept bishop and his lonely wife unknowingly take into their lives a heaven-sent angel who aids the former and ends up falling in love with the latter. In this unnecessary update, an inner-city preacher (Courtney B. Vance) and his estranged ...
Editorial Product Review: :A shameful chapter in American history is powerfully dramatized in Rosewood, but moviegoers in 1997 may not have been ready for the African American equivalent of Schindler's List. And while the massacre that occurred in the nearly all-black town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1922 cannot compare in scale to the Nazi holocaust, it potently illustrates the same issues of racism and inherited intolerance that percolate at every level of human existence. An estimated 40 to 150 blacks were killed ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Tina Turner, that dynamic diva of pop/soul/R&B from the '60s to the '90s, sings like a woman whose life story is every bit as rough and tough as her voice. And What's Love Got to Do With It, based on her autobiographical account (in I, Tina, written with Kurt Loder) of her years under the iron fist of her abusive husband and musical partner/Svengali Ike, is further proof of what we've always known about Tina: She's what ...
Editorial Product Review: :Tim Reid's wonderful film about life in the black neighborhood of Glen Allan, Mississippi, from the mid-'40s to the dawn of the civil rights movement, is thick with terrific, inspired actors and possessed of a mature, limpid visual style. The story is told from the point of view of a young boy raised by his stalwart grandfather and his kind aunt. But the collective tale of a community coming to terms with the risks it must take to fight ...
This raw work-flow application isn't the Holy Grail many hoped it would be, but Apple Aperture 1.5 could make life easier for photographers who need to cull, retouch, and output large numbers of photographs quickly and efficiently.
This raw work-flow application isn't the Holy Grail many hoped it would be, but Apple Aperture 1.5 could make life easier for photographers who need to cull, retouch, and output large numbers of photographs quickly and efficiently.