Back In The Mid90s, A Solid Coming of Age Story Occurred Just As Bojack Horseman Was On A Very Famous TV Show

First Jordan Peele, then Bo Burnham, now Jonah Hill, there are so many comedians getting into the business of directing dramatic pieces of cinema these days! At this pace, I expect Horatio Sanz to have an acclaimed indie feature out by Summer 2020 at the latest. Hill's contribution to this trend is a coming-of-age story called Mid90s taking place in the middle of the (when else?) 1990's. Serving as Hill's first time directing or writing a movie (though he has received a Story By credit on a number of past movies), Mid90s isn't as good as the directorial debuts from the aforementioned likes of Peele or Burnham, but it is good enough to make me curious about where Hill goes as a filmmaker from here, he's certainly got a distinctive creative voice that has real potential.

Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman Is A Triumphant Examination Of Past & Present Racism

Far too many American movies dealing with racism in America's past do so, usually with a Caucasian white savior protagonist in tow, with the purpose of reassuring white moviegoers that "Everything is fine now, look how much better things are now compared to the past!" Horrors of the past and the lives of the disenfranchised who had to endure the brunt of such horrors are reduced to being simply a way to reassure privileged members of present-day society that everything related to race in the modern world is cool, everything is fine. That's certainly not the case with Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, which is all about using a story about a black cop infiltrating a KKK charter to explore how racist horrors of the past still heavily influence a modern-day world where bigotry runs rampant.

Driving Miss Daisy Is Hard To Hate But Is Also Hard To Get Wrapped Up In

Winning the Best Picture Oscar is typically akin to winning American Idol; such an ostensibly prestigious victory that should result in an avalanche of good news usually invites more scorn than admiration. Though plenty of exceptions like Casablanca, No Country For Old Men and Schindler's List exist, a large number of Best Picture winners are only known by the general public in the years afterward for beating out a movie they vastly preferred for the victory. That strikes me as unfair to hold against a movie since it's the voters for the Academy Award that designate a certain movie should win Best Picture, not the movie itself.

Do The Right Thing And Watch Spike Lee's 1989 Masterpiece

One of the biggest takeaways I have about Do The Right Thing is that its entire climax (which hinges on an unarmed African-American man being killed by a police officer via a chokehold) feels chillingly relevant today. My other big takeaway is that Spike Lee's 1989 film Do The Right Thing is an extraordinary piece of cinema, a motion picture that fleshes out the array of inhabitants in one neighborhood and makes the location feel like an entire world. This wasn't the first Spike Lee directed movie to really take off (the guy had even hosted SNL prior to this), but it's so easy to see why Do The Right Thing took Lee to the next level of stardom.