Highest 2 Lowest From Lee Surge It’s all about African-American coolness. The Brooklyn director’s latest confetti is a summation of stylish American upper-class black elegance and a poetic return to a musical cultural tradition destroyed by blind profits and swaggering rap chants. Someone must have told Lee that getting lost in ideology (PT Anderson’s model) is a stale procedure (BlackKkKlansman) and then here he returns to his more affected and familiar pace (In Man), where entertainment rhymes with sophistication, captures the perfect flow of Kurosawa’s masterpiece (Anatomy of a Kidnapping, 1963) and shines like a jeweled exhibition Denzel Washington here is David King, the biblical owner (he looks like Quincy Jones) of Stackin’ Hits Records and an impeccable ear for exclusively black musical talent.
Nestled in the luxury of an apartment in Brooklyn’s Olympia Dumbo overlooking Manhattan (a kind of vertical jungle), filled with black sports-political iconography on the walls, King is looking to recover the shares of the company he sold a few years ago to gain a majority again, secretly regretting having surrendered real control of the label to the most unscrupulous and empty of business blinders.
Meanwhile, his beautiful wife Pam (Ifanesh Hadera) goes to a music foundation meeting, King accompanies his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) to basketball practice, forcing him to turn off his smartphone for a few hours and connect with reality. That doesn’t mean King was a person who lived in ancient times, quite the opposite. All drenched in knick-knacks, nice earrings and flashy rings, white tie over white shirt and blue jacket, with big vintage gold headphones (actually a signature of Lee’s aesthetic), he isolates himself mystically while listening to music.
What disrupts his boss’s happiness is a sudden phone call, in which he is asked for a large ransom (17.5 million dollars in Swiss francs) to get his son back. Within moments the New York police anti-kidnapping machine was activated and a detective suspected King’s driver, Paul. (Jeffrey Wright), his “brother” and a kind of iconographic link to past petty crimes as well as Islamism Malcolm
Overall ship’s crew he places himself in King’s loft, where another small change occurs: Trey was never kidnapped, but due to an exchange of sweatbands during basketball, Kyle, Paul’s son, who was practicing with him, was kidnapped. The first hour of the film flows with deliberately controlled linearity, a patinated, translucent surface, on which King even shows hesitation in paying a ransom for his friend’s son.
Highest 2 Lowest finally unfolds in a symphony action And neonoir in the second hour, it begins with an elaborate series of money transfers that Lee passionately plans in a subway car filled with Yankees fans and on the street with an invasion of thousands of Puerto Ricans for their national parade/holiday. Here the vast, geometric scope of the director’s Do the Right Thing becomes a sensory maelstrom with a solemn Blanchardian soundtrack Howard Drossinthat blends with the live performance of aging Puerto Rican icon Eddie Palmieri.
Money lost. Kyle returns home. The police no longer understood anything, but King’s ears turned to the solution. He and Paul, guns in hand, pistols fired, and a confession, would find the rapper’s kidnapper in the depths of the ghetto they came from. Eventually King would find a smaller, more familiar label, starting to produce Sula (Alyana-Lee), this time discovered by his son Trey, a kind of melodic return to more harmonious, traditional soul music.
We’re going into a lot of detail (you can find it everywhere online) not because we want to give away spoilers, but to clarify where Lee, via his Washington/King alter ego, wanted to go with this. a kind of mature, adult confessionreturning to the rather conservative origins of the music, naturally fed up with the negative slant of rap production itself which is no longer based on the authenticity of poverty but on the thirst for easy income thanks to social media.
Highest 2 Lowest And strong and classy amalgam between image and sound, a very friendly cinema for those who listened to Motown and James Brown (the third nocturnal hunt section is completely set to the tune of Mr. Dynamite) before auto-tune arrived. The song Highest 2 Lowest is sung by Alyana-Lee, and also the version by Prisencolinensinainciusol by Celentano in the closing credits, it is an extraordinary work. While Washington is a very charming actor, camouflaged among the world’s invincible echoes Equalizer and bourgeois coolness.
