Malcolm X

Its the best movie I have ever watched. very clear and easy to shift through.will encourage any potential buyer to go for it.

I am a huge fan of the book, but the movie has so many flaws that it left me hungry for a better film. The good: The acting by Denzel Washington is great. He brings life to a man that most of us knew only as an angry man. His smile and spirit (and almost dead on physical similarity to Malcolm) brought so much to humanize him. Spike Lee couldn't have cast the main role any better and he was responsible for writing a great likable living Malcolm. It was also nice to see Ernest Thomas aka Roger from the TV show "What's Happening" ('hey hey hey Raj!"). The bad is that several of the other actors were not nearly as good. Al Freeman Jr. was terrible as Elijah Muhammad and it bordered on comical how clunky. Nothing was clunkier than the music that was chosen for the movie. It really pulled you out of the scene, especially the music during the Mecca visit. It sounds like a song from a 1970s bad documentary. The scene with Malcolm and his wife discussing their personal lives was destroyed by the terrible music.

One highlight was Lee's choice to use Ozzie Davis' voice for the eulogy. Since he wrote and delivered it at the actual funeral, it was a brilliant move to have it recreated by him for the film.

I am not a huge fan of Spike Lee's work, but this movie is epic and he did an amazing job of condensing a great book. The life of Malcolm X was perfect for a movie. It really is a life in 3 acts, and the third act has the rewards of his life before, but also the penalty of his previous life, which he can't escape. Sadly there were parts that were missing including the debt he owed his Aunt. She was pivotal in the book, and even one scene with her would have helped explain where he got the money to go to Mecca.

The picture of the DVD is great, but the sound is just average with some of the dialog mixed very low. The 2 disk set has a great deal of extras that make it worth it. The deleted scenes were wisely left out of the original movie. Nice to see them (love DVDs for this!) but Lee was very smart to not include most of them. The hunger scene was great, but didn't fit in the movie. I do wished he would have included the scene about the white girl who wanted to help, but was not given the opportunity. Lee filmed a follow up scene that redeemed Malcolm, but for some reason didn't include it. The omission of this one scene left me frustrated because it really showed how his humanity had changed after his trip to Mecca. He finally embraced a new self and Denzel played it so well. Luckily it is one of the deleted scenes so enjoy it.

Overall, I wish he had spent another 20 dollars on the soundtrack. He might have gotten something that wasn't so distracting and it would have made the movie much stronger. The music fights the moods so many times it really reminds you that you are watching a movie. Much of it sounds like temp music that he just slapped in there regardless of how it affected the emotion of the scene.

I love Malcolm, I love Spike, I love Denzel...I grew up on the street Malcolm was born on, in North Omaha, Pinkney Street, BUT...the movie is lacking...Read The Book!!! It is a revelation.

It was great and it showed how Malcolm X evolved as a person. I loved it.

Epic films about influential martyrs who die young, whether the subject is Lincoln, JFK, or Malcolm, rarely attract my attention or hold my interest. The best one can hope for is that a point of view stops short of propaganda, that it doesn't fall prey to a white-washing, or black-washing, of a story that has already taken on the stuff that mythic dreams are made of. Lee's movie and Washington's performance are both so powerful that one can easily forgive many of the broad strokes, enjoy the film, and evaluate the sum effect--which at least has the potential to bring about a fuller understanding of race and religion than the daily political-media noise to which most of us are otherwise continually exposed.

Malcolm comes across as a practicing idealist, a man of the highest integrity and most rigorous discipline capable of realizing his vision of a brotherhood whose awareness of its lineage will bring forth the very best moral intentions and practices. Although the problematic divisions of Islam into Sunni (Malcolm's alignment) and Shia, along with the distinctions between Islam and the Nation of Islam, are merely suggested and the break with Elijah Muhammad due to the latter's "woman problem" is glossed over, in the end the movie's importance rises above attention to such details. Malcolm is a hero, a role model and, most importantly, the inspiration for a meaningful, potentially constructive, mythic legacy that, like similar narratives centered on Lincoln or JFK, cannot outsize its human source beyond the point of credibility.

If one accepts the current tendency of the population to bifurcate its citizenry into black and white, the hope has to be that those who see themselves as black will see in Malcolm's separatism not segregation and exclusionary practices but a rallying cry to accept one's identity as a full-fledged member of a human race empowered to pursue and achieve excellence regardless of (not because of) color. What Malcolm perceived as a flaw (his white genes transmitted by rape through his mother) became, after all, his strength. As for those members of the audience who identify themselves as white, the hope has to be that the uneasy feelings provoked by Malcolm's stance of separatism will bring about self-recognition of the assault to personal worth brought about not simply by exclusionary practices or the publicized statements of a "social radical," but by generations of whites practicing "Biblically sanctioned," legislatively licensed segregation.

At its best, cinema has the potential to be a reflective screen, a mirror of our social and private lives, exposing the best and worst in us all. Individually, few figures in America's history have so effectively mirrored "white America" to itself as Malcolm X. Together, the two--film and Malcolm--make for a potent mix, a powerful chemistry that, we can only hope, will continue to exert its clarifying powers on the diversely colored stage that is being set for the coming year's test of a nation's ability to practice the democracy that it professes to prize above all else.