Part of our CINEMA IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS series. Saturday, June 20, 2020 @ 7p, Netflix Streaming Service: MALCOLM X (1992 , Netflix, dir by Spike Lee, streaming, 201 mns)
HOW TO: While we all work to be socially responsible during the age of coronavirus, Secret Movie Club is experimenting with news ways we can all come together as a community and watch great movies.
We want to keep this very reasonable since folks have to have Netflix to start with. So donate whatever works for you. $1 is fine with us.
Just make sure you download NETFLIX PARTY on a Chrome Browser. You'll see the initials NP in the upper right hand corner of browser after a succesful download.
Secret Movie Club will email the link for the Netflix Party at 30 minutes before showtime using the email you provide here. Click that link then click the NP in upper right hand corner. This will synch you to our screening. We will start the movie at exactly 5 minutes after the hour.
There will be a chat function that allows everyone to comment as we go.
The Secret Movie Club team will be offering trivia, history, insights, articles, deep dives throughout the movie(s). We're going to work to make this as rich a feast as possible utilizing the technology at hand.
Then we'll want your feedback immediately on how we can improve/make it better! This also will allow Secret Movie Clubbers from all over the world to join in on a virtual screening!
MALCOLM X is very much both a culmination and transitional movie for Spike Lee. It culminates a cycle of movies he made starting with SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT that partnered him with cinematographer Ernest Dickerson. Together they created a visual language of bold color, strong camera movement, and electric compositions that finds one of its fullest expressions in this movie.
At the same time, Lee would be transitioning to a more diverse and eclectic body of work after this willing to make engaging genre entertainments as much as his provocative commitments to the issues faced by the American black community.
But in MALCOLM X, we interestingly find Lee blending both these rivers of his moviemaking journey into one. Based in large part on Alex Haley's THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, the spine of the movie is Denzel Washington's amazingly focused, electric performance as Malcolm. At the same time, Lee chooses to be BOTH challenging (the movie opens with images of the 1992 Rodney King beatings) and classical (the entire film feels like the great biopics of the 1950s and 1960s).
The result is a stunningly complex and even handed movie that shows Malcolm X's journey from a drug selling hustler in the 1940's to the influential Civil Rights Leader he would become in the 1960's. For those who've seen DO THE RIGHT THING, you know the famous photo of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King shaking hands that plays a huge part in that movie. Lee's entire career somehow seems to contain the tension expressed in that image of two men committed to righting the injustices of American racism with different approaches.
Lastly, for anyone who's not read the Alex Haley novel, Lee fully commits to the narrative told in that book including Malcolm's conversion to Islam and finally his realization that it wasn't white people as a group against whom he was fighting (for he met many kind white people during his trip to Mecca) but institutionalized American racism.
Join us for one of Spike Lee's very best movies.
Best always,
Craig Hammill
35mm Secret Movie Club Founder.Programmer