Word: denzel
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...crude, careless sensibilities like Lee's deal in. He means to be affable here and pay some sort of tribute to the world of his father Bill, a jazzman who wrote the film's score. But despite firsthand knowledge, his story of how the career of trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Denzel Washington) is undone by pride, womanizing and unwise affection for a shiftless manager (played by Lee) is conventionally romantic, and so is his realization of its 'round-midnight atmosphere...
...Better Blues, produced, written and directed by Lee, centers around the life of Bleek Gilliam (Denzel Washington), a gifted trumpeter and leader of a popular New York jazz quintet. Gilliam is an arrogant introspective artist who puts his music first and everything else in his life a distant second...
...acting, under Lee's capable direction, is strictly first-rate. Denzel Washington's performance is nothing short of tremendous. Washington portrays the various aspects of Gilliam's life--the arrogance, the defermination, the hopelessness--with convincing power and emotion. Even the difficult onstage scenes and trumpet close-ups seem natural enough. Another Oscar nomination, this time for best actor, should be in the offing...
...July 18, 1863, the blacks of the 54th Massachusetts led a virtually suicidal assault upon Fort Wagner, a massive Confederate earthwork guarding the approach to Charleston, S.C., harbor. At a critical moment in Glory's version of the attack, Trip, the runaway slave-soldier played by Denzel Washington, seizes the American flag and runs forward with it to his death. His death says this: "I did not want your white man's flag; earlier I refused the 'honor' of carrying it. But I will do it now, dying with other black men, because, understand me, we are citizens...
Kevin Jarre's script makes no direct comment on these matters, and a squad of fine actors ground the film in felt reality: Denzel Washington is a proud and badly misused troublemaker; Driving Miss Daisy's Morgan Freeman a steadying influence; Andre Braugher a Harvard student who finds Emersonian idealism of small help in mastering the bayonet. It is the movie's often awesome imagery and a bravely soaring choral score by James Horner that transfigure the reality, granting it the status of necessary myth. Broad, bold, blunt, Glory is everything that a film like Miss Daisy, all nuance...