Word: gilliams
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...FISHER KING Directed by Terry Gilliam; Screenplay by Richard LaGravenese...
...pity is that fledgling efforts at international communication can be so easily subverted by reporterial inattention. Our guests were polite enough not to mention the insult. Your paper must. Nathanial Hupert '87-'88 Zoltan Arany '89 James Morris Andrea Cheville Mike Murphy Carey Farquhar Peter Nigrovic Melissa Gilliam Curtis Page Bill Grobman Sara Szal Matt Menard Caroline Tsen Jose Morales Jessica Wu Czechoslovak Project
...what 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...
...their weaker, and sometimes uglier sides. The themes concerning Black society come across as sappy, too typically Hollywood. No doubt, Lee could have found more powerful ways to convey his message. But especially disconcerting is Lee's scripting of the two Jewish night-club owners who refuse to give Gilliam's group their fair share of the lucrative profits. The two characters are viciously stereotypical, bordering on the unacceptably offensive. They appear saddeningly hypocritical in light of Lee's protests against the stereotyping of Blacks in American films and society...
...considerable risk of armchair psychoanylizing, I venture that that is not all this film is about. Mo' Better Blues has a strong autobiographical quality about it. I suspect that, together, Gilliam, the driven artist, and Giant, the pawn of economic forces--noticably non-Black--represent Lee himself. In light of Lee's previous praise of his own close family and his equally strong condemnation of a film industry he has found to be exploitive and racist, some of Mo' Better Blues's themes take on new meaning...