Another trio of titles is ready to hit the online store, and this time the slate consists of Spike Lee’s “Mo’ Better Blues,” Klaus Härö’s “The Fencer,” and Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show.”
Spike Lee’s meteoric rise began when he won a Student Academy Award in 1983 for “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” his NYU master’s degree thesis film. He then made his feature length debut with “She’s Gotta Have It” before helming what’s generally regarded as his masterpiece, “Do The Right Thing.” Lee’s third feature was “Mo’ Better Blues,” the director’s first of four films starring Denzel Washington.
In “Mo’ Better Blues” Washington plays Bleek Gilliam, a trumpet player torn between two women who’s also the leader of a band concerned that his loyalty to childhood friend Giant — the band’s gambling addicted manager (played by Lee) — is holding them back. While the film certainly explores themes of race and color (such as the fact one of Gilliam’s paramours is a dark-skinned woman while the other is light-skinned, or the way the other band members treat the pianist’s white French girlfriend, or the group’s tenuous relationship with the white owners of the nightclub where they perform), these issues are less at the forefront here than on Lee’s previous picture or the one that followed it, “Jungle Fever.”