Product Description

Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington gives a riveting performance in Spike Lee's breathtaking film on music and love. Talented trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Washington) is obsessed by his music and indecisiveness about his girlfriends Indigo (Joie Lee) and Clarke (Cynda Williams). But when he is forced to come to the aid of his manager and childhood friend (Spike Lee), Bleek finds his world more fragile that he ever imagined. Stunning cinematography, a rousing score and superlative performances come together in this unforgettable feast for the senses.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43939 in DVD
• Brand: UNI DIST CORP. (MCA)
• Published on: 2004-12-01
• Released on: 2004-12-28
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 130 minutes

Amazon.com
With Mo' Better Blues, the story of a young trumpeter's rise to jazz-world stardom, Spike Lee set out to counter Clint Eastwood's cliché-ridden biopic of Charlie Parker in Bird. But the final product, a slick, glossy drama (with hip-hop jazz provided by Gangstarr no less), is just as superficial as the numerous Alger-esque stories of music stardom to which movie audiences are accustomed.

Denzel Washington gives a typically charismatic performance as the trumpeter in question, as does Wesley Snipes as his sax-playing rival. And as with most Spike Lee films, there are numerous solid performers in small roles such as Bill Nunn, Latin-music star Rubén Blades, and comedian Robin Harris. One character, however, attracted unwanted attention: John Turturro's role as an unscrupulous music-industry exec. Critics called the Turturro character, who is at once money hungry, swarthy, and perpetually shrouded in darkness, a classic anti-Semitic caricature. But the charge seems almost irrelevant in Spike Lee's cartoonish, overstylized world of impossibly hunky jazzmen, curvaceous hangers-on, and incessant bebop. --Ethan Brown

From The New Yorker
The hero of Spike Lee's film is a trumpet player named Bleek Gilliam (Denzel Washington), who is squarely in the tradition of obsessive, single-minded movie jazz musicians. Lee's script presents Bleek with a series of choices, about his love life, his artistic life, and the connections between them. The problem with the picture is that it doesn't frame the hero's choices so that we know what's at stake. And Lee doesn't seem to have thought through the role of the music. He has set the film in the present-in pointed contrast with other recent movies about jazz-but his attitude toward the music's relationship to contemporary culture is incoherent. The picture has a distracted, meandering quality. It leaves out all sorts of crucial information about the characters and then, after two long hours, ends with a slick, evasive montage sequence: eight minutes of images of domestic bliss, with John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" on the soundtrack. Denzel Washington's magnetism and intelligence keep the movie watchable even during its most aimless stretches, but the script doesn't allow him to shape the performance. Lee's filmmaking here is all notions and no shape: hard, fierce blowing, rather than real music. Also with Wesley Snipes, Joie Lee, Cynda Williams, Giancarlo Esposito, Dick Anthony Williams, John and Nicholas Turturro, and the late Robin Harris. Lee himself plays a comic lovable-sidekick role. The score is by Bill Lee (the director's father), and the music of Bleek's quintet is played by the Branford Marsalis Quintet, with Terence Blanchard as the trumpet soloist. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker