Mo' Better Blues

Yet another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was the jazz movie Mo' Better Blues. It's going to be on StarzEncore In Black tomorrow at 3:48 PM, so I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

A brief prologue set back in 1969 has a young Bleek Gilliam practicing his scales on the trumpet under the tutelage of his mother. Some of his friends are outside the front steps of his house, cajoling him to come out and play ball with them, which makes his mother none too happy, as Bleek goes back to his scales.

Fast forward 20 years. Bleek is now an adult, playing in a jazz combo bearing his name together with saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes), bassist Bottom (Bill Nunn), piano player Left Hand (Giancarlo Esposito), and drummer Rhythm (Jeff Watts). The group is managed by Bleek's childhood friend Giant (Spike Lee, who also directed and wrote the script). The combos seems successful, although Giant and the club's management (brothers played by John and Nick Turturro) worry about Shadow going into solos that run too long. So there is at least a bit of tension within the combo. Left Hand also has a French girlfriend who causes him to show up late at times, and even comes into the dressing room, which is a big no-no.

But the movie is much more about Bleek's life and, on a secondary note, Giant's, than it is about Left Hand. Bleek has a girlfriend in Indigo (Joie Lee), but it turns out that he has a second girlfriend in Clarke Betancourt (Cynda Williams), who is an aspiring singer who would like it if Bleek could put her up on stage to sing with the combo. Now, there's nothing wrong with her wanting to sing, and nothing wrong with having an instrumental combo, except that the two are clearly incompatible. Maybe Clarke could sing with a different combo, but that would bring up its own set of problems.

In fact, Clarke is going to wind up singing with another combo when Shadow begins to chafe under Bleek's leadership, even falling in love with Clarke himself. But that all comes later in the movie, after Clarke and Indigo both find out that Bleek has two girlfriends, thanks to his having bought the same dress for the both of them that they both just happen to wear to the club on the same night, even though Indigo doesn't normally like going to the club. Talk about bad luck, although Bleek brought it upon himself by having two girlfriends in the first place.

In the meantime, we've also got Giant's story. He's not a particularly good manager, having negotiated a bad deal for the combo, which they'd like to renegotiate except that Bleek's name is on the dotted line. That's part of why Shadow things about going out on his own with a new combo. Bleek would like more money although management rightly point out there's that contract. Giant needs more money. He's been betting on baseball, and doing a lousy job of it, because he's fairly heavily in debt to his bookie Petey (Ruben Blades). Giant is unable to pay, resulting in muscle being brought in to try to make him pay.

Mo' Better Blues has a pretty good story, helped out by an unsurprisingly good performance by Denzel Washington. The music is also quite good, even if, like me, you're not the biggest fan of jazz. But one place where I felt the movie was really a let-down was in the direction. Spike Lee used some really intrusive camera movement throughout the movie when static shots would have worked better. There were dizzying pans on several occasions, and one weird sequence that apparently had Bleek on a turntable in his own apartment as the camera stayed on his face while the background did a 360-degree rotation. Sure, the camera doesn't have to be stationary all the time the way it was in those early talkies of filmed plays, but the choices for moving the camera around here were, I thought, too frequent and at the wrong times.

But for peole for whom such camera movement isn't an issue, they'll definitely love Mo' Better Blues.