Product Description

Inspiring story of Malcolm X, as he rises up from poverty, encounters the law, achieves spiritual enlightenment, and reaches out to others in the fight for human and civil rights.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: PG13
Release Date: 18-JAN-2000
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4302 in DVD
• Brand: WASHINGTON,DENZEL
• Released on: 2000-01-18
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, HiFi Sound, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 201 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Just as Do the Right Thing was the capstone of Spike Lee's earlier career, Malcolm X marked the next milestone in the filmmaker's artistic maturity. It seemed everything Lee had done up to that point was to prepare him for this epic biography of America's fiery civil-rights leader, who is superbly played by Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington, from his early days as a zoot-suited hustler known as "Detroit Red" to his spiritual maturity after his pilgrimage to Mecca, as a Black Muslim by the name of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Do the Right Thing climaxed with the photographic images of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King engulfed by flames of rage; Malcolm X explores the genesis and evolution of that rage over Malcolm's lifetime, and how these two great figures--held up to the public as polar-opposites within the African American human rights movement (King for nonviolent civil disobedience, Malcolm for achieving equality "by any means necessary")--were each essential to the agenda of the other. Lee careens from the hedonistic ebullience of Malcolm's early days to the stark despair of prison, from his life-changing conversion to Islam to his emergence as a dynamic political leader--all with an epic sweep and vitality that illuminates personal details as well as political ideology. Angela Bassett is also terrific as Malcolm's wife, Betty Shabazz. --Jim Emerson

From The New Yorker
There's a great deal of passion in Spike Lee's three-hour-and-twenty-minute adaptation of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," but it's not an artist's passion; the responses Lee aims for are the clear, pedagogically effective ones rather than the disturbing, irresolvable ones that Malcom's own account evokes on almost every page. Malcolm, who achieved fame in the early sixties as a compelling spokesman for the black-pride philosophy of the Nation of Islam, is an unlikely hero for a big-studio prestige picture: he begins as a predatory street criminal, becomes a studious Muslim ascetic, and fulfills himself as a scourge. The movie is disappointingly impersonal; it doesn't provide readers of the autobiography anything like a fresh vision of its remarkable subject. Lee assumes Malcolm's greatness and then simply illustrates it. His approach isn't radical enough to give shape and coherence to Malcolm's internal conflicts; and the ponderous rhythms of the great-man bio-pic only emphasize the impossibility of rendering this story with conventional movie-narrative means. Denzel Washington's performance as Malcolm gets off to a rocky start-for the first hour, he's required to play the hero as a teen-ager-but it gains authority as the movie goes along. This film's Malcolm isn't so much a character as an image: a statue for us to look up at in wonder. Also with Angela Bassett, Delray Linde, Albert Hall, Spike Lee, and Al Freeman, Jr. (a wonderfully sly turn as the hero's mentor, Elijah Muhammad). The script, credited to Lee and Arnold Perl, incorporates (haphazardly) scenes and ideas from a scenario written more than twenty years ago by James Baldwin. The original score, by the jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard, is brilliant. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

very good Malcom x movie
Its the best movie I have ever watched. very clear and easy to shift through.will encourage any potential buyer to go for it.

Flawed masterpiece
I am a huge fan of the book, but the movie has so many flaws that it left me hungry for a better film. The good: The acting by Denzel Washington is great. He brings life to a man that most of us knew only as an angry man. His smile and spirit (and almost dead on physical similarity to Malcolm) brought so much to humanize him. Spike Lee couldn't have cast the main role any better and he was responsible for writing a great likable living Malcolm. It was also nice to see Ernest Thomas aka Roger from the TV show "What's Happening" ('hey hey hey Raj!"). The bad is that several of the other actors were not nearly as good. Al Freeman Jr. was terrible as Elijah Muhammad and it bordered on comical how clunky. Nothing was clunkier than the music that was chosen for the movie. It really pulled you out of the scene, especially the music during the Mecca visit. It sounds like a song from a 1970s bad documentary. The scene with Malcolm and his wife discussing their personal lives was destroyed by the terrible music.

One highlight was Lee's choice to use Ozzie Davis' voice for the eulogy. Since he wrote and delivered it at the actual funeral, it was a brilliant move to have it recreated by him for the film.

I am not a huge fan of Spike Lee's work, but this movie is epic and he did an amazing job of condensing a great book. The life of Malcolm X was perfect for a movie. It really is a life in 3 acts, and the third act has the rewards of his life before, but also the penalty of his previous life, which he can't escape. Sadly there were parts that were missing including the debt he owed his Aunt. She was pivotal in the book, and even one scene with her would have helped explain where he got the money to go to Mecca.

The picture of the DVD is great, but the sound is just average with some of the dialog mixed very low. The 2 disk set has a great deal of extras that make it worth it. The deleted scenes were wisely left out of the original movie. Nice to see them (love DVDs for this!) but Lee was very smart to not include most of them. The hunger scene was great, but didn't fit in the movie. I do wished he would have included the scene about the white girl who wanted to help, but was not given the opportunity. Lee filmed a follow up scene that redeemed Malcolm, but for some reason didn't include it. The omission of this one scene left me frustrated because it really showed how his humanity had changed after his trip to Mecca. He finally embraced a new self and Denzel played it so well. Luckily it is one of the deleted scenes so enjoy it.

Overall, I wish he had spent another 20 dollars on the soundtrack. He might have gotten something that wasn't so distracting and it would have made the movie much stronger. The music fights the moods so many times it really reminds you that you are watching a movie. Much of it sounds like temp music that he just slapped in there regardless of how it affected the emotion of the scene.

Read The Book!!!
I love Malcolm, I love Spike, I love Denzel...I grew up on the street Malcolm was born on, in North Omaha, Pinkney Street, BUT...the movie is lacking...Read The Book!!! It is a revelation.