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: #3845 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