Spike Lee has directed feature films for over 40 years and has built a reputation as a provocateur and savvy self-promoter. His films, including She's Gotta Have It, Malcolm X, and When the Levees Broke, have provoked public reaction, challenged audience notions about race and sex, and intersected with popular culture. Highest 2 Lowest reimagines Akira Kurosawa's High and Low as an entertaining morality play centered on a kidnapping plot involving a record executive (Denzel Washington) and a destitute superfan (A$AP Rocky). The film deliberately invokes Kurosawa and Rashomon influences and invites broader readings about class, race, and interpretation.
Over Spike Lee's more than 40 years of directing feature films - from his indie breakout She's Gotta Have It (1986) to his epic Hollywood biopic Malcolm X (1992) to his polemical Hurricane Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) - he has earned a reputation as a provocateur and a savvy self-promoter. His "joints," as the Brooklyn-bred auteur brands his movies, have sparked ludicrous fears of rioting ( Do the Right Thing), unsettled audience notions about race and sex ( Jungle Fever), and landed him in blockbuster Nike ads alongside Michael Jordan ("Money, it's gotta be the shoes!"). His new movie, Highest 2 Lowest, aspires to no such distinction.
Lee's lively reimagining of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 crime drama High and Low just seeks to stage an entertaining morality play. But this is Spike Lee we're talking about, which means his dramatization of a kidnapping plot involving a high-flying record executive, played by Denzel Washington, and a destitute superfan (A$AP Rocky) seems destined to be read as something more - whether the director intends it to or not.
I want to say this right here, from the jump: This is not a remake. This is a reinterpretation. I was introduced to Kurosawa when I was doing NYU graduate film school. And a lot of people don't know this, but the thesis of She's Gotta Have It came from In Rashomon, there's a rape and the audience is left there questioning, "Who's telling the truth?" So I just hijacked that shit.
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