Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee, 2025)

[Michael Kerpan]

I have to say that Kurosawa's portrayal of the "low" struck me as pretty shallow -- as is the norm for him when portraying "ordinary people". I get the sense that he had next to no knowledge about the lives of ordinary working people and less than zero knowledge of the life of people living in (or near) poverty. His films have many virtues -- but I find his "humanist" noblesse oblige towards the lowly galling. (Unlike someone like Naruse who was extremely familiar with poverty and the bottom tier of the working class).

[bearcuborg]

To bring this back to Lee, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see his remake, but your post got me interested. Think I’ll check it out now.

To further help along Brian’s post that makes you want to see it, the opening felt like a nod to Woody Allen’s Manhattan.

[nicolas]

I absolutely loved this one and have now watched it two days in a row. This is such a fun experience and a lot of it is due to Denzel Washington, Spike Lee and A$AP Rocky clearly having a great time. Lee is hit or miss for me but I do admire his idiosyncrasies and passion he imbues most of his films with even when he indulges at the expense of tighter editing, focused narratives etc. I love his films the most when he manages to weave his interests and “messaging” into an entertaining, fun, more classically cinematic canvas, such as with BlacKkKlansman, Da 5 Bloods and now Highest 2 Lowest. There are many great points in this thread already but one more observation regarding the score. I do agree that the wall-to-wall ambient music in his films can be very annoying when it doesn’t contribute anything to the story, atmosphere etc. but Highest 2 Lowest is one of the least offensive offenders. When Lee uses ambient music here, which is usually a mixture of the kind of piano solos he drenched his 2010s low-fi digital films with and an orchestral score, he actually gives it some purpose and lets the music carry on and flow into the next scene or a montage for a few beats. An example is after the conversation between King and his son in the latter’s bedroom. After being familiar with Lee’s other films, I found myself surprised that he managed to either restrain himself with the music or someone gave him good notes and he listened. A shame that this’ll be buried on Apple just like it never really played theatrically.

[Brian C]

The theatrical release plan for this movie seems really strange. There were TV ads and theatrical trailers, and I saw it in Polson, Montana, of all places, which is definitely not a place one would expect to see a movie in limited release. I believe it also played in Missoula, so two theaters in an area often skipped by even relatively high-profile arthouse releases. I know it didn't play very wide but it doesn't seem like it was exactly buried, either.

Box Office Mojo reports a $15K average per screen on 100 screens (which seems pretty good) for one week, and then it just disappeared. Sure seems like they could have milked it a bit more than that. But I've long stopped being able to figure out what distributors were trying to accomplish theatrically.

[Roger Ryan]

Given how much of this thread is about how effective Kurosawa was at depicting those on the margins, I’d be interested in hearing how posters here feel about Lee avoiding these depictions altogether in his version.

There are a number of things I really like about Highest 2 Lowest but those are in service to an interesting story that is weakened by being tied to the book King’s Ransom and to Kurosawa’s adaptation. The film Lee seems interested in making is about a once very successful record company executive who is seeing profits declining rapidly and struggles with whether he should sign an artist with a guaranteed hit-making high profile because he morally disagrees with the artist. That movie could be a really good one. But Lee is obligated to have a kidnapping, a ransom drop-off, a chase, and some violent confrontations, all blandly presented. The film’s two different identities feel in opposition to each other and the result is a middling end product.

[pistolwink]

It occurs to me that this movie doesn't seem to acknowledge that the record industry is a shell of what it once was. There are plenty of record moguls who got rich in the 1970s through the early 2000s who are still around and enjoying their wealth, but precious few who actually made a fortune, or meaningfully enhanced their fortune through record sales, after that. I understand that Denzel's character is supposed to be a once-powerful mogul in decline, but the film still suggests that a rivalry between two big record labels focusing on "urban" music is of real economic and cultural consequence and that there is still lots of money to be made by labels for finding the next big thing. (On a separate note, is it bad for the film if the supposedly terrible music made by the film's villain is more appealing than the "uplifting" but generic song that's supposed to be the vehicle for the protagonist's redemption?)

This aspect reminded me of American Fiction in that the filmmakers, despite seemingly seeking to make a film that satirized or commented on The World As It Is Today, picked as subjects or targets things (like world-owning music-industry impresarios or white liberals' fascination with gangsta rap fantasies) that are way out of date. I think this is more damaging to American Fiction since the dated references are the primary basis of its satire, but in both cases it gave a powerful sense of the filmmakers being woefully out of touch.

[Brian C]

Could be misremembering, but wasn’t Washington’s character said to have had his biggest successes during the early 2000s?

[brundlefly]

Given how much of this thread is about how effective Kurosawa was at depicting those on the margins, I’d be interested in hearing how posters here feel about Lee avoiding these depictions altogether in his version.

While I don't think he avoids them altogether, Lee has no interest in presenting any part of his city as a nightmare. (This is, as has been noted, a great NYC film, and its crowds are communities -- often ones joined around music, be it a simple sports chant or a colorful salsa explosion.) For one thing, no need to be complicit in the false and racist conservative news push about unsafe cities. For another -- not that Lee's ever afraid to repeat himself(*) -- he did this already, and I wonder if he had High and Low in his head when he made the "Living for the City" sequence in Jungle Fever.

(*)

The thing I wish hardest about H2L is that Lee left well enough alone by reworking the end of High and Low into that tense studio scene.

As Brian said here...

while Kurosawa digs into the underworld for a close look, Lee's vision of community is much deeper and more holistic. For example, one scene that really stood out to me that doesn't have an analogue in the Kurosawa was when the Denzel character visited Yung Felon's wife, and I think it's key to Lee's vision. In the Kurosawa, Mifune's character was a rich guy with a decision to make, but the ramifications never really extend outward past his and the chauffeur's families. But here, we get this heartbreaking scene where we see how personal David's situation actually is - he's not just a rich guy who lives in a prominent house on a hill, he's a guy who people know and look up to and invest their own dreams in, and so also a potential source of disappointment to them.

...there's far more direct connection between Washington's character and Yung Felon than there was between Mifune's and the medical student. For better and worse, perhaps. But Lee emphasizes an integral element of the story that gets lost in the Kurosawa -- fatherhood -- by making the chauffeur's son a godson, having Washington/Yung Felon comment on father figures and illegitimate children, through the name of Yung Felon's child.

I also think that, despite this...

It occurs to me that this movie doesn't seem to acknowledge that the record industry is a shell of what it once was.

...even as there's an Old Man v. Cloud view of the world (literally -- there is late acknowledgment, I believe via the Wendell Pierce character, that the record company is losing a war of attrition against streaming and mixtapes and whatnot, suggesting consolidation is the only way for big companies to survive and that this merger is their last chance to cash out), and culture drops that feel very Kids Don't Read the Classics (the R&B vs. hip-hop of the movie feels weird, given not only how Lee once used rap but that one of the fake magazine covers here associates Washington's character with rap -- it may be self-criticism? or at least self-awareness? Washington (and by default, Lee) does entertain a broad spectrum of artists -- Ice Spice, the folk singer, etc.), that one of the matters on Lee's mind is the vanishing role of the gatekeeper. Whom he may see as another kind of father figure, with responsibility to his community. (One of the first things the Washington character does in the movie is hedge on his wife's regular contribution to young Black artists.) Even with devastating income disparity, life's margins can no longer be represented by a tour of a slum; it's a matter of visibility, and the internet has made that a more porous proposition. Though there's nothing new about compounding fame or cashing in on notoriety, it's interesting how the dominant image of Washington's profitable heroism is a garish old school New York Post cover while, despite the spit and vitriol at the end, Yung Felon feels he is negotiating from a place of power.

[nicolas]

Blu-ray and UHD coming from A24 in April.