I enjoyed watching the motion picture in class. I’m glad we could watch it in just two sittings instead of dragging it out as is usually necessary in a classroom setting. The movie was pretty honest to the book. It was almost four hours long so Spike Lee was able to fit in most of what I remember from the autobiography. But the film was also able to portray the story of Malcolm X in some ways that the book could not. In one scene, after he has become a minister, Malcolm’s and Dr. King’s speeches are compared by fading between one and the other while showing footage of each of the speakers. It emphasized how the two were contemporaries and were advocating similar yet very different ideas.
Also, in one of the closing scenes, leading up to the assassination, Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” plays and sets an eery tone that makes it clear that the assassination is imminent. The picture flashes between Malcolm, his family, suspicious audience members, etc. and builds up tension as everything happens in slow motion until he is killed. Then, at the end, real historical clips are shown, to demonstrate the impact Malcolm X had on so much of the world. Dr. King speaks again, referring to the assassination, and real footage of Malcolm X (not Denzel Washington) speaking across the country.
I felt more emotion watching the movie than I seemed to feel while reading the autobiography. I think this was because The movie was not spread out over the course of weeks. Over the course of the story in both the book and the movie, we learn about a man who earns our respect and sympathy, but whose life is ended unfairly, and, in the movie, he seems to be killed when we’ve only just met him. But the movie clearly misses out on many of the details that help paint a more full picture of Malcolm and the path he chose, so the story is much better when it is both read AND seen in complement.
Source:
http://malcolmxfall2012.wordpress.com/2012/10/05/initial-thoughts-on-the-movie/
