On the DVD of 25th Hour, this documentary looks at the career of Spike Lee from his first release that cost under $200K but grossed over $8million through to 25th Hour which was the first major release to be filmed in New York after 11/9 happened.
A twenty minute film, this documentary is pretty much split in two parts - the first part looks at Lee's career with contributions form other directors and actors, the second part looks at the making of 25th Hour. If the film had tried to be either of these things by themselves then it might have worked, but as it is a flop at both in this attempt. Lets look at the second part first.
The look at 25th Hour actually is quite interesting but I wanted to hear more. We are given 10 minutes on the film that isn't really enough. The cast all contribute but they don't say anything of real value on the whole and, considering the people involved, this is a shame. They discuss characters and cast and I would have happily watched a 30 minute version of these 10 minutes as it was going OK. I don't understand why they didn't just do this as a stand alone without roping it into Lee's career.
Which brings me to part 1 - why on earth would you go to the bother of making a documentary about Spike Lee's career but only give it 10 minutes? Lee has had a great career (and much more to come) and it is almost an insult to try and squeeze it into such a short time. This is best seen when 4 or 5 films are discussed with the lone sentence `Lee went on to make other films' - what!? There are some interesting contributions, even if some have been culled from interviews and TV spots but for goodness sake why would you treat the man like this? I understand that the studio or whatever wanted to fill out the DVD extras section but why didn't they just make it about 25th Hour?
As it is this film does two things poorly where it could have done thing well. It misses the opportunity to use the cast contributions to do a good `making of' for 25th Hour and, even worse, spends 10 minutes doing a real rush job and pretending to be a look at Lee's career. This is something that demands at very least a full hour - to do this is an insult to Lee's input and impact in modern day cinema.
