So I Went to Spike & Denzel’s ‘Highest 2 Lowest’ Premiere in Brooklyn...
Chances are high you won’t see this one in the theater, but I did
Greetings from Los Angeles, where I’m taking a break from the scheduling headache of fall festival season — a headache I welcome, to be clear! — to jump feet first back into Emmy season. As you read this, I am probably onstage with Alan Cumming and a group of all-star Traitors stars to talk about the latest season of my beloved reality series, which is nominated for four Emmys this year. You’ll be able to hear that conversation on an upcoming special episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, so stay tuned!
While I’m in town, I’ll be moderating a few other events, catching up on some pre-festival screenings and doing my best to get a sense of whatever buzz may exist in these final days of the Emmy campaigns. Unlike Oscar season, with its weeks of precursor events and additional awards, there’s no concrete narrative for the second phase of Emmy season. A lot of contenders are on vacation, a lot of voters have presumably already made up their minds and there’s no real way to tell how things might have shifted since the nominations were announced.
That’s why I’m especially intrigued to get an up-close look at Televerse. Launching this year, the “festival for industry insiders and television fans alike” is put on by the Television Academy itself, featuring a slew of FYC panels like the one I’m doing for The Traitors, as well as events you might see at a fan conversation, like a Judging Amy retrospective with Tyne Daly and Amy Brenneman. I can’t tell how much it will feel like Comic-Con versus a regular FYC event — or maybe it’s an ideal hybrid of the two that can finally create a real event for these last-gasp Emmy campaigns to work around. I’ll report back!
Before I took off for L.A., though, I spent a few days in New York seeing a whole lot of movies, most of which will be making their way to fall festivals and then on to the Oscar conversation. Make sure you’re subscribed to Prestige Junkie After Party to hear more about this year’s awards contenders on our Fall Festival Draft; it was a blast, and you won’t want to miss it — especially when a subscription only costs $5 a month or $50 a year.
I also saw Highest 2 Lowest, the latest from Spike Lee, which opens in select theaters this Friday and will be on Apple TV+ just a few weeks later, on Sept. 5. That’s an unusual release strategy for a movie from an Oscar-winning director with a major star like Denzel Washington on the poster. But coming just a year after Apple shunted George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s Wolfs almost entirely out of theaters, it’s also not completely surprising. So what is the deal with this major reunion, the first film Lee and Washington have made together since 2006’s hit Inside Man, and why do you have only a few weeks to see it in theaters? After catching the film’s big premiere in Brooklyn on Monday, I think I have a few ideas.
Highs & Lows
Every movie premiere comes built in with an enthusiastic audience. That’s part of the appeal, and it’s why I sometimes have to respect it when a film’s reps won’t show me something ahead of time; they want me to see it in the kind of crowd environment that encourages you to overlook any flaws. The crowd at the BAM Harvey Theater on Monday night was no exception. Located just a few blocks from Lee’s beloved Fort Greene neighborhood, it was as much of a hometown crowd as you can possibly imagine, the kind where people gamely waited 45 minutes past the scheduled start time and cheered mid-movie when beloved actors finally walked onscreen. (Congratulations, Wendell Pierce, certified crowdpleaser.)
But even the premiere audience was noticeably struggling a bit through the extended first section of Highest 2 Lowest, which largely takes place inside the plush Brooklyn penthouse belonging to the Quincy Jones-esque music mogul played by Washington. The character, David King — yes, King David, you get it — receives a phone call that his teenage son has been kidnapped, with a ransom of $17.5 million in Swiss francs for the teen’s safe return. (The perpetrator asks for Swiss francs because the currency weighs less than U.S. dollars and is thus easier for King to carry in a backpack; the more you know!) Eventually, it’s revealed that King’s son wasn’t the boy who got kidnapped; instead, it was the child of King’s old friend and employee, played by Jeffrey Wright. The calculating mogul is left with a question: Is another boy’s life — especially the child of a lower-class person — also worth the $17.5 million?
If that same moral dilemma sounds familiar, it’s because Highest 2 Lowest is Lee’s interpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 drama, High and Low (both movies are based on Ed McBain’s 1959 novel, King’s Ransom). But while the story engine between Lee’s latest and Kurosawa’s masterpiece is the same, Lee has put his stamp all over the material — from the cheeky title to the Brooklyn setting and a deep hatred of the Boston Red Sox. Still, the setup turns out to be the least interesting part of Highest 2 Lowest, which only finally kicks into gear once King decides to go ahead and pay the ransom and follows the kidnapper’s instructions to bring the money onto the subway. I could see the audience literally sit up in their seats as the score gave way to an onscreen musical performance from the recently deceased Eddie Palmieri, whose son Eddie Palmieri II paid tribute to him before the screening began.
The ransom drop, you see, is happening during both the Puerto Rican Day Parade and a Yankees-Red Sox game at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. It’s the perfect recipe for chaotic crowds and gridlock, as any New Yorker knows. The sequence, which has Washington riding between subway cars plus a series of motorbike chases, would be electric under any circumstances; following all the slow, melodramatic and flatly staged scenes in the penthouse, it’s downright ecstatic.
It also turns out to be a fitting introduction for the kidnapper and ransom plotter, played by A$AP Rocky. I’d been hearing since Cannes that the rap star threatened to steal the entire movie from Washington — and that buzz isn’t necessarily wrong. What emerges once Highest 2 Lowest shifts gears is more of a two-hander, as King learns that the kidnapper is an aspiring rapper who styles himself as Yung Felon, and aspires more than anything for King’s approval. The two scenes in which the two speak face-to-face are easily as spectacular as the subway sequence. A$AP Rocky has never played a major film role before, and he can do this??
(As it turns out, I was at the start of an A$AP Rocky double feature. The following day, I caught a screening of the Sundance sensation If I Had Legs I’d Kick You with Rose Byrne, in which he’s a smaller but still magnetic supporting presence. That movie is heading to the fall festivals in a few weeks, so we can talk more about it then.)
Highest 2 Lowest opens in theaters this Friday and will have three weeks before its Apple launch to prove it really could have been a box office contender. I’m not sure how many audience members will clock out during the slack first hour and miss out on the excellent stuff that follows — but I imagine even fewer are likely to sit through it watching it at home, with other Lee and Washington movies or A$AP Rocky videos just a click away. There are thrills in Highest 2 Lowest on par with Washington’s Equalizer movies, all of which have been late summer/early fall box office hits. But it’s possible A24 and Apple are assuming those audiences won’t have the same response to a movie that starts as a talky domestic drama before getting to the fireworks.
Still, regardless of its release strategy, Highest 2 Lowest got the celebration befitting a directing legend, particularly since Lee’s previous feature, 2020’s Da 5 Bloods, was denied a lot of that pomp and circumstance due to Covid. (Pandemic aside, that movie was also a streaming-first release on Netflix; the last Lee feature to get an authentic theatrical run was 2018’s BlacKkKlansman. It made just over $93 million worldwide.) The Brooklyn premiere was followed by a lavish star-studded party at the BAM Café, where Washington’s sons, Malcolm and John David, mingled, Ice Spice and Rosie Perez (both of whom appear in the film) weaved through the crowd, and former Lee costars like John Turturro and Giancarlo Esposito chatted with guests. But there, Lee was the king: The 68-year-old stationed himself by the DJ booth — and just to the right of a shaved ice stand, which was a delightful touch — greeting all the well-wishers who approached. The film’s Cannes premiere in May was the coming-out party; this was the homecoming.
