26th Favorite Movie - Malcolm X

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

The third and final Spike Lee movie to make my list ties him with the most of any other director on here. Stay tuned next week to see who the other director is who has 3 movies on my top 50 list. Actually, next week we will be in Mexico with the high school group working at an orphanage. The next couple of days Bethany and I are trying to take it easy to rest up for the loooong drive down and back.

I think there are two main reasons why I appreciate this movie so much. The first has to do with the filmmaking. Denzel is amazing as always in his performance and Spike Lee makes the movie feel so epic... and I'm not just talking about the 3+ hour length, but everything he does lends a grandiose sense to what you are watching. The second reason has to do with the person of Malcolm X himself. While I do not agree with some of his beliefs, there are certain attributes in him that I admire. The spiritual transformation that he went through. The humility he shows before God. The passion he displays in the pulpit. The drive that keeps him going even when he is tired, has been betrayed, and is getting death threats.

Malcolm X is also interesting to me because it shows a man trying to balance his family life with a very demanding work schedule. Something I have been thinking about lately is the idea of "putting family first before work". That is something that I hear talked about a lot and I agree with... but I think how it is played out may look different at some times. For most men, work is how we get a lot of our self-worth, and it seems to me that if someone is passionate about their work at times that will directly cut into family time. If the person is in the middle of a project, has an important business trip to take, or needs to take classes or tests in order to become more proficient at work, during that "season", time with the fam will likely be impacted. But sometimes that season goes on for too long. Sometimes we men take on more work in order to provide a more stable home and future for our families... when all our wives and children really want is to see us around more (the great book For Men Only by Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn talks about this). If we ALWAYS put work first, that is a problem.

I started thinking about all of this after watching 2 movies this last week. The first is called Something the Lord Made, and it is about the men who performed the first successful heart surgery about 50 years ago. You get the feeling watching the movie that they weren't exactly home for dinner every night... but their families understood that was because they were on the verge of discovering something that would save thousands of lives. But you also never get the sense that the men didn't adore their familes, they just had important work to do that they were very passionate about. The other movie is The Pursuit of Happyness, starring Will Smith. Again, this guy loved his son but was also passionate about becoming a stock broker. He had to put his son into a day care that he didn't feel all that great about and was always dragging him around on sales visits and studying for a test he had to take. But I think in both of these movies the characters DID put family first in their hearts, even though they chose jobs that may have kept them from spending more time with their families. I just hope that when/if the time comes for Bethany and I to have children (calm down, Grace!), that I would be able to find the right balance between work and family, because I think it is one of the most important factors in a man's life.