E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Around 20 years ago - when I was a young man in my early 20s, and an avid film-goer - a curious cultural event happened - Sixties horn-rimmed glasses became cool.  A mini-genre emerged, roughly between 1988 and 1992, which, in this five year period, created some of the best American films - The Civil Rights movie.  Perhaps it starts with classic redneck vs. G-man Mississippi Burning , which features a startlingly young Willem Defoe as a buttoned-up Kennedy-boy FBI man and a brilliantly simmering Gene Hackman , in perhaps his finest role other than the French Connection films. Defoe wears the specs here.  Then came 1991's masterwork, JFK , Oliver Stone 's own conspiracy-theory Citizen Kane/Rashomon , which retells the Kennedy assassination and general 60s paranoia, from the perspective of Kevin Costner (never better), as Jim Garrison.   Finally, Malcolm X , with Denzel Washington , appeared in 1992, and here, Spike Lee 's great biopic does not spare us th...