Last night at Pratt Institute, some poor dude asked Spike Lee if he might see “the other side” — that is, the good side — of Brooklyn’s gentrification. While I don’t know for sure that Spike’s sleepy eyes got big and buggy, I like to imagine that that’s what happened as this went down. Read More
Say what you will about Spike Lee’s polemics; the man knows how to craft a powerful narrative. Whereas Part One of If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise opened with the excitement of the Saint’s Superbowl win, the opening montage of Part Two—filled with footage of the havoc wreaked by the oil spill—set Read More
We love to see the underdog persevere. It makes us feel good, and like all monumental sports wins, it glosses over truth and makes it seem like progress is immediately possible. It’s telling that Spike Lee begins his Katrina documentary If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise with the Saint’s Superbowl win. There’s Read More
In my more militant youth, I used to argue that May 19 should have been a national holiday. And if it couldn’t be one, then at the least I could sacrifice a day of school or work to commemorate Malcolm X’s birthday. In retrospect, that was stupid (maybe immature is the better word) because if Read More
In my guest-blogging efforts over at Alyssa’s spot, I recently reflected on the oddity of seeing Ray Allen and LeBron James on the court together and how it reminded me that Spike Lee saw it all coming a long time ago. Twelve years ago, to be precise: It’s probably the best hoops movie of my Read More
blackink: In the lull between March Madness this weekend, try to fit in a viewing – or a re-viewing, if you will – of Spike Lee’s hoops-themed drama He Got Game. It would have been easy to write off the film, originally released in 1998, as a farfetched mishmash of traditional themes: a boy grasping for manhood in Read More
When Malcolm D. Lee arrived on the cinematic scene with 1999’s The Best Man, audiences marked his arrival by awarding him 34,074,900 of their hard-earned movie-going dollars over the course of the film’s run. A respectable showing for any debut film, this gross afforded Lee a bit of clout coming out of the gate. Perhaps Read More
