Spike Lee: Dud or DUD?!?

But on the other hand, I sort of have to admire the fact that he's constantly trying to make epic statements about actual issues, which, when you think of most other filmmakers, is something of a rarity. Surely this has to do with being one of the first major black directors, and feeling a need to do something really massive with that opportunity.

'Coz he's black. And he had two good movies: 'She's Gotta Have It' and 'Do The Right Thing.'

I like Spike Lee a great deal. I might not 100% agree with absolutely everything the man has ever said, wanted to say, or tried to say. Needless to say, he is needed.

In the end though I will see any Spike Lee film even though I know that they may annoy and infuriate me (Bamboozled was hamfisted, satire has to be subtle).

Not in Europe yet, just western Mass. I WILL be in London on Friday, though. Quick thoughts on Spike Lee: the rolling shot sucks and the only time it ever worked was in "Crooklyn". All of his movies are great, including the ones that suck. "Do The Right Thing" and "X" are his most important movies, but "Crooklyn" is far and away his best film to date.

Good God, I'm Litte Lord Anglophile today, aren't I?

And Mira Sorvino? She's the worst actress of our generation, and not particularly attractive to boot. If she wasn't related to Paul - who ain't exactly great himself but better than her at least - she'd be eating out of a fucking dumpster. She's ridiculously awful, whatever he did to her she deserved.

It's all fine & good to strive for social significance, but I'm all for taking a more personal route (instead of tackling the Big Issues and History head-on, epic DeMille style).

I'd defend Mira, but the characters she plays all seem to be the same. At least she's easy on the eyes, and not stupid.

= the real name of 25th hour is "my name is spike lee and i'm a scorsesaholic" but it's STILL better than gangs of new york (not that i've seen GoNY yet)

btw, Spike seriously needs to start playing leads in his films again. Enough of this gratuitous cameo bullshit.

_25th Hour_ is great, BTW.

All of the above.

I happen to think that Spike Lee has some very grebt directorial skillz (the closing scene of Jungle Fever made up for all its unevenness, I thought) but Anthony is completely on the money here.

Joel are we not to speak ill of ppl who have brothers and sisters, is that the deal? gosh I hope not

Actually Anthony I could accuse you of that on just about any thread, but this one was the one I was posting to.

Yes, John, every single woman in every Spike Lee movie is a hooker or has sex with him. But where is the scene in Do the Right Thing where Mookie gets it on with Mother Superior? Or in Crooklyn where Spike the glue-sniffer gets it on with Ms. Woodard (I always forget her name)?

Ally's right that sometimes he seems a bit ADD--my first thought upon seeing one of his films is often, "Stop cutting so much" (not least the hectic opening scene of 25th Hour but he does make of this style more than almost any other contemporary Hollywood filmmaker and he knows how to be patient when he needs to--sometimes.

I'm totally in his fan club.

That "Dead End" shot reminded me of a scene from Cecil B. De Mille's Dynamite, where our hero and heroine and trapped in a coal mine and suddenly spy a box of dynamite: close-up of box of dynamite, labelled "DYNAMITE." Cut to shot of hero and heroine. Heroine exclaims, "Dynamite!" Cut back to close-up of box of dynamite. Hold for 10 seconds. ... Somewhere in the audience, a 3-yr-old shouts, "Enough already!"

his tremendous skills and his glaring weakness are generally all tied up in the same knot i think — he is good at really unexpected things which he then completely distracts you from by some shouty bit of business (that said, rosie perez shouting in do the right thing is just some of the funniest, sexiest acting in cinema)

i love that he LOVES LOVES LOVES new york, and even the "fuck you" mirror monologue in 25th hour — which starts out you think it's a clunkadunk hommage to TWO iconic scenes in taxi driver in one go, and i think also some stuff in raging bull!! — which ultradisses koreans, gays, italians, cops, blacks, old rich ladies, taxi drivers etc etc, is a kind of sweep-of-the-city love poem after all

he's also the only person i can quickly think of who's carried on using godard's cartoon swiftness and kept it political AND funny — this is where he falls down most often (godard too probably) but in 25th hour there one scene (v.late on) which i won't spoil, which is basically just a single photo set-up, that packs SO much into it abt america, and lee and america, and black-and-white in america, and the past and the future. and what could be and what is, and what's stopping what ought to be

(eg tarantino can also to the godard cartoon thing but tarantino's politics never get beyond the immediate circle out into the big city world and public arena blah blah)

25th hr is VERY deft abt exactly all the things lee has previously been very UNdeft abt: esp.what's so pernicious in jungle fever

it's had flak here (in the UK) for the 9-11 stuff being sellotaped clumsily in but i didn't think that at all: it's like it's the current affairs catalyst for spike to acknowledge american possibility and generosity ALSO, even though he's still utterly politcally realistic abt it, not sentimental or bullying

Anthony remains OTM insofar as Spike Lee, whose work I generally like a lot, is something of a sexist. So are a lot of people, I'm not saying "dismiss him!" or anything. But the women he writes are caricatures, and the exceptions you point out draw attention to this rule.

[morbs actually that was a shitty reponse of mine during a tough day, apologies]

Kinda wish I hadn't dumped my Netflix subscription right before this premiered.

stevie, the Mars Blackmon character appeared regularly in a saturation NIKE campaign (with Michael Jordan) before America even knew who Spike was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Blackmon

That seems like an extremely weird characterization of how that happened considering that I was able to learn about She's Gotta Have It via reviews and award hype before the Nike ad campaign in Minnesota without actively seeking information out about it

well you were at least somewhat plugged into indie media, I'm guessing, as many of the TV eyeballs were not.

SGHI grossed $7.1 million off a $175,000 budget, which was a big arthouse hit for Island Pictures, but still not a mainstream breakthrough.

I am pretty sure I heard about the movie via the indie rag Newsweek

Siskel & Ebert's many years encouraging Lee began with their rave for SGHI.

Yeah actually it was the 1-2 David Ansen/Siskel & Ebert reviews that put Lee onto my radar

heh, fair enough! But apparently only a million or fewer people went to see it. I still think the Nike campaign was most people's introduction to him.

(the occasions on which people see films upon reading reviews are infrequent enough to have killed the film critic)

xxp

i don't think it's controversial to suggest that most americans introduction to spike lee was via the nike ads

I learnt about Spike Lee from his ads for tube socks, not sneakers

(probably shown before My Life As A Dog, guessing at what my parents would have taken me to on the same screens around then)

I think that was the trailer for SGHI?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfmbvIR_QtA

Yep. I've still never seen the Nike commercials, but I did have the Fight The Power 12" for about ten years before I finally saw She's Gotta Have It.

"With my man Mars! Mars! Mars! MAWS BLACKMON!"
"Yo, yo, that's Spike Lee, man."

Been misremembering that as "Three for fi' dollars" for 33 years. My gentrifying ears!

what is he saying ?

Just “Three fi’ dollars.” Condense the message, good marketing!

all kinds of fresh fish sold here daily

no word on Armond, but Jeff Wells is in favour:

HE's Own Staggering Genius pic.twitter.com/HjG8edZzMX

— Glenn Kenny (@Glenn__Kenny) June 15, 2020

On that tip, there's a poster over on Criterion Forum who's been keeping receipts on Wells' stupidity which they recently shared in a mammoth post Here (post #367)

he is a Bill Maher-level moron who should be ignored

oh my god

the main things I remember Wells from are "writing to a director to plead for stolen nude scenes of a specific actress" and "someone posted a photo of their TV screen while watching Roma, and Jeffrey threw a giant tantrum for days that there was a secret colour version that other critics were allowed to see but he wasn't" (because... the photo was in colour)

every time he comes up you learn at least two more things too demented to believe, but that's a treasure trove

the Mars Blackman commercial with Little Richard was the best

God with all these options I’m just not sure who to ignore first.

Saw some complaints about the "awful" sound mixing? Is that something anyone here has noticed or is that just people unfamiliar with Lee's work? Sorry not reading the thread

I'd guess the latter - he mixes sources a lot in this, especially overlapping audio when crossing from scene to scene

some rando blogger had a bit to say

Great but imperfect flick

Very good, honestly just glad to have him back making good movies again after so many years.

Every non-black person in this movie is a cardboard cutout, a nice inversion for a war movie and not that surprising from SL.

Brilliant use of the isolated vocal, and while all of SL's worst tendencies are present--too long, too many threads, speechifying, collages that don't work--none of the incidents are egregious.

I read Mark Kermode, "it felts bolted on"... yeah, have you seen She Hate Me? he's done so much worse. as someone said upthread, his work is more relevant than ever and I really enjoyed this, I actually wish there was more contemporary material/explicit jumps to the present.

An interesting review/essay from the NY Times that I'm just gonna post in its entirety:

Vietnamese Lives, American Imperialist Views, Even in ‘Da 5 Bloods’
by Viet Thanh Nguyen

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. This is certainly true for what Americans call the “Vietnam War” and what the victorious Vietnamese call the “American War.” Both terms obscure how a war that killed more than 58,000 Americans and three million Vietnamese was also fought in Laos and Cambodia, killing hundreds of thousands more and leading directly to the Cambodian genocide.

In its own typically solipsistic, American-centered, whitewashed fashion, Hollywood has been waging this war on celluloid ever since John Wayne’s atrocious “Green Berets” in 1968, a film so nakedly propagandistic it could have been made by the Third Reich.

Born in Vietnam but made in America, I have a personal and professional interest in Hollywood’s fetish about this war. Unfortunately, I have watched almost every “Vietnam War” movie that Hollywood has made. It’s an exercise I recommend to no one.

Watching “Vietnam War” movies is my own personal “Groundhog Day” experience, because I know, without fail, how Hollywood will represent the Vietnamese and Americans. For Americans, Hollywood turns a defeat by Vietnamese people into a conflict that is actually a civil war in the American soul, where Americans’ greatest enemies are actually themselves. In one of the stranger twists in self-aggrandizement, Hollywood renders Americans as the antiheroes, which might seem odd given that Hollywood is America’s unofficial ministry of propaganda.

The reason for this troubling treatment is simple: For Hollywood, and for Americans, it is better to be the villain or antihero rather than virtuous extra, so long as one occupies center stage. For Vietnamese people, as well as Laotians, Cambodians and Hmong, their role is almost always that of the extra, their function: to be helpful, rescued, blamed, analyzed, mocked, abused, raped, killed, spoken for, spoken over, misunderstood or all of the above.

So, when Spike Lee’s new movie, “Da 5 Bloods,” was announced, my feelings were mixed. On the one hand, I am an admirer of many of Lee’s movies. On the other hand, I feared that Lee, despite being a Black American with a powerful, necessary voice, would, in the end, be an American. Could his antiracist critique overcome the investment in American imperialism that most Americans have without knowing it?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. “Da 5 Bloods” is a lesser Lee movie — honestly, it’s a mess — whose characterizations of Vietnamese people are inextricable from its political failures.

I feel almost churlish writing this, given the urgency of Black Lives Matter that Lee gestures to and given how Hollywood — and America in general — has mostly erased, ignored or distorted the history of Black people. It’s been a decades-long struggle for Black talent in film to tell Black stories with Black actors as stars and with Black writers, directors and producers behind the scenes. In this context, “Da 5 Bloods” rightfully deserves its moment as it recounts, in unique Spike Lee fashion, the experiences of some of the Black soldiers who fought in disproportionate numbers during a war whose racism cut both ways, against Black (and Brown and Indigenous) American soldiers and also against the Vietnamese (and Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong).

I stand with Black Lives Matter and against anti-Black racism, but still, as I watched the obligatory scene of Vietnamese soldiers getting shot and killed for the thousandth time, and as I felt the same hurt I did in watching “Platoon” and “Rambo” and “Full Metal Jacket,” I thought: Does it make any difference if politically conscious Black men kill us?

“Da 5 Bloods” remains a “Vietnam War” movie about fighting an American dirty war again, except that it puts Black men in the spotlight and it eliminates the worst of the anti-Asian, Yellow Peril racism that characterizes the genre. What remains, however, is evidence that while Lee means well, he also does not know what to do with the Vietnamese except resort to guilty liberal feelings about them.

As a result, the Vietnamese appear as the tour guide, the sidekick, the “whore,” the mixed-race child, the beggar and the faceless enemy, all of whom play to American desires and fears. In a particularly absurd moment, a Vietnamese gangster threatens the Black veterans as he recounts the My Lai massacre. While acknowledging the massacre of 500 Vietnamese civilians is important, it is also a clumsy exercise in American guilt that relegates the Vietnamese to victimhood, which is how Americans prefer to remember them, except when they remember them as Viet Cong.

The sense that Vietnamese people must be victims also plays out in an episode where a vendor tries to force one of the Black veterans, Paul (played by Delroy Lindo), to buy a live chicken (something that no Vietnamese I know has ever heard of). The situation escalates rapidly and the vengeful native screams at the Black veterans that they killed his mother and father.

While this might have happened, it’s extremely rare. Many American visitors to Vietnam remark in amazement that the Vietnamese have seemed to let the past go. This is true. We have no time to hate Americans because we hate each other more, given that our war was actually a civil war (plus, the Vietnamese really hate the Chinese the most). The Americans and the French, our former colonizers, are seen as walking wallets, not to be offended.

Being a victim, over and over again, besides being traumatic in real life, is really boring onscreen, and Lee understands that basing a Black story on such an experience is a losing proposition. His strategy in “Da 5 Bloods” echoes Francis Ford Coppola’s in “Apocalypse Now,” which he references often — reserve the starring role for American men who struggle with their own heart of darkness. In a brilliant performance, Lindo becomes a kind of Black Ahab, driven by demons until he meets his fate. “Da 5 Bloods” shows Black men as agents of their own destiny, capable of both heroism and horror, as we all are as human beings whose inhumanity is an inextricable part of ourselves. This complex subjectivity is what white Hollywood has mostly denied Black people, and it is what they deserve. But so do the Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians and Hmong.

Perhaps this is asking too much from a Black story, but it’s Lee himself who sets the high bar. “Da 5 Bloods” clearly aspires to be a movie that jabs at American racism and imperialist warmongering, but whereas it succeeds at the former, it fails at the latter. Why? In putting Black subjectivity at the center, Lee also continues to put American subjectivity at the center. If one can’t disentangle Black subjectivity from dominant American (white) subjectivity, it’s impossible to apply a genuine anti-imperialist critique. Hence the marginalized Vietnamese continuing to serve their role as excuses for a Black drama staged against America’s Black-white divide.

This is not an argument for more Vietnamese inclusion. It’s a demand that we recognize how decolonization and anti-imperialism are impossible if we keep reiterating the imperial country’s point of view, even from the minority perspective.

The political ambitions of Lee’s movie are clear from the two Black intellectuals he includes at the beginning and ending. The film starts with the classic anti-racist, anti-imperialist quote from Muhammad Ali about the Viet Cong: “They never called me nigger.” It’s sad, then, that Paul’s response to the chicken seller is to call the Vietnamese “Gooks.” Yes, Black soldiers used this slur, and the slur says a great deal about Paul’s traumatized internalization of racism. But Paul’s justification rings hollow when he says that if Black people can call themselves by the worst slur possible, he can use the Vietnamese slur. No. Black people can call themselves whatever they wish; that is their right. But we don’t get to call Black people a racial slur, and they don’t get to call us one either. Lee’s attempts to provide anti-racist alternatives — another Black veteran connecting with his mixed-race daughter, or a donation to a demining effort — fall under the category of liberal condescension, the rescue narrative with Black saviors instead of white ones.

But don’t listen to me. Listen to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose important speech “Beyond Vietnam” is quoted at the film’s end. The fact that most Americans know “I Have a Dream” but not “Beyond Vietnam” is testimony to the depth of American propaganda, the willingness of Americans to want to feel good about the American Dream and their reluctance to confront the American Nightmare. In the American Nightmare, the severity of anti-Black racism is inseparable from the endurance of American imperialism. As King said, Black Americans were sent to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” He condemned not just racism, but also capitalism, militarism, American imperialism, and the American war machine, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In another speech, he demanded that we question our “whole society,” which means “ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together.”

“Vietnam,” meaning the “Vietnam War,” continues to haunt this country, which was built on war and for war. American cinema and storytelling play their role in these wars, including our current “forever war,” by reiterating, again and again, the centrality of the American male soldier’s experience, mostly in white and now in Black. Making a “Vietnam War” movie in this classic mold, except with Black men, Lee cannot overcome the imperialism that is as American as slavery and genocide. He overlooks the more radical possibility that King outlined in “Beyond Vietnam” when he called on Americans to listen to the “voiceless ones.” King meant the Vietnamese, but the “voiceless ones” are anyone the United States confronts with its massive, multicultural war machine, including, now, Iraqis and Afghans. “Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence,” King said, “when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves.”

King knew that the only way to save a racially divided America from itself was to have white Americans listen to Black people, and he knew the only way to save an imperial America from itself was to have Americans listen to those it normally prefers to kill and silence through massive firepower, whether ordered by the Pentagon or Hollywood. I wrote about this in my 2015 novel, “The Sympathizer,” which includes a depiction of a Hollywood “Vietnam War” spectacle that looks suspiciously like “Apocalypse Now,” but with a little tweaking — change the white guys to Black guys — could be “Da 5 Bloods.” I created a narrator who was as complex as Delroy Lindo’s Paul, who spoke back in tragedy and anguish to American racism and imperialism. The novel was rejected by 13 out of 14 editors. The one who bought it was British.

I suspect that one reason for these rejections is that for Vietnamese people, we are often only heard by Americans when we are apologetic for our existence and grateful for our rescue by Americans. It is bad manners to point out, as I have done, that we wouldn’t have needed rescuing by Americans if we hadn’t been invaded by Americans in the first place. The reality, however, is that it is up to us to tell our own stories and create our own narrative plenitude. Other Americans won’t do it for us, even those Black Americans like Lee who understand too well the pain of narrative scarcity.

But the true urgency here is not only for self-representation and the need to recognize ourselves so that others will recognize us, too. What is also crucial is the need to tell stories differently. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde once wrote, and indeed, a war story that repeats a purely American point of view will just help ensure that American wars continue, only with more diverse American soldiers and ever-newer targets to be killed or saved. What kind of war story sees through the other’s point of view, hears her questions, takes seriously her assessment of ourselves? Would it even be a war story? And isn’t that the story we should tell?

I liked Da 5 Bloods maybe a shade less than Chi-raq and BlacKkKlansman, but it definitely continues Lee's impressive current streak. A few things I groaned at--a specific winky reference to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and another to The Bridge on the River Kwai, the gazillionth use of "Time Has Come Today" in a 'Nam flick--but the cast is great (Lindo and Major especially) and I bought most of Lee's more audacious flourishes. One music-nerd bit I laughed at: two of the bloods talking about going "back to the world" as "(Don't Worry) If There's A Hell Below We're All Going To Go" plays over the scene; wrong Curtis album, I know, but I can't believe it wasn't intentional.

Also, I just realized this was my first time seeing Chadwick Boseman in anything. An effective, and now-even-more poignant performance; I don’t know if this is technically his last film, but I’m seeing more John Cazale (who completed The Deer Hunter just before his death from cancer, if I have my facts right) parallels here.

Wouldn't be any Spike Lee film without groans.

this thread title sucks

Yup

most of the "I don't know jack shit impress me" posting is on Twitter now thankfully

and ilm, ho ho i'll be here all night

heard that in Rod Stewart's voice

“Da 5 Bloods” outtake of Boseman singing Marvin’s God is Love is truly beautiful - Spike put it on insta but there’s a youtube clip here:

https://youtu.be/hHHmfKmQ618

this thread title sucks

fervently agreed

starting new threads is easy and free

Well, there's also "why is japanese/french/italian cinema awful?" threads that get revived to talk about the cinema of those nations so Spike is in good company.

change those too

Ive always dreamt there could be some equivalent of FP for thread titles, where if enough people vote "(THIS THREAD TITLE SUCKS)" gets appended to the title

every single music poll would get TTTS'd by non-ILM readers

the "why is such-and-such cinema awful?" threads were all intended to suck, as provocations to ensure ppl contribute and push back

this is not true of all thread titles that suck (which is most them, merely boringly)

I'm not really a computer guy, so I never really understood why certain things can be altered and other things (thread titles, poll choices) can't. Not questioning the truth of this--I literally don't understand.

thread titles are often changed, and also can be

people get very silly about thread titles being changed, who knows why they're so bad and hated

Bamboozled gets better with each viewing, to the point that I think I would now rank it very close to among his best. I still hate the cinematography, though.