Spike Lee: Dud or DUD?!?

And this is remarkable or notable for mainstream American filmmakers in what way?

to be fair i think the score's OK, and norton — while a bit flat yes as per — is far from unwatchable

to be honest i don't understand why any actor living says yes when they find they're playing lead to phillip seymour hoffman's second (or indeed 20th) banana => i believe i wd avidly gaze at a warhol-esque slo-mo epic of PSH cracking a smile slowed down so that it takes 24hrs

Not the worst uillean(sp) pipes of the yea though, they gop to the wandering band in Gangs Of New Yoirk.

Its a pity Zoe Williams didn't think of refering to the ultimate fear of UTBS in the 25th Hour - to reference her Guardian magazine piece. The fear of UTBS and the solution was ridiculous.

(i think fear of having yr teeth bashed out for convenient BigHouse BJs is a justified fear)

do the right thing, obv.

it's a while since I saw it.

...so...ummm..."because there's lots of sexism, we shouldn't fault a talented director for it?" You can't mean that, can you?

On the other hand Lee's need to have wall-to-wall soundtracks does render those moments when he turns it all off poss. more effective (e.g. the beatdown in 25th Hour).

[[Mark the fact that you are proofing anyone's writing makes me happy. Sometimes I worry that my typo-ridden, grammatically dodgy posts betray my editorial incompetence but now I fear not.]]

This to me was a problem during the shouting-at-the-mirror scene in 25th Hour. The music came close to ruining that sequence for me.

(sorry.)

by the way, I agree that this was really weak (as was the whole nightclub sequence in my opinion--I really thought it could have been so much more). But the Scorsese thing is a cheap shot.

I say, para/rephrasing, "Spike Lee's women seem like caricatures."

You say, again I'm para/rephrasing "So are women in other films by other directors."

Do you mean "it's unremarkable in Spike Lee, therefore it's a non-issue"? Do you mean "Spike Lee is being unfairly singled out for something so wholly pervasive that it is, in fact, not remarkable in his work"? Your initial response seems to say "Spike Lee is no more sexist than any other director." Then you get huffy and say "I'm not saying that, but g'head and take it that way." So: restate your position, maybe I'm unclear. Are you not somehow excusing Spike Lee's tendency to caricature women when you point out that lots of other American films do so, too? Rhetorically, I hope you'll grant that it's not unreasonable to think so. "This book is sexist!" "Well, it was written in the 16th century, sexism was somewhat pervasive then." -seems a not-unfair analogue, and the response does seem to attempt to mitigate the trait being decried.

(x-post)

I like Spike a lot, his charms make it very easy for me to overlook his weakness. Mo' Better Blues is great, but I'm a jazz geek.

"This flat scene, appearing at points where other films blast out in plot-solving action, has been subtly cooling off, abstracting itself, with the words coming like little trolley-car pictures passing back and forth across a flattened, neuterised scene."

(haha, hippety-hop => farber goes precog on us, predicts "fight the power" 21 years b4 the fact, despite much time-static)

(what is the timeframe of the final sentence quoted: "this flat scene... has been subtly cooling off..." when? during the 9 years between 1959-68? what a weird thing to say! i love manny farber!)

not the shot on its own, but the entire sequence it's embedded, is in look and speed and content anti-narrative (in terms of the actual narrative): instead it's an interrogation of another story — actually here not as "fiercely inadequate" as jean seberg or lee in other movies — which "abstracts itself" the more you think of it afterwards (into a kind of generous cartoon of Grand American Narrative of Possible Freedom or something), and in fact "cools off" the rest of the story, or rather, contextualises it in a broader way

it's a long way from godardian technique now (and lee was always a long way from godardian politico-tic), so you could say it's spike's own as a device to play with now, but the role of that section — yes yes also a scorseaholic's hommage to last temptation's best known coup — is somewhat like i think what farber is getting at, re godard, in that passage

in other words: you have the story and it clips along, until these bits where the director takes out a flipchart and some coloured magic markers and interrupts the plot proper to bulletpoint "wider" stuff (in breathless, it's actually pre-politico-godard, that's part of farber's specific argument, semi-relevant maybe to 25th hour's "post-political" lee maybe, in an upside-down way but i'm too tired to work that bit out)

*spoilers end spoilers end spoilers end*

Actually Mark that answered my question perfectly.

http://www.depauw.edu/news/story.asp?id=377147461458333