Some Drivel On...Inside Man

Released 20 years ago, Spike Lee’s rare foray into something approximating genre filmmaking suggested Sidney Lumet’s own New York bank robbery classic “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975) played at a different tempo. The latter’s bank robber, Sonny Wortzik, was not only based on a real person but animated, high-strung, and forced to improvise when his plans go awry. The bank robber of “Inside Man,” on the other hand, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), is a cool cucumber. “Don’t I sound relaxed to you?” he asks the hostage negotiator at one point in the voice of a man who has mapped out every possible contingency. Indeed, the meta structure of Russell Gerwitz’s elaborate screenplay is established with Dalton breaking the fourth wall as the movie begins by explaining directly to the camera who he is and what he plans to do, that is, “execute the perfect bank robbery.” So, he does. The remaining two-hours-and-nine-minutes is showing how he executes it, though without giving away the most crucial elements until the very end, giving “Inside Man” the feel of a deconstructed magic trick, like David Copperfield telling you he is going to make the Statue of Liberty disappear and then showing you exactly how he makes the Statue of Liberty disappear.

Dalton Russell is the perfect role for Clive Owen. The part requires outsized self-confidence, and Owen has always excelled at imbuing outsized self-confidence without appearing to exert any effort at all. His face is hidden behind a mask and sunglasses virtually the entire movie, yet the baritone of his voice and his presence make the person unmistakable even if the screenplay by design is never really infusing a sense of personality to keep him a mystery. Denzel Washington, then, makes for the perfect counterpart as boisterous Detective Keith Frazier who is enlisted as lead hostage negotiator when Russell and his small team take 50 hostages inside the Manhattan Trust Bank and put their exacting plan in motion. Even when Frazier is forced into a bout of introductory exposition, Washington sells it with genuine crackle, just as when he walks, he struts in the manner of his Detroit Red version of Malcolm X. Frazier’s boss is throwing him a bone, so to speak, after a run of bad luck and Washington seizes on that bit of backstory, moving through the movie like his character is seizing the day. Yet, if Frazier is smart enough to know Dalton is frying bigger fish, he is too much a small fry in the pecking order to do something about it. That is reflected in the harsh light of the third key character, Madeleine White (Jodie Foster), a nebulous if high-powered fixer who has to broker the robbery for the bank owner (Christopher Plummer) hiding a crucial secret. Palpably relishing the opportunity to play against type, Foster’s own enthusiasm deliciously melds with the character’s enthusiasm for virtually eating the lunch of everyone in her orbit. And though White is shorter than all the surrounding characters in height, in her tall stilettoes, not to mention Foster’s imposing aura, she seems no less towering, a gargoyle on the edge of a building come to life.

And so, these three characters circle one another as events play out, Dalton seeming to deliberately stall for time, and Frazier sensing that he seems to be deliberately stalling for time. Lee interrupts this straight-forward structure throughout with scenes in the aftermath of the robbery as Frazier and his partner, Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor), interview the hostages, all of whom are suspects given the sly diversionary tactics that Russell employs not only to confuse the police but to throw them off the real scent. It’s an ingenious device that not only heightens the tension but evokes how Lee is deconstructing the nature of the bank robbery movie itself just as a sequence later in which the police prepare to storm the bank, we see imagined scenes of how it might unfold, as if Lee is showing us how such a movie might typically stage its conclusion and then pulling the rug out from under us just as Dalton pulls the rug out from under Frazier and White and everyone else. The ending relies on a striking bit of coincidence, I grant you that, but I also can’t say that I mind. Dalton had already made the Statue of Liberty disappear, after all, so why couldn’t he perform one last miracle?

Some Drivel On...Summer of Sam

Spike Lee’s oeuvre is so extensive and varied that it’s impossible to drill down to his most essential work. That’s why over the years I have come to think of “Do the Right Thing” as the best Lee movie, and “He Got Game” (1998) as my favorite Lee movie, and “Summer of Sam” (1999) as the most Lee movie. When I say the most, first, I mean it as a compliment, and second, mean to say that it seems to me the exemplar of his preference for exaggerated emotion and aesthetic, a movie made his way, no one else’s. Even if Lee’s halting and mannered acting in a handful of brief appearances as a television reporter is kind of terrible, his presence is right. He is a true auteur in so much as he rarely vanishes from his own movies, imprinting them with his personal taste, distinctly coming across as their author. When the sun glints off a Dead End sign around which some characters congregate, it’s as if Spike himself is winking at you; when a couple breaks up, it is underscored with Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” like a sentence with two exclamation points; he even copies the “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” Phil Rizzuto breakdown to score one of Son of Sam’s killings. Anything goes.

Rotten Tomatoes might be a suspect tool for considering movies, but I still find “Summer of Sam’s” current grade of 50% to be apropos, split right down the middle, echoing its divisiveness. From the moment Lee’s movie debuted at Cannes, it was mired in controversy with people attacking its ostensible reverse racism and its graphic violence, exploiting the Son of Sam murders for profit, the latter accusation lobbed by the supposedly reformed Berkowitz himself from prison. It’s a molten movie, that’s for sure, as Lee generally knows no other way, but if Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” literally and figuratively evoked one scorching hot summer day than “Summer of Sam” literally and figuratively evokes one scorching hot summer, not just a city block but a whole city driven to madness, put into perspective right away as Lee segues from a recreation of one of .44 Caliber killings to a dance club, its denizens coping beneath gleaming disco balls. Indeed, though we see Berkowitz (Michael Badalucco) throughout, he is a peripheral character much more than the main one, a sinister version of the moon in “Moonstruck,” sending everybody over the edge. 

The nexus of this effect becomes Vinny (John Leguizamo), a Bronx hairdresser who is habitually unfaithful to his wife Dionna (Mira Sorvino) and navigating the unexpected return of his childhood friend Ritchie (Adrien Brody). The latter shows up after a period of time away affecting a British accent and sporting wild Liberty spikes, suggesting the punk rock version of “Mean Streets” Johnny Boy to Vinny’s Charlie Cappa. In reality, though, it turns out to be the other way around. Epitomizing his melodramatic tendencies, Lee never quite sees these characters beyond one dimension, boiled down to their dueling punk and disco preferences, but the filmmaking intensity and Brody and Leguizamo’s commitment to the bit means it works on an emotional level anyway.

If “Summer of Sam’s” explicit violence got everybody in a huff, so, too, did its explicit sex, much of it tying back to Vinny’s serial philandering on account of a classic Madonna-whore complex, struggling to satisfy his libidinous cravings in a would-be faithful relationship. Aside from a scene or two, this is all seen from Vinny’s perspective, but even in her own limited role, Sorvino imbues a distinct presence, someone who loves this idiot in spite of herself, and in spite of his failings, but also begins to see the writing on the wall. In one heartbreaking scene, she is even forced to consult with the promiscuous Ruby (Jennifer Esposito) about her own husband’s desires. Ruby winds up in an unlikely relationship with Ritchie, kind of a punk version of Pygmalion in which she trades disco glam for anti-fashion. Their relationship becomes a moving contrast to Vinny and Dionna, turned on by one another’s likes and desires, even filming an adult movie, which when cast against the other couple’s failing marriage is weirdly tender and true. Come to think of it, deep down in places they don’t talk about at parties that might have gotten the prudes in a tizzy more than the imagery.

Ritchie’s sense of self makes him an outsider in his own neighborhood and subsequently causes him to be fingered as the .44 Caliber Killer. Not by the detectives working the case (Anthony LaPaglia and Roger Guenveur Smith), mind you, nor even by the local mafioso Luigi (Ben Gazzara) who agrees to aid the hunt. No, the real murder investigation in “Summer of Sam” is a fake one conducted by Ritchie’s ostensible friends, the wastoids who gather around that Dead End sign day after day, lorded over by Joey T (Michael Rispoli), adults who never advanced beyond the teenage wasteland of “Baba O’Riley,” The Who’s anthem that scores a mid-movie montage functioning as Lee’s emotional thesis. Vinny reluctantly falls in with them as his life gradually falls apart, the portrait of a weak man subsumed by mob rule. So cocky and magnetic in the early going, by the end, Leguizamo has reduced his character to a ghostly husk. And if “Do the Right Thing” concluded with everything just sort of going back to normal, “Summer of Sam” ends with Sam in the back of a cop car but everything else up for grabs. 

Da 5 Bloods

In “BlacKkKlansman”, director Spike Lee made a movie about a true story from the past that was communicating with the present, foreshadowing our current crippling racial polarization. In “Da 5 Bloods”, on the other hand, telling the story of five American Black Vietnam veterans, one of whom died during the war, by jumping back and forth between the late 60s and right now, the past and the present are having a conversation. If Lee changes the aspect ratio between eras, that is more to signify the switches, because “Da 5 Bloods” blurs the lines between eras, living out the idea of the past not being dead. Rather than cast younger actors for the flashback scenes, or even opt for digital de-aging effects, Lee simply has his four older actors work right alongside the younger Chadwick Boseman. The effect is brilliant, conveying how the remaining 4 bloods were both made by their Vietnam service and how hardened they have become in the intervening years when seen standing next to the young, idealistic Boseman, a radical frozen in time.

The movie opens in the ebullient vein of a hangout movie as the remaining Bloods — Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) — meet up in Ho Chi Minh City and boogie their way through a nightclub conspicuously called the Apocalypse Now (this is a real place). As young Vietnamese cheer the men on and slap their backs, all the famous portent of Coppola’s film just seems to drain away in real time, hinting at a kind of peace. When Da Bloods are a bought of round of drinks, however, by a couple aged ex-Viet Cong and raise their glasses to the end of The American War, all the jovial air in the movie vanishes, just for a moment. And if this sequence epitomizes “Da 5 Bloods’” tendency to render its Vietnamese characters as mere bystanders, it all also efficiently illustrates how for these Black American men, the war remains an open wound.

Nominally Da Bloods have come to find the body of Boseman’s Stormin Norman in the jungle and provide a proper burial; really, they are here to honor something like Stormin Norman’s dying wish. In flashbacks we see Da Bloods unearth a cache of gold bars, intended as payment from the United States to the South Vietnamese. Stormin Norman, however, argues, in commanding rhetorical flourish by Boseman, to keep these gold bars, not as payment for themselves but as reparations. And so, Da Bloods’ present-day journey upriver is not into a heart of darkness but toward something like the light, glimpsed in a flashback where the camera looks up at Stormin Norman, the sun falling on him through the trees, casting him in the image of a martyred saint.

This scene is also evocative of Lee’s penchant for just letting his characters talk. Film might be visual medium, but Lee has never been shy about opening the floor up to debate. He has also never been shy about just sort of stopping a movie in its tracks o tell you what he wants to tell you. And if “Da 5 Bloods” opens with an electrifying visual essay, cutting between images of Vietnam and the American Civil Rights moments, convincingly arguing that for Black Americans the real war was back home, it continues raiding the archives throughout. When Otis cites Milton Olive III, Lee proudly puts the Medal of Honor winner’s visage on screen. Even a dramatic moment deep in the jungle finds time for a moving, wonderful, Only-In-A-Spike-Lee-Joint Edwin Moses reference. The French characters who join Da Bloods midway through their mission are not much more than emblems, though Lee deems their representation as atonement for French Colonialist sins too crucial to cut. And though the daughter Otis did not know he had with his long-ago Vietnamese girlfriend gets next to no screen time, that lack of presence proves deliberate, a moving means to bring home the movie’s ultimate argument.

Paul is not history; he is living and breathing and breathing fire. Though he is riddled with PTSD, brought to life in Lindo’s bulging eyes and rapid edits that do not take your breath away but make it feel as if you truly can’t breathe, Lindo is not playing the part as someone who went to Vietnam and never came but came back from Vietnam to find nothing for him at all. It makes sense, then, that he would be a Trump supporter, all his rage and resentment at being left behind taking root in that red cap on his head. In going back to Vietnam, he is not seeking to expunge what he felt but looking to get his, to take what he’s owed. That, however, puts him at odds with the expressed original intent of Stormin Norman which Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) is on hand to represent, tagging along as the new 5th Blood, pointedly written as a Professor of Black Studies at Morehouse, as if he, not his pops, has carried on Norm’s legacy. And if Paul descends into madness, he descends so far that in some strange way he loops back around and meets at the truth, breaking the fourth wall, looking right at us, talking straight to us, not appealing but telling, ensuring this forgotten man will be remembered.

 
Lindo’s denouement evokes “Da 5 Bloods’” turn toward “Treasure of Sierra Madre” with all sorts of hands wanting a piece of the gold bars the men lug out of the jungle. And if Lee has been tweaking war movies, cuing up “Ride of the Valkyries” during Da Bloods’ tourist boat ride, the more it transforms into one, leading to a standoff between Americans, French and Vietnamese. This arc reminded me less of any war movie, really, than “Unforgiven” in which a movie picking apart myths yields to them. And though “Da 5 Bloods” cannot quite square with the idea of taking gold intended for the South Vietnamese, there is still considerable power to the conclusion and the honoring of Stormin Norman’s wishes, linking Otis’s finally meeting his daughter with MLK’s closing words about letting America be great again. The latter can only happen when we finally, fully face our history.

BlacKkKlansman

Is it any wonder that Spike Lee would be drawn to the true-life tale of “BlacKkKlansman”, in which Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) became, in 1972, the first black Colorado Springs police officer? Stallworth sought to elicit change from within an institution that Black America has long viewed with suspicion; Lee has never shied away from laying the oft un-inclusive Hollywood industry bare. The first image of “BlacKkKlansman”, in fact, is not an image from “BlacKkKlansman” at all but one from Hollywood’s famous ode to the Old South, “Gone with the Wind”, followed directly by clips from “Birth of a Nation” (original title: The Clansman). Lee deliberately connects, as Ava DuVernay did in her documentary “13th”, the institutional rot of Hollywood with America, which denotes Lee’s intentions as larger than simply re-telling Stallworth’s admittedly scintillating story of infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan. And that is why Lee mostly employs Stallworth’s memoir as an outline, eschewing narrative cinema for a movie of ideas and images, and employing the movie’s oft-exaggerated tone to intensify its reality.

Precisely what drives Ron to be a cop is something of an oversight, his backstory a big fat blank, just showing up at the CSPD to apply, a scene where those interviewing him are seen first, underscoring the inevitable forthcoming scrutiny. In that way, Ron is not unlike James Meredith enrolling at Ole Miss, who saw himself less an individual seeking an education than a symbol making a point. Granted, this lack of dimension somewhat counteracts the philosophical quandary of Ron’s belief in the role of policing despite so many African-American attitudes to the contrary, but the follow through in which the bad apples theory of policing is first embraced and then rejected still rings true. Washington’s performance sells the character anyway, evincing affliction but also allowing a distinct joyfulness to filter through that anguish, a juxtaposition in tune with the movie’s alternating drama and comicality.

To that last point, his undercover scheme is both presented and played as something of a lark, with Ron flipping through a local newspaper and coming across a Klan recruiting ad. So, he dials them up, not even bothering to conceal his identity, a true fact forcing him to enlist fellow detective Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), white and Jewish, to assume the identity of Ron Stallworth to go undercover. If the obvious dramatic connotations this might elicit are occasionally present, Lee mostly dispenses with those to hone in on notions of identity and voice. Indeed, even as Flip plays the part of Ron, the real Ron keeps taking phone calls from the Klan, including Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace), a sly flouting of the oft-touted, always unbelievable idea that people don’t see color.

“BlacKkKlansman” sees color. That’s why Ron’s superior, Chief Bridges, a deft turn by Robert John Burke of grudging empathy, assigns his young charge to covertly patrol a local Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins) rally where the film momentarily gives itself over to the pulpit. If Ture’s oration touches multiple bases, it is highlighted by him imploring the audience to chant “Black is beautiful”, which Lee accentuates with shots of black faces against a blacked-out backdrop staring directly into the camera, reveling in the beauty of their dark skin, cinematic evocations of a Charles White portrait. Later, after Ture and the Black Student Union activists who have helped put on the rally are pulled over and threatened, Lee allows the characters a brief reprieve through a jubilant dance sequence. If his tableau of black faces pushes back against the notion of blackness being ugly, this semi-sing-along to the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose pushes back against daft Angry Black Man stereotype to which Lee himself has so often been subjected.

At the rally is where Ron meets Patrice (Laura Harrier), an activist in the local chapter of the Black Student Union. Though she dismisses police as “pigs”, which unsettles him despite keeping his identity secret, their relationship never really crackles with tension, sexual or otherwise. It is more like a conduit for political thought, which makes them feel like a couple students working more on an intellectual level than an amorous one, like differing opinions about the worth of Blaxplotiation movies leading Patrice to cite DuBois’s theory of double consciousness, of African-Americans only seeing themselves through the lens of an oppressive society, both sides of which Ron deliberately inhabits.

That sort of dimension is conspicuously lacking in the film’s presentation of the Klan, not all of whom are caricatures necessarily but are fairly one-note in their hatred nonetheless, leaving a little too much space for cheap liberal laughs. Though these Klansman hatch a bomb plot, the capper is not the eventual explosion so much as a sequence cribbed from The Jerky Boys with a long shot punchline where the Grand Wizard of the KKK is made to look like Edward R. Rooney, Dean of Students, his cheese left out in the wind, signaling what Lee thinks of them. Then again, this Klan chapter is dismissed several times as a clownish fringe organization unable to manage the terror they seek to unleash even as they come close to pulling it off anyway. Ignore them, in other words, and they will not merely melt away but hang around, which is why the concluding clips of the tragic 2017 events in Charlottesville, Virginia are not auteurist indulgence but evidence.

“BlacKkKlansman’s” most powerful passage involves a KKK initiation where members munch on popcorn while screening “Birth of a Nation”, hooting and hollering, as Lee mimics Griffith’s famous cross-cutting technique by switching back and forth between this white supremacist spectacle and a Black Student Union event where an activist, Jerome Turner, speaks. If at first this seems like a counter-myth being raised to combat “Birth of a Nation’s”, it is notable that Turner is played by Harry Belafonte, a real-life black activist, and that the lynching he recounts is the one of Jesse Washington in 1916. This is not myth; this is real; this is Spike Lee ramming the two together until all that we can see, so long as we choose to look, is what’s right in front of us.

Pass Over

Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over” is “a provocative riff on ‘Waiting for Godot’”, to quote the blurb proffered by Steppenwolf Theatre where the stage play debuted last summer. Of course, the principals of Samuel Beckett’s play were waiting for someone to show up, while the principals of “Pass Over”, Moses (Jon Michael Hill) and Kitch (Julian Parker), are seeking to get up and go somewhere else – that is, passing over to the promised land. That, taken in conjunction with the name Moses, evokes “Pass Over’s” Biblical overtones, essentially envisoning African-Americans as modern day Israelites wandering in an urban wilderness, a parallel the play draws by stranding these two characters on a street corner on which they are mystically imprisoned. Nwandu, however, unmasks Biblical parables as colorful, comforting but ultimately empty vessels of verbiage, summarized in her exaggerated conclusion, not to be revealed, that despite its larger than life sensation cuts so deep to the bone it still imbues pointed emotional truth.

Those exaggerations are most prominently embodied in the play’s two white characters – Mister, seersucker suit sporting good ol boy with a picnic basket who seems to have taken a wrong turn in Dixie, and Ossifer, who functions as the nightstick wielding warden of Moses and Kitch’s metaphorical sidewalk cell, both of whom were played in the theatrical production by Ryan Hallahan. Ossifer, with his conspicuous CPD uniform, was destined to engender blowback. And so he did, not that we need to rehash the finer points of the Chicago critics’ community, though that blowback was generally born of a willful refusal to do precisely what the play is asking and look at these broad stereotypes through the eyes of its two black characters and how each case of typecasting has come in its own way to signify an overarching American system of de facto segregation. (Ava DuVernay’s documentary “13th” might be a wise choice for companion viewing.) Nowhere is that system as prominent as Chicago, where segregation has essentially been baked in since its modern reconstruction.

That divide, I suspect, is why Spike Lee chose to bus in black people from the south and west side of Chicago to see a performance of “Pass Over” and then film it for Amazon Studios. (That filmed version was just digitally released on Friday. You can watch for free with Amazon Prime.) Lee’s version, aside from adding a musical score as well as a brief prologue and epilogue showing the people he bused in, leaves the play virtually unchanged. The single difference comes on the production side wherein Lee chose to have Hallahan play only Mister while casting a different actor – Blake DeLong – to play Ossifer. DeLong is fine, but it’s an odd change, one negating the original intention of the black characters viewing all whiteness through the same lens. Still, this casting change does not undermine the finished version, which still achieves the same effect as the play with the added benefit of Lee’s fiery close-ups.

Onstage, the impressively rendered, deliberately sparse set just sort of seems to hang in the ether, accentuated by the black-lit background. But onscreen, when Lee cuts close to either Moses or Kitch, that black background is all you can see. And in their caustic, comic interactions, brilliantly played by Hill and Parker like they are an invisible rope tugging the other one when it’s his turn to speak, Moses and Kitch come across as having been on this corner for a long time, an eternity perhaps, signifying the eternal struggle of African-Americans. In that light, Lee’s close-ups make it seem as Moses and Kitch are drifting in space, completely detached from whatever is around them, suspended in some cosmic purgatory. And while the stage version allowed for the creepy effect of Mister and Offiser to appear from behind the two black characters, as if always there keeping watch, onscreen Lee frequently sets shots behind Mister, and usually from a low angle, eliciting the sensation of this master towering over his two subjects. Even so, whatever visual flourishes Lee added, none can compete with those black faces in the audience.

It is not that Lee explicitly makes them the point. He only occasionally cuts to them. But the audience I saw the play with was predominantly white, and Hallahan’s comments at the Q&A after the screening I saw of Lee’s filmed version seemed to suggest most of the shows contained predominantly white faces too. And in that context, the closing monologue, not to be revealed, as spoken by Hallahan’s Mister directly to the audience plays like a repulsive inside jokes among oppressors. Those words in Lee’s version, however, assume a different context. At the Q&A, Hallahan mentioned his monologue in front of a black audience as playing more like domination, and that might be true. But the monologue is a bout of, shall we say, sinister reassurement, and onscreen in front of that audience this reassurement seemed to me as much an encapsulation of a certain kind of Caucasian telling Black America that racism no longer exists.

Some Drivel On...He Got Game

Maybe the funniest part of Spike Lee’s hardwood opus “He Got Game” (1998) is the college basketball coach cameos. Even now you will recognize many of them, like Roy Williams, like Jim Boeheim, each one recently embroiled in real world scandal, in a fictional ESPN segment involving the film’s principal character, #1 high school basketball recruit Jesus Shuttlesworth (Ray Allen).The coaches, all made to cheekily say the film’s title, tend to have grins on their faces, perhaps not so much from the enjoyment of being in a movie but knowing this will likely be a boon to real-life recruiting. That mixes and matches fiction and reality in a delicious, disturbing way since that’s what “He Got Game” is all about – the sport’s seedy, black market underbelly, where talented high school basketball players are stricken by all manner of leeches looking to get theirs by way of someone else’s.

Lee opens the film with a basketball montage, showing various young players shooting hoops in big cities and small towns, all set to Aaron Copland’s “John Henry.” If the score’s mood seems to elevate these moments to myth, refashioning basketball as the national game, it’s hard not to connect the actual myth of John Henry to exploited African-American basketball players which certainly seems to be Lee’s aim. Everyone wants something from Jesus, from his girlfriend Lala (Rosario Dawson) to his Uncle (Bill Nunn) to coaches like Billy Sunday, played by John Turturro whose slickness and real-life Italian heritage suggest Rick Pitino, and whose emergent recruiting practices suggest Pitino too. The person who wants the most from Jesus, however, is his father, Jake (Denzel Washington), in prison for accidentally killing his wife, Jesus’s mom.

Jake is approached by the Warden (Ned Beatty) with an offer from the Governor for temporary release to try and convince Jesus to attend Big State, alma mater of the Governor. If successful, Jake will get early release. If this plot detail sounds like a gimmick, that’s only because you haven’t read in-depth on the wild wiles of college basketball recruiting. The only reason, I’m fairly certain, my state’s ex-Governor, Rod Blagojevich, never tried a similar stunt was because no elite high school recruit was going anywhere near Northwestern. This twist on recruiting turns, naturally, into a chance for Jake to try and atone for his sins, which is never made easy, by the script or by Jesus, who is, in the meantime, not only fending off leeches but simultaneously trying to raise his sister (Zelda Harris). It’s a busy movie, in other words, but it hangs together, even Jake’s subplot with Dakota (Milla Jovovich), a woman of the night staying next door in the fleabag motel where Jake is shacked up while on his bizarro recruiting trip.

Washington practically lets Jake boil not with resentment, resigned to his sins, but anger nonetheless, all of which comes home in his gait. If actors often play prisoners a step behind, Washington has Jake move with a purpose, a walk that seems like it only has so much time on the outside and wants to take it all in. In one brief section he cuts across the city in a series of swift cuts underlining that speed. And this hurry is born out in flashbacks with the younger Jesus where Dad’s mettle-testing one-man basketball boot camps where he distinctly comes across like a man who knows time is already running out on creating a #1 NBA draft pick. And yet, in his scenes with Jovovich, Washington exudes a palpable tenderness, which renders the bright neon light pouring through the motel windows feel less, makes it feel almost like the carnival of Coney Island transplanted indoors, Jake’s time might be borrowed, but in trying to help Dakota get out of a sticky spot, he does his best to right his violent wrong.

That sort of tenderness ebbs and flows all throughout “He Got Game” and becomes crucial. There is a lot of anger here. How could there not be? In the scenes between father and son, Jesus bristles with anger for the sins his father wrought, and Allen, who I have wrote about before in this role, adopts the tunnel vision of his character quite convincingly. In a volatile flashback to a scene where Jesus and Lala discuss a baby “they” chose to abort, riding a ferris wheel, a fine juxtaposition, Jesus essentially just shouts her opinion down, which is where Lee, never one to let anyone off the hook, makes clear that even if Jesus is a savior on the hardwood, his life has transgressions.

If basketball is the film’s prominent subject, we only see it in snippets, like an early sequence cutting between Jake shooting jump shots on the prison basketball court and Jesus shooting jump shots on the playground, a moment to simply revel in Ray Allen’s perfect, sumptuous shooting form. Later, when father and son stroll the boardwalk, Jake explains how Jesus got his name, not from the Bible but from Earl Monroe (“Black Jesus”), and Lee cues up a few grainy stock images of Monroe from his days with the Baltimore Bullets, which don’t feel standard issue but like little flickering memories that sear themselves into the minds of kids when they first find and fall in love with the game.

“He Got Game” climaxes on the court with a one on one showdown between father and son to decide whether or not Jesus will sign with Big State, which sounds as gimmicky as the inciting incident but becomes so much more, an emotional bloodletting of sorts. No, the only real-real basketball game occurs early in the form of a nighttime playground contest with nothing on the line but pride. Lee sets this pickup game to Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown”, making it feel like a sudden burst of joy, when all the surrounding noise falls away and all you see is the unadorned beauty of the game.

Red Hook Summer

Though many references are made to the foul smells of the neighborhood that gives Spike Lee’s “Red Hook Summer” (2012) its title, from the odiferous cruise ship docked in the harbor to urine soaked elevators in tenement buildings lining the projects, and though the criminal element forever looms, Lee nevertheless allows a sunny disposition to creep in anyway, evoked in the way he often allows warm reds to saturate his visuals, mimicking the sun dappled trees we occasionally see that almost seem to be infusing the screen with oxygen right there before our very eyes. And Lee repeatedly outfits the soundtrack with wordless hymns, as if this meant to reassure the characters themselves that things are never so bleak as they seem. If the narrative can sometimes feel formless, as it often has in Lee’s later years, that still feels right, like a sermon delivered by a preacher without a text, just feeling his way along, maybe getting lost here and there but always finding his back, and always conveying passion, always seeking to make us think as much as he makes us feel.

“Red Hook Summer” is part summer vacation movie, part coming of age film, but with a Biblical bent. Its genesis is a 13 year old attached at the hip to his iPad, bearing the regal Spike Lee-ish surname of Flik (Jules Brown), up from Atlanta for, delivered by his mother to her father, Bishop Enoch, played superbly by Clarke Peters with equal tenderness and fire & brimstone. Flik also meets a neighborhood girl his age, Chazz (Toni Lysaith), a member of Bishop’s Enoch congregation, who tells off Flik as much as she makes eyes at him. Though the amateurism of the two first-time actors clearly shows, the energy of their respective performances is nonetheless palpable, and they make an endearingly rowdy duo. There is a scene when they go kayaking in New York Harbor, in the shadow of Lady Liberty, a splendid little bout of local flavor, and as they trade insults like they’ve had years of practice at it, you can feel the “You Gotta Be Kidding” frustration of the instructor in the background.

The real push and pull of this “Red Hook Summer”, however, belongs not to Flik and Chazz but to Flik and his grandfather. If Chazz, a believer, is content to let Flik figure out for himself whether he believes or not, Flik’s Grandfather is more forceful, withholding his grandson’s preferred vegan food and even screaming and shouting, waving around the Bible and hollering “It’s all in the good book!” And while Enoch is steadfast in this belief, “Red Hook Summer” is never simply assumes the Bible alone can move mountains. The movie is most alive when Enoch preaches, and when he preaches, he ties Scripture back to the social structure of the Red Hook neighborhood, and of the world itself. He wants his flock to be filled with the Holy Spirit, most assuredly, but he wants them to direct that fulfillment outwardly, to combat crime and gentrification. And even if his suspicions of technology can be misplaced, you have to admire the way he fights to get back his grandson’s precious iPad when it’s taken.

If Flik’s doubt is in God’s existence, the hoodlums, whose paths continually cross with Flik and Bishop Enoch, have doubts in the church itself, its function and intention. At first blush it seems this authenticity is on display in Deacon Zee, a broadly drawn character who might have faith but also has a drinking problem. In the end, Deacon Zee is just a red herring, and the spotlight gets shone down on Bishop Enoch instead, calling into question everything everyone thinks they know about him, and that includes us too. This is a movie, I imagine, that was and will forever be defined by the sudden turn it takes toward the end when Enoch, so consistently drawn as one thing, is suddenly revealed as something else. It is jarring. It is also alarming because it calls into question why Bishop Enoch’s daughter would allow her son to be in the presence of his grandfather for an entire summer based on this hidden truth. But that’s rooted more in traditional narrative concerns, and in his later years, Spike Lee has become less interested in traditional narrative concerns. If there’s a hole, there’s a hole, and who cares if you see it? Lee is more interested in how this sudden twist makes us feel.

This is a movie where God continually takes center stage, and as Bishop Enoch himself explains, “God loves all his people.” It’s a lovely sentiment, but Lee does not just want us to accept it at face value; he wants to challenge it; he wants that idea to be earned. He does not, by any means, let Bishop Enoch off the hook for his sins, but Lee also calls upon to offer empathy, and to remind us that offering empathy is not always supposed to be easy. So go ahead and watch “Red Hook Summer” and see if you can.

Chiraq

Spike Lee’s controversially named “Chiraq” – the undesirable nickname of Chicago where the film is set – opens with an all-hands-on-deck title card declaring: This Is An Emergency. The emergency to which it refers is American gun violence, brought home in the immediately ensuing statistic that relays how more everyday Americans have died at the hands of guns in the last fifteen years than American soldiers in the Iraq conflict. This numeric table-setter is followed by a sudden public gunfight at a rap concert and the death of a too young girl in the street, and briefly it seems that “Chiraq” will be a sobering examination of a modern firearms scourge that so often seems devoid of resolution. But that latter idea – the pointed lack of even the possibility of resolution, as ingrained as guns are in our culture, seems to be what’s most on Spike Lee’s mind, and so he opts for satire, brazenly, crazily and kinetically showing just how wrong-headed and impossible-to-change his target of ridicule is.

The screenplay of Lee and Kevin Willmott cribs from that old cut-up Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the 411 BCE comedy in which the title character puts a stop to the Peloponnesian War by convincing her female cohorts to stop satisfying their war-mad menfolk in the boudoir. “Chiraq’s” Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) is married to Demetrius Dupree (Nick Cannon) who is the leader of the Spartan gang at war with the Trojans (captained by an eye-patch sporting Wesley Snipes who accents most of his few line readings with a quiet if unhinged cackle which makes me remember how much I missed him as an actor). That war comes to Lysistrata’s doorstep one day when her and Demetrius’s south-side abode is set ablaze, forcing them to evacuate and eliciting a decree by Dupree of revenge which prompts Lysistrata to seek shelter at the home of her next-door neighbor, Miss Helen, played by Angela Bassett who lends an immaculate air of serene authoritativeness as she explains in no uncertain terms what her new houseguest should go and do.

Lysistrata and the other Spartan ladies put aside their differences with the Trojan women to unite and hold the warfaring gang members at bedside bay, shutting down the “penis power grid”, causing the whole city to go crazy as Lysistrata and her army make like John Brown (who is name-checked) and take over the National Guard Armory and Lee’s already rococo narrative erupts even further to take shots not simply at gun-toting yahoos but racists who will not let the Confederacy die, police violence, imbecilic men’s right activists, and Chicago’s own mayor, portrayed here by D.B. Sweeney as a kind of Rahm-ish version of Gov. William J. Le Petomane. And amidst all these comic broadsides, the majority of characters, when breaking out into song, generally speak not in standard dialogue but rhyming couplets, most notably by Samuel L. Jackson, wearing a dizzying array of natty suits and sporting a cane, a kind of individualized Greek Chorus, who pops repeatedly to talk through the proceedings with a mixture of incredulity, joy and Samuel L. patented foul-mouthed bravado. At one point his character, Dolemedes, mediates a moment between a black gang member and a white cop that acutely and necessarily demonstrates the no-win nature of that fraught relationship.

“(Spike) Lee's best films thrum with a wound-up energy,” the late great Roger Ebert once wrote. Indeed, he may as well have been describing the famed auteur provocateur’s latest opus. “Chiraq” thrums with such wound-up energy that even when the narrative hits 100 and gets off point, its inherent ire remains so palpably on point that it doesn’t really matter. It might sound strange to say, but at his best, Lee is rarely perfect, often indulging in his own whims without regards to whether or not they truly fit in terms of story, more intent on cultivating a roaring maximalism replete with incendiary rhetoric.

It’s a film certain to engender blowback, from every color and creed, for any number of reasons, because Lee is going after everyone, eventually kind of forgoing the city of the title to call out the whole wide world. The gun endemic and the seeming indifference to it by those in the positions of power have driven Lee to a point where he realized normal cinematic channels were not going to properly encapsulate his fury or make his point. And what is his point? After all, the film itself, in the end, has no answer to its central problem other than going old school Athenian which seems, as they say, problematic in the context of the modern world. No, “Chiraq’s” only point is Spike Lee going on air, pounding the table and screaming that he wants all of us to get up now. That he wants all of us to get up out of our chairs and go to the window and open it and stick our heads out and yell I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

A Toast to Spike

I loved Movies from a very young age and still love Movies whole-heartedly. I don’t capitalize Movies flippantly but to suggest something along the lines of Hollywood; Movies as escapism, Movies as trash, Movies as Movie Stars and Red Carpets and Search Lights. I love all that stuff. I do. I love Movies for the Phantasms they are and I love that when I was really little I was once confused about when Han Solo and Princess Leia found time to go to the bathroom because wasn’t this all, like, happening as is? Spike Lee, however, bless his Joints forever and ever, was my introduction to Cinema, to what directing really, truly meant, to paying attention to what the camera was doing and what the auteur was doing behind it. When Denzel Washington seemed to be floating on air while talking to the Audubon Ballroom for the tragically climactic moment of “Malcolm X”, I wondered what in the world I was seeing. I knew what was coming and so it felt like a moment in which he was already in the midst of ascending to the Promised Land, like he knew what was coming. But even more than that, I wanted to know how Spike Lee achieved that shot.

But it goes beyond technical tricks like the Double Dolly Shot. It goes to the very end of “Malcolm X” when Lee chooses to essentially step outside the constraints of the biopic narrative and conclude the film with Nelson Mandela reciting Brother Malcolm’s most famous oration for a group of school kids before cutting back to archival footage of the real thing for the money quote (“by any means necessary”). I was confused and enraptured. You could do this? You could break out of the movie telling a story to go to the here and now with a guy who was very much real and not an actor? You could, and by doing so, Lee had brought Malcolm X with him; in that moment, he still lived and breathed. I became consciously aware of the decision the director made to render what I was feeling. Maybe that should sound small time, now, here, however million billion movies I’m into my Confraternity of Cinematic Doctrine, but it doesn’t. It still feels huge, like suddenly just being able to read another language.

The color palettes of “Do the Right Thing” and “Mo' Better Blues” blew my mind just as the way each section of Malcolm X's life was given a different hue to better highlight his evolving person. And yet none of those quite astounded me like the one in “Crooklyn” when the little girl played so wonderfully by Zelda Harris was sent from New York to live with relatives in faraway Virginia and Spike deliberately compressed the images on screen, distorting the characters wildly, making them appear squeezed and boxed in and making it seem as if we are watching the movie in the wrong scope all as a means to get across Harris’s character’s mental state. To this day, I’m not sure I liked that choice. But whether I do or don’t isn’t the point; it was the choice itself. It was that he could do it and that he did it.

Like when he slapped Aaron Copland’s exuberant “Hoedown” over the pickup basketball game near the beginning of “He Got Game.” That was an aesthetic choice I’m not entirely sure any other director could conjure. It was an angry movie in so many ways, jumping off from Lee’s infamous comments in “Hoop Dreams”, taking direct aim on the sport he adores so much, chastising it for the way it exploits the kids it so relentlessly recruits for its own gains. But there, on the makeshift court under an urban moon, away from all the pushers and peddlers and Coaches Of Young Men, Lee permits himself belief in what he perceives as the most beautiful game, invoking that beauty with Copland’s score.



“Summer of Sam”, though, was where, for me, Mr. Lee really went haywire, and I mean that in the best possible sense. He used everything; he did everything; he showed everything; he wanted to include footage of Willie Mays’ catch and so he did. “There’s no reason for this to be here,” I wanted to shout as Mays went back and to the wall, “ and that’s why I love it so!” All of this filmmaking chicanery, all its kinetic editing, whether effective or not, and most of it is, works in harmony with the film’s frenzied tone covering all manner of characters and situations from that intense and sweltering summer in New York when the Son of Sam was loose and the power went out. Lee himself has said the real life summer of ’77, one in which he spent filming on an old Super 8 camera, was the impetus for his eventually assuming the director’s chair, and you can feel that sentimentality for a life-changing time. There is joy and paranoia and weirdness in equal doses. I watched “Summer of Sam” feeling the glory and folly of an auteur who’s more or less run amok in the best sense of the term, wanting to encompass everything because it all means so much to him. I couldn’t get enough even if it was too much. I’ve seen so many better films (“Do the Right Thing” included); I haven’t seen a lot of films that had such a distinctive pulse.

Today Spike Lee is being honored at the Governor’s Award ceremony in Hollywood, California with an Honorary Oscar. The ceremony isn’t televised and Spike will probably get about 2 seconds of screen time at the Academy Awards next February (God, I hope Chris Rock says something about that) and so I wanted to proffer a few considered ideas emit a bunch of soul glop here about him today and the way he made me sit up and not just watch a movie but see a movie.