Is Spike Lee for real, or just taking the piss out of himself?

This post is not going to comment on the merits of Spike Lee's remake of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low as a movie. I'm still trying to sort out how much I like Highest 2 Lowest, but the answer is "at least somewhat." 

No, this post is about how the movie has an excessive axe to grind with Boston sports.

If you pay even half attention to the NBA, you know Spike Lee is a diehard New York Knicks fan. The camera always goes to him on the sidelines, raising his arms in disbelief if a call goes against his team, and looking vaguely delirious when the Knicks are on a run. In fact, Lee almost saw his dream of the Knicks doing -- well, anything -- come true this year, but they were KO'd by the Pacers in the conference finals. (After beating my Boston Celtics.)

Lee clearly had Highest 2 Lowest in the can before the Celtics and Knicks met in May. In fact, H2L debuted at Cannes that same month, with Lee decked out in Knicks colors as part of his red carpet tuxedo. 

But he was sure to put some Celtics hate into this movie before he wrapped it. (The Celtics had already won last year's championship by then, I would guess.) 

So one of the first plot points involves Denzel Washington's character telling his son to take off his green headband because he doesn't want him to wear those colors in his house. It's a headband his son wears to a basketball practice, and then exchanges with his friend, leading the wrong kid to get kidnapped and the plot mechanics to get moving. 

But that scene is not enough. Coaching the practice -- actually a basketball camp, I'm reading -- is former NBA player Rick Fox, playing himself. If you are not familiar with Rick Fox, he was drafted by the Celtics in 1991 and played with them until 1997. At which point he moved to the Lakers and played with them for almost exactly the second half of his career before retiring in 2004. In a fairly clear instance of "right place, right time," Fox -- a decent NBA player but not a difference maker -- was on the Lakers for their run of three straight championships in the teams led by Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal. So of course, "former Laker" is the identity Fox adopts most, and I get that. 

Lee, though, is not satisfied with the fact that Fox switched from the Celtics to the Lakers -- who are actually the Celtics' rivals, not the Knicks -- and has to get Fox to throw some shade the Celtics' way. 

Before that there's a little self-deprecation on Lee's part. The son character is mixing it up with Coach Fox a bit, with Fox telling him not to talk trash when the Lakers (who aren't mentioned by name) have 17 championship and his Knicks only have two. But the Celtics part comes in later.

When the son goes missing -- at this point, they think Washington's actual son has been kidnapped, and not his driver's son -- detectives show up to ask Fox questions. One asks Fox for an autograph. Fox offers an autograph to the other, who says "No thanks." The first detective explains of his partner: "Celtics fan." Fox rejoins: "It figures."

It figures? It figures this cretin would like the team that drafted him and gave him his earliest opportunities in the NBA? It figures?

This all rings a little hollow because Knick fans' hatred of the Celtics is pretty much a one-way street. Knicks fans consider the Celtics their rivals, but the reverse is not true. The Celtics have been so much more consequential than the Knicks over the history of the two franchises that this year's loss in the playoffs is literally the only time I can remember the Knicks breaking our hearts. The Lakers are the Celtics' real rivals. (So the scene where Lee gets Fox to lord the Lakers' success over this character, a Knick fan, is kind of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" territory). 

It's kind of like what Yankee fans (say they) feel about the Red Sox as rivals -- you can't truly be rivals if one team just has so much more success than the other. The Yankees are on 27 world championships while the Red Sox are on only nine. Similarly, the Celtics have even one more championship than the Lakers, 18 to 17, but that makes 18 to 2 over the Knicks -- way more lopsided than the Yankee-Red Sox imbalance. (And that's what also makes the Celtics-Lakers rivalry so good.)

But wait there's a lot more to say about the Yankees-Red Sox within Highest 2 Lowest, which reveals how the Red Sox have indeed gotten under the skin of Yankee fans in the past 25 years, when the former has a 4-1 edge in championships. I think we can get to that now. 

Lee is less known as a Yankee fan, but he is that too. Actually, I feel like he has most of his affinity for the Brooklyn Dodgers, because Brooklyn is his hood, but the Brooklyn Dodgers haven't been a thing for about 65 years. So maybe he's subsequently adopted the Yankees as a team that is actually, you know, in New York.

After the Celtics stuff in Highest 2 Lowest is done, Lee shifts to a lot of loving shots of Yankee icons and Yankee Stadium, incorporated a little more smoothly than that sounds, in a way similar to how he incorporates images of Black musicians that he loves, in this and other films. But then the Boston sports hatred becomes textual again.

The mid-film centerpiece is a planned money drop from a New York subway -- the 4 train, I believe, since that's the one that goes from Manhattan to Yankee Stadium. Aboard this train are a bunch of people in Yankee caps (which include Denzel). You'd see this on an ordinary day in New York, but maybe not with quite this concentration, as these fans are on their way to the Bronx to see the Yankees. Presumably the Yankees are supposed to be playing the Red Sox, but you never know -- "Boston sucks" chants break out among Yankee fans when they get together, even when they're not playing the Red Sox. 

But just because these chants break out in real life does not necessarily mean you have to make them such a focal point of your movie.

Indeed, variations on the "Boston sucks" chant continue for more than five minutes of screen time during this scene of cross-cutting between the subway, a Puerto Rican pride festival, and at least one other location, possibly involving police assembling to intervene with the drop. At one point, the emergency brake is pulled on the train, and the chant -- led by John Turturro's brother Nicholas -- switches to:

"Boston pulled the motherfucking emergency break! Boston pulled the motherfucking emergency break!"

And here's where I'm wondering if Lee is just taking the piss.

My premise this whole post has been that Lee is myopic in some essential way, as all diehard sports fans are, and he believes that the Yankees and Knicks are fundamentally good and the Red Sox and Celtics are fundamentally evil. (If we're talking fundamental values, though, the Yankees were the fascists who did not allow their players to have facial hair other than moustaches until this year.) I mean, if you bleed for your team, I think you really are blind to the fact that the reasons to root for these uniforms are as arbitrary as where you happened to be born. 

But the emergency brake line makes me wonder. Clearly it's intentionally comedic -- you could never really get people on a subway to chant such a complicated and vulgar phrase in unison, especially when there would be all ages of people and all comfort levels with profanity present in that train car. But is he also having a little fun at the expense of Yankee fans? 

If you're going to blame the Boston Red Sox for something as obviously incorrect as a train stopping on the tracks, doesn't it undermine the validity of everything else you're chanting about?

One thing that's clear, though, is that Lee can't let his sports hangups go. 

Another thing that's clear is that this sort of shit talking still works on me, meaning I'm no better than he is.

Why else would I write a piece like this if this comparatively small part of Highest 2 Lowest hadn't actually bothered me on some level? 

And in that spirit, I proudly note this: I am writing this post on YED.

If you don't know what "YED" is, that would not surprise me, because this is a movie blog, not a sports blog. But even if you are a baseball fan, you might not know what this acronym means, unless you are embroiled within this bitter rivalry enough to have picked up on its finer details.

"YED" is an abbreviation of "Yankee Elimination Day." It is the day we celebrate each year -- well, most years, and every year since 2001 with the one exception of 2009 -- when the Yankees are officially eliminated from playoff contention, from their ability to win that 28th ring. (I had a brief "argument" on Facebook with a friend who said it should be Yankees, with an S, Elimination Day. He's wrong.)

So yes, earlier today Australian time, the Toronto Blue Jays punched their ticket to the American League Championship Series for the first time since 2016 by taking out the Yankees by a 5-2 score and winning the American League Division Series 3-1. This after, I should note, the Yankees beat the Red Sox 2 games to 1 in the Wild Card Series the previous round, the Yankees winning two in a row after the Red Sox won the first game to push them to the brink of elimination.

Given that the Yankees got spanked in the first two games against Toronto and their one win required a comeback from being down 6-1, I'd say sorry, Mr. Lee -- the Red Sox may suck, but if so, the Yankees do not suck less than by a margin that is statistically significant. 

Un-lee-shed: Chi-Raq

This is the final installment of my 2019 bi-monthly series watching Spike Lee movies I had not yet seen.

It's nice to finish with a Spike Lee movie where he really "goes for it."

Lee's career has been defined by "going for it," but you can't "go for it" every time out. Perhaps out of necessity or perhaps just out of a sense of pursuing his cooler and more modest interests from time to time, Lee has kind of alternated bold, polemical statements with smaller, moodier pieces. Although I've liked both, the polemics seem to have more value, as they are more likely to be interesting failures at worst. 

It would be hard to say that I've missed only the smaller, moodier pieces in Lee's career, because this series has featured a number of films that announce their themes in a shout rather than a whisper. But Chi-Raq does feel like ending on a note that is appropriately LEE, in capital letters.

The 2015 film is Lee's modern-day update of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, a play in which women withhold sex from their men as a punishment for the Peloponnesian War. That play was originally performed in 411 B.C., and I guess it just shows my ignorance that I'm surprised that sex was a textual rather than subtextual topic of a play written 2500 years ago. I need to brush up on my classics.

Of course the setting is Chicago, hence the title. The murder rate in Chicago has been sky high for quite some time now, leading to a nickname that compared it to a war zone, like the one that has hosted two major wars in the last 30 years. I have friends in Chicago and they seem to go about their lives pretty much violence free, but there are, of course, places they never go.

Lee's showing us those places in Chi-Raq, as he introduces us to a handful of key characters. There's the title character, born Demetrius Dupree, a rapper and gangster played by Nick Cannon (which surprised me, as Cannon has primarily taken on lighter fare in the past). There's his chief rival, a gangster nicknamed Cyclops (Wesley Snipes wearing an eye patch). There's Chi-Raq's girlfriend, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), who starts to wake up to the horrors of what her man and others are doing after she takes refuge in the home of a neighbor following a shooting and case of arson at and outside her house. That neighbor is Helen Worthy (Angela Bassett), a non-violence advocate who plants the seed that flowers into Lysistrata gathering an ever-larger group of women to go on a sex strike, as a desperate attempt to stop the killing. A number of familiar and not-so-familiar faces fill out the cast, including Samuel L. Jackson in what amounts to a narrator role.

What makes Lee's film all the more ambitious is that the majority of it is told in verse. It's a clever and at times potent way to both acknowledge the classical roots of the source material, while marrying that with modern African-American creative forms that already involve rhyming, like rap. It's just one way in which the film joins consummately realistic elements with those that are clearly fanciful.

Lee leaves no doubt about his ambitions from the film's very start, filling the screen with statistics comparing murders in Chicago over a period of the 21st century with American deaths in foreign wars during that period, which also drives home the comparison to Iraq. Before even introducing the characters, he also gives us a solemn dose of the words of a preacher, talking about the terrible human and community costs of black men killing other black men. It's Lee signaling the serious intentions of his film before leavening them a bit with humor and farce.

Given how Lee establishes the stakes as by and about black men, it was a significant surprise that he gives his most lengthy diatribe to a white man. John Cusack plays local pastor Mike Corridan, who I learned after the film is based on a real man in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, whose skin color has no bearing on the extent to which he's loved and respected by his black congregation. One of the victims of the constant warfare is a young girl, and Corridan gives a fiery speech at her funeral decrying the conditions -- both external and self-inflicted -- that have left this community in its current sorry state.

I kept waiting for Lee to undercut Cusack's character in some way, but I guess I underestimated the man. He's never been so simple as "white bad, black good," and in case you're looking for that kind of thing, there is a bad (or at least terminally self-interested) white character played by D.B. Sweeney, the Chicago mayor. And there are any number of other characters with darker skin tones who get their own diatribes. But this centerpiece scene perhaps struck me more a) because it involves a pastor, who has rhetorical tools that exceed those of an average person, and b) because Cusack plays the scene so convincingly. It's not the type of role I'd seen Cusack undertake before, and I had the sense he wasn't really up to it at this stage of his career.

Lee delivers the material with a balance of fun and sobriety, of outrageousness and even sometimes subtlety. There are big choreographed numbers involving oodles of extras, including one where different groups of people in different locations sing and dance along to the Chi-Lites' "Oh Girl." It reminded me a bit of how Lee uses "Too Late to Turn Back Now" -- a song from the same year as "Oh Girl," 1972 -- in BlacKkKlansman. I was loving Chi-Raq for the first half. And then ...

... well, and then I'm not really sure. And then I got tired, I can say that much for sure. I've been solo parenting this week as my wife recovers from oral surgery, and on Wednesday night that had definitely taken something out of me. I might have even slept for some portions of the second half, though it's hard to tell which parts I might have actually missed and which parts are just hazy because I was sleepy.

In all, I gave it 3.5 stars but was wavering on the verge of a 4. It's definitely not an interesting failure, it's an interesting success. But I was prepared for it to be even more of a success than it ended up being, as the film took some steps backward for me in the second half. Whether that's a deserved criticism or just the reality that I was exhausted, I may not know until I see it again.

I can tell you that in a sea of otherwise superlative performances, I was a bit disappointed by the work of the film's one Oscar winner, Jennifer Hudson. She plays the mother of the girl who was caught in the crossfire, and she's also the only one whose reactions to the events of the story don't seem quite correct. I suppose Lee might be heightening her character to go along with his chosen approach of relying on verse, and that any time you are responding to the death of your daughter through the rhythms of archaic poetry rather than the immediacy of sadness and rage, something is going to be lost. But I did expect a little more from Hudson.

There are enough choice nuggets in Chi-Raq that I'm sure to leave any discussion of this film prematurely, but it's the holiday season and I've got a lot of other things to do.

Besides, I have to give you at least a little recap of Un-lee-shed.

Just as a reminder, I started in February with She's Gotta Have It, and from there, every two months, followed with School Daze, Mo' Better Blues, 4 Little Girls, Miracle at St. Anna, and Chi-Raq. Mo' Better Blues was an emergency replacement for Get on the Bus, which I could not source. That remains one of only three Lee films I won't have seen at the end of this series, along with Girl 6 and Clockers.

Considering that Lee has had some real stinkers in his career -- I'm looking at you, She Hate Me -- I was glad to see that I didn't dislike any of the films I watched for this series. The closest to disliking one of them would have to be Miracle at St. Anna, but that film struck me with a particular kind of dilemma. Because I knew it was critically scorned, I felt like I was deducting points from it that maybe it didn't deserve to have deducted. I went with a 2.5 stars for that one, but it easily could have been 3. I liked most of what it was trying to do, and with a few exceptions, it was executed pretty well.

However, neither do I come to the end of this series feeling like I have a number of new and interesting takeaways about the man. The range of star ratings for these six movies was only 2.5 to 4, with 4 Little Girls earning the high and St. Anna the low. I'm unable to comment on the ones that remain unseen, of course, but it looks like I had seen most of the "essential Lee" before I got started, even if I had not seen either of the films he made before Do the Right Thing, at least one of which should probably be thought of as essential.

Still, I'd say I gained an additional context and understanding about some of Lee's work, in some cases how it relates to the work of other black artists, or to black culture on the whole. For one, School Daze helped broaden my understanding of HBCUs, which would be the focal point of Beyonce's Homecoming, which I watched just a few weeks ago. Some of what Beyonce did in that Coachella concert was a specific shout-out to School Daze, although enough time had passed between my two viewings that I failed to identify what.

4 Little Girls gave me a real education on a pocket of black history that I am not as familiar with as I should be. The testimonies of the affected parties were extremely moving, even decades after the events in question, and I was really impressed by the way Lee deemphasized his own idiosyncrasies and showier techniques in the face of that important subject matter.

Two of the films in this series also reminded me of the extreme range of Lee's abilities, and how we can't really pin down the parameters of "a Spike Lee film" -- or "joint," in his parlance -- because he's constantly challenging himself to do new and interesting things. His first film, for example, reminded me of someone like Jim Jarmusch, who had never seemed a tempting point of comparison for Lee in the past. Then I also got to see Lee's version of a war epic, something I would have never guessed interested him until he actually made it.

In short, Spike Lee contains multitudes, and watching six more of his films was a good reminder of that.

I haven't yet decided what my bi-monthly series will be in 2020. I'm tossing up either another deep dive into the unseen films of a major artist, or possibly a themed series that's specific to me and my viewings.

I can assure you, when I decide, you will be the first to know.

Un-lee-shed: Miracle at St. Anna

This is the fifth in my 2019 bi-monthly series Un-lee-shed, where I catch up with (most of) the Spike Lee movies I haven’t seen.

Spike Lee has made a bunch of duds in his career. Given what I’d heard about it at the time it was released in 2008, I was pretty sure Miracle at St. Anna would be one of them.

It’s really not. Although it veers toward that territory during its low moments, Lee does mostly right the ship. He doesn’t right it enough for me to actually recommend Miracle at St. Anna, which is too long and has too many “goofy moments,” for want of a better word. But really, it’s not that bad of a movie.

What’s more, it feels like a Spike Lee movie. It’s loaded with his familiar concerns and some trademark touches.

When I first heard about Miracle at St. Anna, I thought it was a strange milieu for Lee – you know, a war movie. Many directors seem to eventually want to try one, so it isn’t surprising that Lee also wanted to take his turn. I mean, he’s never a director who has limited himself to just a few genres. But I guess I just didn’t expect it, maybe either in terms of the scope or in terms of the subject matter.

But Lee is no stranger to historical epics, which is kind of what I consider Malcolm X to be. Ambition can take on multiple forms, and with Lee, it has. He has ambitions toward tackling thorny racial issues, but he’s also got ambitions about the canvas on which he paints. So really, Miracle at St. Anna is not such a strange choice.

And it’s fairly credibly mounted. The war scenes, which are actually relatively few, have the basic details right. Bodies fall in the direction they should. Explosions seem like explosions. Music plays forlornly, perhaps too forlornly. If I have technical concerns with the movie, they relate mostly to the editing choices, and some of the shots by Matthew Libatique, who has actually since become one of the most sought-after DPs (Black Swan, mother!, A Star is Born).

I guess what doesn’t really work about the movie is that it feels like a mish-mash. Oh, plus those moments that feel like they come out of left field, tonally, many of which involve actor Omar Benson Miller.

Lee bites off a little more than he can chew here, but that’s not unusual territory for Lee. He was accused of doing that in BlacKkKlansman, which was my second favorite movie of last year. Maybe it’s the way he chews it.

The story follows the four surviving soldiers of a misbegotten mission in which a cowardly white captain (Walton Goggins) sends in a black company basically as sitting ducks for a German ambush. Oh, this is World War II, in case you didn’t know, and the setting is rural Italy. These four make their way to an Italian village, picking up an injured and delusional young boy along the way. Those villagers also have a back story, as do some Germans we meet, as do a group of Italian “Partisans” who were anti-Mussolini.

The story has the strange effect of introducing some of these characters too late for them to seem like such an integral part of the story, and abandoning others too early. I forgot to mention there is also a present-day (early 1980s) frame story involving one of the surviving soldiers shooting a man point blank when he recognizes him as his one time enemy, during a random interaction at a window at the post office. This portion of the story features John Turturro, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Kerry Washington … who, combined, receive about four minutes of screen time. The story doesn’t miss them per se, since the flashback that takes up 93% of the running time is actually more interesting, but it just calls into question why Lee bothered to show us this frame story and cast it with actors we would have expected to see more of. Perhaps most problematically, there's an especially strange and pointless cameo by John Leguizamo that doesn't even have any corollary when the frame story wraps back around at the end. 

And then there are the weird episodes. Almost without explanation, Omar Benson Miller, playing the character Sam Train, breaks out into uncomfortable moments in which it almost seems like he is doing a parody of the type of minstrel show African American that was the subject of Lee’s film Bamboozled. At best it’s a distraction and a tough tonal shift to swallow; at worst it feels like it sets back the racial understanding the film is grappling with. The fact that these moments of outrageous behavior are few and far between kind of helps, but also kind of begs the question about why Lee let those scenes get away from him in the first place.

In all, though, this is a mostly credible war movie that has some affecting moments. There’s too much of it, for sure, but that’s not a problem that’s unique to Lee. And it’s not totally satisfying, but it’s not unsatisfying, either. I’m not sure if I’m being biased by the negative reviews of it to give it a mild thumbs down rather than a mild thumbs up, but my concerns with it are significant enough that I’m comfortable with that. Especially since I’ve decided I need to toughen up and not just give every mediocre movie a pass.

One complaint I definitely had about it is that I went through the whole movie and could not definitively determine what the miracle of the title was supposed to be. There are a couple things that might have qualified, but none of them seemed really miraculous, or if so, the miracle was not presented in enough of an “a-ha!” moment for it to really sink in. There’s some magical realism here, but it’s begging for more explication.

To end on a more positive note, I did enjoy seeing some elements that I considered to be trademark Lee. Two in particular, in fact, were later echoed in BlacKkKlansman. The first is a scene where the soldiers stop and look at some war propaganda posters pasted to a stone wall in one of these villages they pass through. We see them looking at the posters in disgust – head on, as if the posters occupied the space where we the audience are sitting – for quite some time before we see what they’re actually looking at. It turns out this propaganda features some racist caricatures of black people in the type of hurtful style that was, again, the focus of Bamboozled. But the technique itself reminded me of the moment in BKKK where John David Washington slowly approaches the vile caricatures that the klansmen had been using as target practice. It’s not until he reaches the targets that we see how awful they truly are.

Lee’s fondness for cross-cutting is also on display here. There’s a scene where we see soldiers from three different countries – America, Germany and Italy – all praying to the same God, despite the fact that all three are in opposition to each other in meaningful ways. It may be a rather obvious message that we as human beings are more the same than we are different, but I’m a sucker for the kind of technique he uses to dramatize that. I suppose it’s used differently here than the “White power! Black power!” moment in BKKK, but no less effectively.

I’ve ended up writing more about Miracle at St. Anna than I expected I’d have any reason to, which most certainly speaks well of it, whether I think it’s ultimately a success or not.

Okay! This series concludes in December with Chi-Raq.

Un-lee-shed: 4 Little Girls

This is the fourth in my 2019 bi-monthly series watching Spike Lee’s films that I haven’t yet seen.

4 Little Girls was one of the movies in this series I was looking forward to most, though I’m not sure you can make such a statement without providing an asterisk. You don’t look forward to spending any time with the type of tragedy documented in this movie. I do, however, look forward to watching examples of powerful, emotional filmmaking, and 4 Little Girls was certainly one such example.

It was on my radar at the time it was released in 1997, but I didn’t have the vacuum cleaner mentality I have today about sucking up all the cinematic content worth seeing in a given year. In fact, I might have dinged Spike Lee’s first documentary a little bit for not being a film that was released theatrically, as 4 Little Girls was produced by HBO. I might still arbitrarily ding it for that reason, except it’s not really true. The original plan was to debut it on HBO, but all involved realized it was important enough to get a theatrical run before its cable TV premiere. It ran in four theaters in the summer of 1997 and was eventually nominated for an Oscar for best documentary.

The film of course examines the loss of four young black girls in Birmingham, Alabama as a result of a September 1963 church bombing. Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair were those girls, and they were all in the 12 to 14 age range. It was an act of contemptible racism carried out by a true miscreant whose name I will not even mention here. I don’t think he knew the children were going to be killed in the bombing but that hardly changes anything. He reacted smugly and all the footage of him shows him with this big shit-eating grin.

The film goes into the details of the case as well as giving portraits of these four girls from their surviving relatives, who are still clearly shaken from their deaths even three-and-a-half decades later. It’s potent, moving stuff. It’s also shocking. One of the most controversial elements of the film – though I can’t tell if it actually created a controversy or just made it hard to watch – is that there are brief flashes of post-mortem photographs of the children. Lee didn’t want to give just a sentimental celebration of four young girls whose lives were cut tragically short. He wanted to confront us with the reality of what it looks like when victims are pulled out of the rubble of a bombing. You breathe a sigh of thanks that they are only brief flashes, because it means you can’t fully make out what parts of the body might be missing or altered. I didn’t go back to pause it to find out.

Of course, 4 Little Girls didn’t interest me only on the face value of its content. Especially in the context of this series, I wanted to see what aspects of it reminded me most of Spike Lee. There were principally three, though at least one of those three is only superficial.

The first and most obvious is the montage opening, which gives us a bunch of imagery related to the topic set to the song “Birmingham Sunday” sung by Joan Baez, whose lyrics relate directly to this bombing. Although the use of the song makes for a rather obvious creative decision, I was interested and a bit surprised to see that Lee would choose a white artist from a very white type of music (folk music) to introduce this film, though it works beautifully. Many other Lee films start out similarly.

A slightly more Lee use of music was the undercurrent of jazz that plays under a lot of the interview subjects. It’s something he shares in common, aesthetically, with Woody Allen. Maybe it’s a New York thing.

The really superficial Lee trademark was that he interviews frequent collaborator Ossie Davis. That’s not just a random selection based on their friendship, as Davis and wife Ruby Dee were big civil rights activists and participated in Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom a mere two weeks before the bombings. But if I were looking for the ways Lee put himself into the film, that felt like an obvious one.

But he didn’t do too much else in that regard, I suspect because it would have distracted from the very sober story he was telling. 4 Little Girls is not about Lee demonstrating his skills as a filmmaker. It’s about wrestling with a period of great racial discord in American history, from the perspective of a time that is only slightly less discordant. Bill Clinton was president when Lee made this film, and though he is often described (mostly by black people) as “America’s first black president” – or at least was before there was an actual black president – it’s clear that the improvement in American society from 1963 to 1997 was comparatively small. Sadly, it probably still is.

When I return to this series in October it will be with the only true flop I am watching, Miracle at St. Anna (2008), which I’m sure has some good parts despite its turkey reputation.

Un-lee-shed: Mo' Better Blues

This is the third in my bi-monthly 2019 series watching (most) of the Spike Lee films I haven’t yet seen.

June brought my first audible in Un-lee-shed. I had to call it when I couldn’t find the movie I was intending to watch, Get on the Bus, available on any streaming service I subscribe to, at the library, or on iTunes. In fact, most of these services returned a strange message when I searched for the title, which was (and I’m paraphrasing here) “I haven’t even heard of this movie. Go get stuffed.”

So I did, and watched Mo’ Better Blues instead.

Which was fine, as I actually thought of Blues as the more “significant” Lee movie I hadn’t seen than Get on the Bus, and iTunes obviously agrees. The main reason I preferred Get on the Bus for this series was that I wanted to do a bit of a jump forward in time, rather than watching a third movie within a span of five years on the calendar after She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze. When paired with Four Little Girls, which I intend to watch in August (assuming availability), the summer months could make a good “middle section” to Lee’s career.

But instead it was the best fashions 1990 had to offer in Mo’ Better Blues.

I was indeed a bit distracted by the fashion in the movie, which of course I remember only too well from the time, but which now seems hopelessly specific and dated. And since the 1990s have not yet been fully reclaimed as an era for us to nostalgically revisit at the movies, I felt only the mild repulsion to that fashion, rather than the sentimentality.

But this movie is not about fashion. It’s about jazz. Or blues, I guess, though to me it seemed a lot like jazz.

It stars Denzel Washington as Bleek Gilliam (great name), a trumpeter who leads his own band (featuring the likes of Lee, Bill Nunn, Giancarlo Esposito and Wesley Snipes, all regular Lee collaborators, though this was the first for both Washington and Snipes). Bleek is two-timing two women with each other, though they kind of know it. One of these is Lee’s sister, Joie, who was in almost every Lee movie to that point and still appears in them today, most recently Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. (She’s also on the She’s Gotta Have It TV show, which Lee produces.) The other is an actress I knew I recognized, Cynda Williams, ultimately identifying her (with the help of the internet) as the star of One False Move. That’s a really good movie I need to see again.

Story? What story? It’s pretty much a slice of life of these characters over a number of years as Lee’s character gambles himself to within an inch of being beaten to death, Bleek tries to juggle the women without losing either one, Esposito bristles over the band’s treatment of his white (and French) girlfriend, and Snipes wants to break out on his own. There are a lot of musical numbers incorporated in, to good effect. And a lot of “Lee-isms” are being played with here, like cameras that swoop in to close-ups, dolly shots, a forlorn jazz score, and Brooklyn street life.

But I felt toward Mo’ Better Blues as I did the two previous films in the series, though I guess I gave 3.5 stars to She’s Gotta Have It and three to School Daze. I’m at three stars again here. All three of these films provide useful insight to Lee’s growth as a filmmaker, but I guess I’m not shocked that I missed them. They aren’t essential, and this is probably the least essential of them.

As I was watching this, I wondered how well the movie he released next, Jungle Fever, would hold up today. It didn’t hold up well for some people at the time it came out, but for me it seemed nearly as urgent in its own way as Do the Right Thing, though obviously for different reasons. The Samuel L. Jackson performance in that movie was the real standout, as I remember. If I watched it today – either for the first time or as a revisit – I’d probably be just as distracted by the fashions, but hopefully still engaged by the themes.

As I said, Four Little Girls is on tap for August, if the gods of availability see it fit to oblige me. Otherwise ... Girl 6? Clockers? We'll see. 

Un-lee-shed: School Daze

This is the second in my 2019 series watching a Spike Lee movie I haven't seen every two months.

"Wake up!" the character played by Lauren Fishburne, then credited as Larry Fishburne, yells a number of times in a typically direct Spike Lee ending to School Daze. The message, I suppose, is that the students of historically black Mission College need to wake up to the ways they are selling out their own cultural history, turning a blind eye to important social movements, and generally treading water. Race is not explicitly referenced, though there is a definite fissure between black characters who have dark skin and those who have lighter skin, indicating that interracial relationships (wanted or otherwise) are indecently recent in the history of those family trees.

However, the kind of deflating aspect to what is obviously designed as a galvanizing moment is that it's not direct enough. Spike Lee tends to say things in a loud and unambiguous way, and usually it's not possible to mistake what he's saying. Here, though, it is. He's structured his narrative so that Fishburne can deliver a climactic two-word phrase that amounts to "check yourself before your wreck yourself," but the narrative leading up to that point has not clearly enough indicated what these characters need to check for.

The most dominant aspect of School Daze -- which I thought was set in a high school prior to watching it -- is its investigation of fraternities at Mission College, which also includes sororities, various hangers on, and those who set themselves up in opposition to the Greek system. It all comes back to the Greeks, though. So what you'd think Lee's message would be is that the conformity and blind obedience that goes along with the fraternity system is the thing Lee's shouting down, even if it's not the kind of Lee message we would ordinarily expect. Fraternities don't seem like they are, or have ever been, a hot-button issue for African Americans.

Except the sheer amount of time Lee spends with the Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity, led by the character played by Giancarlo Esposito among others, is a strange kind of endorsement of the various rites, rituals and humiliations associated with pledging a fraternity, which is happening for the entire running time of the movie. Lee himself even plays one of the "Gammites," as they are called -- the fraternity's pledges. He and Esposito are collaborators on the film's most shameful moment, when Esposito prostitutes out his own girlfriend (Tisha Campbell) so that Lee's character can lose his virginity on drop night. Clearly the movie does not support the actions of either of these guys, but it does not seem to frown on them as much as one would expect. It would be too simplistic to suggest that by playing one of these characters, Lee is suggesting it is something he as the director believes in, because I don't sense Lee needs to be the hero of his own films. But the whole thing is a bit problematic.

I've come in kind of sideways on School Daze, I suppose. I should tell you that it is not, primarily, a message movie, Fishburne's climactic theatrics notwithstanding. In fact, on the surface it reminded me a lot more of another movie with the word "Daze" in the title, though it would come after this: Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. School Daze is, at its core, a hangout movie, and in this respect it is quite fun.

In a form that was not present in his debut (She's Gotta Have It) but would come to be a defining characteristic of Lee's work, School Daze is an ensemble movie, one where you feel like you get to know a bit about a lot of different characters. It is also, for all intents and purposes, a musical, which I don't think Lee would return to until Chi-Raq (which I will also be seeing later in this series). Some of the numbers are typical musical numbers, where the characters break out of whatever everyday activity they were doing to sing and dance, and others are "diagetic musical numbers," in other words, performances that are experienced as performances by the characters. They are without exception fun and even sometimes poignant, and act as the lubricant between scenes of characters hanging out, sassing each other, and interfacing with those who oppose them.

There are a lot of familiar faces in this one, including three actors who would star in the TV show A Different World, most notably Jasmine Guy and Kadeem Hardison. Hardison is, inexplicably, one of the top-billed in the cast, though he hardly has any lines. You've also got future Lee regulars like Roger Gunvere Smith, Bill Nunn and Ossie Davis, as well as multiple Lee siblings. Samuel L. Jackson even makes an appearance. This cross-section of charismatic actors I either already knew then, or have since come to know and love, just contributes to the sense of hanging out with friends for two hours, walking in their steps as they go through life in an Atlanta college.

The only reason why this is not fully satisfying on its own is you feel like Lee is trying to say more. He has a whole song devoted to differences in hair between light-skinned and dark-skinned people, and Fishburne's big political initiative is to protest the school's investment in South Africa, from which they need to disengage in the era of Apartheid. But Lee has not yet found the ideal way to streamline this content into a coherent message, so for the most part it just feels sprinkled over the proceedings at random. Which is why the big "Wake up!" ending feels like a bit of an anticlimax.

Still, this is a clear artistic and creative step forward from She's Gotta Have It and seems to lay the groundwork for what he was able to accomplish the following year in his masterpiece, Do the Right Thing. That alone makes it worth seeing.

It was poignant to watch this on the same day that I learned of John Singleton's death, as I think of Lee and Singleton as joint pioneers in a period of vital black cinema that began with Lee and which Singleton pushed forward significantly through Boyz N the Hood. That was also the movie where I was introduced to "Larry" Fishburne, who stars here. Singleton was not able to remain vital in the ways Lee has, as he steadily transitioned into more of a genre filmmaker. But he deserves credit for his role in this important historical moment, and it felt nice to pay a sort of tribute to him by watching School Daze, however accidental the tribute was.

In June I will jump forward to 1996 with Get on the Bus, pending availability.

Un-lee-shed: She's Gotta Have It

This is the first in my bi-monthly 2019 viewing series devoted to six Spike Lee features I haven't yet seen.

I'm off and running on my new Spike Lee series. This despite wondering if my very first target, She's Gotta Have It, would actually be available in an easily accessible way.

I had no real reason to suspect it wouldn't be, except for the general sense of Murphy's Law pessimism that states that as soon as you announce plans to watch certain movies, they become unavailable if they weren't already. In the end, though, She's Gotta Have It ended up being as easy to find as flicking over to Netflix. Which makes sense, I guess, given that Netflix has a TV show version of the movie that got released a couple years ago.

Despite having heard a discussion of that show on The Slate Culture Gabfest, I didn't really know a thing about the movie before I started watching. I didn't even know that the title was a reference to a woman's insatiable sexual appetite, though once I did figure that out, I could easily retrofit the title to some of the discussion of the show on the podcast. (Since I hadn't watched the show I had been sort of "listening loosely," as I call it, to that particular discussion.)

Even in his first feature film, Spike Lee came in with a style that was easily recognizeable as the progenitor to all this future creative choices. Early on there are still images of his beloved Brooklyn scored to forlorn jazz music. If it hadn't been set in Colorado, we could very well have seen that same approach in BlacKkKlansman, it is so trademark Lee.

The film's black-and-white aesthetic, though, put me in mind of a different one of Lee's independent film contemporaries, that being Jim Jarmusch. Unfortunately, that's not a compliment in this case. Although only one of these was actually black-and-white, She's Gotta Have It put me in mind of Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Permanent Vacation, two Jarmusch films for which I have very little affection. That is to say, She's Gotta Have It felt aimless and cerebral, at times more fartsy than artsy, and not going anywhere fast.

Fortunately, that's when I fell asleep.

When I resumed the movie at the 38-minute mark the next night, Monday night, it really picked up and took shape for me. You could just say I was too tired to get in its groove on Sunday night, but I do think this is a movie that kind of ambles out of the gate and finds its stride as it goes. Not until just after that 38-minute mark did I get the film's central conceit, or that it even had one. It was then that I figured out that this was a movie about a woman with multiple partners, three in particular: Tommy Hicks' Jamie, John Canada Terrell's Greer and Lee's own most famous creation, Mars Blackmon. (More famous than Mookie? I guess we could debate that, though Mookie did not appear in a bunch of Nike commercials.) The dynamics that flow from that scenario are pretty rich.

Let's talk about that woman. Her name is Nola Darling, and she's played by Tracy Camilla Johns. For all that Nola Darling attains a certain kind of iconic status in this film, enough to make a new series about her 30 years later, Johns did not benefit from it. Perhaps we should credit whatever endured about Nola to Lee's writing rather than Johns' charisma, because she hasn't had much of a career since this movie put her on the map. And indeed she does strike a few false notes over the course of the film, so maybe she just wasn't cut out for acting.

The character, though, is certainly an interesting one. There's a temptation in watching She's Gotta Have It to label it as a prime example of Lee's problems with writing female characters, or perhaps to chastise Lee for a love of the naked female body, as some of the shots of Johns' breasts in this film preview those of Rosie Perez' in Do the Right Thing. (I should add, though, that random nudity was not considered as gratuitous then as it is now.) And this is, after all, the story of a woman whose sex drive leads her to constantly search for new ways of gratifying herself. In short, a slut, before slut shaming was a thing.

But there's something undeniably sex positive about the portrayal of Nola as well. She likes dick, sure, but she likes it in a way that is unapologetic. Neither does this make her a bitch or unfeeling. She genuinely cares about her three suitors, though if forced to pick she can figure out which one she likes best. As she is completely up front with them about their competition, both that they have it and and what the strengths and weaknesses of that competition is, she's engaged in a kind of radical honesty with both them and with herself. She knows who she is and she knows what she wants, and no man is going to tell her differently.

There is a scene that got mentioned on the podcast that is somewhat problematic, which the podcasters described as a rape scene, but one that I would be more likely to characterize as rough sex. When Jamie, whose affections for her are the purest, gets fed up with the way she's keeping him like a yo yo on a string, he accuses her of only wanting him to fuck her, not to make love to her. To demonstrate his point, he kind of throws her onto the bed and penetrates her from behind.

The thing is, it's part of the sex positivity that defines Nola that she actually kind of does want that and that this scenario is not entirely unwelcome to her. That's very close to saying "she's asking for it" or "she likes it" in a way some kind of Brett Kavanaugh douchebag would say it, but I think in this scenario you really do have to consider the person it's happening to. Nola is so perfectly in control of when she has sex and what kind of sex she has that it's kind of an insult to her to suggest that she'd let anything happen to her in the bedroom that she didn't want to happen. It's not that she couldn't be overpowered by someone, but that that she's such a strong woman that it's pretty unlikely to happen. She's also so good at seducing the men in her life that any kind of petulant sexual aggression they display is really an expression of the kind of puppy dog love they feel for her.

I can't say the portrayal of Nola's sexuality is entirely unproblematic, but there is definitely something progressive about Lee's choice to make this material the subject of his first movie. Nola really does come off well, and fully in control of her own destiny, while the men seem, well, petulant.

I enjoyed the odd kind of camaraderie between the men, as well. Nola has already told them about each other, and I think they know each other as well, but she forces the issue even further by inviting them all to a Thanksgiving dinner together. By the very polygamous conditions Nola has established, they are stripped of their natural male instinct to fight and hurt one another in the attempt to mark their territory. Simply put, she's never given them any illusions that they possess her. So they resort to passive aggressive tactics to get a leg up, and these morph into a type of bond informed by gallows humor and a sense of being all in this together.

I also really enjoyed a little touch Lee throws in over the credits. He gives each of his primary speaking roles a clapperboard with their name on it, and a chance to bring down the clapper while saying their names and throwing in a few humorous improvised comments. It gives the sense that this was a little family making this movie and they all had a lot of fun making it.

As for Lee himself? I enjoyed his Mars, but I'm still partial to Mookie.

In April I'll move on to School Daze.

Introducing: Un-lee-shed

In the tradition of last year's bi-monthly series Re-coen-sidering, here comes Un-lee-shed.

I have always thought of myself as a big Spike Lee fan, which made it all the more gratifying that he really returned to form with last year's BlacKkKlansman, my #2 of the year.

However, thinking a little bit extra about Lee last year made me question my own Lee credentials.

I call myself a big Lee fan, but you know what? I haven't seen anywhere close to his whole filmography. In fact, even if I devote a bi-monthly series to watching his features I haven't seen, I'll still have a couple left to tackle when the series is over.

Better get started.

So every two months in 2019, starting in February and ending in December, I'll watch one Lee film I have not previously seen, and post about it here. I'll go chronologically, unless I run into sourcing issues. This is the tentative list, pending availability of course:

She's Gotta Have It (1986)
School Daze (1988)
Get on the Bus (1996)
4 Little Girls (1997)
Miracle at St. Anna (2008)
Chi-Raq (2015)

That would still leave Mo' Better Blues (1990), Clockers (1995) and Girl 6 (1996) (my goodness was Lee prolific in the 1990s) as remaining unseen, and serving as good alternatives should I have trouble sourcing any of these.

You might argue that one of the above three titles is more significant in Lee's filmography than Miracle at St. Anna, but I'd like to spread things out chronologically as much as I can, and my coverage of 21st century Lee films is actually pretty good. Besides, I'm as curious about Lee's misguided attempts, of which there have been many, as I am about the times that his instincts are true. And I don't want to take others' word about which constitutes which. I saw Bamboozled about five years ago expecting to dislike it based on others' assessments of its merits, but I ended up loving it.

Not a lot more to say except I'm going to go track down She's Gotta Have It.

One final note that I hope goes without saying. I'm including hyphens in the name of this series in order to draw attention to my own cleverness, but this is not meant to be pronounced as a three syllable word ending in "shed." It's just "unleashed." Don't forget it. There will be a quiz later.

See you back here next month.

Old Oldboy vs. new Oldboy

I have been wanting to see Spike Lee's Oldboy since it came out ... but I have also been wanting to reacquaint myself with Park Chan-wook's Oldboy before I did so.

Both are streaming on Netflix, so I figured, might as well make it an Oldboy Weekend. So I did this past Friday and Saturday nights.

I realized recently that although I hold Park's original, the middle of his Vengeance Trilogy, in very

high esteem, I could remember very little about it.
There was the classic fight scene and the classic tooth removal scene, but I couldn't even remember why the character needed vengeance in the first place. A little jogging of my memory reminded me that he was locked away for 15 years and then mysteriously released back into the world, but what happened from there remained a blur.

In fact, I probably would have watched it again long before now if I hadn't persisted in the belief that the version streaming on Netflix was dubbed into English. My friend Scott watched over an hour of it while he was babysitting for us back in the first few months of my older son's life. The restlessness of my son kept him from watching the whole thing, but he didn't get back to it on his own (at least, I don't think he did) because he wasn't enjoying it as much as he thought he was supposed to be -- and that could have everything to do with the fact that it was dubbed.

When I found it again on Netflix, I marveled at two things: 1) It's no longer dubbed, and 2) Netflix wanted to know if I wanted to "resume" my viewing. That's right, Netflix still had a record of the fact that someone on this account had started watching this movie on December 22, 2010. Talk about a long memory.

I'm glad I saw it again rather than just going into Spike Lee's cold, because it gave me a good means of assessing the success or failure of Lee's effort. (You can argue whether it's fair to judge a movie against the movie it's remaking, but it's only human nature that we do so.)

And honestly, I was expecting to hate Lee's version. People I trust have said it's terrible, and Lee is someone I have trusted a lot less in recent years (I greatly disliked Red Hook Summer and avoided The Miracle of St. Anna altogether).

You know what? Lee's version is fine. Really it is. Better than fine, maybe.

Not better than the original. I will never go that far. But a worthy attempt to remake a popular Korean film? Sure, why not?

I think what struck people as so strange about Spike Lee remaking Oldboy was that this director had chosen this project in particular. Nothing about his resume suggests that it is a good match for him.

But let's set aside Lee's affiliation and look at it merely as a business idea. Remaking Oldboy is no stranger than remaking any of the dozens of other hot Asian properties from which Hollywood has tried to spin gold, most notably the horror franchises The Ring and The Grudge. Those films are not Korean, but Bong Joon-ho's The Host had been lined up for an American remake that has apparently stalled out. The objection you could have to remaking Oldboy is the objection you could have to remaking any great film whose legacy should not be tarnished.

It's actually almost too shrewd, too Hollywood a move for someone like Lee. It did not seem to fit his character, and in fact, the movie does not have a major studio's backing. It was distributed by FilmDistrict, which has since been absorbed into Focus Features. But wouldn't that almost suggest that Lee would be free to bring something fresh, something original, something funky to the project?

Maybe that's why people were so disappointed -- there is very little of Lee in this film, or so it would seem. One of the supporting roles goes to Samuel L. Jackson, whom Lee put on the map back in 1991 with Jungle Fever, and there's one instance of Lee's trademark dolly shot, where a character appears to be floating through his environment. Beyond that, though, any studio hack probably could have made this.

Which is not to say it's clumsy. In fact, it feels quite technically accomplished in a lot of ways, in the sense that it is a clean, crisp, unfussy telling of the story that excises details of the original story that, indeed, may have been superfluous.

Of what do I speak? Well, I may be getting into a bit of spoiler territory now, so look away if you don't want anything spoiled.

One thing I noted is that the character the main character tells his story to is gone. In the original Oldboy, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) emerges from his suitcase atop a building, where a businessman is contemplating suicide nearby. He saves him, momentarily, from this suicide attempt by grasping his tie as he starts to plummet over the edge of the building. After Oh tells him the story of being imprisoned for 15 years, and leaves the man by himself, he actually does go through with it, caving in the roof of a nearby car. It's as though this final glimpse at man's inhumanity to man was what convinced him to go through with it, rather than the story saving him in some way.

Is this character really necessary, though? It wouldn't seem so -- though the shot of Oh hanging on to the man creates a visual parallel to the method Lee Woo-jin used to kill his sister, an event that occurred in the past but has not yet been visualized in the movie.

Yeah, so Lee just gets rid of him altogether. No great loss, really.

Lee also lessens the screen time of the villain (Sharlto Copley's captor has only a couple scenes, and is not nearly the unhinged scenery chewer I was led to believe he'd be), and does away with the explanation for how the villain got the captive and his daughter to fall in love. Park has them both hypnotized, whereas in Lee's film, their meeting relies on the meddling of an intermediary (played by Michael Imperioli) who pretends to be on the captive's side (he's named Joe Doucett in this one, and played by Josh Brolin). The hypnotism element comes back in to Park's film at the end, when Oh wants to forget that he shagged his own daughter and tries to have the memory hypnotized out of him (though possibly not successfully -- the ending is vague on that front). But you don't really feel its absence in Lee's film.

Naturally, then, the ending is a bit different too. In neither film does the daughter find out that she has had incest with her father, but the fate of her father is quite different in the two films. While the ending of Park's film is clearly tragic, Lee opts for optimism, with both Joe (who has chosen to return to his imprisonment, somewhat inexplicably) and his daughter Mia (Elizabeth Olsen, who drives off to start a new life) with smiles on their faces. I wouldn't call it a happy ending, exactly, but it certainly leaves the characters pointing in the direction of a brighter future.

The details of the scandal the main character witnesses differ as well. In Park's film, Oh sees his eventual captor fooling around with his own sister, a rumor he ends up sort of passively spreading, without any malicious intent. In Lee's, it's his captor's sister and her father he sees in sexual congress, and spreads the rumor willfully and mean-spiritedly. Perhaps Lee thought that in the age of bullying as a serious social issue, the film needed to come down strongly and unambiguously against bullying -- even if it means his protagonist is more guilty and less sympathetic. Lee's film is further on the side of Copley's character in the sense that it's his father, not himself, who is ultimately responsible for taking his sister's life.

Then there are the more minor details, like how Oh and Joe tortue the man hired to keep him locked up. (And yes, I am just now realizing that Oh Dae-su and Joe Doucett are nearly identical sounding names.) Oh engages in that aforementioned act of tooth removal, while Joe performs a ritual that's supposed to be more gruesome but ultimately has less effect on the viewer -- he removes little bloody chunks from Sam Jackson's neck as part of a plan to eventually pull his head off with his bare hands.

The other scene you're probably wondering about is how Lee handles that famous fight scene, the one where Oh has only a hammer and has to fight off an alley full of henchmen trying to get him. The famous things about this shot are two: 1) It is shot entirely from a side angle, like the character in a video game walking left to right and seeing what he encounters next, and 2) It is performed all in one take. While the fight choreography might be slightly less accomplished in Lee's version, and there's a notable lack of blood involved, Lee doubles down on the complexity of the shot by having it continue down a ladder and on a second level, where the challenge essentially resets for Joe. The effect of this little bit of cinematic bravura is pretty much what Lee would have intended.

But I guess the real issue with Lee's version is that it's just not, I don't know, weird in the ways Park's version is. One of the great moments in Park's film is when Oh eats a live octopus, kind of stuffing it into his face as the legs continue to squirm around, making it certainly seem like Choi actually did eat the live octopus to get this shot. Then there's the desperate pleading of Oh in the final scene when he wants to prevent his daughter from finding out that he's her father. Not only does he promise to be his captor's dog, licking his shoe and crawling around on all fours, but he then puts his money where his mouth is, so to speak, by cutting out his own tongue. It's a mad moment of atonement that really resonates. In Lee's film, both of these scenes are alluded to, but that's it -- one in a shot where Brolin examines an octopus hugging the glass wall of a fish tank, and the other in the form of a severed tongue (of Imperioli's character, I believe) being sent in a box to Joe from his captor. One senses that he considered trying to match the outrage of Park, but just went limp in the attempt.

I should probably point out a couple of moment of real awkwardness in Lee's film, as well. Notably, the first 15 minutes are just terrible. They involve Joe sabotaging an important business deal in the most ridiculous manner imaginable -- he essentially has his client on the hook, but then blows it by making a pass at the client's girlfriend while the client is in the bathroom. Even if this is meant to indicate that Joe is a real jerk, and the rest of the movie is supposed to function as a redemption of that jerk, I didn't buy it for a second and in fact thought it was clumsy as hell. Brolin's performance of his subsequent drunkenness is pretty over-the-top, but that's actually consistent with Park's approach, as we meet Oh in a police station where he's a soused mess.

Speaking of Brolin's acting, his reaction to learning that he has slept with his own daughter needed to be re-shot, as it has a bit of an "Annakin Skywalker realizing Padme is dead" quality to it. Given that this is the movie's emotional climax, Brolin and Lee really needed to sit down and re-think it.

Still, this movie doesn't quite deserve its bad reputation. And lo and behold, after finishing Lee's Oldboy, I discovered that the movie's reputation is not quite as bad as I thought it was. Metacritic's 49 score for it translates to "mixed or average reviews," which include a 91 from none other than one of my personal critical heroes, Owen Gleiberman, who was then of Entertainment Weekly. That's to balance out the zero from The New York Observer's Rex Reed, I guess.

Okay, that's just about enough of that. Out with the Oldboy, in with the new.

Are some legends unfilmable?

When Spike Lee released the brilliant Malcolm X in 1992, my first thought was, "Wow, I can't wait to see what he does with the life of Martin Luther King."

I'm still waiting.

We live in an era when Hollywood never leaves a hot idea untapped for long, and as proof of its devotion to certain ideas, reboots them before the corpse of the original is even cold. (The Incredible Hulk and this year's upcoming Fast & Furious are great examples and probably worthy of another post). But the same is most definitely not true for biopics. In fact, it seems like some of the truly deserving characters in the history of our nation -- indeed, the history of the world -- have yet to find a home in the cineplexes.

The conversation starts with Martin Luther King Jr., though it certainly doesn't end there. But while we're on MLK -- it being his birthday and all -- let's figure out what's behind his particular case. I do have some guesses.

1) He is such a beloved figure that no one wants to get his story wrong. I mean, the guy has his own holiday. The reverence reserved for him borders on the religious, and I certainly have no desire to dispute that. Any serious film about Martin Luther King would have to delve into unsavory aspects of his life -- such as his purported dalliances with women who weren't his wife -- and it may just be perceived that no good can come from that, in the public sphere.

2) Many inferior tellings of his story have already saturated the marketplace. While there has yet to be a truly authoritative prestige picture in the mold of Malcolm X, the man's story has been filmed numerous times. A large number of documentaries and a smattering of features about this man already exist. Perhaps because the features have generally been done quickly and had a TV-movie sheen to them, there's a sense that a theatrical feature would be stigmatized by being associated with its forbears.

3) It's more interesting for a filmmaker to tell the story of a flawed person. I'm not saying Martin Luther King wasn't flawed, but compared to Malcolm X, he was a frigging saint. If you're going to devote 205 minutes to the telling of a man's story, as Lee did with Malcolm X, you can't devote only 20 minutes to bad behavior. Generally speaking, I think filmmakers are drawn to characters who are not only tragic because they were killed, but tragic because of choices they made and ways they could not see themselves clearly. King's just about the best behavioral model you can think of, outside of someone like ... Barack Obama. (And I'm really interested to see what Lee -- or whoever he hands the baton to -- will do with Obama's story sometime in the 2020's).

My guess is that it's this last that really stops filmmakers in their tracks. Let's take someone like John F. Kennedy. "But wait," you say. "What about Oliver Stone's JFK?" Lest you forget, that wasn't the story of his life -- it was the story of his assassination. And sure, Kennedy has appeared as a character in many films, such as Thirteen Days. (Not by any means the most important example, just the one I could think of right now). But there hasn't been a prominent film about the man and his life yet. You could say the same thing about guys like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Sure, they've both been filmed numerous times, but it was usually either something done for television, or as a character in a movie with a broader scope.

When filmmakers focus their lens on someone famous, they want it to be someone a little unexpected, like HBO recently did with its series John Adams. Those who flocked to John Adams almost certainly did it for one of three reasons: 1) The acting (Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney); 2) The fact that it's on HBO; or 3) "Hey, I know he was a president -- but shit, I don't know anything else about him." Exactly. These filmmakers can make the definitive John Adams movie, and not worry about other cinematic interpretations that have come before. Lee could pretty much say the same thing about Malcolm X. Even as famous as he was, Lee basically "introduced" him to the world by virtue of the fact that he hadn't already been under the lens, in half-assed ways, a hundred times.

I guess when you come right down to it, X is more interesting than King in the same way that Richard Nixon is more interesting than Jimmy Carter -- and George W. Bush is more interesting than his dad. I mean, why do you think it is that Oliver Stone made Nixon and W., but never even considered making Carter and H.W.? According to Stone, the story of George W. Bush demanded to be made so much, we shouldn't even wait until the guy left office.

So will we ever see Spike Lee's Martin Luther King, or maybe just King? I guess I don't rightly know. But maybe now that Obama is in the White House, we can finally dig below the surface and paint a portrait of the real, flawed man that he was. Maybe now, the black man will achieve cinema's measure of the equality his race has always been seeking:

A biopic of a genuine human being, warts and all.