Underrated. The movie can sail by on it’s premise alone. For once we have a film that doesn’t try to get inside a serial killer’s head but simply accepts that he’s nuts and focuses on the community around him. Spike had me on hello with that one and beat Zodiac by like 7 years. Aside form a wonderful premise the films depiction on italian americans in that area of NY rivals Scorcese. With better timing and marketing this film would be much more highly rated than it is.
i havent seen either of these films. in fact, i need to do a complete survey of lee’s cinema, so i can fill in all the blanks.
A real mis-step by Spike Lee…technically, it tries to ape Good Fellas, Boogie Nights and any number of other BRILLIANTLY edited films, but it has a script that is just a mess…despite the talking dog & the blend of disco & punk on the soundtrack.
This is one of Spike Lee’s White Movies, like Gregg Araki used to call some of his non-gay-themed movies “Heterosexual Films.” As such, it hits some false notes. Imagine obnoxious Sal and sons with no Mookie or Da Mayor or Sistermother to add warmth. Imagine the creepy, calculating Jewish nightclub owners in Mo Better Blues with no Denzel Washington to add soul. In other words, an incomplete social vision and an overload of caricaturized Bad Whites. There’s the seed of a great ode to New York here, similar to the simmering heatwave mood of Do the Right Thing. But it lacks that film’s focus and feel for the characters and situations. John Leguizamo, as a symbol of pusillanimous white manhood destroyed by Catholicism, is allowed — enabled? — to overact shamelessly in a way that suggests Lee had no idea how to direct him. The disco soundtrack feels like Lee got the idea from Boogie Nights, and wanted to beat Anderson at his own game (Anderson didn’t even use the song “Boogie Nights” — “our boogie nights are always the best in town” — which kicks off S.O.S. like a throwdown challenge), but lacked the Andersonian irony to pull it off. (In spire of a farily inspired use of “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” during one of the murder scenes.) And the worst scenes are the ones where a human voice is actually coming out of the dog’s mouth — way too literal and unintentionally funny. However, it’s the unlikeliest character — Adrien Brody’s polymorphous-perverse punk-hipster — who stands out and gets Lee’s (and our) full attention and sympathy. Too hip for the conservative Italian squares, Brody becomes the surrogate black man in the movie, nearly lynched for a white man’s crimes. He’s the fascinating heart of the film, and the film’s salvation.
The dog talking is clearly intentionally funny that’s the great thing about it. Spike Lee is too good a filmmaker to worry about making the killer’s delusions “dark and disturbing” the way so many cliched hollywood films portray them. The guy says the dog talked to him so lee shows his crazy perspective for that one brilliantly funny moment but then it’s back to what’s really important, the way isolated acts of mayhem can bring normal folks inherent insecurities about there own lives to the surface.
Spike Lee doesn’t make “Black movies” or “White Movies,” just movies. Spike, like many black people or anyone from an urban area grew up observing all kinds of cultures and explores them intelligently in all the films i’ve seen. I know there are some towns in America where people say "I’ve never met a ______ person, but Spike grew up in Bensonhurst so your Gregg Araki comparison has no basis in reality. Spike is more like Almodavar, who has explored homosexuality but really makes films about love of all stripes. If Gregg Araki makes “Homosexual Films” he must be a very poor filmmaker. The 25th Hour and Inside Man notwithstanding, Spike tends to make “Community Films.”
I didn’t mean that Lee doesn’t have the right to make movies about anything he wants. I think it’s true, though, that some of his movies are very much about black people and others are not — they have mainly white casts and deal pretty specifically with white culture. His critique of white culture. 25th Hour is an Irish rather than Italian milieu — Francis Xavier Slattery and the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman are White Guys, in capital letters. Sometimes Spike gets this sort of thing right, sometimes he gets it wrong, imo. In most of his films the buffoonish white characters play off nuanced, sympathetic black characters — this is part of Spike Lee’s genius and originality. He is overturning a century of white directors who wrote small, insignificant, villainous, cartoonish roles for black people in the middle of white-dominated stories. But in the absence of the well-drawn black characters, you tend to get just the buffoonery.
Lee would be the last person to say that one should watch his films in a color blind, post-racial way. I think that’s pretty obvious.
Araki was being more outrageous than anything else when he gave his films sexual preferences, but you’d have to call The Living End a homosexual film by any stretch of the imagination. And I’m sorry, I just didn’t like the talking dog — for me it’s strictly an issue of the tone of the film changing drastically at that moment. I understand Lee was taking an artistic chance, and trying to avoid cliche, but sometimes that doesn’t pay off. The white serial killer becomes one more pasty-faced buffoon, but that just throws the whole premise of the film into question.
Also, you compared this to Zodiac — the Zodiac killer was different from Son of Sam.
calling spike’s movies “community films” sounds just as awkward to me as calling them “black films” (or others of his “white films”). these are unecessarily politicized labels.
we should speak in cinematic terms when attempting to engage with his films. genre terms if need be. “do the right thing” is a hip-hop film. “25th hour” is a thriller. not to be overly reductive, but to clear the ground before we dig into them for more nuance.
…i actually think calling Do The Right Thing a “hip-hop” film rather than a “black-film” is not only more innacurate, but borderline offensive (the idea that youg and black=hip hop). the old men of the film probably hate hip-hop, most of the cast doesn’t talk or consider hip-hop at all in the film—its pretty much just Radio Raheem—and Hip Hop as a culture isn’t really brought up at all anywhere in the film, period. there’s more soul and jazz, especially when played by Senior Love Daddy throughout the picture. it’d be far more accurate to refer to it as an Urban Drama, but race is definatley what the film highlights, so in that respect i see nothing wrong with it being refered to as a Black Film…but then, i’m not black.
as far as Summer of Sam was concerned, its one of those movies that has a good notion, but is poorly excecuted. some of Lee’s films thrive on his style and technique, some suffer. i think this one suffers. his concepts of Studio 54 and CBGBs seem straight out of a VH1 documentary, and are based in style as opposed to substance—little happens there, though we see an awful lot going on. same with Sam—yea, its nice not to have his supposed Psychology shoved down our throats, and its cool to see a different idea to the serial killer story (not why, or who is hunting him, but how it affects everyone), but ultimately i found it frustrating to follow and cared very little about most of the people in the film, other than Adrien Brody and Jennifer Esposito. i think this is one people are just going to be stuck arguing about for a while, but frankly i never saw it as one of his better movies.
So so so so disappointed in this movie. Had high hopes and it just turned out to be a mess that didn’t know where it was going. Zodiac is ten times better. And I’m a pretty big fan of Spike Lee’s as well
I’m going to throw something else out for this discussion that is not meant to be a put down of Spike Lee but just an attempt to (accurately?) describe his social philosophy. I don’t think he believes in anything as utopian as community. Even the black communities in his films are struggling to be born and define themselves, with no illusion that they exist yet — Get on the Bus, Do the Right Thing, Bamboozled, He Got Game. And the white communities — fuggetaboutit. They consist of rich fucks who live apart from everyone else and look out exclusively for their own interests (She Hate Me), working class schlumps with attitude and “slumlords” putting on airs (Do the Right Thing), and people who will sell each other out for a dirty look and a crooked nickel (Summer of Sam, 25th Hour).
not only is “do the right thing” a hip-hop film, its the first true masterpiece of the hip-hop film genre.
young and black does equal hip-hop. there is no more powerful cultural force that defines and shapes the new generation of black folks like hip-hop does. try to discuss or identify something young and black that ISNT touched by hip-hop in a profound way.
the old men aren’t the focus of the film. furthermore, it was directed by a young man. a young black man. a young black man of the hip-hop generation.
hip-hop isnt contained solely by “talk”. its a way of life. its reflected in attitude, dress, setting, and other social signifiers. buggin out “buggin out” about his brand new air jordans getting scuffed is pure hip-hop. mookie wearing a throwback dodgers jersey is pure hip-hop. and radio raheem is radio raheem – a walking symbol of hip-hop as structuring motif.
the theme song of the film is “fight the power” by public enemy. its the structuring motif i was talking about, and it sets the stage for the entire film through the opening credit sequence. when senor love daddy shouts out his roll call, he gives hip-hop artists prominence alongside the classic artists of soul and funk.
the hip-hop film is a transgeneric cinema. meaning, it cuts across multiple genres, sometimes melding more than one together as pastiche. so yes, “do the right thing” is a hip-hop film drama.
And tying that in with the discussion of community and black/white relations (and black/black relations), I would suggest that if Lee did hold out any hope for a meeting ground among people it was in hip hop. But hip hop is not the force that it once was, and though it does drive Do the Right Thing, it is largely absent from the sobering vision of later Lee works like Get on the Bus (where “old school” Maya Angelou is given her due) and the documentaries 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke. In fact, as early as Jungle Fever, Lee reserves the right to make his young black heroes yuppies (or buppies) more often than not. The interesting social comment about He Got Game is that the convict dad is more a part of banger culture than his college-age son. So hip hop was very relevant to the moment occupied by Do the Right Thing, but you can see Lee moving beyond it throughout his career.
okay Bobby—good point. i get what you mean, now.
I consider this film to be one of the best of that decade
interesting point about lee holding out hope for hip-hop as a meeting ground for people.
and yes, lee did sort of move on from hip-hop in his later films, generally speaking. plus, he’s at that transitional age group, like obama. sort of sandwiched in between being a baby boomer and a member of generation x (which the hip-hop generation is a part of). not quite of either.
but still, he’s almost a hip-hopper by default. because he was there at the beginning of the movement, he embraced and reflected the culture, and he helped solidify the hip-hop film as a genre.
Your definition of hip hop culture is very good, Bobby. I think it’s like a lot of artists when they first start out — they believe that making a statement is what matters, so you get this very vivid, intense kind of art, in these big broad brushstrokes. But the ones who are lucky enough to stick around, and who have depths of real talent to back up their ambitions, eventually learn that slogans are the enemy of real art. And that a song, no matter how dope, is not going to stop three hundred years of racism, in Spike Lee’s case. These are complicated questions, and I’m sort of thinking my way through them as I type. But an enormous sense of despair began to invade Spike’s work, probably around the time of Jungle Fever. Not everyone was going to be saved. Some of the black men were going to be killed by other black men. Everything just became more complicated. In Do the Right Thing the characters of color discover a kind of solidarity; this was wishful thinking as much as anything. He would go on to tell harder, more honest truths about how the black community resists unification (and not because they should have the freedom to not be unified if they don’t want t be, but for petty reasons). Get on the Bus is my favorite Lee film, and it’s typical of his vision that he focuses on someone who dies at the Million Man March. That film tears me apart — the scene between the father and the son in the woods, where they both agree to be better to each other, is the only scene in a movie that’s ever made me cry. It just gets me. I don’t even mind that Richard Belzer is treated as a thankless punching bag in that movie — history demanded it at that moment.
Another thing that happened is that once hip hop was adopted by progressive (and even non progressive) white people, it became much less defining of blacks exclusively. In 1989 Sal’s sons were not hip hoppers, whereas five years later they would have been, in spite of their father’s and their own racially loaded attitudes.
The other thing about what I call Spike Lee’s white movies is that they have been points of growth for him as a filmmaker, though not without growing pains. He hasn’t made the same movie over and over again. But he’s generally cold toward white characters/people, and this makes his movies about whites feel rather cold. 25th Hour much less so than Summer of Sam, though. I don’t think he’ll ever present a world in which whites and blacks are anything but adversarial toward each other, and that’s fine, he doesn’t have to. At the same time, I prefer what he has to say about black people. It will be interesting to see what his post-Obama work looks like.
black or white or red or blue or blah blah blah SUMMER OF SAM is a dog (a talking dog, but a dog nonetheless)
maybe he’ll direct the obama biopic 10 or 20 years from now. same generation. he might be the ideal guy to tackle it.
Let’s just hope Obama survives to a ripe old age and doesn’t have to have something bad happen to him in order to merit that biopic.
he’ll survive. and who says you have to die before you can get a biopic? stone did one for bush.
lol, true. I still haven’t seen W. but I’m not sure I want to either, even though I’m a Brolin fan.
Hold up, now you guys have all agreed that Do the Right Thing is a “Hip Hop Film,”? Notorious (The Biggie Smalls Biopic not the Hitchcock gem:)) may be a part of this dubiously named genre but Do The Right Thing is certainly not. While the Public Enemy song is a constant refrain in the film Spike’s masterpiece is also steeped in Jazz(Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee) and R&B (various scenes).
The only buffoonish characters who stand out for their whiteness in a Lee picture are the club owners in Mo Better Blues. In Do the Right Thing the only thing that seems to prevent some viewers from seeing that everyone, the blacks,the italians, the Korean store owner, the Hispanics, and even the white cops are complex characters is the fact that Spike happens to be black. Many assume that when Radio Raheem yells at the Koreans we are meant to be on his side. Many miss the fact that the cop who kills him is in such a state of frenzy that he is unaware that his feet aren’t touching the floor. Practically everyone thinks that Spike is saying that Mookie is right to throw the can through the window. People miss the small touches like the care to show that Pino’s brother is not only not racist, but is closer to Mookie than Pino. Spike is asking people to look at racial motivations for actions in a different way. Perhaps the best scene in the film is the moment when Sal tells his workers that they can always work there while Mookie and his 2 sons all look horrified at the prospect. For that moment they share a bond over hating their prospects.
When i say community I am speaking in an almost Altmanesque sense. Sal is much more fully rounded that Buggin Out. The scene with him and Pino talking is quite moving and not at all “Buffoonish.” The Koreans aren’t given much screen time but we respect their standing up to Radio in that short confrontation. Spike uses the heat not to show how black people get crazy when it’s hot, but rather to show how community issues that broil under the surface can burn when exposed.
Seriously, is Any Given Sunday one of Oliver Stone’s black movies or one of his white movies? Do you watch that Black show the Wire, or that White show, Law and Order. And who did Quentin Tarantino this he was making that Black Movie Jackie Brown Spike Lee? The notion that anyone makes Black movies because they and their cast happen to be Black is not offensive, just dumb.
Mike,
Spike Lee’s movies are all about race. They just are. It’s not because he’s black, it’s because he is interested in the subject of race, it’s his great theme. In both Do the Right Thing and 25th Hour there are famous montages in which all the major ethnicities and cultures of New York sound off in ways that emphasize their racial differences — I realize there’s an element of irony and satire here, but the fact is, Lee wants you to think about race. Always.
You don’t seem to like the framing device I use for my argument; I wouldn’t apply it to Any Given Sunday, which is not about race, nor about Law and Order, ditto, not about race. With Jackie Brown you’re getting warmer, because that was inspired by blaxploitation — plus, the hold that Jackie has over black and white men is seen as a factor of her being a sharp, soulful mama. Tarantino took heat from black women over that movie precisely because of his characterization of black womanhood, although in his mind he was exalting them very positively.
Back to Lee and his white characters, and their buffoonery. I will just cite examples off the top of my head. Sal ridiculously shoves Italian culture down his black patrons’ throats in the form of his wall of photographs; his logic is “It’s my place, I’ll do what I want.” His son is forced to admit that his favorite actor is Eddie Murphy, his favorite sports star is Michael Jordan, etc., but he doesn’t hang out with any black people. Sal even treats his own sons like indentured servants, like morons actually. Whatever bond you say they share with Mookie is acknowledged by us, the audience, but not by them. It doesn’t change the way they relate to each other. When the pizza parlor burns at the end, we’re not supposed to feel bad for Sal and sons; the proof is that Mookie demands his back pay (reparations) and gets it. In Mo Better Blues, Denzel Washington’s big self-betrayal is that he leaves his very African looking wife for a light skinned girl with a very white name (“Clark”); she’s a classic one dimensional vamp; whiteness is the enemy of black self-esteem. In Get on the Bus the only white character, Richard Belzer, comes out squarely against the Million Man March and asks to be replaced as driver of the bus — you see nuance there? In He Got Game the white cops and white college recruiters (and white bimbos who give themselves to Ray Allen) are thinly veiled agents of the devil. In Son of Sam, Leguizamo is a walking cliche of Catholic hang-ups; his mistress at the hair salon is an unsympathetic bitch; the neighborhood homosexual is limp-wristedly effeminate to an offensive extreme; the mob bosses are idiots; even the white serial killer is turned into a joke, a fat clown. In 25th Hour, another fat guy, the Russian, heartlessly betrays his best friend Ed Norton in yet another example of white evil; Francis eats with his fingers and pulls racial rank on Naturelle when he’s angry; Philip Seymour Hoffman, we’re told, has chronic halitosis (hardly any black character has ever been fat or unattractive in a Spike Lee movie); and Norton is a criminal on his way to prison. And these are just the examples that come off the top of my head.
Bamboozled is a film in which blacks betray each other as grievously as whites do. “I cooned for you,” the sad remark which Tommy Davidson makes to Sevion Glover, stands as the ultimate sacrifice one brother can make for another. And when the greedy black tv executive is murdered by his black Girl Friday in her spasm of conscience, it’s not meant to be a tragic but an appropriate gesture.
It seems to me that you get a fixed idea in your head, Mike, and you try desperately to hammer the films into the fit of that idea. My ideas derive from watching and absorbing the films themselves. I think you maybe just don’t understand Spike Lee.
the “hip-hop film” is not a dubiously-named genre. there’s nothing dubious about hip-hop.
dont think reductive when you think of hip-hop films. that ghettoizes them (oh, the irony). they’re not to be simply movies about the latest rapper and his life. and they’e not simply movies with hip-hop music in them. hip-hop films are the newest hollywood genre, and they come equipped with their own complex set of myths, conventions, and iconography.
i’d theorize the hip-hop film for you, but there’s no space here. “do the right thing” is a hip-hop film drama. calling it such doesnt reduce its worth, or limit it. for me it edifies the film, and situates it properly in its historical context.
although i still believe that Urban Drama is a good category for Do the Right Thing, Bobby made some good arguments for his case that is a Hip Hop film, and i couldn’t really disagree. i’ve never personally used the term Hip Hop Film, or Hip Hop Drama, but to use it or imply it isn’t a knock against the film, the filmmaker, or his vision. i don’t know what Spike Lee considers his films, maybe to him their just art, or dramas, or pro-Black cinema, or anti-Stereotype cinema, or Hip Hop Films—in any case, none of these are bad things. I also consider Taxi Driver an Urban Drama because its central theme is the citie’s inhabitants and what their life in the city is like. they don’t just live their, they’re alive BECAUSE of the city and what it does. But, like Bobby said, Spike Lee is a director from the Hip Hop generation, and although the music isn’t front and center in the film, the young people in Do The Right Thing—and other than Sal, the young black people are the central characters and most of the background characters—are of the Hip Hop generation (more because they’re in Brooklyn, less because they’re black—i’ve known plenty of white kids and Puerto Ricans from Brooklyn and Queens who are more Hip Hop right now than most blacks from Denver ever could dream of being).
i DON’T think that he’s always demonizing white people in his films, BUT not being white he’s only writing what he sees in white people, and sometimes that’s not always goona look good. maybe he is doing it on purpose, and if that is the case i don’t care nor do i blame him—its a black man’s perspective for once. Tarantino only saw what blacks in LA acted like, and watched alot of movies when he was a kid about and starring black people—hence, all the “Niggas” and “MothaFuckas” in his movies. Spike Lee has only seen white people and watched movies made by and for whites, and therefore he can only guess what whites are like. thats why white people are that way in his movies.
personally, i’m much more interested in what he has to say about Black Americans.
That’s exactly what I’m saying, Marq.
I think it’s hard to have a discussion of race in film, as in anywhere else, particularly if we can’t even use terms like “black” or “white” to mean precise things, or if we are leery of using the terms at all. If we link this to the discussion of Birth of a Nation, we have come a long long way as a country since 1915, or since 1815. But certainly 1989 through the early-mid nineties were still a time of great racial stress — just remember the not guilty verdict against the LA police who beat up Rodney King, the ensuing riots, etc. Spike Lee’s anger is righteous, and not something to be overlooked. One misunderstands his films if one whitewashes or sugarcoats his anger. In fact, his anger at white culture is what makes him so uniquely important.
Justin, sorry dude, but I think you’re allowing your own fears (and maybe some of the dumb stuff Spike says in interviews) to interfere with your evaluations of what’s on screen. I could argue forever about your broad definition of buffoonery but instead let’s first look at some of the Black characters in the films you cited:
What makes you think I’m afraid? Afraid of what?
I happen to enjoy and admire Spike Lee’s movies. Even as a white dude I don’t mind getting my ass handed to me now and then by an intelligent black guy who has something to say. I’d definitely make the same kind of films if I was black and especially if I was black from Bensonhurst.
I said in the beginning I think Spike occasionally gets white people a little bit wrong and oversimplifies them, but this is a decision he makes as a fully conscious black director — the only one, really, since Melvin Van Peebles to consistently make hard-hitting films about American society.
Lee’s movies can be very entertaining; they are not only there for entertainment, however, and I as a white viewer am not supposed to feel comfortable all the time when I’m watching Lee’s films. I freakin’ accept that. There are certain things about the nature of black-white relations in the U.S. that do not apply anywhere else, okay? What Scorsese does with his Italian-Americans is an aesthetic choice, and one that he makes as an Italian-American; what Lee does with his black and white characters is an ethical choice, and one that he makes to re-balance, to recalibrate, three hundred years of lopsided history.
The guys in Get on the Bus are not acting buffoonishly — they’re having fun. They are in on a good feeling. They know they are being funny, they are trying to make each other feel good — in those scenes where they are doing this, which really aren’t that many. A lot of the time they are riding out tensions, challenging each other, blowing up each other’s spots, fighting, just being men, being human. Lee puts human black characters onscreen.
And this is a necessity in a country where up until the election night news coverage of Obama’s victory, you almost never saw a happy African-American on television (apart from token ones in sitcoms who were being paid to look happy). And then all of a sudden, there were inspirational seas of them because it was safe for them to be themselves and their reality, their humanity, couldn’t be ignored anymore.
Look, man. I happen to feel too good to want to perpetuate this debate when I’m not even sure why you’re having such a hard time really seeing what’s there onscreen. Would you no longer be able to watch a Spike Lee movie if you thought he didn’t like white people as much as he likes blacks? Would you think it made him a worse artist? Because it doesn’t bother me, and I think it makes him a more important artist that he has this point of view. To even suggest that Bamboozled has nothing to do with race is a statement that I can’t comprehend at all. It’s like saying Malcolm X deep down was a guy who really had nothing to do with race, or Jungle Fever is just about people who are tryin’ to get laid. We need Spike Lee to be just who he is.
First off, I have to agree with Justin. To view Spike Lee’s films with a post-racial attitude is just naive, to be honest.
And second, I have to disagree with the use of the term ‘hip hop film’. This may be just my opinion, but I find it erroneous to qualify a film as it relates to an entirely different medium of art. I much prefer Marq’s ‘urban drama’ because this actually describes some of the conventions and characteristics of the film, rather than simply the appearance (and music taste) of some of its characters.
For example, if you were listing ‘hip hop films’ that could include 8 mile, Notorious, Do the Right Thing, any of those dance movies that involve hip hop, etc etc. Films which are completely and totally separate from each other in their intentions and delivery. So whereas you might think that it’s a category that ‘blurs the lines between genre’ to me it’s just another useless qualifying term.
Max
Spike Lee often confounds me. SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT and DO THE RIGHT THING are two of my favorite movies. All of his films are interesting and generally good or great. Unfortunately, I had the two worst film viewing experiences of my life watching his SUMMER OF SAM and, to a lesser extent, CROOKLYN. To further fuel the fire, people with opinions that I respect very highly have lauded these films. What am I missing? Who’s on my side? Can anybody account for these atrocity/masterworks?