Friday, June 13, 2008
Trailer For New Spike Lee Movie - And other Spike News
Here's the trailer for Spike Lee's new movie Miracle at St Anna , which should be pretty interesting as it marks a departure for Lee. A period war movie with big-ass battle scenes. After the mainstream thriller of Inside Man it seems Lee is leaving behind his urban dramas (we mean 'urban' both literally and in the sense that spineless PC music execs use it i.e. a euphemism for black).
But the interesting thing about this film is that it has sparked a war of words with Clint Eastwood. While promoting this story of 'urban' soldiers in World War II, Lee was dissing Clint Eastwood for not having black soldiers in either of his recent World War 2 films. Eastwood then came out and blasted Lee, saying among other things, that he should shut his mouth (was he channelling Dirty Harry!?). Spike retorted with some equally insulting soundbites about Clint. See here for more
We're gonna go right ahead and give Clint a free pass on Letters From Iwo Jima...since it was about fuckin Japanese people!! Last time we checked we didn't see any 'urban' Japanese people. As for Flags of Our Fathers, none of the people who planted the flag were black. That's the story he was telling. He wasn't telling the story of the guys who watched from the beach while listening to Biggie Smalls.
Borderline racism aside, Lee has to be admired for what he's done for African American cinema and race issues and perhaps more extras and secondary characters could have been black but come on Spike, get a grip. You'll lose all moral authority if you're claiming every film should randomly star black people. Besides, Flags did tackle race and discrimination from the point of view of Native Americans. The issue of equality/discrimination should not apply to one single race and anything that highlights it, does so for all races. So Spike, you may have had a sniff of a point but we're plumping for Clint on this one. Cue claims of institutionalised racism among The Watchmen.
Anyway Spike, you're movie looks good on this evidence and we're gonna go see it so cool your jets.
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1 comment:
Thanks for this. Lee certainly is a great filmmaker but he really needs to temper his comments. Of course, there is the possibility that newspaper boyos are just waiting for Lee to say something vaguely and then blow it out of context and preportion.
And did anyone notice how all the bad guys in The Inside Man are white and all the good guys, you guessed it? Hmmmmm
Regardless, this trailer looks exciting. I'll be at the front of the line.
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