watch all of Spike Lee's films

I don’t throw this out there lightly, but She’s Gotta Have It came across as pretentious as hell.

It was Spike’s first film and I wonder if it came out of film school. Black and White, characters seriously talking to the camera, and self-conscious dialogue.

It’s a story of a woman involved with three men and won’t settle down with any of them. I can see, more or less, what each of them wanted with her. I can’t see her interest in muscle guy, though I can get the other two (even spindly Spike himself), but…

Ugh.

I’m so glad this wasn’t the first Spike Lee joint I’ve seen, because it would have been the last.

Not even remotely one of my favorite Spike Lee “joints”, but a moving and personal film all the same. If there is a perception of what a Spike Lee film is, this isn’t it. And yet, Crooklyn is at the core of who Spike Lee is and where he came from.

A good movie, but not ultimately one that is memorable or one that would stick with a viewer for any extended period of time. Good, but not great.

One of Spike Lee’s earliest films, “School Daze” is set on a historically black college campus and deals primarily with how black people (on a college campus, because here everything can be magnified) view each other – skin color: light skin vs dark skin, heritage: is Africa important?, hair / eye color: do you really want to be black, or are you trying to be “white”?, belonging: to what “black community” do you want to belong? What does it mean to want to belong? How do you define your blackness?

That’s what I took from School Daze. In terms of being a movie, Lee has made far better. Even Bamboozled, as minstrel showy and uncomfortable as it was (and vastly underrated), was a better movie than School Daze, but School Daze still addresses serious topics of discussion while forming a sense of “entertainment”.

Not something I would expect to watch, but it’s a good movie. The story of an actress who takes a job as a phone sex operator so she can pay the bills, with a soundtrack by Prince? It’s a good movie! Spike Lee rarely disappoints. There is an overtone of sadness to the movie.

I expected to be offended and uncomfortable with this Spike Lee joint which has a Harvard educated black man dig deep inside his “blackness” to create a television show that is “urban” and “authentic” and in response he comes up with a show which updates the minstrel shows and has black actors in blackface. He expects the show to fail so he can go back and write the literate shows he wants to, but it becomes a critical and popular hit.

I was surprised by this movie, and impressed. It is very well done and is a very good flick.

And just a little bit uncomfortable.

Here’s what I’ve seen so far:

Do the Right Thing (1989)
Jungle Fever (1991)
Malcolm X (1992)
He Got Game (1998)
Summer of Sam (1999)
The Original Kings of Comedy (2000)
25th Hour (2002)
Inside Man (2006)

I have a recording on IFC set for Bamboozled later this week.