watch all of Spike Lee's films

miracle at st. ana. this movie is super good! its really cool to watch some of Spike Lee’s older movies and then watch the current one’s because you can see how much he has evolved as an artist. i recommend this one to all that like war movies, there is a lot of history in this one.

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.

please work ..

I LOVE THIS MOVIE

I just watched “She’s Gotta Have It.” I enjoyed it immensely. It was sensual, beautiful, and intriguing. At some moments, it feels self-consciously artsy, with it’s black-and-white camera, and pans across Nola Darling’s collages, but it is a gem of a movie, all the same.

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.

If I can get my hands on a DVD copy of “She’s Gotta Have It,” then I’ll be done. We saw Spike Lee speak at UT-Arlington last night. It was very cool.

addendum I just put an InterLibrary Loan Request in for the film. Woo-Hoo!

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”.

:)