Spike Lee had a template to work from when he agreed to direct a film version of David Byrne’s Broadway sensation, American Utopia. Even if there’s arguably too much theatrical staging to the more recent work to call a screen … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Ten
Like Jonathan Demme before him, Spike Lee isn’t particular interested in the audience. When Demme directed Stop Making Sense — still, and likely forever, the correct conclusion to any debate about the greatest concert movie ever made — he notably … Continue reading Now Playing — American Utopia
If there’s one thing that’s absolutely certain about a project that was developed by Oliver Stone and then given to Spike Lee to rework, it’s that the resulting film is not going to lack for ideas or ambition. Da 5 … Continue reading Now Playing — Da 5 Bloods
For a long time, I primarily made sense of the world through the movies. I read books and newspapers, too, but in those endeavors I mostly hovered above the surface of what might be uncomfortable, what might challenge my conceptions … Continue reading My Writers — Spike Lee
#47 — Delroy Lindo as Rodney Little in Clockers (Spike Lee, 1995) Through the nineteen-nineties, there was no shortage of gangstas and drug dealers in U.S. cinema. It was partially a reflection of the fretful concerns of the time, when the crack … Continue reading Greatish Performances #47
Across thirty-plus years of commercially released feature films, director Spike Lee has rarely lacked for ambition. Near-perfect or fatally flawed, his efforts are routinely packed with ideas, manifesting as narrative deconstruction, wildly inventive manipulations of cinematic technique, or heated social … Continue reading Now Playing — BlacKkKlansman
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. At his very best, Spike Lee is a helluva filmmaker: daring, uncompromising, and astute. He’s precisely the … Continue reading The Art of the Sell — Spike’s Joint
By the evidence of the reviews I wrote, I had a pretty grumpy week at Spectrum Culture. Through the normal cycle, I wound up with a lot of middling material to write about. First of all, I had the new album from Sonny and the Sunsets. I like their previous outing quite a bit, but this new release is drab and uninteresting. And I’m usually a sucker for breakup albums. On the movie side, I reviewed the directorial debut of Martin Donovan, still probably best known for the movies he made with Hal Hartley a couple decades ago. As if … Continue reading Spectrum Check
While I’m falling a little behind in my music reviews, I still had two new film pieces go up at Spectrum Culture this past week. First there was a review of a new documentary that uses one man’s personal experience, documented with a series of video cameras, to illuminate the ongoing challenges of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. While its homemade origins instill some humility into the film, it was also fairly complex and required a certain amount of deftness to detail its strengths and weaknesses. It was a nice challenge to write the review. I also wrote on … Continue reading Spectrum Check
It can be frustrating writing reviews from my relatively remote outpost (of course, there are greater frustrations here these days than that minor inconvenience). I’m reliant on studios that are willing to send out DVD screeners, and that’s a little harder to come by in the day of prolific online piracy. There are often weeks when the film I’m most interested (or best equipped) to review flatly isn’t available to me. And then there are weeks like this one. I tried and tried and tried to select a film from the limited release offerings that might have a screener and … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Coffee for Two 