The Screengrab : miracle at st. anna

Spike Lee's Next "Miracle"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of the release next week of Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee's first movie since his biggest hit, the atypically good Inside Man, John Colapinto profiles the director in The New Yorker. [Not available online] Colapinto notes that Lee has made eighteen feature films, "three of which (Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X) have earned him a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with race." That count seems a little soft: for instance, it's hard to think of any reason besides an obsession with race for making Bamboozled, and even the movie that Lee clearly intended as a showcase for his warmer, fuzzier side, Crooklyn, included a subplot about the foul odor emitted by the film's token white man, played by David Patrick Kelly in outrageous honky drag. After scoring a great success with an ingenious genre picture that required him to mostly give it a rest, Lee's new movie, "the first by a major American director to treat the experience of black soldiers" in World War II, gives him a chance to climb back on his hobbyhorse and also to issue the public proclamations that have sometimes seemed to be his real art, which his movies are only intended to promote. As Colapinto writes, the film is meant "as redress not only for [Clint] Eastwood's Iwo Jima pictures but for an all-white Hollywood vision of the Second World War which dates to the 1962 John Wayne movie The Longest Day--and before." It will be remembered that Lee instigated a vicious back-and-forth between himself and Eastwood by complaining about the absence of black soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima; after Eastwood invited the younger filmmaker to shut the fuck up, Lee called him "an angry old man" and advised Dirty Harry that "we're not on a plantation either." That stroke was standard operating procedure for Lee, who has a history of shutting down discussions by accusing his attackers of racism, a move that has traditionally left them sputtering defensively. The down side of this tactic that it's left Lee with a public image that he may now regret, if only because it may have overshadowed his reputation as a moviemaker. "People think I'm this angry black man walking around in a constant state of rage," he told Colapinto. This misperception makes Lee very angry, and the article describes a man who, because of that, is walking around in a constant state of rage.

One reason he has for being ticked off--even when he has access to Colapinto, a writer who is so much on his side that he even seems to like Summer of Sam and the godforsaken color dance interlude in Lee's debut feature She's Gotta Have It--is that getting funding isn't as easy for him as it used to be. Lee would probably argue that it's never been easy for him, but a lot of filmmakers before Lee wanted to make a biopic about Malcolm X, and Lee was the one who got to bitch in the press about not being given a big enough budget after the epic production was given the green light. (One of the other filmmakers who wanted to make it was Norman Jewison, who was almost ready to go, with Lee's star Denzel Washington in the lead role, when Lee nudged him aside by making a public stink about how wrong it would be for a white director to be entrusted with Malcolm's story.) Miracle at St. Anna wasn't Lee's first choice for a follow-up to Inside Man; it was what he could get funded after he discovered that the box-office cachet he had picked up from that movie wasn't enough to get studios interested in his other dream projects, a James Brown biopic and a movie about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. (St. Anna didn't make the studios salivate, either; Touchtone Pictures signed on to distribute it only after European companies ponied up the money.) It'll be interesting to see whether an historical drama benefits from some of the gravity that Lee has acquired in recent years, seen best not in Inside Man but in his documentaries 4 Little Girls, whose title refers to the victims of a racially motivated church bombing in Birmingham in 1963, and the Katrina epic When the Levees Broke. Stanley Crouch, who wrote a searing attack on Lee back in 1989, believes that his nonfiction-film work has had a strong, salutary effect on Lee: "There was something about the dignity of those people he encountered when he was making 4 Little Girls that had a very deep impact on him, and in some way they seemed to help him grow up. When you got kids yourself and you're talking to the father of someone whose child was blown up by the kind of people who blew those kids up, and you see that this person is not ranting and raving in some kind of theatrical purported rage of the sort that you see in Do the Right Thing." Miracle at St. Anna opens on September 26.

Related stories: Clint Eastwood Would Like Spike Lee to Shut His Face

Screengrab Fall Preview: Leonard Pierce's Picks

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

So,my fellow Screengrabbers have thrown down the gauntlet, and once again, I gotta clean it up. What movies am I really looking forward to this fall? Burn After Reading, The Road and Synedoche, New York, among others. But thanks to the quirky rules we set up just to get on each other's nerves, we're trying not to repeat ourselves, so I've chosen to focus on a few films that have gone unmentioned by my beloved associates.

Of course, there's plenty to look forward to in theaters this fall above what's on my top three list below. The indie film about an Arab-American teenager's crisis of conscience, Towelhead; the wide release of the clever Assassination of a High School President; the American big-screen debut of Wong Kar-Wei's breathtaking Ashes of Time; and the mainstream debut of the sparkling Lily Rabe in the otherwise uninteresting What Just Happened are all enough to put your butt in a padded theater chair if you're a film fan. But beyond that, there's the movies I'm most -- and least -- looking forward to, beneath the cut.

3 UP

Milk: The story of San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California history, would be compelling enough, but with the sporadically brilliant Gus Van Sant behind the camera and three terrific actors playing the key roles (Sean Penn as Milk, the always-compelling Victor Garber as Mayor George Moscone, and Josh Brolin as the homophobic ex-cop who becomes their assassin), this is one I'm going to look forward to until its opening night.

Miracle at St. Anna: Will this World War II epic be directed by the good Spike Lee or the bad Spike Lee? A pointless feud with Clint Eastwood during production suggests the latter, but the screenplay (by the book's author), a cast mixing young newcomers with skilled veterans, and the fact that Spike's movies are never less than interesting even when they're not great pull me towards the former and ensure I'll be in line to see this come Christmas.

Lakeview Terrace: Much like Spike Lee, Neil LaBute can deliver precise hits and broad misses. But this story about racial tension in Los Angeles is right in his wheelhouse, with its themes of hidden anger, authority abused and real ugliness burbling under residential bliss. And a menacing Samuel L. Jackson is a good Sammuel L. Jackson, as Grand Theft Auto fans can testify.

3 DOWN

Beverly Hills Chihuahua: It's a tiny little CGI dog! Who hobnobs with the rich and famous! In Hollywood! And it's got...attitide! And sass! If you need me, I'll be over here in the corner, killing myself.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist: From the asinine title to the 'gosh-isn't-New-York-uniquely-wonderful' feel to the promise of a soundtrack filled with precious tunes by indistinguishable groups of mildly sad white people to the calculated air of cuteness to the presence of one-note Hollywood darling Michael Cera, there's pretty much nothing about this movie that doesn't make me want to punch somebody.

Punisher: War Zone: Sick of superhero movies? Waiting for a real stinker to come out so that everyone will just shut up about them already? This oughtta do it.

WILD CARD

The Spirit: In the world of comics, Frank Miller -- in recent years, at least -- has developed a reputation as an exquisitely skilled artist, a craftsman nonpariel, but also a man who increasingly takes less and less care with this plots and stories, which grow ever more abstract and nonsensical as his art gets better. Which one will show up behind the camera for The Spirit? I'm afraid it'll be both, but there's no denying the appeal of the project, so I'll be taking a chance.

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Clint Eastwood Would Like Spike Lee to Shut His Face

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Publicizing the new box set of Dirty Harry DVDs, Clint Eastwood took the opportunity to respond to Spike Lee’s comments from the Cannes Film Festival. As you’ll recall, Lee took issue with Eastwood’s two-part World War II film, specifically the paucity of black faces in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. “Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee told reporters. "If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that -- that was his vision, not mine. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know.”

This isn’t the first time Lee has gotten all up in Eastwood’s grill. “"He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker],” Eastwood tells The Guardian. “Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else.”

Eastwood realizes there was a “small detachment” of Negro soldiers on Iwa Jima, but in his words, “they didn't raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate.” He sums up the Miracle at St. Anna director succinctly: “A guy like him should shut his face.”

With that out of the way, Eastwood is free to talk Dirty Harry, and to clear up those rumors that he’s taking the character out for one more spin in the upcoming Gran Torino. “Some idiot came up with some theory…Not at my age,” he stresses. “There are certain age limits on police officers. They'd have retired me out at 65.”

Related:
Spike Lee Blasts Clint Eastwood, Coen Brothers
Under the Hood of Eastwood's "Gran Torino"

Turned Stick-Up Kid, But Look What You Done Did

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:30:00 GMT

The fifth and final season of The Wire, considered in some quarters to be the best show in television history, has wrapped up, and with an August release set for the DVD box set, it's ready to take what we're guessing will be a lofty place in the annals of TV drama. One of the great strengths of the show was its dynamite ensemble cast -- there wasn't a bad actor on the show, and it was a character actor's dream. Very few of the urban drama's regulars were established name actors; Frankie Faison, who played the politically adept police commissioner Ervin Burrell, was probably the best-known face to moviegoers from his appearances in the Hannibal Lecter films. And although the series gave a lot of otherwise unknown talents a chance to shine, a lot of fans wondered if their success on The Wire would translate to roles elsewhere.

As New York magazine's Vulture blog reports, after a few rough patches, at least a few Wire alums are going on to prominent roles outside the confines of HBO: Amy Ryan, after an Oscar-nominated role in Gone Baby Gone, is now a series regular on The Office; Lance Reddick is appearing in Lost and on the big screen in Fringe; Jamie Hector will have a recurring role on Heroes next season; Gbenga Akinnagbe appears in the remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3; Idris Elba (who was so compelling as the drug kingpin Stringer Bell) will be in both Rocknrolla and The Unborn; Tristan Wilds, who was fantastic as corner kid turned stick-up boy Michael Lee, will be in (of all things) the upcoming Beverly Hills 90210 TV series; series star Dominic West will be in the sequel to The Punisher; and Michael K. Williams, arguably The Wire's most charismatic actor as the thuglife Robin Hood named Omar, will be appearing in high-profile roles in Spike Lee's WWII epic Miracle at St. Anna and the eagerly anticipated big-screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Which is all well and good, but if Robert F. Chew -- one of the show's greatest actors as the conniving drug dealer "Proposition Joe" Stewart -- doesn't get some big-screen time soon, we're gonna be most upset.