All Articles Tagged "spike lee"
8 Documentaries You Should Check Out During Black History Month
It’s day two of Black History Month and if you’re looking for a way to expand your mind about the people in our history who helped shape the way we live, the way we dance, the way we do our hair (yes, that too), I would recommend doing the easiest and most fun form of research–watch a movie! But not just any ‘ol movie or random attempt at recreating black history. We’re talking documentaries! They keep it real. Literally. If you need help finding a few to pick up from Netflix or to watch online, and can’t sit through 14 hour-long parts of Eyes on the Prize, we’ve got you covered. Happy Black History Month!
Black Films to See At Sundance This Year
If you find yourself in Park City, Utah this week, no doubt the Sundance Film Festival is on your list of attractions. With a plethora of films to choose from, deciding how to divide up your time might be a little tricky.
Well if you’re trying to support black films, actors and directors, be sure to check out some of these flicks.
Black Voices put together a very thorough list of these films.
Check out the description and pick your must-sees here.
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Are We Ready For “Red Hook Summer”?
by Charing Ball
Spike Lee has a new film, Red Hook Summer, premiering at the Sundance Movie Festival, which runs through January 29th. Lee told the New York Times that “it had been too long since I’d done a film, and I couldn’t wait on Hollywood anymore.Too many meetings, too many false starts, too many stuck projects.”
In the same article, Lee revealed that he didn’t bother taking the film to any of the major studios and had opted to financed his latest project on his own, much for the same reason as George Lucas. Likewise he is hoping to walk away from the festival with a distributor. Will Spike and Red Hook Summer get as much of a push when – and if – the film is released later this year? Will folks flood my Facebook timeline with the same urgency to see this film because Lee invested his own money? Will folks debate endlessly about the future of Black cinema if Red Hook Summer bombs at the box office? Probably not. That’s the point that I was making earlier this week in regards to Red Tails. This mad dash to “show Hollywood” that we could be good consumers has dulled the conversation on why we haven’t been out here supporting independent Black cinema.
But let’s not rehash that debate again. Instead I am more curious if we as a country are emotionally ready for a film, which has Lee reprising his role as Mookie and is said to be a sort of follow up to “Do the Right Thing?
There are no clips or a trailer for the new Spike Lee Joint as Lee wants to keep this one under wraps. However, published reports suggest that this film chronicles the gentrification of Brooklyn New York. And according to the synopsis of the story, which had been co-penned by Lee and James McBride (Miracle at St. Anna):
“When his mom deposits him at the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn to spend the summer with the grandfather he’s never met, young Flik may as well have landed on Mars. Fresh from his cushy life in Atlanta, he’s bored and friendless, and his strict grandfather, Enoch, a firebrand preacher, is bent on getting him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Only Chazz, the feisty girl from church, provides a diversion from the drudgery. As hot summer simmers and Sunday mornings brim with Enoch’s operatic sermons, things turn anything but dull as people’s conflicting agendas collide. Playfully ironic, heightened, yet grounded, Spike Lee’s bold new movie returns him to his roots, where lovable, larger-than-life characters form the tinderbox of a tight-knit community. A story about the coexistence of altruism and corruption, Red Hook Summer toys with expectations, seducing us with the promise of moral and spiritual transcendence.”
It has been 23 years since Lee’s groundbreaking film, Do the Right Thing, aggressively illustrated the very real realities of a racially and ethnically divided America. It was the film that garnered Lee the label of Angry Black filmmaker. In the film, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, N.Y would act as a microcosm of America in which a mix of African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Italian-Americans and Koreans lived and worked and sometimes played together. I hadn’t watched Do the Right Thing in over a decade, but I remember it being both groundbreaking and inflammatory.
From the first few scenes of Rosie Perez feverishly dancing over Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” to the scene in which Radio Raheem, a towering young Black man with Love and Hate tattooed on each hand, gets choked out by the police for refusing to turn down his ghetto blaster at request of Sal, the Italian American pizza shop owner to the powerful final scene when Mookie throws a trash can into Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, the entire film served as reminder that despite our best efforts to co-exist peacefully together, there lingers inevitable chaos. A chaos that has resulted from our inability to deal with and address issues around race and power.
No better landscape in the flick illustrates that more than the scene where five characters, all belonging to different racial and ethnic groups, turn directly to the camera and furiously spout off a laundry list of racial slurs, stereotypes and generalizations, ultimately leaving us, the viewers, wondering what just hit them and yet scratching our heads, wondering about if the stereotypes are exceedingly untrue than why do we still hold on to them?
Yesterday’s Year In Review: The Good and Bad of 2011
What a year, huh?! We’ve seen some good, bad, and ugly moments in pop culture in 2011 and it is about time for us to put our spin on it as we head into 2012. Take a moment to see what’s on our list and feel free to add your own memories in the comment section.
Oh yes, the list is in no particular order!
Maya Angelou and Mariah Carey to Receive BET Honors
BET is coming up on its fifth annual celebration of African American success in music, arts, and education, and the network has chosen two women with a lifetime of achievements to be presented with BET Honors: poet/author Maya Angelou and one of the top-selling singers of all time, Mariah Carey.
Singer/songwriter Stevie Wonder, filmmaker Spike Lee, inspirational coach Beverly Kearney, and the Tuskegee airmen will also be honored at the event which will be hosted by actress Gabrielle Union. BET Honors will take place Jan. 15 at Warner Theater in Washington, DC, and the televised airdate for the ceremony is expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
What do you think of this year’s honorees?
Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.
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Spike and His Hats
Spike Lee is known for his film-making and maybe even his controversial comments. But if you’ve been paying attention you might have noticed that the man is also very much about his hats too.
Turns out he’ll be selling them from the 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks collection in a one day, pop-up store called “Spike’s Joint”.
Black Voices compiled a photo gallery of some of Spike’s best hats. Check them out and get details about the sale here.
John Boyega: The Lead in Mike Tyson's HBO Drama
(Business Insider) – HBO is putting together quite the programming sucker punch with “Da Brick.” The boxing drama, about a juvie grad turned ring sensation, will be a collaboration between Mike Tyson, Spike Lee and Doug Ellin, who created “Entourage.” And after an exhaustive search, the producers have settled on their lead: John Boyega, the British star of “Attack the Block,” a low-budg monster movie that lit up SXSW this year.
Love Lessons From Our Favorite Spike Lee Joints
There’s nothing like a Spike Lee Joint. His pro-black, beautifully and artistically crafted films are layered with messages conveyed through his one of a kind imagery and dialogue. A Spike Lee Joint is guaranteed to make you laugh, maybe shed a tear or two and think. After you finish watching a Spike Lee Joint there’s bound to be discussion. Being that love is the strongest force it our world, it only makes sense that it shows up in several of his films.
Check the love lessons we’ve learned from some of our favorite Spike Lee joints.
**Spoiler Alert ** (if you haven’t seen some of these movies you might want to scroll on.)
Stage to Screen: 8 Black Playwrights That Deserve a Wider Audience
Stew
If Stew, who goes by one name, needed any endorsements for “Passing Strange” beyond it’s Tony Award, he could have looked to the fact that Denzel Washington, Whoppi Goldberg, Samuel L. Jackson and Diana Ross all came for a look-see. Or the fact that Toni Morrison and Angela Davis were so moved as to come back for seconds and thirds. But it is Spike Lee who got behind the work in the most supportive way. After a double helping in a single weekend he was distraught enough about the inevitable close of the show to devise a posterity plan. A tale that found itself beyond convention both in content (the coming of age of an African-American rock musician by way of LA, Amsterdam and Berlin) and form (a concert trapped in a play), Lee initially wanted to develop it as a feature production. In the end he got his Tyler Perry on, set up cameras as he had with Roger Guenveur Smith’s brilliant one-man show, “A Huey P. Newton Story”, and began rolling.
This worked out quite nicely. “Passing Strange” showed at Sundance and is now only a Netflix mailing away. But obviously waiting for Spike Lee to have a conversion experience is a less than efficient process for preserving great theatrical work. In the hopes that someone with a camera will hear the call, we propose seven black playwrights deserving of a wider audience. Some already have filmmaking irons in the fire, yet all are ripe for the opportunity.
Spike Lee Film Wins $46M Lawsuit Against French Distributor
(Hollywood Reporter) — Spike Lee has scored a big win in a Paris courtroom. TF1 Droits Audiovisuels has been ordered to pay $46 million to producers ofMiracle at St. Anna for failing to honor a contract to distribute the World War II picture internationally. The dispute centered on a 2007 agreement between TF1 and the On My Own production company. According to the terms of the contract, TF1 was scheduled to release the film about four black soldiers in markets across the world with the exception of the United States, Canada and Italy.
