All Articles Tagged "spike lee"
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.
Spike Lee and Mike Tyson Team Up for HBO Series
(Rolling Out) — Spike Lee, Mike Tyson and the creator of HBO’s “Entourage,” Doug Ellin, are teaming up to executive produce a new drama series for HBO, loosely inspired by Tyson’s youth. According to Deadline, the show, titled “Da Brick,” will be written by John Ridley and is being described as a “contemporary exploration of what it means to be a young, black man in supposedly post-racial America.” “Da Brick” will be set in current day Newark, which is also nicknamed “Brick City.” The idea for the show came from a meeting between Tyson and Ellin on the set of “Entourage,” which was inspired by veteran actor Mark Wahlberg’s early years in Hollywood.
Beautiful (and STABLE!) Black Hollywood Love
While there are no official statistics on Hollywood marriage, a fool can see that the celebrity divorce rate is even more out the box than the already-high one for us regular folk. That’s why these long lasting Black power couples give us the ‘warm fuzzies’. We salute them for keeping their love strong in an industry that makes healthy relationships almost impossible to sustain. If you need a little inspiration when it comes to love today, check out our list of long-lasting Black Hollywood couples! Read the rest of this entry »
Clifton Powell Will Beat Spike Lee’s…
Clifton Powell does not like Spike Lee. He made that opinion crystal clear in a recent interview on the Russ Parr morning show when Russ and the crew asked Powell what he thought about the Spike Lee/ Tyler Perry feud.
Clifton.Powell.went.all.the.way.in.
His comments started off mild, saying he didn’t like Spike Lee; then, the situation spiraled as he claimed Spike Lee is no better than any of “the mans” black people talk about. He mentioned that when he auditioned for Lee’s films he was kept waiting for hours and Lee didn’t take care of his people.
It was clear that Powell had no qualms about what he was saying at the time, “I hope Spike is listening, because I’ll beat your punk a**.”
Clifton said while he sees some buffoonery in Tyler Perry’s movies, he thinks they’re funny. He also said he respects and supports Perry’s films because he provides so many jobs for African American actors.
He said, “Spike had an opportunity to turn this whole thing around in the early days and disrespected a lot of us as actors and that’s why his career has fluttered…”
You can listen to the audio from the interview below:
What do you think about Powell’s comments? Were they dead on? Could he have said it differently?
Let us know what you think.
'Jungle Fever' Turns Twenty
(Uptown Magazine) — When Spike Lee released Jungle Fever in 1991, he single-handedly addressed an issue that had been raising eyebrows for years: interracial dating. Even though at the time of filming, interracial couples represented only 1.9 percent of the population, according to U.S. Census Bureau, there seemed to be a fascination, and for some, a disgust over interracial dating, specifically between African-American men and white women. Set in New York City, Flipper (Wesley Snipes), a married architect began an affair with his assistant, Angie Tucci (Annabella Sciorra), an Italian-American. The affair seemed to stem from both characters’ deep curiosity about each other’s race, more so than mere physical attraction, from the contrast in their skin colors–his dark complexion to her pale, “lily-white” skin to their upbringings, which were worlds apart. After disclosing his secret affair to his best friend, Flipper confessed, “I have to admit I’ve always been curious about Caucasian women.” The friend declared that he had “the fever, Jungle Fever,” described as an attraction between two different races.
