By: OMAR AHMED

OMAR AHMED — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:28:16 +0000

Spike Lee is not just an important film maker, he is arguably one of the finest film makers to have emerged out of American cinema in the contemporary era. It’s nice to see that the BFI are running a season of his work because a lot of his minor work is what makes him a genuinely fascinating and articulate auteur. I see that you mentioned Bamboozled – could this be his greatest film and also his misunderstood? – its a film that seems to provoke a far stronger reaction than ‘Do the Right Thing’. Spike Lee was a millionaire after the success of his first feature film and I think the commercial sensibilities that he has developed over the years has meant he has been able to work at a steady rate, alternating between a diverse range of projects. ‘Inside Man’ seems to prove a point about how critics were always accussing of not being able to make commercial cinema – it is perhaps his clearest genre film but also the one that allowed him to make the expensive ‘Miracle of St Anna’, a film that failed at the box office. My personal favourites of Lee are: Malcolm X (still has the greatest opening sequence to a biopic that I know of), Clockers (severely under rated in his ouevre), Do the Right Thing, He Got Game, Mo Better Blues and also When the Leeves Broke – an incredibly dense documentary that seems to be his critique of the failures of the Bush administration. Come to think of it, you’re right, all of his films have something valuable to say about the state of American society. More on Mr Spike Lee please, Roy.

Comments on: Those Spike Lee Joints

By: OMAR AHMED