In the end, he takes what looks like a big risk, goes for the killer shot, and blows it.īy now, everyone must know that “Do the Right Thing” is about racial tensions in a black neighborhood on a punishingly hot day that the focus of the action is the pizzeria where Mookie works, Sal’s Famous, which is apparently the last white-owned business on the block (there’s a Korean market across the street) and that the movie’s climax is a full-scale riot sparked by a monstrous act of police brutality. But he stops himself: the gigantic theme ultimately exposes his weaknesses, overshadows his strengths. Who’s to stop him? He’s got the talent, the passion, the crew, the cast, and the money. Eager to keep things moving, to force the tempo of the game, he has decided to go for it right now, to catch us off guard-again-by rushing head on at the biggest, most dauntingly complex subject imaginable: racism itself. That’s more than enough ambition to sustain a filmmaker through an entire career, but Spike Lee’s no ordinary artist. thesis film, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads”) tried to dramatize what American movies weren’t showing us about the real lives of black people in this gruelling, reactionary decade to find, if possible, a visual style specific to that experience, not borrowed from Hollywood or Europe and to make it all so funny and vivid that everyone would have to pay attention. His two previous films (or three if we count-and we should-his splendid hour-long N.Y.U. In “Do the Right Thing” this apparently fearless young moviemaker has, in Hollywood terms, cut to the chase. He turns himself into the whole show, acting like Superman because he refuses, absolutely, to be an Invisible Man. (Later in the movie, Mookie changes into a Dodgers shirt with Jackie Robinson’s number on it.) He seems willing to do anything-to take on huge themes and assume the burden of carrying them both in front of and behind the camera. On the evidence of “Do the Right Thing,” Lee is all too conscious of both the responsibility and the power of his position. The first, the buoyant and imaginative sex comedy “She’s Gotta Have It,” seemed to come out of nowhere: made independently, speedily, and on the cheap, it just streaked past all the obstacles, scored big commercially, and earned Lee the chance, almost unprecedented for a black filmmaker, to make entirely personal movies with major-studio backing. Since graduating from N.Y.U.’s film school, in 1983, he has managed to get off three improbable shots, all lofted over the outstretched arms of the movie establishment-three movies, made and distributed, about black experience in America. It’s Spike Lee who’s the one-man team here: he’s also the writer, the producer, and the director of “Do the Right Thing,” and, as the most prominent black director in the American movie industry, he probably feels as if he were sprinting downcourt with no one to pass to and about five hundred towering white guys between him and the basket. Amiable Mookie as the divinely inspired Jordan-who plays basketball so brilliantly that it sometimes looks as if he didn’t need his teammates at all-is a bit of a joke. Mookie, the character Lee plays, is no superstar: he’s an ordinary young man who lives with his sister in a Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, works-just hard enough to hang on to his job-at the pizzeria at the end of his block, and gets along pretty well with everybody. In his first scene in “Do the Right Thing,” Spike Lee wears a Chicago Bulls jersey with a big “23” on it-Michael Jordan’s number.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |