Happy Saturday POU!
We finish up the week with the last 5 films written and directed by Spike Lee before the upcoming release of his latest film BlackKKKlansman.
Bamboozled is a 2000 satirical comedy-drama film written and directed by Spike Lee about a modern televised minstrel show featuring black actors donning blackface makeup and the resulting violent fallout from the show’s success. It features an ensemble cast including Damon Wayans, Jada Pinkett Smith, Savion Glover, Tommy Davidson, Michael Rapaport and Mos Def.
Lee casts his satiric gaze on racism in American television and how America’s racist past still impacts the present in this biting comedy. Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is an astute, Harvard-educated African-American writer working for an independent television network who is assigned to brainstorm a new show for the African-American audience. Delacroix is the only black writer on the network’s staff, and the longer he works under Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), the loudmouthed executive in charge of programming, the more he’s convinced he’s made a mistake.
Wanting to be fired, Delacroix writes a pilot he imagines is so offensive no network would ever dare to air it: “The ManTan Minstrel Show,” in which dancer Man Ray (Savion Glover) and comedian Womack (Tommy Davidson) portray two shiftless dunderheads, ManTan and Sleep ‘N Eat — who are to be played in blackface. To Delacroix’s surprise, Dunwitty gives the idea the go-ahead, and to his shock, the show is soon a massive hit. Delacroix is now stuck trying to explain his show to the African-American community.
The overwhelming success of the show prompts Delacroix’s mental collapse, and an explosion of catastrophic violence, the effects of which are felt far and wide. As in reality, the effects of what is first perceived as only “entertainment”, painfully leads to far and wide negative outcomes.
She Hate Me is a 2004 comedy-drama film co-written and directed by Spike Lee and starring Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, Ellen Barkin, Monica Bellucci, Brian Dennehy, Woody Harrelson, Bai Ling and John Turturro.
Harvard-educated biotech executive John Henry “Jack” Armstrong (Anthony Mackie) gets fired when he informs on his bosses, launching an investigation into their business dealings by the Securities & Exchange Commission. Branded a whistle-blower and therefore unemployable, Jack desperately needs to make a living. When his former girlfriend Fatima (Kerry Washington), a high powered businesswoman–and now a lesbian–offers him cash to impregnate her and her new girlfriend Alex, Jack is persuaded by the chance to make “easy” money.
Word spreads and soon Jack is in the baby-making business at $10,000 a try. Lesbians with a desire for motherhood and the cash to spare are lining up to seek his services. But, between the attempts by his former employers to frame him for security fraud and his dubious fathering activities, Jack finds his life, all at once, becoming very complicated.
Red Hook Summer is a 2012 American film co-written and directed by Lee. It is Lee’s sixth film in his “Chronicles of Brooklyn” series following She’s Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, Crooklyn, Clockers, and He Got Game.
Flik Royale is a pampered buy viagra budapest 13-year-old boy from Atlanta who is sent to live with his preacher grandfather, Da Good Bishop Enoch Rouse, in Red Hook, Brooklyn. In the midst of a sermon, a strange man strolls into the back of the church and accuses Bishop Enoch of sexual molestation 15 years earlier in Georgia. Enoch then admits that it was subsequently covered up by his church, which paid the boy’s family hush money and let Enoch go free to start a new life in Brooklyn. The news causes members of his new congregation to turn against him and beat him, but subsequently, forgive him.
Between his grandfather’s constant preaching and the culture shock of inner-city life, Flik’s summer appears to be a total disaster–until he meets Chazz Morningstar (Toni Lysaith), a pretty girl his age, who shows Flik the brighter side of Brooklyn. Through her love and the love of his repentant grandfather, Flik begins to realize that the world is a lot bigger, and perhaps a lot better, than he’d ever imagined.
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a 2014 American horror film directed by Spike Lee. The plot is about a wealthy anthropologist who is stabbed by an ancient African dagger and turned into what seems to be a vampire. The film is an unofficial remake of the 1973 film Ganja and Hess (with original writer Bill Gunn receiving a credit as co-writer, along with Lee). It was the first of Lee’s films to be funded through Kickstarter. The film was released on June 22, 2014 at the American Black Film Festival as the closing film.
Lee called the film a “new kind of love story”, one that centers on an addiction to blood that once doomed a long-forgotten ancient African tribe. When Dr. Hess Green (Stephen Tyrone Williams) is introduced to a mysteriously cursed artifact by an art curator, Lafayette Hightower (Elvis Nolasco), he is uncontrollably drawn into a newfound thirst for blood that overwhelms his soul. He, however, is not a vampire. Lafayette quickly succumbs to the ravenous nature of the affliction, but leaves Hess a transformed man. Soon, Lafayette’s wife, Ganja Hightower (Zaraah Abrahams), comes looking for her husband and becomes involved in a dangerous romance with Hess that questions the very nature of love, addiction, sex, and status in our seemingly sophisticated society.
A reinterpretation of Bill Gunn’s horror cult film Ganja & Hess, which played as a Critics Choice at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, Spike Lee’s stylized thriller features an Original Score by Bruce Hornsby.
Chi-Raq is a 2015 American musical crime drama film, directed and produced by Lee and co-written by Lee and Kevin Willmott. Set in Chicago, the film focuses on the gang violence prevalent in neighborhoods on the city’s southside, particularly the Englewood neighborhood.
The story is based on Aristophanes‘ Lysistrata, a Classical Greek comedy play in which women withhold sex from their husbands as punishment for fighting in the Peloponnesian War. It stars Nick Cannon, Wesley Snipes, Teyonah Parris, Jennifer Hudson, Angela Bassett, John Cusack, and Samuel L. Jackson.