Letters to the Editor
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On the use of the word "Plantation".
Would some kind journalist like to ask Spike Lee why he chose to use the word 'plantation'? Was his an argument about slavery or the accuracy of events and characters depicted in a motion picture?
Why must an accomplished African American film director resort to playing the slave card in this manner?
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Uh...Andrew
1988's "The Dead Pool" was the fifth and final Dirty Harry movie. It's not the best of the series, but no where nearly as dreadful as "Magnum Force". What I'm wondering is that if Clint Eastwood had directed "Summer of Sam", if he would have left in the talking dog.
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What black soldiers?
What was Eastwood supposed to do, add black soldiers where there had been none? You make it sound like Eastwood *should* have done so, just to be politically correct. The only black soldiers at the Okinawa assault were not part of the flag raising or what led to it.
Lee is out of joint here, not Eastwood. Suggesting they are both wrong and both right is political correctness gone bananas.
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@Felix - you mentioned banna's
Now you're toast
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'Plantation', etc.
O'Hehir didn't include the complete quote from Eastwood, which was pretty condescending. The tone was pretty offensive, and capped by the 'shut his face' comment. I think that's why Lee reacted the way he did. And Lee does tend to frame things in a racial dialectic--its makes for great movies, and newsmaking quotes.
Still, I can see how it seems a little much. Eastwood's response seemed shocked/hurt, like he was lashing out. O'herir's right, though, they both overreacted.
Interesting point about their similarities--I can particularly see a lot of Eastwood in Lee's recent movies.
Its kind-of disingenuous to suggest that Eastwood couldn't include black soldiers because they didn't raise the flag. There were a lot of soldiers in that movie, would it have been terrible to include black ones? Hollywood constantly gussies up 'true stories' for the screen, why not do it occasionally in the name of equality?
I think Lee was just using Eastwood's films as an example of a larger trend of denying the role of African Americans and Hispanics in WW II in films.
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..... and what exactly is so difficult to see what's going on here ??
this guy came to my attention while watching one of his early flicks that depicted african-americans as loutish monkeys with no intelligence to speak of.
and because of such nonsense this little runt hit the air-brains at the theaters for their hard pressed cash -- resulting in said runt's being able to afford to hang a ridiculous collection of baubels & bells from his head & wardrobe.
SO ---- What's really going on here ??
spike the runt has a chip on his shoulder. spike the runt wants to recoup a profit for his investment. spike the runt understands well that to maximize his ability to buy a wider of array of baubles & bells to hang from his head, that he will have to cause people to turn away from their normal busy lives so that he is assured 'free advertising' for his flick in Adam Smith's competitive marketplace.
'Free Advertising' as all hollywood mogul wannabes understand perfectly well is a precious commodity, not to be overlooked.
So --- here we have it --- spike the runt is out in the market square bleating as loudly as he can while Hawking the Hot Cross Buns of his ware --- all the while whistling .... "to market, to market, to buy a fat hog, home again $, home again $, jiggedy-jog.
... THAT ... is simply what this is all about.
Furthermore, spike the runt has little room to comment on history --- a subject he evidently skipped out of class off.
My old man was a naval doctor in the Pacific during that war. Because we lived in a racist, segregated society during that epoch, black americans were as nearly as invisible as the respected, thoughful Eastwood portrayed it.
From "Pearl Harbor" to "The Airmen of Tuskegee" to the German prison camp courtroom flick of Bruce Willis a few years ago, accurate attention has been attempted by hollywood to redress the racist proclivities to make minority presense vanish from the battlefield.
Of course the foci of Eastwood's Iwo Jima was directed at racism -- in this illuminating the story of a forgotten WW II hero who happened to be Navajo.
Some years back spike the runt launched a smilar race-based inaccuracy against another top hollywood director, Mel Gibson, for not depicting a mass slave factory that he fantasized as de facto in "The Patriot's" 1770s South Carolina setting.
spike the runt's rant caused him to become the laughingstock of the season when it was pointed out to this ill-educated pseudo-historian that in Colonial Times, the days when small family farms bartering in crops, indigo and tobacco were the norm.
It was the yankee creation of the cotton gin many years later at the turn of the century that, in fact, triggered a boom in King Cotton and its related boom in bringing slaves into the States from the killer sugar plantations of the West Indies.
Thereafter, mushrooming across the Dixie landscape, the 19th century South proliferated with the grand scale factory plantations holding 'hundreds' of blacks in a bondage that the numbskull runts of the world 'hallucinated' into having existed during the 17th & 18th centuries.
As many academics critisized at the time, spike lee knew little of history as it was. A quick review of the early census records would have pointed out to the charletan movie maker that 'most' white southern families that could afford to keep slaves (and actual slave owners WERE a Minority in vast regions of the colonial south) held but a few slaves in order to help plough the cornfields.
As I wrote in an earlier thread -- one of the few truely Shakesperian Tragedies ever produced by Hollywood was the Dino DeLaurentis' flick, "Mandingo" --- a now quite dated classic that graphically exposed the dispicable crimes against humanity during the ante-bellum era of our nation's past. This film painted history as closely and accurately as is possible for presenting to a popcorn munching public.
'spike's' film on the Son of Sam was pointless, other than capitalizing ($$$) on the media-fed street hysteria surrounding the actions of some asshole.
Naaaahh,--- spike the runt cares very little about historical accuracy in such well researched & documented films by the Gibsons & Eastwoods of the industry. --- 'spike' ?? -- well he's just a 2-bit charletan trying his best to grab up some nickles & dimes off the curbside so that he can buy some more shiney new baubels.