Are there any adults in the room? Can we just get along here?

Spike Lees a racial provocatuer and Clint Eastwood did the right thing by telling the owlish Spike to piss off. Spike’s an angry little man who though small in stature always had a big chip on his shoulder. Lee’s a whining racial demagogue cut from the same cloth as Jeramiah Wright, a self-appointed enforcer of racial quotas in other directors movies? I thought film makers like any artist could do what they damn well pleased with their art in the USA. When Lee was called out on his criticism he did the cowardly thing and hid behind his race with that plantation crack. Lee can criticize others, but others can’t defend themselves against or criticize Lee, he’s an African American sacred cow. Lee has more in common with the KKK, being a racist spoiling for a fight based on a sense of entitlement due to his skin color alone, than does Clint Eastwood. Spike Lee's casting himself in the Malcolm X biopic as the stereotypical clownish pimp ruined what could have been a good movie. I won't smoke 10 bucks on another Spike Lee joint again. Little man, big ego, regardless of your color. Take a hike Spike.

I'll admit right up front that I think that Spike Lee is a better director than Clint Eastwood. Not in a technical sense - Eastwood's films are often beautifully shot and acted. But Lee's films have, at times, broken new ground, and addressed issues of race in an iconoclastic manner, adding a new voice and a new perspective. Plus there is The 25th Hour, easily one of the best films of the last 10 years IMO.

Eastwood's films over the years have not, in my opinion, evidenced any signs of greatness (with at least one exception). To Wit:

The Rookie - execreble pseudo-dirty harry schlock

The Unforgiven - excellent

A Perfect World - overwrought dreck with an added Costner factor.

The Bridges of Madison County - I'm getting heartburn just thinking about this wad of cotton candy and lard.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - How can a film with John Cusack and Kevin Spacey be so damn boring? Really, how is it possible? This film manages to be both soporific and anoying.

Absolute Power - never seen it, probably never will. 38% on Rotten Tomatoes.

True Crime - see "Absolute Power."

Space Cowboys - prompted the following statement by Roger Ebert, which perfectly sums up much of Eastwood's Oeuvre: "too secure within its traditional story structure to make much seem at risk—but with the structure come the traditional pleasures as well"

Blood Work - get's murdered girl's heart, looks for murderer.

The rest you know; Mystic River features more overwrought performances from great actors, no surprises (see Gone Baby Gone for an indication of what might have been. Million Dollar Baby represents Eastwood's nadir. It's the sort of schmaltzy dreck that confoms perfectly with the sensibilities of the maudlin masses, and hoo-boy does it go over well with the Academy! Sentiment sells, and Eastwood is, at heart, a traditional, sentimental purveyor of cinematic pot-boilers.

..... 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.

-- Cow Head Soup

[Read Cow Head Soup's other letters]Permalink Wednesday, June 11, 2008 12:50 AM