Spike Lee bold on the big screen
“Do the Right Thing” (1989): The film that brought Lee to the mainstream is as remarkable as it was the year it was released. It is, on the one hand, a quintessential New York film, painting in vibrant hues a 24-hour portrait of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn on the hottest day of the summer. That heat is both literal and metaphorical, with racial tensions building to an explosive finale as the mercury rises around a White-owned pizza shop in a Black neighborhood. As with Lee’s best work, the film shies away from pat explanation and easy answers.
“Malcolm X” (1992): Arguably Lee’s finest hour as a filmmaker (well, more like finest three hours), this exquisite biopic isn’t a polished hagiography of a larger-thanlife historical icon, but a rich examination of one man’s life, with all the beauty and mess that entails. The film charts Malcolm X’s evolution, from his youth and criminal activities in Harlem to a life-changing stint in prison to his rise as a civilrights icon — but it’s less a historical journey than a spiritual one. It’s an important movie that never feels self-important, and Lee Spike Lee defies easy categorization. The director, writer, actor and producer has been full of surprises his whole career, from explosive examinations of race relations (“Do the Right Thing,” “Jungle Fever”) to Hollywood thrillers (“Inside Man”) to devastating documentaries (“When the Levees Broke”).
And Lee, 56, is still surprising. His latest film is “Oldboy,” an American adaptation of the manga series that spawned the infamously twisted 2003 South Korean movie of the same name.
With “Oldboy” hitting theaters this week, here’s a look at five of Lee’s most essential films. coaxed a career-best performance out of Denzel Washington.
“25th Hour” (2002): Edward Norton stars as Monty Brogan, a drug dealer on his last night of freedom before heading to the slammer for seven years. It’s Lee’s first post-9/11 feature film; ever the New York director, he embraces the city’s hurt, filming one long conversation against the backdrop of Ground Zero. As Brogan’s last night of freedom winds to a close, his state of mind starts to sync with the psyche of a traumatized city — one that clings to hope and perseverance in the face of change and uncertainty, building up to what is, without exaggeration, a perfect ending, and among the director’s most heartbreaking.
“Crooklyn” (1994): Lee’s semi-autobiographical portrait of his childhood in Brooklyn, set during the summer of 1973, centers on a young girl named Troy (Zelda Harris) coming of age in a storm of four wild brothers, a strict but loving mother and a struggling jazz-musician father. They move with the rhythm of a real family (and to the rhythm of a killer soundtrack) in a film that amounts to a love letter to Brooklyn and to family — perhaps in this case, one and the same.
“She’s Gotta Have It” (1986): Lee grew by leaps and bounds as a filmmaker between this, his first featurelength film as writer and director, and “Do the Right Thing.” But this black-andwhite film made on the cheap in less than two weeks marked Lee as one to watch. It follows Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a sexually independent (and sexually prolific) New Yorker who cycles between suitors without apology, rejecting conventional ideals of female sexuality and striking a radical profile for Black women in cinema. It’s not very polished, but then revolutions rarely are.