![]() The soundtrack is Marvin Gaye’s epochal What’s Going On, from 1971, the magnificent album that documented the return from combat of black soldiers who found the communities they had supposedly been fighting for blighted by poverty, drug addiction, unemployment, violence.ĭa 5 Bloods concerns the present-day journey to Vietnam of four African-American veterans. His appearance is juxtaposed with horrifying news footage from Vietnam, from Harlem slums of the period, from the killings at Kent State, the moon landings, Richard Nixon. “America has declared war on black people,” declares Kwame Ture, the former Stokely Carmichael. ![]() To see, at the beginning of a movie, the credit “A Spike Lee Joint”, is to rest assured that one is, at the very least, in for a ride.ĭa 5 Bloods is bookended by footage of Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King, Jr, both expressing dissent at the war in Vietnam. His most recent triumph was last year’s hair-raising BlaKkKlansman, Lee’s statement on the Black Lives Matter movement, the rise again of far-right extremism in America, and the hate-filled rhetoric of Donald Trump, the man he habitually refers to as "Agent Orange". Richard Edson, John Turturro and Spike Lee sweating in Sal’s famous pizzeria, in lee's 1989 classic, Universalįrom the 1986 debut that announced his blazing talent, She’s Gotta Have It, through his riotous Brooklyn-in-the-pressure-cooker classic, Do The Right Thing, in 1989, and the magisterial Malcolm X, in 1992, to his non-fiction films, including the searing 4 Little Girls (1997), about the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama and his devastating documentary about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke (2006), his has been an insistent vision, and it has made him a singular figure in contemporary cinema: the crusading polemicist of American movies. Sports fan, music fan, street style icon, New York booster, actor-writer-director-producer, Lee is, among other things, an accomplished maker of Hollywood genre movies - 25 th Hour, Inside Man - but it’s the films investigating the black experience in America that form the basis of his legend. (Instead, he’ll wait until 2021 to become the first black person to be accorded that honour.) And yet he’s lost none of the righteous anger that made his early work so electrifying. If it weren’t for the coronavirus pandemic, he’d have spent much of May in Cannes, chairing the jury at the film festival. ![]() Lee is 63 now, distinguished, a greybeard, a respected teacher of film at NYU and Harvard. Talking to me on a glitchy connection from his apartment in Manhattan, seated in front of a vintage poster for The Jackie Robinson Story, wearing a fluoro orange Nike zip-up and a white Da 5 Bloods baseball hat, at one point Lee breaks off from our conversation to remotely usher my kids (ages 10 and 7) into the room I’m working from, referring to himself as “Uncle Spike”, sharing with them his love for Arsenal FC, observing that “one day you’ll be able to see my films - but not yet!”, and counselling them on coronavirus etiquette. Spike Lee manages both, on a Tuesday morning in mid-April, at the height of the Covid-19 outbreak. ![]() ![]() It is, as many of us have discovered over the past months, all but impossible to generate genuine bonhomie, let alone to transmit charisma, on a Zoom call. 13 Spirit-Lifting Comedies To Watch On Netflix Now. ![]()
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