FIVE BY SPIKE! written by Craig Hammill, SMC founder.programmer

SPIKE LEE MOVIES #5: He Got Game (directed by Spike Lee) In this programmer's opinion, one of Spike Lee's absolute best movies, HE GOT GAME tells the story of an imprisoned father played with raw rage and vitality by Denzel Washington who gets a brief furlough to try to convince his estranged basketball star son (played by real basketball legend Ray Allen) to play for a certain college team. But like many of Lee's movies, the movie is really about something even deeper. Lee touches on the volatile relationships between estranged fathers and their sons, sexuality, the lure of high pay sports as a way out of systemic poverty, and the way moneyed interests manipulate talented teenagers and working class people to their own ends. This is one of Lee's movies where his rage is matched by a deep thoughtfulness, sadness, and emotion. A primal yell of a movie.

Spike Lee Movies #4: Clockers (1995, dir by Spike Lee) One of the dependable aspects of Spike Lee's career has been that just when you think he's repeating himself or maybe no longer has the fierceness of his early work, he makes a movie as good as anything he's ever done. Lee has a vicious vitality. CLOCKERS inaugurated mid-period Spike. A fully committed angry film that tells the story of a New York projects murder, two brothers who are suspected, the white police detectives trying to get to the bottom of the case, and the black community dealing with the vicious cycle of drug selling, drug related violence at their doorstep. This movie shows Lee getting even more complex in his investigations into systemic racial issues that need to be first acknowledged then addressed. The white cops are racist but they want real answers and are willing to engage. The local Drug Boss, played with amazing tenderness and violence by Delroy Lindo, preys on the local teens need for a father figure. But at the heart of the movie is an angry anguished scream at just how difficult it is to do something positive to change the cycle. A thrilling movie that is also challenging in all the right ways.

Spike Lee Movies #3: Jungle Fever (1991, dir by Spike Lee) Jungle Fever represents, for this programmer, a kind of movie Spike Lee makes a lot. So crammed with things he wants to say that some things work and some things don't but you walk away still blown away by the movie. This movie primarily deals with an interracial affair between a married black architect and an Italian woman. But there are also two side stories: one deals with the crack epidemic and how it affects one family. It's this story with Sam Jackson as Gator, a son so in the throes of crack addiction, he and his parents no longer know how to interact with each other that haunts me. I remember when I first saw Jungle Fever, I liked it a lot. But it was the final confrontation scene between Jackson and his parents (played by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee) that blew me away. Very few films have scenes like this. I was crying, stunned, shocked that Lee and his actors managed to pull off this challenging, difficult, horribly complex brilliant scene. It is the scene that made Sam Jackson's career in many ways. It also showed the compassion, heartache, and anguish families go through when a member is in the clutches of drug addiction. Long before we were told to feel compassion for folks affected by the opiate crisis, Lee was showing compassion for folks affected by the 80's crack crisis.

SPIKE LEE MOVIES #2: Malcolm X (1992, dir by Spike Lee) In many ways, the first period of Lee's work culminated with his biography of 60's civil rights leader Malcolm X starring Denzel Washington. It brims with that expressionistic style, lensed by cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, that characterized all of Lee's early work. But it also marked one of the first movies (BlackkKlansman being the most recent) where Lee cinematically connected the dots between a historical story and a contemporaneous one. Malcolm X opens with footage of the Rodney King beating from the early 1990's, announcing right away, why such a movie is as frustratingly relevant as ever. Lee adapts Alex Haley's AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOM X here and stays true to the source material including Malcolm's own realization late in his life (as he reported it in his book) that it wasn't white people as a whole he was angry at (since he met kind people of all races practicing his Islam) but American systematic racism. The movie contains one of Denzel Washington's best performances and one of Spike Lee's best endings. Spike Lee has always been provocative (thank God) but he's also always been complex and rigorous (thank God again). A tremendous movie.

SPIKE LEE MOVIES #1: Do the Right Thing (1989, dir by Spike Lee) I've seen a number of posts the last few days noting how sadly topical this movie still is. None more so powerful than Lee's own short film "3 Brothers" he made just a few days ago connecting Do the Right Thing and the murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd. The story of a black community and the local Italian pizza place on the hottest day of the summer in New York's Bed-Stuy community. The movie crackles with comedy and humanism until it suddenly erupts into violence after a horrific injustice committed by the police against one of the local characters. This movie is probably Lee's masterpiece. Lee has made many GREAT movies and I tend to actually love CLOCKERS and HE GOT GAME as much as I love this movie. But there's no denying that DO THE RIGHT THING may be the movie that will forever solidify Lee's legacy. No one can say it better than Lee so he has the last word here. As he asked in his recent short movie "Will history stop repeating itself?"

written by Craig Hammill, Secret Movie Club Founder.Programmer