The Screengrab : crooklyn

Spike Lee's Next "Miracle"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of the release next week of Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee's first movie since his biggest hit, the atypically good Inside Man, John Colapinto profiles the director in The New Yorker. [Not available online] Colapinto notes that Lee has made eighteen feature films, "three of which (Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X) have earned him a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with race." That count seems a little soft: for instance, it's hard to think of any reason besides an obsession with race for making Bamboozled, and even the movie that Lee clearly intended as a showcase for his warmer, fuzzier side, Crooklyn, included a subplot about the foul odor emitted by the film's token white man, played by David Patrick Kelly in outrageous honky drag. After scoring a great success with an ingenious genre picture that required him to mostly give it a rest, Lee's new movie, "the first by a major American director to treat the experience of black soldiers" in World War II, gives him a chance to climb back on his hobbyhorse and also to issue the public proclamations that have sometimes seemed to be his real art, which his movies are only intended to promote. As Colapinto writes, the film is meant "as redress not only for [Clint] Eastwood's Iwo Jima pictures but for an all-white Hollywood vision of the Second World War which dates to the 1962 John Wayne movie The Longest Day--and before." It will be remembered that Lee instigated a vicious back-and-forth between himself and Eastwood by complaining about the absence of black soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima; after Eastwood invited the younger filmmaker to shut the fuck up, Lee called him "an angry old man" and advised Dirty Harry that "we're not on a plantation either." That stroke was standard operating procedure for Lee, who has a history of shutting down discussions by accusing his attackers of racism, a move that has traditionally left them sputtering defensively. The down side of this tactic that it's left Lee with a public image that he may now regret, if only because it may have overshadowed his reputation as a moviemaker. "People think I'm this angry black man walking around in a constant state of rage," he told Colapinto. This misperception makes Lee very angry, and the article describes a man who, because of that, is walking around in a constant state of rage.

One reason he has for being ticked off--even when he has access to Colapinto, a writer who is so much on his side that he even seems to like Summer of Sam and the godforsaken color dance interlude in Lee's debut feature She's Gotta Have It--is that getting funding isn't as easy for him as it used to be. Lee would probably argue that it's never been easy for him, but a lot of filmmakers before Lee wanted to make a biopic about Malcolm X, and Lee was the one who got to bitch in the press about not being given a big enough budget after the epic production was given the green light. (One of the other filmmakers who wanted to make it was Norman Jewison, who was almost ready to go, with Lee's star Denzel Washington in the lead role, when Lee nudged him aside by making a public stink about how wrong it would be for a white director to be entrusted with Malcolm's story.) Miracle at St. Anna wasn't Lee's first choice for a follow-up to Inside Man; it was what he could get funded after he discovered that the box-office cachet he had picked up from that movie wasn't enough to get studios interested in his other dream projects, a James Brown biopic and a movie about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. (St. Anna didn't make the studios salivate, either; Touchtone Pictures signed on to distribute it only after European companies ponied up the money.) It'll be interesting to see whether an historical drama benefits from some of the gravity that Lee has acquired in recent years, seen best not in Inside Man but in his documentaries 4 Little Girls, whose title refers to the victims of a racially motivated church bombing in Birmingham in 1963, and the Katrina epic When the Levees Broke. Stanley Crouch, who wrote a searing attack on Lee back in 1989, believes that his nonfiction-film work has had a strong, salutary effect on Lee: "There was something about the dignity of those people he encountered when he was making 4 Little Girls that had a very deep impact on him, and in some way they seemed to help him grow up. When you got kids yourself and you're talking to the father of someone whose child was blown up by the kind of people who blew those kids up, and you see that this person is not ranting and raving in some kind of theatrical purported rage of the sort that you see in Do the Right Thing." Miracle at St. Anna opens on September 26.

Related stories: Clint Eastwood Would Like Spike Lee to Shut His Face

The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History, Part 2

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:00:00 GMT

THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS (1966)

The great Ennio Morricone has contributed to some of the greatest opening credit sequences of all time, but the opening to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 masterpiece The Hawks and the Sparrows holds a special place in the hearts of anyone who has seen and heard it. Here, in tune with Pasolini’s conception of the film as “a comic opera,” the credits are actually sung, in a boisterous vocal performance (courtesy of the great Domenico Modugno) that ranges from cackling laughter to pronounced wail to gentle whisper. Reminiscent of both the rhythmic Spaghetti Western scores Morricone was becoming famous for and the more wacked-out electronic experimentation he was beginning to dabble in, it also displays a weirdo playfulness that is pure Pasolini. Indeed, try to imagine what’s going through the head of this fellow, as he performs this strangest of compositions in concert with Morricone, decades later.

RAGING BULL (1980)

With Martin Scorsese directing and Michael Chapman doing the cinematography, it’s no surprise that the Jake LaMotta biopic has opening credits that are a treat for the eyes (and they’re tremendously aided by the simple choice of making the title of the film show up in red against the black and white of the rest of the sequence, another little touch that makes the whole so incredibly memorable). The ears are also given their due, with the selection of the intermezzo from Pietro Mascagani’s Cavalleria Rusticana providing a mournful, rising sound against which the slow-motion camerawork and the silently exploding flash bulbs play like a dream. But the truly astonishing thing about the opening credit sequence of Raging Bull is how perfectly and precisely it echoes the thematic content of the film: the ring seems impossibly huge, almost as if it’s an open field, but to Jake LaMotta – a snarling, raging animal even before the fight starts, bounding about and throwing phantom punches, champing at the bit for the violence to start – it’s a cage that stifles him, that can barely contain him. Fighting is as close as he gets to Heaven, yet smoke encircles the arena and transforms it into Hell; and while he is at his greatest, his most legendary, in the ring, he seems somehow tiny against its permanence, and he grows as he dances, faceless, towards the camera, only to shrink again into anonymity and nothingness as he once again drifts away. It’s as if the entire film and everything it has to say is contained in these two and a half minutes.

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Even the stinkiest of Spike Lee joints generally boast memorable opening credits; think of the kids playing street games like hopscotch and double-dutch in the otherwise problematic Crooklyn, or the unlikely slice of Americana – a lyrical slo-mo basketball montage scored to Aaron Copland’s “John Henry” – that opens He Got Game. So it’s no surprise that Lee’s finest film features one of the most vivid, arresting main title sequences of the past 20 years. Lee obviously knew he had created an incendiary piece of work, and determined to grab the audience by the throat right from the beginning as the pulsating, near-apocalyptic beat of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” kicks in on the soundtrack, accompanied by a take-no-prisoners one-woman dance-off. Alternately clad in colorful, curve-hugging tights and boxing apparel, Rosie Perez embodies the tale of tensions boiling over on a hot summer day with her aggressive, near-violent gyrations. This was Perez’s first screen appearance; it’s hard to imagine a more mesmerizing introduction.

SE7EN (1995)

It’s hard to believe how long ago Se7en was. It was not only pre-Brangelina, it was pre-Brad&Jen – it was, in fact, circa Brad and Gwyneth. It was before the gruesome goresploitation of all the Saw flicks and before the mind-f@#$ing of Memento. And the opening credits alerted you right away: you were watching something different. Someone was going to great detail to set a tone, and the tone made you uneasy. The jittery stop-motion, the yellowed pages, hand-scratched letters, red darkroom light, and the Nine Inch Nails “Closer to God” remix, it was all indicative of some serious sociopathology. Like the Tom Waits song, “What’s he doing in there?”, you were privy to someone obsessively doing something. And you just knew all that snipping, scrawling photo-developing, photocopying, and bandaged-fingers hand-sewing would amount to no good. Se7en’s opening credits not only caught you up in the horror of the film before the film started, it also launched director Kyle Cooper’s career. It set the bar pretty high for all the horror flick opening credits that came later. For all we know, it may even be responsible for launching a different creepy trend: the scrap-booking craze.

LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

A great title sequence does not guarantee a great movie, of course; sometimes the opening credits promise more than the filmmaker is able to deliver. The hypnotic opening of David Lynch’s Lost Highway is a prime example. Designed by Jay Johnson, the sequence is deceptively simple: a driver’s seat point-of-view of an endless road stretching out ahead into pitch blackness. Our progress is swift, but unsteady – we’re weaving all over the broken yellow line in the middle as credits swoop out of darkness ahead, pause briefly, then shatter against the windshield. David Bowie is no comfort on the radio, singing “I’m Deranged.” Wherever we’re going, something terrible is going to happen when we get there. Well, the movie that follows isn’t terrible; it has its moments, although on the whole it’s ponderous and half-baked, nowhere near the dangerous thrill ride promised by the opening. With its themes of identity confusion, it’s almost a rough draft of the much more successful Mulholland Drive; you almost wish Lynch could keep the title and the credits and take another crack at the rest of it.

PANIC ROOM (2002)

David Fincher, one of the most visually inventive directors working today, usually pulls out the stops when creating his title sequences (see Se7en, elsewhere on this list, as well as Fight Club and Zodiac). Panic Room, though a neat little thriller, isn’t his finest film, but it’s another fantastic accomplishment in terms of setting the table for what’s to come. Its very simple setup belies how incredibly effective it is: we see a number of exterior shots of Manhattan, as the names of the cast and crew appear in stylized photography throughout the sequence. But this bare-bones description in no way communicates the unsettling nature of the actual credits: the names appear as if they were floating in mid-air, part of the physical landscape of New York, carved into nothingness by the hand of God himself like the writing on the walls at Nebuchadnezzar’s palace as a quietly ominous score by the usually overwrought Howard Shore plays on the soundtrack. There’s a disturbing air to the entire sequence, even though nothing menacing actually happens (other than an almost subliminal glimpse of the film’s tagline – “FACE YOUR FEARS” – that appears on a Telex screen). A collaboration between Fincher, design company Picture Mill and special effects outfit Computer Café, the credits took almost a full year to finish, and the fruits of their labors are extremely rewarding, full of subtle menace and nameless dread.

- Bilge Ebiri, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Pazit Cahlon

Read Part 1 of this feature

That Guy!: Delroy Lindo

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:45:00 GMT

All throughout Black History Month in February, the Screengrab's That Guy! feature will be taking a look at some of Hollywood's finest African-American character actors. Last week we focused on Ving Rhames, and this week, we're taking a look at the man recently voted Most Likely To Be Mistaken For Ving Rhames: Delroy Lindo. Born in London to a family of Jamaican ancestry, Lindo's facial similarities to Rhames, along with his powerful physique and tendency to portray gangsters, drug dealers and other low-lifes, has often led to confusion between the two. But while Rhames' on-screen style is smooth, calculating and understated, Lindo tends towards the edgy, the explosive, the half-mad. After making his first major film (More American Graffiti) in 1979, Delroy Lindo didn't make another film for a decade, preferring to focus on the stage roles to which he still occasionally returns; he earned widespread praise (and Tony nominations) for his work in Athol Fugard's Master Harold and the Boys and Joe Turner's Come and Gone. When he finally returned to the big screen, he found his biggest proponent in America's most prominent black director: Spike Lee cast him in a number of memorable roles, and even handed him the role of family man Woody Carmichael in Crooklyn — a thinly veiled portrait of Lee's own father. Despite his frequent portrayal of criminal thugs, Lindo imbues even his most brutal characters with a rind of humanity, and has equally excelled at playing patriarchs, professionals, and even the odd romantic lead. One of his least-appreciated performances was a natural and charismatic turn as legendary Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige in the TV movie Soul of the Game; the NAACP, at least, liked him enough to hand him an Image Award for the film. Lindo's film career has been quiet of late; after landing his first major television role (aside from an enjoyable performance as a frustrated social worker in the "Brawl in the Family" episode of The Simpsons) in the short-lived thriller Kidnapped, he's preferred to focus exclusively on his work in the theatre, appearing in major roles in London and on Broadway and even in Toronto, where he lived for some time. However, at 55 years old, Lindo is at precisely the age when immense opportunities can open up for character actors of his skill and demeanor. We'd hate to think that he'll make us wait another ten years before his next big-screen appearance.

Where to see Delroy Lindo at his best:

MALCOLM X (1992)

Delroy Lindo's first major film appearance after his decade-long exile from motion pictures was Spike Lee's epic biography of the black nationalist leader Malcolm X. His turn as West Indian Archie, the Boston numbers runner with the photographic memory for whom young Malcolm worked, was by turns fearsome and pathetic, perfectly conveying the sense of loss and rage that Malcolm felt at the degradation of blacks in America. It's one of the most memorable performances in a movie full of them, and it served to make Lindo's reputation as a character to watch out for.

CLOCKERS (1995)

Soon after casting Lindo in Crooklyn, Spike Lee gave Delroy Lindo his third choice role in a row as the sinister drug lord Rodney Little. Although the movie has since become notable as the big-screen debut of Mekhi Phifer, it's Lindo who steals the show as Rodney: as is typical of his portrayal of criminals and undesirables, he charges the role with unmistakable emotion and humanity, especially in the scenes where he innocently plays with model trains after ordering the death of his subordinates. One of Lee's most underrated movies, Clockers is anchored by Lindo's role in a story that strongly presages the urban realism of The Wire.

GET SHORTY (1996)

The second installment of John Travolta's umpteenth career comeback was this slight but enjoyable Barry Sonnenfeld adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel. While Travolta's Chili Palmer is the star of the show, it's Delroy Lindo as the L.A. gangster Bo "The Cat" Catlett who gets most of the movie's best lines. Diverging from his usual mode of instilling his thugs with a redeeming sliver of decency or vulnerability, here Lindo goes for flat-out humor, and proves himself to be a rather able screen comedian. Even when he doesn't have the great one-liners — which isn't often — his ability to mix nervousness, intimidation and exasperation carry the laughs.

Celebrating "Black History Mumf" With Odienator

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Since 1976, Black History Month has become a fixture in American schools every February. Most people young enough to have been in school during this time can probably recite the broad outlines of the curriculum — one-dimensional lessons on noble Dr. King and scary Malcolm X, time devoted to the Underground Railroad and the freeing of the slaves, a handful of African-American inventors and scientists, Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat, and the requisite screening of Roots when we were old enough. Yes, as educational as Black History Month has been, it often feels like it's been taught from a pre-approved syllabus that's been forced on the teachers.

But over at Big Media Vandalism, the inimitible Odienator has turned February into "Black History Mumf", an alternative study of African-American culture in America. Odie acknowledges the bitter irony of devoting the calendar's shortest month to the history of African-Americans, as when he spoofs the old children's rhyme, ". . . all the rest have thirty-one, except poor February because it's Black History Month!" But Odie is making the most of the time he's got, averaging a post a day on most recent touchstones of African-American culture that don't get taught in schools.

Some of the pieces are nostalgic, like his essay on the street games seen in Spike Lee's Crooklyn. Others take on some pretty obscure subject matter, like his appreciation of the mostly forgotten actress Diana Sands. And still others offer a fresh take on some old favorites, like his review of Coming to America or his survey of the African-American imagery in Schoolhouse Rock. But every one is shot through with Odie's sassy, stinging sense of humor, which cuts through the sanctimoniousness that's all too common in the mainstream Black History Month curriculum and instead provides an irresistible mix of insight and entertainment. Even in a timely get-out-the-vote piece, Odie can't help but be irreverent, and bless him for that. I know I'd be happier if there were more commercials like his proposed spot featuring Harriet Tubman on the A Train.

Odienator's Black History Mumf continues throughout the month of February. So, for that matter, does Black History Month.