The Screengrab : do the right thing

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Endings and (especially) middles are hard, but there’s something liberating about the instant rush and hit-the-ground momentum of beginnings, which is why so many great (and even not-so-great) directors are often inspired to make big, bold “HERE I AM!” statements in the first few minutes of films that frequently can’t compete with their own opening sequences. But Spike Lee, after two previous good-but-not-great at-bats with She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze, finally knocked one out of the park with Do The Right Thing, which exploded onto movie screens with the sex-and-violence one-two punch of Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” and Rosie Perez’s fly-girl attack during the opening credits, then jolted audiences again with an alarm clock and the fast-talking “WAKE UP!” morning rap of Samuel L. Jackson’s dee-jay Mister Señor Love Daddy, who keeps the pace and sets the scene, letting us know in no uncertain terms that it’s HOT and about to get hotter as Lee takes us on a tour of his beloved Bed-Stuy neighborhood, introducing us in quick succession to most of the major players in a world as instantly distinctive as John Ford’s Monument Valley...or even Woody Allen’s Manhattan. (AO)

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

Rarely has a film’s initial moments set the forthcoming tone as immediately and evocatively as those of Apocalypse Now with its protracted shot of the Vietnamese jungle. From silence comes the sound of helicopter blades, then the airborne choppers themselves, and then the sparse electric guitar notes of The Doors’ “The End.” When Jim Morrison’s voice croons “This is the end” and bursts of napalm decimate the lush forest, the film fully enters into the realm of the hallucinatory, with Francis Ford Coppola’s pan through the smoke and fire soon integrating the superimposed image of Martin Sheen’s upside-down face, his head on a pillow facing a ceiling fan. Dream and reality coalesce in a woozy, hazy blend of longing, fear and self-inflicted violence (symbolized by a gun lying beside Sheen on the bed) that result, per the Lizard King, in “a wilderness of pain. And all the children are insane.” Table-setters don’t get much more exquisite than this. (NS)

BARBARELLA (1968)

This is more of an excuse for showing Jane Fonda naked than anything else, but the same could be said of the entire movie. An astronaut clad in a rather community theatre-looking metallic space suit floats weightlessly above a yellow shag carpet. Elevator muzak plays in the background and piece by piece, the suit comes off, revealing the astronaut to be a comely blonde, naked beneath the suit. Soon we have Barbarella floating around with her ass in the air to the tones of 1960s muzak. Cute and sexy for sure, but also disturbingly fetus-like. (SCS)

LA DOLCE VITA (1960)

La Dolce Vita has its fair share of famous scenes. The opening in which Jesus dangles from a helicopter flying low over Rome beats Anita Ekberg in the fountain by a mile. Fellini knows that any good opening needs to be odd and enjoyable besides hinting at what's to come. Here we have religion, sexy rich women, poor street boys, modern technology and ruins. And Paparazzo taking photos of it all while Marcello Mastroianni's character quietly eggs him on. (SCS)

THE SEARCHERS (1956)

Much is made of the final scene, where the movie's hero/anti-hero, the racist Ethan Edwards, cannot enter the embrace of the household, and the door slowly shuts on him. The opening scene is a mirror of the end, with Ethan's sister-in-law Martha opening the door and walking from the cool shade of the house into the harsh light of Monument Valley, relocated from Utah to Texas for the purposes of the film. Ethan is riding his horse in through the desert, still a ways off although closer than anything else in the huge landscape. The camera's journey from the dark interior to the brilliant and tremendous exterior emphasizes just how small the ranch is. Ethan's visit is his first in many years, and although the film doesn't say a word about it, it is clear that while his sleazy exploits are one reason he has stayed away for so long, his love for Martha is the primary cause. The whole of the plot revolves around that unspoken love. If you look for it, you can see it from the first moment Martha's face becomes visible, all of the concern and ambiguity that she cannot speak. Unspoken truths are at the heart of The Searchers, and in the gulf between what is said and what is meant is the real history of this country. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Hayden Childs

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

Spike Strikes Back

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Folks, we’re having a hard time keeping up with this story. When we checked in on Friday afternoon, Clint Eastwood had just fired back at Spike Lee over his complaints that Eastwood’s Iwo Jima pictures were lacking in African-American presence. Coining perhaps his most iconic catchphrase since “Go ahead, make my day,” Eastwood remarked of Lee that “A guy like him should shut his face.” Naturally we figured that Lee, being the mellow, non-confrontational fellow we know and love, would simply let it slide. But that’s not the case.

The Guardian, the newspaper that carried the Eastwood interview in which he made remarks, now brings us Lee’s retort. The Do the Right Thing man hauls out the heavy ammunition right off the bat. "First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either. He's a great director. He makes his films, I make my films ... And a comment like 'A guy like that should shut his face' - come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there."

“I'm not making this up,” Lee continues. “I know history. I'm a student of history. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to the second world war. Not everything was John Wayne, baby.” Responding to Eastwood’s defense that none of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima was African-American, Lee says, “For him to insinuate that I'm rewriting history and have one of the four guys with the flag be black ... no one said that. It's just that there's not one black in either film.”

Lee wraps it up by getting topical. “Even though he's trying to have a Dirty Harry flashback, I'm going to take the Obama high road and end it right here. Peace and love.” Yes, we can only hope the upcoming McCain/Obama debates will match the level of collegial discourse found in the Eastwood/Lee dialogues.

Related:
Spike Lee Blasts Clint Eastwood, Coen Brothers
Spike Lee Goes to War

Spike Lee Blasts Clint Eastwood, Coen Brothers

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Talking up his World War II epic Miracle at St. Anna, due in October from Walt Disney (!), Spike Lee took the opportunity to get in some shots at a couple of perennial Cannes darlings.

It wasn’t quite Kanye West declaring that George Bush doesn’t like black people, but Lee did have some thoughts to share about Clint Eastwood’s acclaimed pair of WWII pics, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. "Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee told reporters. "If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that -- that was his vision, not mine. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know."

At least that observation has some relevance to Lee’s current project, but he seemed to go out of his way to swipe at the Coen brothers as well. "I always treat life and death with respect, but most people don't. Look, I love the Coen brothers; we all studied at NYU. But they treat life like a joke. Ha ha ha. A joke. It's like, 'Look how they killed that guy! Look how blood squirts out the side of his head!' I see things different than that."

All of this comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which also notes that Lee is about to start work on a documentary about basketball legend Michael Jordan. Lee knows Jordan from the commercials they did together for sneakers made by Asian sweatshop labor, a little factoid Eastwood or the Coens may want to bring up next time the Do the Right Thing man starts gassing on about his respect for human life.

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.

When Good Directors Go Bad: She Hate Me (2004, Spike Lee)

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In addition to being one of America’s most celebrated directors, Spike Lee is one of its most productive, with more than two dozen feature films, documentaries, and television films to his credit along with innumerable shorts, commercials and music videos. Unfortunately, sometimes this productivity has led to a decrease in consistency. Lee has made a number of masterpieces in his career, but he’s also made his share of stinkers, the most notorious of which was 2004’s She Hate Me.

Now, if there’s one word that would never be used to describe Spike Lee, it’s timid. After all, he’s the man who in only his second feature made a campus musical about skin color (School Daze), who made a racially-motivated riot the climactic sequence of Do the Right Thing, and who made the first Hollywood film to actually address 9/11 (25th Hour). In addition, Lee has always been driven by current events. In the words of another Lee, the late Arthur, “the news today will be the movies of tomorrow,” and with She Hate Me, Spike Lee addressed many hot topics of the day- same-sex parenting, Enron, corrupt pharmaceuticals companies, the stereotype of the sexually-powerful black man, the then-recently-disbanded XFL, and the declining state of African-American families.

Sounds like a lot, right? The trouble is that Lee doesn’t quite know how to deal with it all. As a result, She Hate Me is all over the map, not only story-wise, but tonally as well. In one scene, the film’s protagonist, Jack (Anthony Mackie), might be having a heartfelt conversation about values with his father or his best friend. In the next, the film will become an outrageous sex comedy in which Jack beds down the entire starting five of a woman’s basketball team, powered only by Viagra and Red Bull. For long portions of the film, Lee seems to almost forget about the insider-trading scandal in which his former boss has implicated him. The film has no real direction or momentum, so it devolves into one damn thing after another, and by the time Jack has been called before a Senate subcommittee, we’ve long since thrown up our hands.

Another problem is that the comedic moments don’t work. There’s nothing inherently funny about the film’s edgiest and most infamous plot strand- Jack’s side job as a hired stud paid to impregnate rich lesbians (including characters played by Kerry Washington and Monica Bellucci, among others) at $10,000 a pop. So it falls to Lee to make these scenes work, and he’s not up to the task. Looking back at Lee’s career, I can’t help but notice that many of his worst-reviewed films (She Hate Me, Girl 6, the better-than-its-rep Bamboozled) are comedies. That seems a little strange, considering how wonderful She’s Gotta Have It is, and how funny his non-comedy films can be- remember the old guys on the corner in Do the Right Thing or Denzel Washington’s unconventional detective in Inside Man?

So why does Lee have such a problem with outright comedy? In She Hate Me, it just feels like he’s trying too hard. It’s not enough that Jack sleeps with five lesbians in one night- Lee goes overboard to make these scenes as outrageous as possible, crafting quick-cutting montages of Jack’s conquests, turning the women into overpowering stereotypes who call him “bitch boy” (among other things), and then showing Jack and his “magic wand dick” giving them all massive screaming orgasms in spite of the fact that they're supposed to be lesbians. If that’s not enough, Lee includes several animated sequences in which a sea of sperm (all bearing Jack’s face) race toward a waiting egg. It all gets to be too much after a while.

In the end, what’s the point that Lee is trying to make? I think Lee’s message is a simple one, and not a new one for him- “do the right thing.” Trouble is, it takes roughly 2 ¼ hours (!) to get to that point, by which time we’ve long since gotten lost amid all the zany sex antics and the whistleblowing scandal and the wacked-out digressions in the plot (John Turturro riffing on Don Corleone, anyone?). As sprawling and ambitious as Lee’s best films can be, they always maintain a clear focus, but that focus escaped him in She Hate Me, and this as much as anything else is what sinks it. Yet, as bad as it is, it’s certainly never boring. Given the ill-fitting parts of the story, it’s hard to imagine it working at all, but most filmmakers would have tried to rein it in and play it with a straight face. Lee goes in the opposite direction, and while it still doesn’t work, I’ll have a hard time forgetting it. Whether that’s a good thing, I’ll leave for you to decide.

The Movie Moment: Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

Paul Clark — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This afternoon, Spike Lee will be awarded the Wexner Prize by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The festivities include a month-long retrospective of Lee’s work, which enabled me to finally see Do the Right Thing on the big screen. I was too young to see the film in theatres on its first release, but I’ve watched it dozens of times on VHS and DVD in the intervening years. Lee's masterpiece has been one of my favorite films for a long time, but it never had nearly as much of an effect on me as it did on this most recent viewing. As much as any widescreen epic or special-effects spectacular, Do the Right Thing practically demands to be seen on the big screen.

One important element of the film that can’t be fully appreciated at home is the way Lee re-creates the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in which the film takes place. In Do the Right Thing, this isn’t simply the backdrop for the story, but a vibrant place. Lee presents a flurry of human activity, both seen and heard, and he’ll sometimes foreground characters in one scene only to put them in the background in the next. Lee’s Bed-Stuy always feels like a place where people really live. But as Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy asks, “are we gonna live together? Together, are we gonna live?”

On the hot summer day during which most of Do the Right Thing’s action occurs, the answer to Love Daddy’s question is in doubt. With so many people living on top of each other, there’s already plenty of tension in the air. There’s friction between the African-Americans and the Puerto Ricans who live in Bed-Stuy. Nobody seems happy about gentrification, personified by the Celtics-loving Clifton (John Savage). And there’s some lingering resentment towards the local business owners, a Korean family that has recently opened a convenience store, and even Sal (Danny Aiello), who for years has run the pizzeria with his sons and employs the film’s audience surrogate Mookie (played by Lee himself) as a delivery boy.

Meanwhile, smaller bits of tension pile up on top of each other. Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) makes a stink about the “American-Italians only” pictures on Sal’s Wall of Fame. Sal’s son Pino (John Turturro) can’t keep his racist tendencies in check, and occasionally rails against the neighborhood and its residents. Radio Raheem’s (Bill Nunn) Public Enemy-blasting boom box antagonizes many of those he meets, especially Sal. And then there’s the NYPD, who occasionally drive through, casting suspicious eyes in everyone. Lee shoots many of these moments at tilted angles to create unease in the audience, and the tilts grow ever more extreme as the film progresses. All the while, Lee is saying that these conflicts are a reality in our country, and all it takes is one small spark to make them explode, as they do in Do the Right Thing’s climactic sequence, in which Radio Raheem is killed by the cops and Sal’s store is burned to the ground.

Yet watching the film again, amid all the violence, I was drawn more than ever to its most empathetic character, an elderly seen-it-all drunk called Da Mayor, played by Ossie Davis. Da Mayor is the most ubiquitous supporting player in the film, often hovering over the action when he’s not actively taking part in it. Several times in the film, he’s disrespected by others, but he’s kind to everyone. Even as the tension at Sal’s comes to a head, Da Mayor calls for a peaceful resolution, and eventually he leads Sal and sons away from the rioting to (relative) safety.

Most moving of all are his scenes with Mother Sister, played by Ruby Dee, Davis’ real-life wife. At first, Mother Sister puts him down, proclaiming him “a drunk fool.” Their early scenes together are shot at the same severe angles as the other arguments in the film. But after Da Mayor brings Mother Sister some flowers as a peace offering, the shot composition of their scenes changes. As the sun begins to set, Mother Sister thanks him for saving a young boy, and from this scene onward, their conversations are shot with a level frame, indicating that the friction between these two has given way to a deeper understanding for each other. As if to punctuate his point, the shot of Da Mayor reacting to Mother Sister’s thanks is framed with a streetlight in the background, and as his face brightens, the light flickers on.

At the time of its release, many critics interpreted Do the Right Thing as an attempt to incite racially-motivated violence. Perhaps they were confused with the film’s final quotations, one from Dr. Martin Luther King advocating understanding, the other from Malcolm X arguing about the intelligence of violence in self-defense. But it’s clear to me that Lee sees them as two sides of the same coin: empathize if you can, fight back if you must. Now more than ever, the film plays less as a incitement to violence than to empathy, as set forth in Dr. King’s quote:

“[Violence] is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding… It destroys a community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue.”

Throughout the film, characters are so intent on shouting each other down that they won’t step back and listen, and this as much as the sweltering heat finally leads to the climactic tragedies. It’s for this reason- among many, many others- that Do the Right Thing remains the crowning work of Spike Lee’s fascinating career, and one of the greatest and most important American films ever made. And that, to once again quote Love Daddy, is the quintessential truth, Ruth.

Links to previous Movie Moment posts can be found by clicking here.

Do the Wright Thing

Gwynne Watkins — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

It's the little things in life that make us happy. Like when Jeffrey Wright make headlines for reprising his role as a CIA agent in the next James Bond film, Bond 22. Wright is one of those actors who's received extraordinary critical praise throughout his career, yet has mostly been relegated to character roles, meaning he's not yet a household name. Among film enthusiasts, he's best known for the title role of Basquiat and for reprising his stunning Broadway performance as Belize in Mike Nichol's Angels in America. The Bond film just started shooting today, but fans can next catch Wright in the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival entry Blackout, which will see a DVD release in February.

That Guy: Steve Park

Peter Smith — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Korean-American actor Steve Park doesn't have the robust résumé that some of the people we've featured in this column can claim. Whose fault that is makes for a fascinating question — one that Park has had the courage to ask, which may in itself constitute the answer. Park is a gifted and emotionally open actor who's likewise a talented comedian; he was a series regular on In Living Color, where he met and married his wife, actress Kelly Coffield, and while the show didn't serve as a springboard to huge fame the way it did his fellow cast member Jim Carrey, he likewise didn't become synonymous with shrill, joke-free comedies, and got to ply his trade in a number of TV sitcoms without half the country cringing at the mere mention of his name. In 1996, coming off of his greatest screen performance, he was accorded the rare opportunity to become a guest star on Friends — at the time the highest-rated show on television, and one which, by no means coincidentally, was coming under some criticism for its portrayal of contemporary New York as a lily-white yuppie enclave no more ethnically robust than Omaha, Nebraska. While filming his episodes, Park witnessed an ugly racial incident involving the crew, and detected a certain callousness and arrogance in his fellow actors; and, rather than do what 99% of Hollywood would do in that situation — keep his mouth shut and collect his paycheck — he chose instead to pen a deeply felt and brutally honest article called "Struggling for Dignity," in which he attacked the industry for its retrograde views of Asian-Americans and its highest-paid stars for ignoring the often brutal and inhumane treatment of their lesser-known fellows. Since writing his 'mission statement,' Park has struggled to findfilm work. He turned in a memorable cameo as a villain on the clever Venture Brothers cartoon, and he's currently appearing in Rocket Science, his first big-screen role in a decade. It doesn't take much speculation to conclude that daring to call out the entertainment industry on its casual racism and failings of basic decency is the reason he hasn't gotten much work lately, but hopefully his own struggle for dignity is behind him, and enough producers and directors will see in him what the Coen brothers did in his most famous role.

Where to see Steve Park at his best:

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, tension between Korean-Americans and African-Americans was at an all-time high following a handful of violent confrontations. Ice Cube crudely dramatized it in his song "Black Korea," and when Spike Lee chose to make it a factor in his powerful drama of racial conflict in New York, he used Steve Park as the face of the Korean immigrant population. Park's role as Sonny was his big-screen debut, and it's also the first hint that he was a talented actor as well as a comic.

FALLING DOWN (1993)

Ironically, given his later role as a de facto spokeman against Hollywood's still-lingering racial prejudices and ethnic stereotyping, one of Steve Park's biggest movie roles was that of Detective Brian, a policeman assigned to the "D-FENS" case in Michael Douglas' 'angry white male' action-drama. Like many people who saw Falling Down, Park's character (and, without a doubt, the actor himself) must have had a pretty hard time figuring out what a guy like Douglas's peevish upper-middle-class defense contractor had to be pissed about in the first place.

FARGO (1996)

As Mike Yanagita, Steve Park can fairly be said to play perhaps the key role in the Coen brothers' brilliant portrayal of small-town crime gone bad. The appearance of the character skews the entire movie, and plays a key role in determining the character of Marge Gunderson; Park took a great deal of heat from certain quarters of the Asian-American community for taking the role, which was short-sightedly perceived as stereotypical by some who missed the deep irony contained in the character. Time will tell if it turns out to be the first of many great performances by Park, or simply an unforgettable role of a lifetime.

— Leonard Pierce