MALCOLM X (1992) was a big fucking deal for Spike Lee. A big budget period historical drama, an epic really, that he had to fight to get hired on, and to finance, and to get permission to shoot in Mecca. And got recently freed Nelson Mandela to make a cameo in! It worked, and it was a phenomenon. So how the hell do you follow that up? He chose to make his most autobiographical film, though actually it’s more about his younger sister Joie, who gets a story credit and wrote the screenplay with Spike and their brother Cinqué.
So on May 13th, 1994, three days after Mandela was inaugurated as the first president of free South Africa, CROOKLYN came out, did pretty good, came in third after THE CROW and WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN. Probly felt a little anticlimactic for Spike. But it’s a great movie.
Lee still had editor Barry Alexander Brown, production designer Wynn Thomas, and costume designer Ruth E. Carter, so there’s a continuity with his earlier movies. But Ernest Dickerson, the director of photography for everything since his student film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, had retired from cinematography to direct JUICE and SURVIVING THE GAME. Those were big shoes to fill. So Lee hooked up with Arthur Jafa, a Howard-educated video artist who had been married to Julie Dash and was d.p. for her DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST. (read the rest of this shit…)
CUT THROAT CITY may be the capital of 
June 26, 1998
Clooney had already become a superstar on ER and proven himself big-screen-worthy in FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, but it was Steven Soderbergh who taught him to cut down on his trademark head-bobbing and become a real movie star. Wearing a suit I thought I heard somewhere was inspired by Cary Grant’s from NORTH BY NORTHWEST, he manages to charm his poor bank teller victim enough that when he tells her to have a nice day as he’s leaving with the money she reflexively says “You too.”
Well, I’m skipping ahead in the Spike Lee chronology I’ve been ever-so-slowly crawling my way through, but I thought a movie about a march on Washington would be a good thing to revisit on the Martin Luther King Day starting the week that, as far as we know, will end with the inauguration of the first American president to be 2 degrees of separation from Steven Seagal (they have a mutual friend, a Russian guy named Vladimir something) and subsequent protest march.
