Luther Campbell, aka Uncle Luke, is surely best known for writing songs like “Me So Horny” and “Pop That Coochie” with 2 Live Crew, but he has warranted mention on this site a few times before, like when he starred in a Sundance short where he has sex with some naked zombies. Basically, it’s not like he’s been sitting around his townhouse waiting for a comeback on Omelets with the Stars or something. Today he’s back in the news, having written an editorial for the Miami New Times referring to Spike Lee as “Hollywood’s resident house negro.” Uncle Luke has apparently been writing this New Times column for quite some time, but hardly any of us noticed until he started sh*tting on Spike Lee because we’re terrible.

Screw Spike Lee. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is a brilliant flick that more accurately depicts the African American experience than any of the 15 movies about black culture Lee’s directed in his lifetime.
[...]
Lee needs to get over himself. He’s upset because Tarantino makes better movies. The man who put Malcolm X on the big screen is Hollywood’s resident house negro; a bougie activist who wants to tell his fellow white auteurs how they can and can’t depict African Americans.
He complains that Tarantino uses “n*gger” too much (100 times) in Django Unchained, but show me a white man in the 1800s who wasn’t dropping n-bombs left and right.
Tarantino is one of Tinseltown’s most clever directors. Some of the most brutal scenes in Django Unchained are metaphors for the unfair racial inequality African-Americans still experience today. For instance, Leonardo DiCaprio’s plantation owner character Calvin Candie trains some of his male slaves to fight to the death in a sport called “Mandingo Fighting.”
When one of the slaves refuses to fight, Candie threatens to feed him to his wild dogs. That scene is analogous to professional boxing where white promoters control black fighters through fear and intimidation.
In another scene, a bunch of slaves are shocked to see Django riding a horse since blacks were never allowed to have one. That’s like the cops who stare at and then pull over the dude who is driving a Bentley on South Beach.
While on the horse, Django tells the slaves that he’ll treat them worse than any white man ever will. That’s the truth about blacks in positions of authority in today’s corporate America. They will treat blacks worse than any white boss every could.
Lee could never pull off a movie like this. When he’s not being an ass from his court side seats during New York Knicks games, he’s making bull crap films that most African Americans cannot relate to. [MiamiNewTimes/Luke's Gospel]

Obviously, I liked Django Unchained quite a bit, and I’m almost positive I didn’t come away from it with a rosier view of slavery or more desensitized to violence. I generally like Tarantino and think Spike Lee is generally the black version of Oliver Stone, a guy who claims many causes but none more than self-aggrandizement. In short, kind of a twat. That said, between this and Armond White calling Sam Jackson an Uncle Tom (I disagree with his analysis, but he made the occasional valid point), I’m a little uncomfortable with how quickly arguments over this film seem to devolve into vicious personal attacks. Which is to say, I can think of at least one more Mandingo Fighting parallel that should make us all a bit queasy about cheering too hard for this feud. Can’t we agree to disagree? I mean you didn’t hear white people calling each other race traitors because they didn’t like Crash. And it would’ve been just as valid because that movie was an embarrassment. Or The King’s Speech. In fact, if ever there was a white version of an Uncle Tom, it’s Colin Firth, that repressed motherf*cker.

As mentioned in the previous post, the New York Film Critics Circle had their awards ceremony this week, and as a three-time former chairman of the circle, our favorite old curmudgeonarion thesaurasaurus Armond White was in the audience. At one point, Michael Moore took the stage to present an award for How to Survive a Plague, at which point White and a friend began to heckle him, shouting “F*ck you!”, which is much less Armond White-like than when he shouted “Ethel Waters!” at Viola Davis last year.

Moore was on hand to present the award for Best First Film to David France, whose feature “How to Survive a Plague” is a salute to ACT UP, the radical protest group whose most notorious action was to send thousands of protesters to St. Patrick’s Cathedral during the Christmas season in 1989. Dozens stormed into the December Mass to disrupt the prayers and desecrate the Host, which Catholics believe is the Body of Christ. A stunned John Cardinal O’Connor looked on in horror. The publicity stunt was denounced by David Dinkins, Mario Cuomo, Ed Koch and the Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Rights.

Moore, saluting the ACT UP film, said the American public was indifferent to the AIDS crisis as it happened and indeed breathed “almost a collective sigh of relief that it [AIDS] was primarily victimizing gay men.” Moore went on to say he liked the film’s reminder that “the Cardinal couldn’t get through Mass at St. Patrick’s.”

Moore stated, “I personally like that one. I say that as a former seminarian.” But White and a friend shouted, “[Bleep] you!” “You liar!” “Shut up!” and “Drop dead!”

Moore responded, “I’ve pissed off the Catholics,” and began a blessing in Latin. He then went on to say that “those who would deify Reagan and Pope John Paul II are responsible for the deaths of thousands of people . . . because of their bigotry.”

You see, in the world of Armond White, Catholicism is almost as sacrosanct as those benefirous priapizians of modern masculinity, Neveldine and Taylor, whose effervesphorescent tours de force in multi-dimensionarious explosiatalitarianism out-patinas the lambency of even Paul WS Anderson and Jack and Jill. As such, a vulgar interloafer like Michael Moore must be punished with the most withering pejoratives in the junior high milieu. Read the rest of this entry »

For a guy who once said “I don’t change my style for anyone. Pussies do that.” Michael Bay sure seems to get hurt little feelings any time one of his actors points out that Transformers has all the cultural value of those Olestra chips that made your asshole leak. Or as we in the business call it, “acknowledging the obvious.” Most recently, it was Hugo Weaving, who provided the voice of Megatron, who said, when asked by Collider if he’d been contacted by Michael Bay about the next Transformers movie:

“No.  That’s a weird job for me because it honestly was a two-hour voice job, initially.  I was doing a play and I actually didn’t have time, anyway.  It was one of the only things I’ve ever done where I had no knowledge of it, I didn’t care about it, I didn’t think about it.  They wanted me to do it.  In one way, I regret that bit.  I don’t regret doing it, but I very rarely do something if it’s meaningless.  It was meaningless to me, honestly.  I don’t mean that in any nasty way.  I did it.  It was a two-hour voice job, while I was doing other things.  Of course, it’s a massive film that’s made masses of money.  I just happened to be the voice of one of the iconic villainous characters.  But, my link to that and to Michael Bay is so minimal.  I have never met him.  I was never on set.  I’ve seen his face on Skype.  I know nothing about him, really.  I just went in and did it.  I never read the script.  I just have my lines, and I don’t know what they mean.  That sounds absolutely pathetic!  I’ve never done anything like that, in my life.  It’s hard to say any more about it than that, really.”

Pretty diplomatic, really. He felt bad taking a big paycheck to do a movie he didn’t care much about. He still took it, but it’s not like he said Michael Bay was a black-market organ farmer or anything, he was mostly being self-deprecating. Of course, Michael Bay didn’t see it that way, lashing out at unnamed h8ers on his personal website, like a baller do:

Do you ever get sick of actors that make $15 million a picture, or even $200,000 for voiceover work that took a brisk one hour and 43 minutes to complete, and then complain about their jobs? With all the problems facing our world today, do these grumbling thespians really think people reading the news actually care about trivial complaints that their job wasn’t “artistic enough” or “fulfilling enough”? I guess The Hollywood Reporter thinks so.

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Pfister, speaking with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

Q: What’s most important in shooting a film?

A: What’s really important is storytelling. None of it matters if it doesn’t support the story. I thought “The Avengers” was an appalling film. They’d shoot from some odd angle and I’d think, why is the camera there? Oh, I see, because they spent half a million on the set and they have to show it off. It took me completely out of the movie. I was driven bonkers by that illogical form of storytelling.

In conclusion…

Actually, I made a similar complaint in my Avengers review, that there were certain shots, especially in the beginning, that just had random detritus (leaves, bushes, etc) framed in the foreground that were only there so they could show off the depth of the 3D. It didn’t ruin the movie, but it was still lame. Nonetheless, I’m excited for the inevitable pissing contest between humorless Dark Knight Rises apologists and humorless Avengers apologists. I bet it will be humorless!

Okay, so that was the blatant link bait, here’s a more interesting bit:

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Nikki Finke File Photo

There’s a funny little story I like to tell at my Hollywood swingers parties on board the Sony Pictures invisible yacht. It’s about the time that I had a fake Ryan Gosling Twitter account and the real Ryan Gosling didn’t like that I had “burgled” his name and he had it shut down, crushing the hearts of 50,000 people with good senses of humor and 1 batshit crazy Italian girl who Tweeted “TOLDJA!” at people every day that she’d get me caught for impersonating Baby Goose. Haha, hey girl, you win at Twitter and life.

And speaking of fake Twitter accounts and “TOLDJA!” baloney, Deadline’s Nikki Finke is apparently freaking out – shocking, I know – over a parody account that mocks her “Don’t f*ck with me” attitude. The account, @NIKKIFINKE, has a bio that pretty much sums up how most people feel about Finke: “Mostly I want to see how it long it takes until Nikki Finke threatens me with a lawsuit.”

And according to David Poland of The Hot Blog – which disappointingly features no GIFs of Olivia Wilde jiggling her boobs – Finke is threatening him, not because he has anything to do with that parody account, but because he retweeted it. So go ahead and add this to her current feuds with Bret Easton Ellis, Gavin Polone, and probably you, for all you know.

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