The other day when I posted the Fergie song on the Great Gatsby soundtrack, I couldn’t shake the feeling that The Great Gatsby would be the non tongue-in-cheek Spring Breakers. This latest batch of posters only seemed to confirm my suspicions, thus I added captions. I think the Spring Breakers captions work so well that I didn’t even need to alter them. Memes, mash-ups, the internet, etc. It’s important work we’re doing here.
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.
Over the weekend, Spike Lee told Vibe TV that he won’t be seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, because it’s disrespectful. I don’t know how he knows that without having seen it, but whenever people don’t see a movie, I like to imagine them saying “here’s my impression of the audience for Miracle at St. Anna.”
“I cant speak on it ’cause I’m not gonna see it,” Lee said. “All I’m going to say is that it’s disrespectful to my ancestors. That’s just me… I’m not speaking on behalf of anybody else.”
I guess “speaking on it” doesn’t include what he just said or what he said on Twitter, because he also Tweeted the following:
American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western.It Was A Holocaust.My Ancestors Are Slaves.Stolen From Africa.I Will Honor Them.
— Spike Lee (@SpikeLee) December 22, 2012
“@ba_benny_boy @spikelee its just a movie damn spike”Wrong.Birth Of A Nation Got Black Folks Lynced.Media Is Powerful.DON’T SLEEP.WAKE UP YO
— Spike Lee (@SpikeLee) December 22, 2012
While Spike Lee has a history of saying dumb things (accidentally retweeting an elderly couple’s address while trying to incite mob violence against George Zimmerman being only one of the more recent) and of publicly criticizing Tarantino, I don’t want to just dismiss what he says out of hand because of who he is. Though I will say that if you’re trying to do intellectual cultural criticism, maybe a phone that capitalizes every word and makes you sound like semi-literate spambot isn’t the best tool.
As for the criticism, I’m not sure what it even is. That you’re not allowed to make genre films about serious subjects? That every slave movie should be Roots? The holocaust is a terrible comparison. “Slavery was a holocaust! You don’t see Tarantino making three-hour spaghetti westerns about the holocaust, do you? I mean, other than that three-hour holocaust western he made three years ago!”
A Twitter user threatened to shoot up the Broadway opening of a Mike Tyson one-man-show being directed by Spike Lee on Friday. The shooting never happened, but when the NYPD asked Twitter for the user’s information, they refused.
“This s–t ain’t no joke yo — I’m serious, people are gonna die like aurora,” the lunatic scrawled in one tweet.
“Gosh I’m still making this hit list damn I wanna kill a lot of people,” the nutjob warned in another chilling tweet about the bloodshed he would unleash at the Longacre Theatre in Midtown, home to Mike Tyson’s one-man show, “Undisputed Truth.”Detectives immediately sent an “emergency request” to Twitter in an effort to unmask the sicko — but the social media site flat-out refused it in an e-mail the next day, the sources said.
“Gosh, I wanna kill a lot of people.” It’s nice that he won’t take the lord’s name in vain while he’s committing murder. Can’t be all bad, right? Anyway, this was Twitter’s response, according to the NY Post:
“We appreciate the timeliness and sensitivity of this matter, and have reviewed the reported Twitter account,” the e-mail said.
“While we do invoke emergency-disclosure procedures when it appears that a threat is present, specific and immediate, this does not appear to fall under those strict parameters as per our policies.”
In other words, Twitter says Twitter gets to make those decisions. Not that the police would necessarily be better at making them, it’s just… interesting.
In a heartwarming story of cooperation and racial understanding, Spike Lee, the man who single-handedly proved that chunky eye glasses do not make you smart, has reached “an undisclosed settlement” ($KEET $KEET $KEET!) with the Florida couple whose address he accidentally retweeted while trying to incite mob violence against the guy who shot Trayvon Martin. Time heals all wounds. Oh, and also lots of money.
The couple’s attorney, Matt Morgan, announced the settlement Thursday. Morgan says Lee called them to apologize for retweeting their address. Specifics of the settlement weren’t disclosed.
“He was really kind,” Elaine McClain said. “And when he called us, you could just tell he really felt bad about it. And it was just a slip, and I just know that he really, really has been concerned.” [EntertainmentWeekly]
Phew, well I’m glad this case is behind us now.
How much money did he pay them? I’d say about four “really”s worth.
[pic via DailyRotation]
