Saw "He Got Game" - the Spike Lee movie. It didn't quite work for me.
I'm afraid Spike can do comedy ten times better than evoking sympathy or tears. It certainly wasn't better than "Hoop Dreams." A pity considering how much potential his story-line had -- the father (Jake Shuttlesworth) of the nation's top basketball prospect is given a secret furlow from Attica, so he can convince his son (Jesus Shuttlesworth) to go to the governor's alma mater.
I don't know why Spike underplayed it. Perhaps he's not hungry anymore. He's got the exposure. He's got the reputation. He's got the undivided attention of black movie-goers. Maybe he's got too many "yes men" around him now. Success has a way of filing down a person's sharp edges.
Not much politically correct stuff in the movie. Interestingly, Spike scripts in more subtle affection for Italians than they deserve. And the Hispano-black lead in the movie -- Jesus's girlfriend -- has the curious name "Lala Bonita." Funny, but kind of slap. Kind of like naming the lone blackman in a movie "Nappy Hamhock." _Boricua_ is thrown all over the flick as I guess the Puerto Ricuenos are beginning to shape black/inner city culture. And one of Jesus' gangsta friends is a very white looking Puerto Rican. Jesus' mother looks whiter than Lena Horne.
I get the sense that Spike has turned the corner on his racial animus, if he ever had any. I know he disapproved of his father's second (white) wife. And then again maybe it was more complex than that. After all, I remember the racial "hype" surrounding Spike Lee and "Do the Right Thing" and rap groups such as Public Enemy.
Maybe I should have been suspicious when this film got a white-media 3+ stars. Traditionally, they used to show up on my TV screen to protest some of his best work -- "School Daze," "Do the Right Thing," "Jungle Fever" -- thereby elevating those films to "must see" status. Hey, any black man causing consternation among the whitefolk, while producing good entertainment and yielding provocative racial dialogue is a "must see" in my book. Yet, there was nothing even redeemingly risky in this venture.
The movie's failure all made sense to me by about 30 minutes into the overdone Nike Ad. Think about the promo, all the cameos and the Public Enemy soundtrack, I understand what Spike Lee is into now -- making money off the presentation rather than the substance. His film had a quintessentially American/multi-cultural sheen to it, but jazz always seems to sneak into his movies. And whereas I've almost always found his movies having something in them for everybody, this effort fell short. Simply, it tried too hard.
I bet Spike hoped this film would end up being a "cross-over" bonanza. Yet, all it signalled to me is that he ready to "sell-out." Way too much Aaron Copeland in the soundtrack. Way too many slow-pans over meaningless pastoral settings. One wheat-field shot is too much! All the P.E. tracks used classic-rock riffs as the back-beat. The first scene, in fact, had a farm boy with corn-colored hair shooting a basketball. C'mon! Basketball might be American, but really, any more genuflecting to the whitefolk in a sport mostly dominated blacks is just a few steps above pan-handling.
As for the drama, Spike left all the dramatic material wrapped up in its unopened box. Jesus remains the same as when he began, his father, virtually unchanged -- save his 70s 'fro that the furlow produces. Other characters remain the cardboard cut-outs they are introduced as. I know Spike's been criticized of this before -- no character development -- but at least in his earlier works, he used these cartoons for comic effect and some important social commentary.
Perhaps there's a lesson drawn from his film and its artistic failure. In one scene, when an Italian agent tries to court Jake's son into jumping right into the NBA, Jesus says he's going to pick a "brother" as an agent. The agent quickly pulls out a wad of greenbacks and says something like "I'm white, you're black and the only thing that matters is green...this is green." Well, now I know what Spike's grabbing for and you better believe it ain't the soul.
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