The man who gave us “Do the Right Thing” and “He Got Game” is talking up the power of getting a good education and how the media makes gangster life far too appealing. Cosby said essentially the same thing a few years back, but members of the black community didn’t take kindly to the veteran comic’s message.

Despite 100 years of slavery, our ancestors were smart enough to know that education would be the thing to lead us out of bondage,” he said. “At a time when to learn to read and write was against the law for African-Americans, our ancestors risked life and limb to learn.”

He spoke of his parents’ and grandparents’ generations greatest mantra: “Education is the key.”

Then, he asked the crowd how, with such a rich history, fewer than half of Black males graduate from high school in America.

Lee blamed the influence that crack cocaine has had in poor neighborhoods and the influence that media have had in glorifying drugs and gangsters, whom he said are primarily portrayed by Black actors.

“I am from the pre-crack generation. When I was growing up, we never, ever, never ridiculed someone because they were a good student,” he said.

Read the rest of Lee’s comments here.

Smith is the pudgy fanboy fave behind “Clerks” and “Chasing Amy.” Lee is the combustible auteur who gave us “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X.”

But both directors find their careers in serious decline, and they’re not going out without a fight. But instead of making great movies to smite their critics, they’re opening up their mouths far too often.

Smith has been playing this game for years now, ranting via Twitter and any nearby media outlet about how little his work his valued, all the while keeping up a pseudo-self deferential shtick. His latest salvo – blasting the Independent Spirit Awards for daring to snub his crude horror film “Red State.”

Lee is rocking a similar boat. His best work appears behind him, and yet he can’t stop talking as if he were still the same wunderkind who bowled audiences over with “Do the Right Thing” back in 1989. Remember his ungainly dust up with living legend Clint Eastwood about the number of minorities in Eastwood’s World War II film “Flags of Our Fathers?”

Lee recently let loose an expletive-filled tirade against Hollywood during a screening of his newest movie at the Sundance Film Festival. The irony that Lee’s latest, “Red Hook Summer,” might not have gained such a prestigious festival birth had Lee’s name not been made two decades ago wasn’t lost on the director. He acknowledged that fact indirectly during his rant.

So, is “Red Hook Summer” any good? Here’s TheWrap.com’s take on the film, which finds Lee playing the same character he developed for “Do the Right Thing:”

“Red Hook Summer” is confounding, divisive and messy. It’s a lament disguised as a comedy that turns into a brutal drama and ends up as an epic.

Others were less kind, Tweeting that the film marked “one of the worst films to ever premiere at Sundance.” Hey, it couldn’t be as bad as Smith’s “Cop Out,” right?

It would be great to see either Smith, Lee or both directors return to the headlines for all the right reasons. Instead, we’re left to feast on press-grabbing antics rather that movies that make us think, laugh and appreciate two formerly outsized talents.

THR:

In his opening remarks, Obama recalled how he took Michelle to see Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing on their first date, according to the pool report.

Lee quipped: “Good thing you didn’t choose Driving Miss Daisy.” …

Mariah Carey and husband Nick Cannon are among the 45 guests at the $35,800-per-ticket dinner in NYC.

Amid all the talk of a Hollywood boycott on fundraising for Barack Obama because of his SOPA position, the president was feted Thursday night at a $35,800-per-ticket fundraiser at director Spike Lee’s New York City brownstone.

Full piece here.

The New York Times piece Lee refers to here is the most appalling piece of race-baiting I’ve read in years. You can read my write-up about it at Big Journalism. The reaction the Times was looking for is exactly this kind of thing from Spike Lee. They want high-profile, left-wing black Americans to take after Herman Cain. They want to toxify him as a sell-out in order to hurt his standing among black voters. The Times also wants to make damn sure Tea Party Republicans get no credit for embracing a black man. That would kill a cherished narrative the corrupt MSM has spent two years creating about us being racist.

The Times thinking is simple: racists love “minstrelsy” Black people, so by portraying Cain as such, the dishonest narrative that the Tea Party is racist lives on… in spite of Cain being our guy.

The price black people pay for being free thinkers in this country is a very, very cruel one.

Ask Clarence Thomas.

In many popular narratives of the period, it was the Baby Boomers (born 1943-1960) who “ruined” the movies. Here’s the pretentious film snob summary of the death of Hollywood’s alleged second Golden Age, as popularized by Peter Biskind. The seventies were filled with bold, dark art and transgressive intellectualism. Then the greedy Baby Boomers – like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – made “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “E.T.” All of a sudden Hollywood did not want to make serious, grown-up pictures. Now it was the age of blockbusters so simple that 3-year-olds can summarize them.

It was the 1980s when Boomer Blockbuster filmmaking would arrive in the event pictures of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson. We see this tendency further in the films of arch-Boomers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. For a definition of Boomer cinema just look at the output of their company Imagine Entertainment. These aren’t the New Wave-influenced pictures of Roger L. Simon’s generation.

It was the Boomers who also gave us our most strident and simpleminded cinematic leftists: Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, and Michael Moore. Think about these three careers. Over the past 30 years have any of them shifted an inch in their political thinking? Of course not and neither have most Boomers who are still arguing over sex, race, and the Vietnam War as though it were still 1975.

If I speak with some hostility about the Boomers’ failings and excesses it’s partially because that’s my nature as a Millennial/Gen Yer. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s books each generation acts as a check on the excesses of its parent generation. As young adults in the ‘60s and ‘70s the Baby Boomers declared war on the cultural institutions of their GI Generation parents. The GIs (born 1900-1924) are what Howe and Strauss describe as a “civic” generation; they were driven toward creating social harmony. The Boomers (an “idealist” generation) were a check on that, fomenting greater individualism in the 1970s and culture wars in the 1990s. That our electoral maps are so split today is their fault. When the Civic GI President Ronald Reagan won in 1984 it was almost a solid red map. My generation – also a Civic generation – is a reaction against Baby Boomer extremes and will seek to create greater social harmony. This will become much more apparent as the younger Gen Yers in junior high and high school now start to make waves in 10 years.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet (born 1957) has been emblematic of the divisive Boomer paradigm for his whole career. His plays and films are famous for the “Mamet style” of short bursts of memorable dialogue and the mainstreaming of casual profanity.

And so in his book detailing his rightward shift away from a “Brain-Dead” Hollywood leftist, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, the reader finds this same mindset applied to the political essay. The need to divide the world into clear cut categories of Liberalism and Conservatism pervades the text. Mamet even capitalizes them to Emphasize the Great Importance of the Political War between Boomer Liberalism and Boomer Conservatism. Gone is Simon’s sense of skepticism in Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine.

The Secret Knowledge is a collection of 39 short essays. Mamet has crafted an experience like the signature Boomer film “Forrest Gump.” Life is like a box of chocolates – and devouring the delicious morsels of Mamet’s book is an addictive treat, filled with surprises. Who cares if it’s just a political sugar rush? Most conservatives are familiar with the bibliography Mamet cribs his ideas from: Sowell, Hayek, VDH, Friedman, etc. Thus they won’t learn anything life-changing but will still enjoy the thrill of Mr. Mamet’s Wild Ride. And if that sentiment doesn’t summarize the Boomer cinema of Lucas-Spielberg-Bruckheimer-Moore-Stone then what does?

The endowment of the Baby Boomer Hollywood Apostates is the call to fight, the drive to confront with big special effects, and the need to divide ourselves from the intolerable. This makes for satisfying blockbuster popcorn films and effective (James Carville-Karl Rove style) political warfare. While there is plenty to critique in the failings of the Boomer presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush credit must be given: the Boomer political strategists were masters. Too bad they wasted their brains on winning the electoral fights while ignoring (and sometimes exacerbating) the more vital policy fights.

In Part 4 of the Hollywood Revolt, we’ll see how the Gen X leader Andrew Breitbart is reinventing this confrontational spirit – what he calls Righteous Indignation — and redirecting it in a more pragmatic, effective way than the Boomers ever could.

Luckily, my experience in graduate school is a different story. My professors have been more concerned with historical relevancy and less about turning a film lecture into a civics lesson. One professor who does the field a favor by putting together a fair assessment is Drew Casper, the Alma and Alfred Hitchcock Chair of American Film at USC, with his latest book, Hollywood Film 1963-1976: Years of Revolution and Reaction. Casper takes on a time period of filmmaking very dear to him that he feels has been unfairly dominated by leftist praise that purposely ignores certain films. Exposing his frustrations, Casper says that “predictably, the [scholarly] discussions are rather obsessive, focusing on the same films time and again that fit the critically beloved template” (xvi). This is exactly what I went through as an undergraduate. Extra studying on my part had to be done to get a well-rounded view of film history.

This common template favors liberals, constantly overhyping films like The Graduate, Mash, and Five Easy Pieces with praise that is more suited for something like The Godfather. Casper’s problem is that in the usual  film history text, a film like the leftist McCabe and Mrs. Miller will take up an entire chapter while the conservative and more iconic True Grit (1969 version) goes overlooked. The pious view of some films like Dr. Strangelove will force the ignorance of an equally important film (even those with similar political leanings). This fidelity to the most radical films will create a predictable view of others, “sometimes a conservative film is noted, only to be vilified for its politics, such aspersion clouding any thoughts about its aesthetic merits” (xvii). This is the case with Dirty Harry, where the left loves to hold this film up as fascist (Casper describes the “self-righteous” vitriol spewed by Pualine Kael about this film).

The first few chapters of the text are a well-balanced account of the 60s and 70s in America both culturally and politically. Courageously, Casper notes it’s so difficult to hear about centrist and conservative movies in many film courses because anti-American Marxists began to dominate the humanities fields in higher education. Continuing his discussion of the time, Casper says that “One nation, indivisible, under God, was turning into a secular series of ever-growing fiefdoms” (27), which accurately paints a picture for this tumultuous time period in American history (he also provides an honest depiction of the Kennedys which was a breath of fresh air). The lengthy breakdown of the changes occurring in America and Hollywood is essential in understanding this part of American film history (especially if you are like me and were born after the fact).

A large chunk of the book is dedicated to detailing how genres were used during this time period. Genres began to transition into what felt like a revolution (131), working primarily as a political force. The culture war blew up and all sides got in the fight. This period saw films working as renewal, hybridization as well as demythologizing of traditional genres (adventure, Western, family melodrama, comedy, etc). Casper accurately notes that “using genre as a soapbox, characters’ psychology became less significant than the ideas they incited” (134). The collective liberalism in the country was growing which led to far less superhero films (the genre is generally conservative) and many more Vietnam-Westerns. In addition, adventure films became popular but are widely overlooked by scholars. Films like Papillon, The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen and Deliverance are given ample appreciation compared to past work on this timeframe.

The 60s and 70s saw a large downswing in war films which led to an upswing in Westerns, allowing filmmakers to comment on the war through metaphor. These films depicted a savage attitude towards Native Americans to address the violence in Vietnam (Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, Ulzana’s Raid). Others became a platform for radical domestic politics such as Robert Altman’s widely praised McCabe and Mrs. Miller (which is a wonderful genre play that unfortunately becomes and anti-capitalist wet dream). While these films are certainly worth noting, Casper does the genre justice by also mentioning other important films the liberals like to ignore such as True Grit, Jeremiah Johnson, El Dorado, and overlooked (liberal) Sam Peckinpah films; The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. In addition, we see the popular Leone films examined as Marxist where the filmmaker “planned to expose the ‘real’ American West as one rough-and-tough environment diseased by the obsession with money” (338). It’s easy to see why these films consistently make the cut in film academia and it’s not just because of the amazing Ennio Morricone scores.

Another great genre, the vigilante film, is put into a helpful context in this book. As a film student, I’ve seen Serpico praised and Death Wish denounced for solely political reasons (which isn’t helpful to a student). Each film represents strong feelings from opposing sides that are worth discussing in terms of grasping the cultural climate. Casper says that “respective political ideologies could place a vigilante, someone who took or countenanced the taking of the law into his/her own hands to attain justice, in either camp – dutiful lawman (if you’re conservative) or fascist criminal (if you’re liberal)”  (309). This honest and balanced attitude towards the material presented is obviously why Casper has the respect and massive following that he does. During a time when social and political tensions were high, all sides need to be seen in order to get a complete view of Hollywood in the 60s and 70s.

Such honesty about American film during a tumultuous time period is not common in the field which makes Hollywood Film 1963-1976: Years of Revolution and Reaction so good. The book is not meant to be a turning of the tables on liberal film historians; it is meant to be a balanced account of history when so many texts overanalyze the same select movies. I’ve read many books where the leftist films are referred to as “heroic” and “courageous” while the conservative films are called “reactionary” and “fascist.” What Casper does, that works so well for audiences of any political persuasion, is simply refer to films as “liberal,” “centrist,” or “conservative.” Understanding that taste is subjective, Casper allows the audience to decide which films they prefer.  I highly recommend this book to any film student or person interested in Hollywood films of the 60s and 70s. This text will definitely become a go-to reference as I continue my studies.

—–

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No, not partisan at all, Michael Moore. And how nice of you to declare bin Laden the winner in all of this:

“He may be dead, but in a way, he won. We gave up our rights. We passed a PatriotAct. We spent trillions on needless wars. Fear now rules us.”

Now can we question Moore’s patriotism?

But if you look closely, what we’re being told is that it’s patriotic to take away people’s liberties with ObamaCare, truly American to spend our children and grandchildren into oblivion, and wholesome to punish prosperity.

In a nutshell: Government-enforced equality over individual liberty is baseball, hot dogs, mom, and apple pie!

This is all about 2012, folks. All about couching Obama’s extremist message and failed policies into something the independents he lost in 2010 can tolerate.  Everyone together now: Thanks Hollywood!

But this isn’t 2008 and we are on to you this time.

Fishbowl DC:

MSNBC debuted new “Lean Forward” ads today featuring the network’s four primetime hosts: Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz.

But there’s something different about the ads this time around. They’re directed by Spike Lee, and Oscar-nominated Matthew Libatique, who worked on “Black Swan,” served as the director of photography.

According to a press release, the ads were “all shot completely unscripted” and will appear on television, msnbc.com, and in movie theaters across the country this summer. Separate print ads will run in “major publications.”

Full piece here.

But with such wild success has come wild controversy, for the centerpiece of Perry’s success has been his portrayal of a character named Madea. She’s a wise-cracking, comedically abusive and pot-smoking older lady, which means that Perry is playing her in drag – a fact that some other black filmmakers like Spike Lee have criticized, accusing Perry of being too uncomfortably close to racial stereotypes of the past.

At a press event for Perry’s newest film “Madea’s Big Happy Family,” which comes out today, Perry addressed Spike Lee’s criticisms in a most unexpected fashion – by railing at me for a question I was making about a completely different kind of potential backlash. I wanted to know if the black churchgoing community that make up his strongest fan base – for Perry’s films are all rooted deeply in Christian themes and values – are likely to give him a backlash over the amount of marijuana use and comments about the drug in the new film. (Such material is rampant throughout the movie, as a new character named Aunt Bam smokes more pot here than is consumed in a Cheech and Chong movie.)

The movie itself is hard to review, as it’s filled with Perry’s usual mix of wildly conflicting emotions of happiness and sadness, faith and despair, and is often over-the-top due to its prior history as a stage play in which the actors all played loudly to the back seats of theaters nationwide. Basically, look at the commercials and trailers and you’ll know immediately if it’s for you or not.

But Perry’s outraged response – keyed to his misunderstanding my question – caused national news on countless film-related websites. So if you really want to know what went down, keep reading:

Q: You’re in the character of Madea in costume more than any of your other movies. How challenging was it to direct at the same time?

TYLER: It wasn’t challenging for me because I worked with a lot of the same people as before. So my team knows it’s me calling the shots when in costume. But i’m sure for the new people it’s strange seeing me stand there in the wig and costume going ‘Ok move over here,’ and then saying “Action!’ and i’m in the middle of the scene with them. It’s very interesting but it worked well.

Q:Why does everybody love Madea so much? Is it because she can say all the things regular people feel they can’t? And have you ever discussed teaming up with Martin Lawrence as Big Momma?

TYLER: We had discussed it at one point, I thought it would be funny. As far as Madea goes, I think everybody white, black, Jewish Asian, of a certain generation you knew this woman. She said what she wanted to say and would smack your ass, but she’s not around any more. She’s that 100 year old tough-talking cookie.

Q: What considerations were made for the characters in this film? You’re known for putting a lot of thought into who you wanted to work with.

TYLER: I use Old Spice, so I knew I wanted to work with Isaiah. (JOKING) When I wrote it I knew I had certain people I wanted to work with. Cassi I worked with on House of Payne and she was my sidekick on the road for years. I wanted a younger, more hype and exciting group so I had peple like Bow Wow. David and Tam I’ve worked with before, and Isaiah I was excited about doing something different with.
Loretta is one of the hardest working people around and is even working right now today. I just wanted to work with a really open cast.

Q: How do you decide is too much Madea – how do you balance giving the audience what they want with her while still telling your other stories in the film?

TYLER: This one was easy for me because I’d already done the show 125 times on the road in live performances. Cassi was right there with me in the first leg of the tour. The live audience told me what they wanted to see and what they didn’t. But the truth is this is more Madea than any of them combined, because after Colored Girls and Why Did I Get Married Too I just wanted to have some fun and really enjoy myself.

Q: Is it harder to work with adults or kids?

TYLER: It depends, because some adults are worse than kids. It really depends on who you’re working with.

MY QUESTION: Do you ever get any flack…?

TYLER: I knew this was coming – flack about what?

ME: Not about Madea. No, a lot of your audience is church folks, I was wondering if they give you a hard time about pot jokes?

TYLER: I was really ready to get you. I thought you was going to ask about Spike Lee. I’m so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee,” Perry said during the press conference. “Spike can go straight to hell! You can print that. I am sick of him talking about me, I am sick of him saying, ‘this is a coon, this is a buffoon.’ I am sick of him talking about black people going to see movies. This is what he said: ‘you vote by what you see,’ as if black people don’t know what they want to see. Spike needs to shut the hell up…I’m so sorry I jumped on you.

ME: (Somewhat joking) I’m scared now.

TYLER: On this one I pushed the envelope a little bit. Something happens to you at 40, and when you lose your mother, you get to this place in your life where you’re like, You know what? It don’t even matter. Don’t take things as serious as I used to. I pushed the envelope a little bit. I know some church folks are gonna be like oh, but I have some who have a problem every time I say “hell” in one of the shows. So there are some who will think it’s too much, but then there are others who know that Madea is not the Christian in the movie, but the Christian themes are in there. So sorry so sorry! I just thought Spike Lee was in the air.

Q: You talk about some health concerns like diabetes and prostates. How challenging was it coming up with material that would satisfy old fans while still drawing the interest of new ones?

TYLER: People say where do your stories come from. Well, I”m black and I live in a neighborhood where I sometimes walk down the street and see things. For instance, with the fast food scene here, one time I drove up to a drive through at Burger King in Atlanta, pulled up the window and ordered a Whopper and the lady said, ‘We ain’t got no meat.’ You can’t make that stuff up, man. That’s where the whole Madea fast-food scene came from. So being able to have all those kinds of experiences, be around people who are around all kinds of things and will tell you the truth. This was born out of me needing a place to release after my mother died. I wrote it and went on the road with it, and then many other things my family was going through at the time. I shut everything down and went on the road instead of shooting “Colored Girls,” nobody prepares you for turning 40 and for that kind of grief. And together is a combination.

Q: What inspired the letter yesterday?

TYLER: Going into this junket. I was writing in an open email about people and how hard people work to discourage people from seeing my work. This is where the Spike Lee thing comes from – that this is Stepin Fetchit, this is coonery or buffoonery. They try so hard to get people aboard with them in this mob mentality, to come against what i’m doing but this is what I want to make clear to everybody, especially black people: i’ve never seen Jewish people attack Jerry Seinfeld and say ‘this is a stereotype,’ I’ve never seen Italian people attack “The Sopranos.” I’ve never seen Jewish people complain about Mrs. Doubtfire or Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. This is not something I can undo.

Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois went through the exact same thing; Langston Hughes said that Zora Neale Hurston, the woman who wrote ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ was a new version of the ‘darkie’ because she spoke in a southern dialect and a Southern tone. And I’m sick of it from us; we don’t have to worry about anybody else trying to destroy us and take shots because we do it to ourselves.

Of course it went from hilarious to sickening when I read further into Silverman’s account of the event, and saw how she reacted to the “big hug” by equating Obama’s body with that of a thoroughbred. At this point I said to myself: “Silverman has obviously never hugged a thoroughbred.” (I grew up around racehorses, and Obama’s emasculated frame is by no means reminiscent of a thoroughbred.)

As a matter of fact, Silverman’s comparison of the two – Obama’s body with that of a thoroughbred – is so silly that one might call her sanity into question were it not for the fact that she’s not alone in speaking the absurd in relation to Obama. In other words, she’s not the only Hollywood celebrity to utter such imbecility; she’s just the latest one.

For example, during the 2008 campaign cycle, director Spike Lee said an Obama presidency would not simply bring “a new day, [but] a better day.” George Clooney said Obama possessed “the one quality you cannot teach…which is he is a leader.” And actor Josh Lucas described Obama as “a truly scholarly man.” (Pardon me while I throw up.)

I wonder what the people represented by the approximately 10% unemployment figures in this country would say about Obama’s new day? I wonder what Gulf of Mexico residents who watched Obama play golf in 2010 instead of taking a hands-on approach to the BP oil spill would say of his leadership? And since when does thinking the United States has 57 states or stuttering through speeches on a teleprompter or spending a country into oblivion by running a 3 trillion dollar deficit up to 14 trillion in 2 years seem scholarly?

Obama hasn’t brought a better day, he isn’t a leader, and the only scholarly attribute he has is the distance he keeps between himself and the real world.

Other than that, his only credentials arise from the way his speeches send a thrill up Chris Matthews’ leg or make some second-string comedian like Sarah Silverman tell him she’s going to be naked in her next film.

Yawn.