Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

I must confess that I have never seen Ganja and Hess, the cult classic this is a remake of, but this one is terrific. It's definitely boring, and it's not exactly scary, but Spike Lee's careful pacing and beautiful cinematography paired with great performances and a killer soundtrack create a melange of sorrow and dread that's difficult to put out of one's mind. You could say this is one vampire movie that doesn't su--(Glenn has been fired from R3 for even attempting that joke.)

RATING: 78%

School Daze

Spike Lee's second movie is some bizarre piece of auteurism masked as a college sex comedy set at an HBCU. It's got all the expected weird and wacky characters who get into college hijinx, but then there's a Broadway-style musical number in the middle, racial tension between light and dark skinned girls, and a strange tonal turn in the last five minutes where a girl (basically) gets raped and there's all these nonsensical angles and Laurence Fishburne yelling at the camera. I don't hesitate to call Spike Lee one of the three or four genius directors alive, but often, like Tarantino or PT Anderson he'll just make a movie that so abrasively bucks audience expectations that it's difficult to know what to make of it as a film. Also, I'm glad he stopped putting himself in his own movies because he is NOT A GOOD ACTOR.

RATING: 63%

He Got Game: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

I don't remember too much about the movie He Got Game other than liking it when I was 18, but the soundtrack was amazing. Spike Lee paired music by Public Enemy with what is essentially a "greatest hits" collection of music by composer Aaron Copland. I never bought the Public Enemy disc, but the Copland disc is essentially what got me into 20th century classical music. Everybody knows "Fanfare For The Common Man," which is on this album, but there are a lot of other wonderful mid 20th century capsules of one of America's greatest composers here, from Copland's nostalgic reinterpretations of traditional folk melodies to his dissonant reconstruction of the icon Billy the Kid. So you can be miserly your whole life and blame the economy or you can try to at least enrich your sophisticated half by buying the classical part of a soundtrack to a failed movie indicting college sports if I remember it correctly (and probably racism).

RATING: 84%

Summer Of Sam

#55 on Glenn's Top 100 Movie List

The preview for this one always gave me chills, and the movie was also great. Spike Lee, you know? I saw this with Killian in the theater when it came out, and I turned to him and sad "This Adrian Brody guy is going to be a great actor." And lo! It came true. He is a great, oscar winning actor. It wasn't as impressive as the time we saw Bait and I turned to Killian and said "This Jamie Foxx guy is going to be a great actor." Because Summer of Sam is a great movie, and Bait is a terrible movie. So I think I did a better job spotting a good actor in the bad movie than the good one.

RATING: 89%

Malcolm X

#69 on Glenn's Top 100 Movie List

Spike Lee is one of my favorite filmmakers in all of history. Definitely top ten. Malcolm X is probably his best movie, but I'm putting it ahead of some other movies of his on this list because I thought of some things to say that I might forget. First, there was a month when I was a freshman in college right after I bought this on tape that I watched it five times. In a month. And this movie is like three hours long. I've only ever done that with Dawn of the Dead and 2001, and those are my two favorite movies of all time. But Malcolm X isn't breaking the top ten in my countdown partly because I think I wore it out, and mainly because the tape switch really messes up the movie. The first half of the movie is kind of a petty thief criminal movie, and then he gets arrested. Then you switch tapes, and it enters more definitely into the political realm and character evolution part of the movie. It creates a great overall project. But having to physically change tapes really emphasized the difference in tone between the two halves, and after a while I would just watch the first half of this movie for Delroy Lindo. So that's why this movie doesn't break my top ten. Eventually when I get it on DVD I guess this problem will work itself out. So maybe it will move up the list a bit. Also, does anybody from the south remember those fucking "You wear your 'X,' I'll wear mine" shirts with the confederate flag on them? That is the key argument in demonstrating that the confederate flag is definitely about hate, not heritage.

RATING: 88%

Clockers

#86 on Glenn's Top 100 Movie List

In high school I used to like movies that were really super stylized, which means I liked a lot of Spike Lee and Oliver Stone movies. Looking back, some of those were stupid movies to like (U-Turn), but this one holds up, even if since then there have been a billion movies about how much dealing crack sucks. I was going to be a crack dealer myself until I saw this movie. Also in high school my favorite actor was Delroy Lindo. What happened to that guy?

RATING: 87%