Who is......?

Question

Spike Lee??

Answer 1

Spike Lee burst onto the movie scene in 1986, immediately establishing himself as one of the most important young American filmmakers and a controversial figure in black culture.

A Brooklynite, a third-generation alumnus of Atlanta's Morehouse College and a graduate of New York University's film school, Lee won immediate acclaim for his commercial debut, "She's Gotta Have It" (1986). This independently produced, stylish, black-and-white (and partly color) feature did surprising box-office business and garnered critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival. Although the film's sharp, witty direction impressed critics, Lee's portrayal of the comic streetwise hustler Mars Blackmon (and his trademark litany, "please, baby, please, baby, please, baby, please, baby") proved to be the most compelling element of the production.

Between film projects Lee directed himself as Mars in an Anita Baker music video ("No One in the World"), a short made for "Saturday Night Live" ("Horn of Plenty") and, most notably, in two Nike Air Jordan television commercials ("Hangtime" and "Cover") in which Mars Blackmon appears with basketball star Michael Jordan.

Television work, in fact, has been a much more frequent outlet for Lee's creative energies, as he battles to make uncompromising yet commercial films about the black experience within Hollywood's white-dominated financing, production and distribution system. Following the success of "She's Gotta Have It", a number of black musical artists, including Miles Davis, Branford Marsalis, Steel Pulse and Grandmaster Flash, have sought Lee to direct their music videos. With a film production team that includes editor Barry Brown and the gifted cinematographer (and neophyte director) Ernest Dickerson, Lee completed not only a number of videos, but also five one-minute spots for MTV, another series of Nike commercials, and ads for Jesse Jackson's campaign in the 1988 New York Presidential primary.

These projects have all supplemented Spike Lee's driving ambition, the production of feature films for his company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. After the self-described "guerrilla filmmaking" techniques employed to produce the low-budget "She's Gotta Have It", as well as his earlier NYU thesis film, "Joe's Bed-Stuy Barber Shop: We Cut Heads" (1982), Lee's second feature, "School Daze" (1988), was partly financed by Columbia Pictures. Despite Columbia's underfinancing (Lee was given only a third of the usual Hollywood budget), "School Daze" remained true to his provocative vision. And despite the studio's poor promotion efforts and unenthusiastic reviews, the film grossed more than twice its cost. With an all-black ensemble cast, the film satirically addresses, in the form of a musical-comedy, class and color divisions within the student body at a black college: affluent, light-skinned "gammas" clash with underclass, dark-skinned "jigaboos." In the face of production problems (Morehouse, Lee's alma mater, refused cooperation just before shooting began), "School Daze" was a notable achievement on two counts. Spike Lee became perhaps the first black director given complete control by Hollywood over his film, and "School Daze", as one critic wrote, established that a vehicle which "puts real African American people on the screen" could succeed--redeeming a history of stereotyped screen images by speaking and acting from authentic experience.

Lee's next film, "Do the Right Thing" (1989), enlarged upon his successes on several levels--commercially, artistically and thematically. Based on several real-life racially motivated acts of violence in New York City, Lee's politically charged and polemical drama stirred controversy even before its release. The finished film was widely praised for its exciting and flamboyant visual craftsmanship. Like his other films, "Do the Right Thing" presents a slice-of-life look at a predominantly black environment, in this case a block of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Lee's portrait is both celebratory and critical: the "mise-en-scene", music and dialogue are rich in allusions to African-American cultural history (a deejay's litany of black musical stars mixes with the score written by the director's father, jazz bassist Bill Lee), and, as in "School Daze", Lee also unflinchingly presents the divisions within the black community by centering the film on a photograph of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and ending it with seemingly opposing quotations from both men. More importantly, "Do the Right Thing" focuses its tense drama on the interracial violence that occurs between Bed-Stuy's black underclass and the white family that runs the local pizzeria. Climaxing with the killing of a black youth at the hands of white policemen and a fiery street riot, Lee's film offers no resolution for the racial violence which has plagued the city.

In presenting both the inter- and intra-racial problems that have marked recent American history, Spike Lee's films collectively call for an awakening of consciousness. A sleeping character in "Joe's Bed-Stuy Barber Shop" is hailed with the line, "Wake up. The black man has been asleep for 400 years." "School Daze"'s problematic climax features warring factions greeting a sunrise with the cry, "Wake up!" "Do the Right Thing" continues the plea, as the same refrain introduces both the film and Lee's Mookie character.

Lee's next two films failed to live up to the dramatic promise of "Do the Right Thing", though both boasted strong performances, increasingly showy camerawork and colorful, stylized imagery. Inevitably, a critical backlash began to develop against the cannily self-promoting filmmaker.

"Mo' Better Blues" (1990) was Lee's first collaboration with charismatic leading man Denzel Washington, who portrays a self-absorbed jazz trumpeter forced to wake up and open his eyes and heart to the needs of those around him. The film intensified the ongoing criticism of Lee for his shallow characterization of female characters. The director also fielded charges of anti-Semitism for his scathing depiction of a pair of Jewish night club owners. In interviews Lee had decried the inauthenticity of jazz films by white filmmakers--Clint Eastwood's "Bird" (1988) was a favorite target--claiming that, as the son of a genuine jazz musician, he was better qualified to depict that milieu. Most reviewers, however, deemed the film slight and overlong.

"Jungle Fever" (1991) again courted controversy for its depiction of a lusty affair between a black married professional man and his Italian-American working-class secretary. Despite some powerful scenes and performances, the film is sadly underwritten. The central relationship is neither adequately explained nor realistically depicted, with the film emitting much heat but little illumination on race relations, black self-hatred, or the allure of sex with the Other.

Lee's next project would prove to be both his most ambitious and most controversial--indeed, the intensity of the controversy that surrounded "Malcolm X" (1992) even before shooting began made the completed film something of an anti-climax. The press gleefully related tales of Lee intimidating non-black director Norman Jewison into relinquishing the project to him. Lee persuasively argued that only a black filmmaker could tell this story, while some black intellectuals, notably poet/activist Amiri Baraka, publicly doubted that he was the man for the job: Alex Haley's "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" was a revered historical document of a hero more important to black culture than any "Spike Lee Joint". Undaunted, Lee took on the monumental project.

When the film's backers balked at escalating production costs, Lee turned to such black entertainment luminaries as Bill Cosby, Janet Jackson, Tracey Chapman, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, who gave him the money to complete the film as he envisioned it. The final product was a three-and-a-half hour, surprisingly traditional biopic that swiftly covers a great deal of material before culminating in an emotionally devastating climax. Though a huge production, the film remains "A Spike Lee Joint", encompassing everything from gangster action, flashy costumes and a big dance number, to location shooting in Mecca, with many jaunty directorial flourishes along the way. Most impressive, however, was Denzel Washington's towering performance as the charismatic black Muslim leader. Almost inevitably for a mainstream project about such a complex and controversial figure, "Malcolm X" has its flaws and omissions. Malcolm's early delinquent phase, in particular, is cleaned up for mass consumption. Nor is the extent of his later radicalism, and the controversy it provoked among both whites and blacks, adequately addressed. The Hollywood blockbuster has never been a congenial medium for overtly political filmmaking but, in the final analysis, "Malcolm X" must be viewed as the triumph of Spike Lee's will.

Lee's 1994 film "Crooklyn" was a loosely structured story of a jazz musician, his wife and their children in Brooklyn of the 70s. Packed with the sounds of the seventies, and with little narrative, "Crooklyn" could be viewed as Lee's return to the kind of depictions of neighborhood, family and characters he delivered with such adeptness in "Do The Right Thing" and "She's Gotta Have It". Co-scripted by sister Joie Lee, "Crooklyn", unlike prior Lee-helmed features, emphasized a female protagonist--here the only girl child among the Carmichael's five. Reportedly the film's brightly and loudly nostalgic family romance was only loosely based on the Lees' own youth. Alternately sloppy and shrewd, wise and idiosyncratic, the film met with an extremely mixed critical reception and poor box office.

Lee was reportedly reluctant to direct "Clockers" (1995), a much anticipated adaptation of Richard Price's acclaimed 1991 novel about the world of low-level street crack dealers in Jersey City. He felt that audiences, both black and white, were tired of the spate of grim rap-driven urban crime pictures of the preceding half decade or so. Those in the know had high hopes for "Clockers" as, originally, the august director-star team of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro were attached to the project. Lee came aboard after they bowed out and proceeded to transform Price's screenplay into "A Spike Lee Joint". He shifted the locale to his beloved Brooklyn and rewrote the script to de-emphasize the white cop protagonist's angst in favor of focusing in the African-American victims and dispensers of violence. Working with neophyte feature cinematographer Malik Sayeed, Lee painted a gritty canvas of urban life far more dark and "realistic" (though still highly stylized) than in his previous films. He placed another newcomer, first-time actor Mekhi Phifer, center stage as the tormented young drug dealer Strike. Some reviewers quibbled over Lee's deviations from Price's admired original but many more hailed it as the best work of his career.

Answer 2

Shelton Jackson Lee (born March 20, 1957 in Atlanta, Georgia), better known as Spike Lee, is an American film director, producer, writer, and actor noted for his films dealing with social and political issues. He also teaches film at New York University.

Answer 3

Spike Lee, eigentlich: Shelton Jackson Lee, (* 20. März 1957 in Atlanta, Georgia) ist ein US-afro-amerikanischer Filmregisseur, Drehbuchautor, Produzent und Schauspieler. In seinen Filmen behandelt er gesellschaftspolitische und soziale Themen, insbesondere den Rassismus gegenüber der afro-amerikanischen Bevölkerung. Lee zählt in der Fachwelt zu den einflussreichsten Filmemachern der USA.

Answer 4

Channing Tatum is warm yet in my opinion i do no longer think of there's a such element using fact the main well liked guy interior the international. I considered various warm adult men that seem a lot distinctive from one yet another yet i think of they are the two warm. additionally channing tatum is overvalued in basic terms like megan fox is overvalued.

Answer 5

Erik said it. Great pic! Are you really a teen? Feel free to ask some more who is questions. I'm looking forward to them.

Answer 6

Just another jerk making money off racial prejudice and the color of his skin ... the guys a puke and i'd like to take a dump on the hood of his car just for kicks.

Answer 7

Hands up to Erik. He knows alot about him.

Answer 8

Another black man who will never be attracted to you.

Answer 9

hes a directorrrrrrrr yo. hes a brutha

Answer 10

some move director or something...

Answer 11

I have no idea