Remember last month at SilverDocs, when Spike Lee declared that the election of Barack Obama would “change everything…it’s gonna be Before Obama, and After Obama”? He repeated himself virtually word-for-word at a press event last week at the Television Critics Association conference, where he showed up to shill his upcoming Kobe Bryant doc for ESPN. Lee also predicted that the candidate’s election will change Hollywood’s attitude about race, and argued vehemently against a SAG strike. Some excerpts from the event, delivered to us by Kevin Kelly, follow after the jump.
It may seem like I’m late to the party on this one, but I swear, I’m not––I saw the TV version of this CNBC story last week, so I knew that Nike launched a limited edition sneaker last weekend called Air McFly, based on the self-tying shoe that will apparently de rigeur for hoverboard flights in the very near future, assuming the very near future looks anything like Back to the Future 2. I knew that fans had been clamoring for the sneaker for years; I knew that there’d be great demand, but extremely limited supply. What I did not know, was that the shoe’s launch, at a single store in Santa Monica, turned into a some kind of fan fest, complete with lines around the block (some waited over 24 hours, according to HypeBeast) and a special appearance by Kobe Bryant, who arrived in a DeLorean (what, Michael J. Fox wasn’t available?) Photo evidence and related links after the jump; above, a video from last year setting the Air McFly lobbying campaign to song.
Spike Lee physically showed up to accept the Guggenheim Honor from the SilverDocs film festival tonight, but mentally, for much of the evening, he seemed to be elsewhere. Maybe his recent squabbles with Clint Eastwood have taken a toll, but when asked to talk about his non-fiction films by Denver Post film critic Lisa Kennedy, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker was virtually unresponsive. Only two subjects seemed to draw out Lee’s fierce, super-quotable Frankenstein.
One was Tyler Perry, who Lee didn’t quite slam, but definitely dissed by implication. “I’d love to see a great film about Martin Luther King,” Lee said. “But I can’t do everything.” He paused as a smile crept across his face. “I gotta leave something for Tyler Perry.” This got the desired affect from the audience––laughs, claps, a few stray “ooooh!”s––and then Lee offered cryptic clarification. “I made the movie Bamboozled,” he said, as if that’s facetious evidence enough that the master of the modern minstrel show would be the appropriate director for a serious film about Dr. King.
The only other subject that could jolt Lee out of his slumping stupor on stage was Barack Obama, to which all conversational roads seemed to lead. …Read more
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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