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
I’ve been making plans travel plans for the next couple of months this week, and it looks like in mid-June I’ll be making my first trip to SilverDocs. And look: they’ve just made their first major program announcement:
Spike Lee, the Oscar-nominated director of Do the Right Thing, will be honored at this year’s Silverdocs film festival for his documentary work including When the Levees Broke, on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, organizers said on Wednesday.
Lee will screen excepts from his documentary works and discuss his career on June 19 at the Charles Guggenheim Symposium, which recognizes top documentary filmmakers and is a centerpiece of the June 16-23 festival.
More from Reuters and at the SilverDocs website. I’ll be in town from the 17th-23; will you?
Several blurbs of note to report in the documentary world this late Thursday:
***Anthony Kaufman has the news that Errol Morris is blogging for the New York Times. Kaufman interprets Morris’ first entry–a long consideration of photography, truth, interpretation and meaning–as “a sneak peak into what I expect are the theoretical underpinnings” of Morris’ upcoming Abu Ghraib doc, Standard Operating Procedure.
***This is not a TV blog, so we won’t waste time making obscene hand gestures about most of the Emmy nominations. However, it’s worth noting that Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina doc When the Levees Broke picked up several nods, as did two recent festival hits: Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, and Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple. A.J. Schnack has further details.
***John Anderson has a review of Your Mommy Kills Animals, a doc on the animal protection debate which begins a one-week Oscar qualifying run today. Calling it “a miraculously evenhanded treatment of a snarlingly divisive debate,” Anderson also notes that the film also makes “it pretty clear that blinkered self-righteousness and unwavering belief in one’s cause don’t much differ, whether you’re a member of the Animal Liberation Front or Al Qaeda. The corollary question is whether anything less than the most militant action will move corporations away from committing cruelty to animals.”
