Pretty Baby

Pretty Baby

Well, you think a movie about preteen girls dancing suggestively is controversial – how about a movie about a preteen girl getting paraded around naked? If you’re wondering how this 1978 movie even got made…so am I. I do know it got banned in several countries, and...
Kramer vs. Kramer

Kramer vs. Kramer

Sometimes the older film with which I pair the recent one has a tenuous connection to it, if even that. While I tend to pride myself on being imaginative in those cases, here’s one where the later film has often been compared to a specific earlier one. TV Tropes even...
Perry Mason (Original)

Perry Mason (Original)

I came up with an inspired idea for a complementary post for the new series. How do I follow up an eight-episode serialized miniseries with a 271-episode long-form procedural? I use a random number generator to pick which one of the original 271 episodes to watch...
Do The Right Thing

Do The Right Thing

I saved the best for last in this Spike Lee series. I’ll start by addressing my point in the BlacKkKlansman post about how I’ll never fully respect Lee after the fiasco of the lawsuit against SpikeTV for trying to capitalize on “his” name, which in his...
Malcolm X

Malcolm X

Now we get to an epic biopic (bioepic?) about a black man (in)famous for being incendiary in his outspokenness – just like the director himself. Of course we’re taught in school how Martin Luther King, Jr. was the good black civil rights leader, preaching nonviolence...
BlacKkKlansman

BlacKkKlansman

I am going to follow up my Da 5 Bloods post by also discussing Spike Lee’s most notable previous works. For this film, I’ll start by copying and pasting the Facebook status update I wrote after watching it in the theater months before I started this blog: This...