I could write blind for an hour about Spike Lee. Baldwin said something about discovering that you’re a writer rather than deciding to become one, and peeling the layers back to my own realization took me till the age of 22. I had published three comic-book fan letters, wrote to and was published in Right On! (“Where can I write to Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis?”) as a kid, blah blah. But not till seeing School Daze my high school senior year, renting She’s Gotta Have It and gobbling up Spike’s “making-of” books did I think of writing as a career, and here I am. Spike mentioned some- where in She’s Gotta Have It: Inside Guerilla Filmmaking that if you wanna make movies, get your writing game up. He said Hollywood was more likely to let you direct what you wrote if your writing was strong. You could always just direct other people’s stories, but that’s not that Fellini/Woody Allen/Scorsese shit (though they all occasionally did, yeah, direct things they ain’t write). And “what I really want to do is direct” like everybody else – hold me to that in five years – so I started taking writing more seriously. Nobody in my fam made a living off anything artistic, so that was another hurdle to clear, but like I say, here I am.

The Spike Lee retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française ends Sunday, and Miracle at St. Anna just dropped today in the U.S. I published something on France, race and the Spike Lee film festival over on TheRoot.com today. In the closing weeks, I made it out to Summer of Sam, When the Levees Broke and, last night, the highly underrated He Got Game. Like the first crop of films I saw for the second, third time earlier this month, some new things stood out to me in bas-relief. Like:

• The opening shots of baskbetball playing in the sticks of Americana over Aaron Copland orchestra music in He Got Game. What other director would score a movie to two different soundtracks by Aaron Copland and Public Enemy? (Their last good album, by the way.)
• The dead bodies and dead babies floating in Levees. I’d only seen 20 minutes of this one on a visit to NY last year. The four hours was harrowing, not for the length, but for the… experience. I missed Katrina, I was half a world away. With the hurricanes and the $700 billion financial crisis, tell me I’m wrong about America going to hell. (OK, I’m being dramatic.)
• The great disco in Summer of Sam! The soundtrack doesn’t even have the best stuff. “Running Away” by Roy Ayers; “Let No Man Put Asunder” by First Choice; Machine’s “There But For the Grace of God Go I.” I’d seen the movie twice before and never noticed Grace Jones’s version of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” before, because I just discovered it here like two years ago.
• I wasn’t a father the last time I saw He Got Game. Don’t know about you, but I’m good for putting myself in the place of the protagonist when I see a movie. If you watch films this way, then any flick with father vs. son drama will dredge up your daddy issues. And we’ve all got strong emotional stuff tied to our parents, positive or negative. The plot has pull; messed up that it didn’t make its money back, despite the then-almighty Denzel.

Catching some of the Spike Lee retrospective going on in Paris has been interesting. The main reason is because Spike’s movies aren’t enjoyable to me like they used to be once upon a time, when I was gung-ho about the black filmmaking wave 20 years ago. (Yes, School Daze was 20 years ago, and it wasn’t even his first film.) A smaller reason is, for someone who doesn’t usually see movies more than once, I’ve seen the majority of Spike’s oeuvre several times and I’m still a little worn out by the repeated viewings. I love Prince too, but I just can’t play Purple Rain again, not in this lifetime. (Okay, maybe once more.) Then again, I can’t well imagine Hollywood without Spike Lee either. I am very glad his body of work exists; still, I’m honestly not in the mood for another three hours of Malcolm X.

Spike spoke tonight at the Cinémathèque Française, after a premiere screening of Miracle at St. Anna. Unfortunately, it turned out to be just for members of the cinémathèque (membership is available to anybody for probably something like 100€ a year), so I didn’t see Spike or his new film. But I did pay for 25th Hour and Clockers so far this month – Summer of Sam is tomorrow – and here’s what I noticed as a 37-year-old seeing these movies for the umpteenth time:

• All the Seal music in Clockers.
• A reminder of how that pre-screening of 25th Hour (I see you, Kenji) made me want to move to Paris. The closing sequence had Ed Norton dodging his prison sentence to start an anonymous life far away from New York, raising a family under an assumed name somewhere in Bumblefuck with his one true love. Something about the idea of disappearing completely and never being found appealed to me even then.
• The DJ Dust party sequence in 25th Hour. “Flava in Your Ear,” “Warm It Up Kane,” “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” and all that Cymande music? Classic sequence.
• The NO MORE PACKING subliminal billboard that pops up everywhere in Clockers. Black people unite and put down the steel.
• Rosario gotdamn Dawson in that silver dress, 25th Hour. Took me back to that time she showed up to the Oneworld office back in the day waiting for the editor, 15 minutes just me and her. (What happens at Oneworld stays at Oneworld, Rosario.)
• Speech comes up in the hardest MC debate between the drug dealers on the benches in Clockers. Why? I’ll mail you a dollar if you’re in your twenties and you even know who Speech is.
• The last lines of 25th Hour put weight in the lump in my throat, reminiscing on the expatriate adventures I’ve had since the movie first dropped: “It all came so close to never happening. This life came so close to never happening.”
  

After shutting down in August (like quite a few French businesses) for vacation, the Cinémathèque Française is open for business again next Monday with a vengence. Let’s start with the Spike Lee retrospective running from September 3-28 (!): kicking off with La 25^e Heure (2002’s 25th Hour to you), the cinémathèque is showing every single Spike Lee Joint, including Miracle at St. Anna, not released in America till the 26th. This special screening on the 12th will feature a Q&A with Shelton Jackson Lee himself, and tickets are up for grabs on the 10th at 3:00 by calling 01 71 19 32 39, or emailing libre-pass@ cinematheque.fr. I won’t run the schedule below (it’s over 15 movies, even the Katrina documentary four hours straight), but click here for the run-down.

The rest ain’t nothing to sleep on either. A Dennis Hopper retrospective is going on too (hence the healthy helping of his movies below). See as much as you can if you’re here, or just imagine you’re in a Parisian theater watching Basquiat. This is hardly everything at the cinémathèque, just everything I think is dope.

Eyes Wide Shut – October 6
Citizen Kane – October 9
The Last Movie – October 16, 25 (only recently re-released)
Easy Rider – October 19, 30
Monterey Pop – October 23
Cool Hand Luke – October 22, November 8
Tarzan and Jane Regained… Sort Of – October 25 (Warhol, gotta love it)
Apocalypse Now Redux – October 26, November 15
Collateral – October 27
The Mark of Zorro – October 29 (Bruce Wayne’s favorite)
Blue Velvet – November 1
The Parallax View – November 6
Basquiat – November 9
Five Easy Pieces – November 20
La Strada – November 21
Giant– November 22
Jackie Brown – November 24
Chocolat – November 24
Rebel Without a Cause – November 30

Why were those frogs falling from the sky in P. T. Anderson’s Magnolia so patently different from the phones that rained from the heavens in Spike Lee’s Girl 6? One director was praised to the skies for the deux ex machina device and the other got critically shitted on. Anyway, here’s my favorite modern-age director Paul Thomas Anderson shucking his latest, There Will Be Blood, on Charlie Rose…