Director insists that despite the reappearance of his character Mookie it is emphatically not a Do the Right Thing sequel
The weekend's premiere of
Red Hook Summer was accompanied by a stern caution from its director, Spike Lee. It's "NOT a motherfucking sequel to Do the Right Thing", he told the Sundance film festival audience. It may be shot in the heat of a Brooklyn summer and see the director reprise his role as Mookie – still delivering
Sal's Famous Pizzas, 22 years on from Lee's Oscar-nominated hit – but this is no sequel. It is, said Lee at a Q&A after the screening, "another one of my chronicles of Brooklyn", made independently with Lee's own money because studios
"know nothing about black people".
"I didn't need a motherfucking studio telling me something about Red Hook," said Lee of his film, which follows a teenager as he moves from his comfortable family home in Atlanta to live in his preacher grandfather's apartment in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighbourhood. Lee himself moved from Atlanta to Brooklyn when he was a child. His comments on financing and the studio system, which included a dig at Universal for its inertia over the sequel to Lee's
Inside Man (
pronounced dead, now apparently resuscitated) came in response to a question from comedian Chris Rock. "What would you have done differently if you'd actually gotten a bunch of studio money," Rock asked. "Would you have blown up lots of shit?"
Red Hook Summer has received a mixed response from critics in Park City, not least because of a revelation at a late stage in the movie that shows the preacher (played by The Wire's Clarke Peters) embroiled in an out-of-the-blue scandal. "The complete absence of any kind of foreshadowing makes this switch to a more disturbing consideration of sin and redemption seem like part of another movie," said the Hollywood Reporter. The film received more positive reviews from Salon.com's Andrew O'Hehir ("a passionate, painful love letter to Brooklyn, NYC, black America & the black church") and the Los Angeles Times's Steven Zeitchik, who took to Twitter to describe Red Hook Summer as Lee's "most interesting/ambitious film in yrs, tho the last section will be polarising".
Henry Barnes
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our
Terms & Conditions |
More Feeds
More...
Spike Lee's Red Hook Summer gets Sundance premiere
Linear Mode
