Quiet as it's Kept
She's Gotta Have It (1986)
directed by Spike Lee
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Spike Lee's New York, a world he recognized in person but not in movies (supposedly the director's impetus for making She's Gotta Have It, in response to - what else - The Color Purple), included enough of The Wizard of Oz to inspire a sequence in color. But She's Gotta Have It does what The Wizard of Oz couldn't manage on the backlot: fresh air and soft sunlight. Lee's debut is a great open-air film. From iron benches to the lazy wakes of barges on the East River, currents scout the city in their endless Sunday variations.
She's Gotta Have It is also a good example of how learning-as-you-go sometimes beats the film school influence of aesthetic and historical instruction. A rape - as sure an homage to those hard-luck neo-realists as Mars Blackmon's around-town bicycle - is superfluous to Nola's ascension as her own woman, and as such, a disservice to Nola and the gentler inclinations of Lee's script. The lead, Tracy Camilla Johns, looks the part of a breezy kind of light, too.
The first thing that observant filmmakers lose in their transition to becoming industry insiders is a sense of humor. Which, in a movie like She's Gotta Have It, is as intrinsic to the Brooklyn that Lee didn't think other movies were showing him as the chapter-stop still photographs of subways, snowfall on the monument in Fort Greene park, and early afternoon on Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstones. Sort of everything, really.
directed by Spike Lee
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Spike Lee's New York, a world he recognized in person but not in movies (supposedly the director's impetus for making She's Gotta Have It, in response to - what else - The Color Purple), included enough of The Wizard of Oz to inspire a sequence in color. But She's Gotta Have It does what The Wizard of Oz couldn't manage on the backlot: fresh air and soft sunlight. Lee's debut is a great open-air film. From iron benches to the lazy wakes of barges on the East River, currents scout the city in their endless Sunday variations.
She's Gotta Have It is also a good example of how learning-as-you-go sometimes beats the film school influence of aesthetic and historical instruction. A rape - as sure an homage to those hard-luck neo-realists as Mars Blackmon's around-town bicycle - is superfluous to Nola's ascension as her own woman, and as such, a disservice to Nola and the gentler inclinations of Lee's script. The lead, Tracy Camilla Johns, looks the part of a breezy kind of light, too.
The first thing that observant filmmakers lose in their transition to becoming industry insiders is a sense of humor. Which, in a movie like She's Gotta Have It, is as intrinsic to the Brooklyn that Lee didn't think other movies were showing him as the chapter-stop still photographs of subways, snowfall on the monument in Fort Greene park, and early afternoon on Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstones. Sort of everything, really.
posted by NPK at 8:21 AM
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