For Screen Slate:
During a radio interview with Sam Greenlee, author of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, one of the hosts asks, "Now how did [the movie] come about? Did they approach you?" "There wasn't no 'they!'" Greenlee shoots back. To bring his controversial novel to the screen, Greenlee became a producer, partnering with filmmaker Ivan Dixon (perhaps known to cinephiles as the star of Nothing But a Man) to sell shares to predominantly black investors. It was…
For Screen Slate:
For his sophomore film, Spike Lee takes on the subject of greek life at historically black colleges in the all singing, all dancing School Daze. It has biographical resonance for Lee, the son of a teacher and a legacy alumnus of Atlanta's Morehouse College, on which the film's Mission College is evidently based. And perhaps too acutely: the school unceremoniously booted the production off its campus when the administration realized the film might air its "dirty laundry."…
Grotesque absurdist comedy about a couple on the run through a small French town during its esoteric festival of the dead. It's difficult to describe Litan without leaning on other references, so: this is like Monty Python's The Wicker Man meets The Purge 2 directed by Wojciech Has. (And therefore the reviewer who compares it to Gymkata is somehow totally spot-on.) It's sort of a quasi-episodic labyrinth in which there always seems to be another story happening just out of frame. Totally singular and incredible film.
