- Inside Man
Each Thursday, the Logan Theatre screens a famous old film as part of its “Throw Back Thursday (#tbt)” series. This week’s selection is Spike Lee’s seminal Do the Right Thing, a true summer movie if ever there was one. Lee is a prolific auteur—he’s directed more than 30 narrative and documentary features since 1983—and one of the country’s most polarizing directors. His oeuvre is marked by peaks and valleys—or, in other words, some outright masterworks and plenty of outright failures. But that’s sort of what makes him fascinating. For every dud in Lee’s filmography, there’s a bright spot to help shape our understanding of his method. Occasionally I’ll revisit a Lee film I initially disliked after seeing one I love and notice things I hadn’t before—suddenly, the film’s “failures” are somehow less egregious, which isn’t to say the film has necessarily improved, only that Lee’s high points and low points go hand in hand. The paradoxes his films present are alternately fascinating and infuriating, and that’s precisely what makes him an interesting director. You can see my five favorite Spike Lee movies below.
- Inside Man (2006) Considering his sharp ear for dialogue and penchant for dynamic character interplay, I’ve long held the belief that Lee would have had a fantastic career making spy/heist/paranoia thrillers in the 60s and 70s, and I point to this massively entertaining riff on both Dog Day Afternoon and his own personal style as proof. The film’s tightly wound plot isn’t Lee’s usual method—compare this to something like Jungle Fever and you’d think they were the work of two different filmmakers—but the whole thing works splendidly.
