Category: Greg’s Essays

An (Imaginary) Interview with Spike Lee

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I’ve also done an (imaginary) interview with Steven Spielberg.  That one is cool too.

White people hate Spike Lee and I have no idea why.  When I was in film school, they brought in this huckster guy to talk to us about producing, and he mentioned Spike Lee, and then, as an aside, he made sure to tell us that he doesn’t think Mr. Lee is talented.  Things like that happen all the time and I don’t get why.

When I was seventeen, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was my favorite movie, if you can believe it.  At that time I was exploring American independent and foreign ‘cinema’. They say the best way to be an atheist is to read the bible. Well, the best way to love real movies like Back to the Future is to watch French movies and American indies. However, in small ways, Do the Right Thing holds up for me. It’s definitely Spike’s most complete movie—it has arcs and a brilliant ensemble.  The compositions and camera movements are mind-blowing, and it does a great job of making you feel like you’re on the block. It’s alive and adventurous—it’s filled with music and color and jokes and fun—not to mention, some very touching human moments. In fact, the only thing it really lacks is clarity. It’s so much of a hang-out movie that you end up having to accuse it of loitering. But, I’ll always have an affection for it, and I’ll never call it a bad movie.
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John D’Amico, Greg DeLiso, and Jenna Ipcar on Philip Seymour Hoffman

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John D’Amico: 63 roles in 23 years of acting. Where do you even begin? He absolutely hummed as Lancaster Dodd in The Master, as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. He has about a million solid movies you kinda forget about until you look at the long scroll of his filmography. How about State & Main? That was a very fun one, uplifted by his ability to be both campy and deeply believable at the same time. He elevated otherwise listless projects like Pirate Radio and Patch Adams—Jesus, he was even good in Patch fucking Adams! Watching Hoffman, even in a bad movie—hell, especially in a bad movie—you feel his talent almost as a physical presence in the room, a rush of light illuminating himself and everyone else.
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On Documentaries: How and Why They Work, When They Work

matBeyond the Mat (1999), one of the greatest documentaries of all time.

Documentaries have always been fascinating to me.  They were born out of newsreels, short news segments that used to play before features in the theaters way back when.   From the newsreels came smaller, more intimate human interest stories (Kubrick even made a few in his early days).  An early example of this sort of thing, Nanook of the North, is often cited as one of the first documentaries—although, if you ask me, it’s nothing more than a piece of history. The production is stagey, and, as to be expected given the time period it came out, it’s dreadfully boring.

Around the 1960s, when cinema finally started to open up, a few people started to realize that vérité filmmaking could be used to create a documentary—the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman was an important landmark. It was distant yet intimate, objective yet close, and endlessly revealing.  Although dated now, their early filmography marks the first departure into interesting and effective documentary filmmaking.
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Fuck Writer’s Block

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Adaptation (2002)

Writing is hard.

It should be easy, because you just sit down and describe the stuff in your head, but what about when there isn’t anything in your head?  They call that ‘Writer’s Block’—which Jerry Seinfeld says is bullshit. “Writer’s Block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work,” he says.

And he’s absolutely right.

If you’re serious about being an artist, and making a living as a filmmaker, then you gotta write.  It’s work in the same way that being a teacher or a construction worker or a nurse or an office person is.  It’s work, so do it.
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A Dig Through Walmart’s Bargain Bin

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I never go to Walmart.  Not out of some liberal hatred for it or anything, though. I don’t go because here in Michigan, we have a superstore called Meijer which makes it unnecessary to shop anywhere else.  (The people here call it ‘Meijers’ by the way—it’s a stupid, Michigander thing.)  Anyway, last night I went to Walmart with some friends, because they wanted to go to Walmart, and I was at their mercy, so I went.

Walmart has a bargain bin.  A real one.  Meijer phased out their bargain bins a while back, which sucks, and is really the only thing that sucks about Meijer.
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