I know this marks me as regressive, but I find the idea of a black guy named Negron hilarious. It sounds like the name of a character in a blaxploitation sci-fi movie.
Miracle at St. Anna is not a sci-fi movie, but it does have a black dude named Negron. The new trailer for the Spike Lee film is out, and I like what I see quite a bit – I especially like how the opening at first seems like it’s going to be one of those fucking hokey WWII movie cliches where two guys who met in the war meet again as old men and have an epiphany or a moment or something. But no, the one guy blows the other guy’s brains out. Capital work, Spike!
Spike Lee is one of my favorite directors, and it’s interesting to see him tackling a whole new genre. I like the look of what he has here (although it does look a touch small in spots – but it’s a low budget film), and I’m excited to see the whole thing. A lot of people continue to bitch about what Spike said about Clint Eastwood’s fatuous and obvious Flags of Our Fathers (revisiting my review I’m glad to see that I didn’t fall for the hype at the time) not showing black soldiers. Obviously most of the bitchers, who just hate hearing black men speak up, don’t even understand the point Lee is making (and it’s not that one of the flag raisers should have been made black, it’s that the black experience at Iwo Jima could have been included in a movie that is ABOUT how the real heroes of Iwo Jima didn’t get the recognition while some photo op guys got all the glory. Doesn’t sound like a subplot or even a SCENE about how black WWII soldiers were, and continued to have been, ignored would be that hard to work into a movie that was already padded like a motherfucker), but I would hope that at the very least Spike stood up and made an answer film to Eastwood’s movie. This is the element that keeps getting ignored, and people act like Spike’s critiques of Flags just happened, as part of some marketing campaign. Miracle at St. Anna is the critique.
Click here to see the trailer, go to the message boards to expose your racialism by calling me out on my ‘liberal guilt.’