KOBE DOIN WORK! (again)

Kobe’s Beautiful Game

Thursday, 21 May 2009 09:16

Like him or not, after watching Spike Lee’s mesmerizing documentary, you’ll be sucked into the hype, too.
By: Salamishah Tillet

I've never been a Kobe Bryant fan. Maybe it’s because I'm still getting over the Lakers 4-1 deafening defeat of my mainstay, the Philadelphia 76ers in the 2001 NBA finals. Maybe I just don't like his particular blue-chip swagger. Of his generation of athletes, I have always appreciated Serena Williams' extroverted braininess, Donovan McNabb's self-composure, and of course, Allen Iverson’s blue–collar, rumble-in-the-jungle plays. Most certainly it’s because I never got over those sexual assault charges.

But I have to hand it to Spike Lee. For about 90 minutes last weekend, as I watched his documentary, Kobe: Doin' Work—which aired on ESPN Saturday and was released on DVD on Tuesday—I got sucked into the hype.
The conceit for the project, as described by Lee, is: “one great player, one day, on the job.” Filmed during a Lakers game against the San Antonio Spurs during the end of the 2007-2008 regular season, Lee captures all things Kobe with 30 cameras, the images mixed with real-time floor commentary and a post-game voiceover. As a result of this cinematic mixture, Lee not only gives the audience the game as Kobe sees it, but also gives us unprecedented access to the game as Kobe thinks it.

Bryant’s voiceover reveals certain unfamiliar insights about his defensive ability, his ignorance about how much talking he does on the court, his multilingual trash talking with his Slovene teammate, Sasha Vujacic; his shooting irregularities, his unabashed respect for San Antonio players Manu Ginobili and Bruce Bowen. By relying so much on Bryant’s analysis, Kobe feels like we are in the locker room with him, studying film, rather than watching greatness.

On one hand, Lee’s commitment to basketball purity is admirable. Other than one of the opening scenes in which Kobe is watching CNN ask Hillary Clinton about Barack Obama’s “bitter” comments during last year’s Democratic primaries, the game is suspended in time. That one game becomes every game. That one night becomes every night Bryant is on court.

Through the intimate nature of Bryant’s narration about why he does or does not take a particular shot, his translation of the Lakers’ silent on-court communication and his eloquence about ball rotation, we literally learn how to see the game differently. We feel the rhythmic minutiae of basketball. Pedestrian. Laborious. Repetitive. Less pomp and circumstance, more fast breaks and fatigue.

As engaging as Lee’s approach is, the documentary reveals little about how Bryant views anything other than basketball. Unlike Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, the 2006 film on the soccer great which inspired Lee to make Kobe: Doin’ Work, the singular focus of Bryant’s voiceover does not allow for glimpses into the prodigy’s development, either as a player or as a person.

The film closes with Bryant, his wife, Vanessa, and their two daughters returning home after the game. The scene of domestic tranquility conjures up opposing memories of the chaos surrounding the sexual assault charges brought against Bryant in 2003. Unlike Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and James Toback’s Tyson, Lee’s documentary is uninterested in exploring the tensions between sexual violence, male privilege and fame. The film is unwilling to ask what demons haunt and yes, constitute Bryant’s genius, what past he so desperately wants to remake. By removing context and conflict, Lee’s film assumes that the only greatness that matters is Bryant’s intellectual and physical dexterity on the court.

In the real world, character, charisma and depth are considered virtuous traits. But, if you’d like to forget about those things for 90 minutes, one night of Bryant’s eloquent play and Lee’s engrossed directing redefines how you experience the beautiful game of basketball.

Salamishah Tillet is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the non-profit organization, A Long Walk Home, Inc., which uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to document and to end violence against underserved women and children.

[Source: The Root]

NEWSWEEK SPEAKS ON 20-YEAR-OLD "Do The Right Thing."

Thursday, 11 June 2009 16:28
The Fire Next Time
By Joshua Alston

Considering all the effort put into shrouding Barack Obama in swarthy otherness during the election, it's a wonder that one biographical factoid went without much scrutiny. On their first date, he took Michelle to see Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, the dystopian meditation on race relations that, a full 20 years after its release, remains the hottest firebomb in Lee's provocative filmography.

Never mind Jeremiah Wright and Michelle's Princeton thesis; if anything would have given "hardworking white Americans" pause, it's the thought of their president and first lady courting at a film that features a black mob gleefully torching a white man's business. There's even a recitation of a Louis Farrakhan quote about how the black man will one day "rise and rule the earth as we did in our glorious past," but Obama wasn't asked to reject or denounce his choice of date movie.

That the film never came up is more surprising considering that the two decades since Do the Right Thing's release haven't blunted its impact. The film takes place on a record-hot day in Brooklyn's predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Lee plays Mookie, a pizza schlepper for Sal (Danny Aiello), an Italian-American whose pizzeria is either a great place to grab lunch, or akin to a foreign military base, depending on who is asked. During the film's climax, Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito) and Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) storm Sal's to demand he put a black face among his all-Italian-American wall of fame. A fight breaks out, and when the NYPD shows up, Raheem is choked to death by an officer, sparking the riot that destroys Sal's pizzeria.

Do the Right Thing demands that the viewer make an uncomfortable value judgment: what's more important, a white man's property or a black man's life? Lee was unconvinced that white America would reach the right conclusion, as the film ends with a mayor's statement on the riot, read by a radio announcer: "The city of New York will not allow property to be destroyed by anyone." (That line, Lee admits, was aimed directly at then-mayor Ed Koch.) It would be nice to write off Lee's pessimistic view of race relations, particularly as the police are concerned, but the deaths of Amadou Diallo in 1999 and Sean Bell in 2006 bear out the notion of police killing innocents, then dressing up racial malice in gross incompetence's clothes. If Lee made the film in 2009, it would probably be more indignant rather than less, the election of Obama notwithstanding.

The film's most controversial feature was actually in the credits, in which two quotes roll: one from Martin Luther King Jr. repudiating the use of violence, and one from Malcolm X justifying violence in self-defense. There's no bolder choice a filmmaker can make than to create an ambiguous ending, to force the audience to decide how it feels about what it's seen rather than simply agree or disagree with him. To watch Do the Right Thing now is to be reminded why Lee stands among our most original, most daring filmmakers. It's still relevant, still troubling and still more of a third-date kind of movie.

[Source: Newsweek]

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