I’ve got a lot of respect for Spike Lee as a filmmaker. It would be nice to see him stretch himself a little more outside of the race issue theme that he always seems to fall back on… but you can’t deny the man can make a powerful film. The newest one appears to be a film on the L.A. Riots back in 1992. The good folks over at Movieweb give us this:
Imagine Entertainment and Spike Lee are teaming up on the drama, L.A. Riots for Universal Pictures. The film focuses around the April 1992 riots, written by John Ridley. Variety says the riots occured following the acquittal by a white jury of four police officers who were videotaped beating black motorist Rodney King, caused the death of 55 people, thousands of injuries and close to $1 billion in damage.
This is going to sound odd coming from me… but I don’t know if this is such a good idea. Could Spike Lee potentially make a solid hard hitting film out of this? Yes, I’m sure he could… but… I just finished watching a horrible horrible film called “The L.A. Riot Spectacular”, and in it Snoop Dogg actually makes an interesting observation… he basically said that the repeated showing of the Rodney King clips, and the media circus just feed on the boiling hostilities a lot of people already felt… and that was part of the reason the whole mess that cost a lot of people their lives got sparked in the first place.
Making a movie about it now… even 15 years later… seems a little irresponsible. I don’t mind controversy… I don’t mind hard questions being asked and answers being demanded… but it just feels to me like making this movie right now is just asking for trouble. But who cares I guess… as long as there’s money to be made I suppose. Perhaps I’m just being too cautious about the whole thing and I’m a bit paranoid… but this just doesn’t feel right to me.
