QUOTE (JohntheBaptist @ Mar 15 2010, 01:11 PM)
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Wow. I didn't know so many people loathed Spike so much. I have the doc ready to watch tonight, so maybe he didn't really do himself any favors here, I admit.
He puts his foot in his mouth a lot, but what you're referencing here isn't a good example of that. I've heard him talk about "Hoosiers" a lot of times, and I think it's taken to be a lot less theoretical than he intends.
Without dragging the debate up too much, I think his point is that the classical Hollywood narrative of squeaky clean white kids overcoming the odds and beating the huge, hulking monsters of CAHS is both a tiny bit disingenuous and, well, probably kind of uncomfortable to watch for him. The way the "bad guy" is classified in sports movies is always interesting, as an aside. Think of
Major League- the Yankees are implicitly whatever the hero team- the Indians- are not: down to earth, not-corporate, working class, underdog, etc. We recognize it more easily because the Yankees are baseball shorthand for that- it's why they're the bad guy so often. Sports movies cast the team we're supposed to dislike automatically in the opposite light of whatever the "good guys" are cast in- we're conditioned to like the good guys through Acts 1 and 2 for specific reasons, and they end up being the exact reasons NOT to like the final foe, so to speak. In the case of "Hoosiers," it's a valid subtext for discussion. Race is a major, major part of American film. He's an important part of that.
He's a pretty angry guy, and I find myself disagreeing with him often (he was wrong in his "fights" with Tarantino and Eastwood, I think)- but he's also passionate and, people forget- really a brilliant guy when discussing his profession.
I do loathe him. I interviewed him for a paper back in college and the guy was a major ass. Pompous, condescending and obnoxious. I do see your point about Hollywood, however I totally disagree with your assessment of
that film fitting into that particular genre. Attucks High wasn't portrayed as the "bad guys", just the more talented guys - which they obviously were. In fact, two of the other teams that Milan (Hickory) plays got the "bad guy/thug team" rap, not Oscar Robertson's team. And more importantly, the movie was based on fact. A group of white hillbillies beat the much bigger (and blacker) school from the city. If Lee wants to mock Rocky II thru Rocky V about the White Engine That Could, I'm right there with him. But I think he is being overly sensitive and is flat wrong about Hoosiers.
By the way, to prove he can be a little oversensitive and obnoxious, he let me know right away at the start of the interview (it was in 1992) that I was lucky to be sitting with him because he normally didn't "do interviews for white colleges"...I went to Fordham, which is Catholic and shamefully, primarily white.