SUMMER OF SAM (1999) *** This is Spike Lee's greatest film. It's not fun, it doesn't leave you feeling good, it leaves you nauseous to the point of…um, absolute nausea like vomiting arsenic all over the tulips, but it is so brilliantly presented that you understand why he had to do it. For me and my friends (pseudo-bourgeois military brats, university drinking buddies) the '70s were all about "I want to rock and roll all night/and party every day", Spike drives home that it was a lot different for the New Yorker underclass. It's far too little to say that Spike knows something about New York city-everyone knows something, no one knows it all-but the presentation is so authentic as to….oh, God!, what a hell hole . Anyone who longs for the (bad) good old days should be forced to watch this. It's all terrible, there are billions of brilliantly developed characters…and no one you would consider trading places with. I guess the cops are the closest and, you know. It's great that Spike did this one….it would be all too easy for it to be declared racist and auto-ignorable if he wasn't a Black man representing the Black community this way…or is he simply offering a commentary on portrayal? I don't think so, I think there's some bitterness there. And disco…and punk ! The immediately and incessantly ostracized punker is, I guess, the most sympathetic character in the film in the best of ways, but…CBGBs has really been over-romanticized, hasn't it? I mean, this looks like, it's a fucking cesspool that no one in the right mind would want to be on the same continent as and…ok, I might have enjoyed it some at the time, but… The only redeeming thing about this film is its truth. The acting is across the board good to brilliant, Adrien Brody at the brilliant end, Jennifer Esposito is as brilliant as he demands as his equally demented (worse? better?) love interest, but the absolute shock is that Mike Starr delivers the best of humanity as it could be in the denouement. What? Fuggedaboutit? Just fucking try, mate. Spike doesn't avoid nor develop the conspiracy theories (nicely documented ones actually, it's only an open question) about the monster acting on behalf of a group-perhaps because Jimmy Breslin is so present (and as the guy who probably gets it most, says the conspiracies are bullshit lies)-but anyway because it's not so much about a serial killer as it is about the way it affects us all. Evil, the fear of evil, the way that fear makes us more vulnerable to evil.
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