Clint vs. Spike
All of this controversy nonsense between Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee started at Cannes where Lee said this about Eastwood:
“He did two films about Iwo Jima back to back and there was not one black soldier in both of those films.”
Then, Eastwood fired back:
“[He should] shut his face.” Eastwood said his 2006 film Flags of Our Fathers was historically accurate. The Oscar winner insisted that black troops were not involved in raising the flag at Iwo Jima. “If I go ahead and put an African American actor in there, they’d say ‘this guy’s lost his mind,’” he said.”I’m not in that game. I’m playing it the way I read it historically.”
And recently, Spike retaliated:
“First of all, the man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either … He’s a great director. He makes his films, I make my films. The thing about it though, I didn’t personally attack him. And a comment like ‘a guy like that should shut his face’ — come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there.”
My assessment of this situation so far:
- Spike Lee is clearly promoting his own war film by drumming up an old argument and playing his favorite card. I mean, come on… he basically called Eastwood a “plantation owner”.
- Clint Eastwood overreacted. “Shut your face” is not the kind of cantankerous rhetoric anyone was expecting from him. This story probably would have gone away if he didn’t react the way he did.
- Spike Lee is a good trash talker. Something he no doubt learned from this man.
- When the dust has settled, both will be seen as guilty of drumming up publicity by extending this argument.
