Director: Spike Lee
Year Released: 2012
Rating: 0.5
Spike gone completely Amateur Hour. A privileged vegan brat (Jules Brown) is sent from Atlanta to Brooklyn for the summer to live with his grandfather (Clarke Peters) to apparently (?) find Jesus; what he finds out is that his grandfather is a child molester and that there are actual gangs in New York (!). You'd have to look far, far back in Lee's filmography to find a work this shoddy, terribly acted and atrociously written: why, for starters, would the boy's mother send her son to live with someone booted out of Atlanta for abusing a boy (unless she wasn't aware, in which case, she's a moron)? Why must we endure Peters' endless rants about Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior and the healing power of soul food? Why are we supposed to feel like there's any kind of substantive relationship forming between Brown's young dope and a sassy neighborhood girl (Toni Lysaith) when the two always look like they don't belong together or even care about each other? When he leaves Red Hook, is he supposed to have changed his world-view based on anything he's experienced? Lee, an accomplished talent whose mouth oftentimes speaks louder than his movies (unfortunately so) is also a respectable instructor of film: what would he rate this if a student handed it to him and asked him to grade it objectively?
