At random points, the footage becomes over-saturated and grainy and then 10 – 20 seconds later it will revert back to normal. Lee has no problem throwing in long takes, messing with the filters, and embracing his look-at-me shots, but with Red Hook Summer there doesn't seem to be any method to the madness. In Red Hook Summer, the conversations are just two people reciting Lee's viewpoints and the cinematography is so stolid and staged that we're left to wonder if Lee just wanted to make a stage play, but didn't want to give up his visual flourishes. These are scenes that make us long for the days when Spike Lee had the courtesy to have characters editorialize directly to the camera. Peters can't do anything about the cliché sermons and he can't do anything about the dull scenes where Enoch sits on a bench with another character and they comment on the larger world. Additionally, all of his dialogue is basically along the lines of "something, something, Jesus, something." It's tough to share in Enoch's religious fervor when it seems like he's pulling all of his material from the Standard Book of Black Preacher Sermons. Outside the church, Peters makes Enoch a fairly compelling figure, but there's nothing special or unique about the character when he's in preacher-mode. The film does have a talented actor in Peters but he's also limited at times by the material. Perhaps Lee thought that a hands-off approach to their performances would provide something more natural, but just the opposite occurred and we feel embarrassed every time Flick and Chazz open their mouths. However, Brown and Lysaith's performances are so bad that they would get booed off the stage of a middle school play and rightfully so. Part of the problem is that Lee's script gives them awful dialogue that no real child in the 21 st century would ever say. Brown and especially Lysaith are two of the worst child actors I have ever seen. This pacing may have worked in character-driven story, but that would require multi-dimensional characters who grow and change over the course of the movie.Įven if you can justify the film's overall form, the separate elements are indefensible. In one scene we have Flick using his iPad 2 to conduct an interview with a Red Hook resident, the next scene will have Enoch and one of his congregants talking about the state of black people in modern America, and the next scene will have a local gang member ( Nate Parker) being all threatening. From there, the movie stumbles from scene to scene without much rhyme or reason, and there's nothing organic about this approach. While working at the church, Flick meets Chazz ( Toni Lysaith), a local girl/churchgoer/most-annoying-human-being-on-the-face-of-the-planet. Enoch, a local preacher, makes Flick spend time cleaning up the church and listening to the ravings of the drunken Deacon Z ( Thomas Jefferson Byrd). Flick ( Jules Brown) is uprooted from his comfortable life in Atlanta and forced to stay with his estranged grandfather Enoch ( Clarke Peters) over the summer in Red Hook, New York while his mother goes on a trip.
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