The Sundance Film Festival just wheezed its last asthmatic, independent breath of the year in Utah, despite competition with a completely unforseen presidential inauguration. Really, it is not a great time for the independent film business. Reading the coverage that has come out of it, there are several movies I’m very curious to see over the next year or two (Sundance movies, particularly the majority which are not acquired by a major distributor, tend to have a slow and pokey way of finding their way to an audience, if they manage to at all). Nothing sounds more exciting as a music and movie fan, however, than Spike Lee’s Passing Strange. Lee filmed the last three Broadway performances and one rehearsal of this acclaimed rock musical to construct his performance films. Both correspondents for the AV Club gave the film a rare A- rating, and it has earned favorable comparisons to Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads movie Stop Making Sense. Similar (if on a smaller scale) to Lee’s approach, Demme combined footage of two concerts to make his film. Significantly, he avoided the concert movie cliche of constant cutaways to canned crowd shots, preferring to focus the framing on the actual stage in thoughtful compositions. Lee approaching such a project is tantalizing, as he has for years been one of America’s finest directors with a distinctive and thrilling visual style.

Spike Lee is always a magnet for criticism and controversy, and to be fair he often courts such attention. I do believe, however, that in assessing his films there is sometimes a tendency to criticize his public celebrity persona instead of the work itself. While he personally makes a point of being outspoken and loudly saying things many would rather just not address, it sometimes is overlooked that his films are often obsessively fair-minded, examining social problems and racial issues from every perspective. A great example is my favorite movie of the ’80s, Do The Right Thing. Prior to its release, some in the media prematurely decried it as irresponsible agitprop that would spur violence in audiences. The actual movie, while being one of the most intellectually and emotionally provoking I have ever seen, takes its examination of racial tension over a single day in Brooklyn across all of the diverse characters and factions that must interact and gives equal time to all of them, showing no favoritism. Such an approach makes the visceral tragedy all the more devastating in the explosive conclusion, because every single character is sympathetic in some respect but still flawed (in other words, human).*

Lee is frequently attacked for “fixating” on racial problems, specifically involving black people. This strikes me as patently unfair and not just a little bit racist (as well as untrue, considering great films like 25th Hour and Summer of Sam that are not primarily set in black communities). Anyway, Lee is a lifelong black Brooklynite, so it seems absurd to me to criticize an auteur for frequently revisiting the themes that concern him most. I would argue that the struggle of black people from forced diaspora to enslavement to still persistent oppression and now the very recently unthinkable election of a black President is the primary narrative in understanding this wacky mixed-up nation of ours, with its ingrained idealism and possibility contrasted with a legacy of blood and hypocrisy. Lee’s ongoing ghettoization as just a “black filmmaker” ignores that he may be the great American director of his generation.

Only the Coen Brothers might be able to compete with Lee in raw quantity of great movies in the same time span, and I can’t think of anybody else with as many unjustly overlooked masterpieces such as Clockers and He Got Game. The latter competes in my cranium with Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull for the title of greatest sports movie of all time (although I may have to amend that when I get around to seeing The Wrestler at the Naro this coming week). Lee and Scorsese are close friends (Scorsese produced Clockers for Lee), and they really do have a lot in common. Both are New York directors that have made several world class films about the communities they know best. Strangely, you never hear Scorsese attacked for returning to Catholic iconography juxtaposed with Italian and Irish immigrant crime narratives the way Lee constantly gets torn apart for telling stories of black communities. Sure, Scorsese is definitely an “Italian filmmaker” and Lee is a “Black filmmaker,” but in a much broader sense they are the great New York filmmakers of their respective generations, telling big stories in America’s cultural capital that resonate throughout the nation and world.

A project such as Passing Strange, a groundbreaking Broadway musical using its international search-for-self storyline to explore underexposed personal issues of racial identity, sounds like an ideal vehicle for Lee’s sensitive and dynamic gaze (and anybody who has seen School Daze knows that Lee can film and cut the hell out of a theatrical musical number). This is where I try to reign in the absurd number of words my passion for Spike Lee led me to spill and return to the origin of this tangent, the recent Sundance Film Festival. A few more flickers have aroused my interest. I think Doug Pray is the most fascinating emergent documentarian of the moment, and altogether he may be second only to the great Errol Morris in his field. Although his new film Art & Copy has received a few tepid reviews, I’m still excited to see his take on advertising’s greatest hits. Big Fan marks the directorial debut for former Onion editor and screenwriter for The Wrestler Robert Siegel. Starring Patton Oswalt as an obsessive sports fan, the movie has the potential to tell a deep, knowing story of geek neurosis from a few guys who know the subject well (it should also be funny). Finally, David Bowie’s son has made a semi-abstract science fiction movie called Moon starring the wonderful Sam Rockwell that has earned comparisons to 2001. I guess being spawned by Major Tom had an effect. It is encouraging in this free information age when the major movie and music industries are collapsing that we still have so many weird projects with such potential to look forward to. What about you? Is there anything on the horizon this year that you just can’t wait for?

*As a random but relevant bit of wikipedia trivia, our new president and first lady saw Do The Right Thing on their first date.