Go Ahead...Shut Your Face

To me, Clint Eastwood is hard to pin down.

Sure, he'll drift into town and have a quick draw duel at high noon, but he'll bring an orangutan with him and then become mayor. Or he'll pop out his .44 Magnum but paralyze a female boxer. And with his latest kick on WWII, Spike Lee is not a fan.

Let's just start by saying I think Spike Lee is a (reverse) racist idiot who thinks he's God's gift to cinema. I deliberately avoid his films because he's a hypocrite and a pompous jerk - he even tried to sue Spike TV for stealing the name Spike, even though Spike isn’t Spike Lee’s real name. Anybody who has the audacity to criticize filmmakers who are clearly better than him has no credibility, and it's pretty clear that he's just bitter because he peaked 20 years ago and has been irrelevant ever since.

Now, Lee cries foul that Eastwood is keeping the black man down, obviously trying to drum up interest in his own WWII film Miracle At St. Anna. Speaking about the casting for his tale of four black American soldiers in Tuscany, Lee said that black actors appear in war films too infrequently.

"Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," he said. "If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that -- that was his vision, not mine. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know."

Well, Clint doesn't take shit from anybody, least of all Mars Blackman.

"Has he ever studied the history?" As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, "but they didn't raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate."

And it wasn't the first time Eastwood's taken crap from Spike Lee.

"He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. 'Why would a white guy be doing that?' I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else."

Regading Eastwood's next picture Changeling, which is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city's make-up was changed by the large black influx, he says:

"What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin' story about that?" he growls. "Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is. When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people. A guy like him should shut his face."

I don't care that he almost signed the Declaration of Independence, I still wouldn't mess with Clint. He's a tough old bastard. Suck it, Spike.