malcolm x Tagged Articles at Cinematical

• Joseph Barbera (1911-2006) - Writer, director and producer who was half of the Hanna-Barbera animation team. Read my full tribute here.
• Desmond Briscoe (1925-2006) - Sound engineer who did sound effects for The Man Who Fell to Earth, Children of the Damned, The Haunting (1963) and The Ipcress File and composed music for Phase IV. He died December 7.
  
• James Brown (1933-2006) - Read my full tribute to the "Godfather of Soul" here.
• Robin Buss (1939-2006) - English writer, critic and translator who was a well-known Francophile. He worked as a film critic for The Independent and wrote the books The French Through Their Films, Italian Films and French Film Noir. He also served as a translator in the documentary Drug-Taking and the Arts. He died of cancer December 16, in London.
• Hallie D'Amore (c.1940-2006) - Oscar-nominated makeup artist for Forrest Gump. She also worked on Dick Tracy, xXx, Bugsy, 2 Fast 2 Furious and Apollo 13. She also won an Emmy for the HBO movie Normal and she appeared in Forrest Gump as an extra. She was found dead in her home, along with her husband, December 15. A police investigation has ruled that she shot her husband, photographer Richard D'Amore, and then shot herself because of "domestic discord."

The current issue of New York magazine features an excellent six-page piece by Ariel Levy on Spike Lee and his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee. I started out just breezing through it, but quickly got sucked into Levy's excellently descriptive characterizations of Lee. Also, I learned some fascinating Spike Lee facts:

• He lives on the Upper East Side of New York City, and his children attend one of the toniest private schools in Manhattan;
• They also have a home on Martha's Vineyard, in an area called Oak Bluffs, a vacation spot for wealthy blacks since the 1930s;
• His wife, Tonya, was "marrying down" when she married him; Lewis' father, a prominent executive with Philip Morris, is a member of the Boulés, the "most elite social club for black men in the country"; her mother is a member of Links, basically the female equivalent. Lewis grew up amid the Blackristocracy;
• Lee and his wife are at the top of W.E.B. DuBois' "Talented Tenth" of black society; and
• Lee's wife, on why comparing Lee to Malcolm X is unfair: "Spike is not as malleable as Malcolm."

Check out the full piece, it's a well-written, fascinating glimpse at what Lee is like. Levy also talks a good deal about Lee's four-hour Hurricane Katrina documentary.

[ via Green Cine Daily ]