![]() ![]() He’s a bit tortured by his city’s suffering, and he yearns to do cinematic justice to every social injustice. (Like that native son, Lee is a social critic.) Being in the eye of the storm, Lee can’t disambiguate its wider effects. “I wouldn’t want to be any other place in the world but here, the epicenter,” Lee says, in an interview, sounding not unlike Chris Rock at the mike. By comparison, the muckraker of “NYC Epicenters” is a scattered man, spun out of orbit by his outrage. “4 Little Girls” and “When the Levees Broke,” his operatic visits to historical events distant and recent, stand alongside his dramas “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X” as his finest, most controlled work. Lee has rightly noted that his documentaries are underappreciated. ![]() Sometimes you need the showman and not the priest to m.c. The occasional Knicks joke puts his subjects, survivors of trauma, at ease. Early frames show Donald Trump in March, 2020, boasting about the country’s indomitability against the coronavirus underneath, a caption in large red type reads “President Agent Orange.” Later, Lee introduces Chris Cooper, the black birder who was targeted by Amy Cooper in Central Park, as “Harvard Edumucated.” As an interviewer, he’s avuncular. (More on that final chapter later.) These chapters are held together not so much by theme as by pungency. He has also mined the film canon for off-kilter references-often to his own œuvre-and collaged all this into four episodes divided into two chapters apiece, each of which is roughly an hour long, with the exception of the last. Lee has conducted two hundred interviews, rooted around for decades’ worth of television-news ephemera, and surfaced upsetting footage of catastrophe and corruption. The documentary is not just visceral but a kind of viscera: Lee’s thought process enfleshed. Unpredictably, the director splays himself across its seven and a half hours, offering up his messiness and his provincialism in equal proportion to his brilliance and his sensitivity. You can watch “NYC Epicenters” as a raw paean to the unbreakable city, but you can also watch it as a twilight retrospective of Lee by Lee. The ego is all there in the informality of the title, which gives off the weird gravitas of an epiphany scribbled in the Notes app. He wants to have you in his custody from the moment you learn the name of the “joint.” It is possible that, among all of Lee’s projects, “NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021 ½,” an oral history for HBO, reveals the most about his mammoth political and aesthetic appetites, in part because of its mammoth subject: twenty-first-century New York City, his home and muse. ![]() The documentary airs on Spike TV on Friday, September 9 at 11:15 pm ET, following live coverage of the rematch between Danny Jacobs and Sergio Mora.Spike Lee cannot wait for the picture to begin. The documentary includes classic footage of the fight-some of Ali’s best pre-match quotes included-with commentary from Sugar Ray Leonard, Mike Tyson, Walt Frazier, Ed O’Neill, and LL Cool J.Īli passed away at the age of 74 earlier this summer, leaving behind a legacy as one of the greatest boxers in the history of the sport. The rumble was the first of three epic fights between Ali and “Smokin Joe” and this one didn’t disappoint: it lasted 15 rounds. And now, we get a closer look at the epic event in the one-hour documentary Roots of Fight Presents: Ali: Birth of The Greatest, airing Friday at 11:15 pm ET on Spike TV. It was the first time two undefeated boxers went head-to-head for the title. That fight took place on Mawhen Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier battled it out at Madison Square Garden for the World Heavyweight Championship. It was the most momentous fight the sport had ever seen-it was the “Fight of the Century.”ġ1 Memorable Quotes From Muhammad Ali > ![]()
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