Spike Lee on Kristaps Porzingis: "He Ain't Scared of the Brothers"

Spike Lee was a guest on Jimmy Fallon’s show on Thursday. Spike is all jazzed up about the Knicks and Kristaps Porzingis, who is performing way ahead of schedule. Then poor Fallon lamented that his Knicks seats aren’t as good as Spike’s, and Spike (half) joked that he’d get James Dolan on the line to rectify that. All in all, an accessible chat.

While we’re here, it’s worth noting that Spike Lee has come under a large amount of criticism in Chicago, where I live, for what it’s believed the filmmaker’s new movie Chi-Raq will denote. The rapper Rhymefest (Cheland Smith) summed it up:

"“Spike Lee should have used Chicago writers. None of them were from Chicago. This movie is not about a war. This is not a war. Wars are fought for a reason generally. People fight over land, over money. . . . That’s not what’s happening on Chicago’s South Side . . . . People like to say its gangs fighting over turf. That’s not it. It’s senseless violence. People feel disrespected and not validated. They’re poor. Guns are cheap. Drugs are cheap. Because guns and drugs are cheap senseless violence happens. The guns and drugs get into the hands of children. . . . You can pick up the story of this film and drop it into any [city]. Chicago was used because of the media’s portrayal of the violence and it was used as a way for [Lee] to sell tickets. We were used. We were exploited. This story is not specific to Chicago.”"

Read the full criticism here.

[H/T SportsGrid]