Boston Globe April 1998

These 3 paragraphs are the Milla related part of the article - the full article is below.

For those who have been put off by Lee for these reasons in the past, ''He Got Game'' may offer some surprises. For one, it features Lee's first sympathetic white female character. (He has admitted that his early films dealt harshly with women, period, but some of his later works - ''Crooklyn,'' ''Girl Six,'' ''Four Little Girls'' - portray very strong black women.) Granted, the good white girl here is a prostitute (played by model-actress Milla Jovovich), the cliched whore with a heart of gold. But Lee places her on the same level of need and sympathy and basic human desire as the character played by Denzel Washington, which is quite a leap forward.

In fact, to the extent ''He Got Game'' stirs racial controversy, it may simmer mainly among Lee's core black audience. At preview screenings in Philadelphia and Manhattan, when Washington started to kiss Jovovich, the black majority in the theaters moaned and groaned. In New York, as the protests mounted, a young black woman yelled out at the screen, ''Denzel, you promised! ''

Jovovich, who attended the Manhattan screening, was shocked by the reaction. ''You see what our society is coming to,'' she said the next day, still a bit shaken. ''It's very hard for me, growing up with very liberal views, hanging out in the fashion scene, where everything is so open. I've never had racism directed toward me - or my character. It was strange to see this happening in New York. That's kind of scary.''

NEW YORK - Spike Lee may be the world's most famous New York Knicks fan, studiously scoping every game at Madison Square Garden from his $2,000-a-pop courtside seat. So it comes as a surprise to consider that after he's directed 11 films in as many years, his 12th - ''He Got Game,'' which opens Friday - is the first that even remotely deals with basketball.

''I never thought about it,'' Lee replies when asked why he hadn't made a film about the sport before. ''Now that I look back, I scratch my head. Why did it take so long? But I'm a firm believer that timing is everything. And this is certainly good timing.''

The sports pages have been rife lately with tales of greed and corruption in college basketball. Two players for Arizona State plead guilty to taking bribes and shaving points. Another pair, at Northwestern, are indicted for fixing a series of games, making sure their team lost by a wider margin than the bookies' point spread. An NCAA survey finds that 25 percent of college athletes have gambled on sports, 4 percent on games in which they've played.

A topical setup indeed for Lee's film about a poor black kid named Jesus Shuttlesworth, the nation's top-ranked high school basketball player, growing up in the projects of Coney Island, N.Y., now tempted by coaches, agents, and friends, even loved ones who offer big money, fast cars, or faster women if he picks a certain college or turns pro or simply spins the way they want.

Lee wrote his script before the latest wave of scandals. ''This just comes from a life growing up as a sports fan,'' he says, sitting in a Manhattan hotel suite arranged by Touchstone Pictures, which is owned by Disney.

But this is ''A Spike Lee Joint,'' as the credits of all his films note, so ''He Got Game'' - which features real-life Milwaukee Bucks star Ray Allen as the kid and just-plain superstar Denzel Washington as his father - is more than a sports movie. It's about growing up in Brooklyn (where Lee still lives), about father-son relationships, about the redemption of a moral code - and, a constant in nearly all his films, it's about power and race.

The ranks of African-American film directors have grown since 1986, when Lee, not yet 30, burst forth with his zesty full-length-feature debut, ''She's Gotta Have It.'' But Lee, now 40, remains the only one among them who makes studio execs sit up, churns out a movie a year, wins complete creative control, and gets paid millions of dollars to boot.

Still, Lee remains something of an outsider in the system - and clearly has mixed feelings about his status. On the one hand, he seems to relish it as personal proof of social injustice, pushing it when he can gain an advantage, dismissing aesthetic criticisms as racist, and demanding to be regarded as America's Black Director. On the other hand, he rankles at the establishment's slights and double standards, and yearns to be treated as simply a director like any other.

His films often have an agitprop element - from their titles (''Do the Right Thing,'' ''Get On the Bus'') to pieces of dialogue (Laurence Fishburne pleading ''Wake up'' straight into the camera at the end of ''School Daze''). However, when asked what political effect he wants his films to have, Lee insists his main aim is ''just to tell a story.'' Lee has said he makes his films for a black audience, but he acts surprised and upset when few whites turn out for them.

He has long urged blacks to pool resources, form their own businesses, their own studios. Yet he grew livid when a journalist once asked him, at the opening of his (now-defunct) Spike Lee merchandise store, how much of the profit he would donate to the black community.

''The audacity of that question was just mind-boggling,'' he says, still upset years later. ''Robert De Niro owns three very fine restaurants in this city. Can you see anybody asking De Niro a question like that? Because you're black, you just can't be an entrepreneur, like any other American in this free-market society, and make money.''

The fact that De Niro has never expressed any political commitments Lee considers beside the point. ''It's just a double standard,'' he says, adding, ''No black journalist ever asked me a question like that.''

He was accused of anti-Semitism for his stereotyped depiction of greedy jazz club owners in ''Mo' Better Blues.'' He has denied the charge many times, but still approaches the issue with curious abandon. Asked how he felt when ''Four Little Girls,'' his moving documentary on the 1963 Birmingham, Ala., bombings, lost at the Oscars last month (Lee has been snubbed repeatedly by the academy and at Cannes), he replies, ''When I saw the list of nominees for best documentary and saw that one of the films was a Holocaust film, I knew then ... I wasn't going to win. How many Holocaust films do you want? And one of the producers was a rabbi? These are insurmountable odds. A lot of Jewish people came up to me on the street afterward and said, `You got robbed.'''

It's not just Lee's detractors who detect a problem with white people, especially white women. And it doesn't take a Freud to observe that this might have something to do with his father's having married a Jewish woman - whom the filmmaker openly dislikes - after his much-beloved mother died of cancer.

For those who have been put off by Lee for these reasons in the past, ''He Got Game'' may offer some surprises. For one, it features Lee's first sympathetic white female character. (He has admitted that his early films dealt harshly with women, period, but some of his later works - ''Crooklyn,'' ''Girl Six,'' ''Four Little Girls'' - portray very strong black women.) Granted, the good white girl here is a prostitute (played by model-actress Milla Jovovich), the cliched whore with a heart of gold. But Lee places her on the same level of need and sympathy and basic human desire as the character played by Denzel Washington, which is quite a leap forward.

In fact, to the extent ''He Got Game'' stirs racial controversy, it may simmer mainly among Lee's core black audience. At preview screenings in Philadelphia and Manhattan, when Washington started to kiss Jovovich, the black majority in the theaters moaned and groaned. In New York, as the protests mounted, a young black woman yelled out at the screen, ''Denzel, you promised! ''

Jovovich, who attended the Manhattan screening, was shocked by the reaction. ''You see what our society is coming to,'' she said the next day, still a bit shaken. ''It's very hard for me, growing up with very liberal views, hanging out in the fashion scene, where everything is so open. I've never had racism directed toward me - or my character. It was strange to see this happening in New York. That's kind of scary.''

''Not you, Denzel!''

Hill Harper, a young black actor who plays Jesus's best friend (a role that Lee himself would have played if he were 15 or 20 years younger), saw it differently. ''Denzel's a black male sex symbol,'' he explained, ''one of the very few out there. So it's like, `It's bad enough a lot of other black men go to white women - but not you, too, Denzel! You're the only thing we've got left!'

''If white men dated black women,'' Harper continued, ''it would be OK for a black man to date a white woman. But it only works one way in our society. So black women see that and say, `We're losing another one.' It becomes a very emotional issue.''

The very different reactions from Harper and Jovovich - which parallel, more articulately, the reactions from the black and white viewers in the theater that night - point up a trademark theme of Spike Lee films, the one element that irritates, dismays, enlightens, or does all those things at once. He sees - and show us in his films - that black and white are different cultures in America, that they very well may never ''get'' each other, that true communication, total integration, may be impossible, may not even be entirely desirable. The most we can manage, Lee suggests, is some pieces of common ground.

In this sense, though, ''He Got Game'' may provide new glimmers of hope in Lee's worldview, and not just because he shows Denzel Washington sharing a brief, caring intimacy with a white woman.

More revealing, and unequivocally stirring, is the film's opening: pastoral scenes of young people across the country shooting baskets - white farmboys (and tomboys!) in Indiana, as well as black kids in Brooklyn - all to the swelling symphonic music of Aaron Copland. The film's street scenes jam to songs by Public Enemy, but all the basketball scenes - the characters' glimpses of freedom and lyricism - sway to Copland. Copland! The heart-tugging hymnist of Americana, fruited plains, and the swirling together of dissonant masses into a melting pot of harmony.

Lee seems utterly without irony in this. ''Basketball is an American game,'' he stresses. ''Copland is very American. I love his music, too.'' Is this Spike's new joint: sports as a fanfare for the common man - and woman, white and black? The hoops court as the outdoor overture for a new common ground? It's a start.

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