Comparing Apples and Oranges?
Having seen both “He Got Game” and “Bulworth,” I read Stanley Crouch’s commentary with interest (“Beatty, Lee and Their Worlds of Blackness,” June 13).
Given that Crouch is a well-known writer and social critic, his rather involved comparison of the two films is surely intellectual. However, is he comparing apples and oranges?
While “He Got Game” is a seriously beautiful film about current racial and class inequities, “Bulworth” is a farce. It seems to this average filmgoer that both Warren Beatty and Spike Lee produced movies with a message. Only the forms were totally different.
MARY MEYER, Pasadena
*
The problem with Crouch’s article was not that it was so grouchy and transparent in dealing with Warren Beatty’s movie-making efforts in “Bulworth” but that it was long, dismal and boring.
It’s about time that Americans got over the old, hackneyed notion that only black folk can talk about black folk and that in essence is what he was saying and that is just not good enough for a writer in his revered position.
MARSHALL BELL, Los Angeles
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