We all know Spike Lee, he's one of a small handful of directors that transcend their own movies.

And know it or not, we've all been waiting for him to make a war movie about black soldiers in Vietnam.

Apparently we've been waiting for him to do it because despite there being a veritable

gold mine of source material, a treasure trove of experience and memory from which to draw.

No one else has yet made a movie out of it without putting Charlie Sheen or Robin Williams

in there to interrupt the black people while they're talking.

When to five bloods was released, we bounced it to the front of our

cue as we sometimes do and not just because it was a major motion picture event, but because

it redressed a glaring imbalance

in the war movie pantheon,

and the redresser was famous and famously engaged in the redressants.

We're coming up on the third anniversary of Friendly Fire

and one consequence of watching and reviewing close to

250 movies is that we all see the hand of the director much more readily.

This has become John's job on friendly fire and not just because it's a place you can be graciously middle-aged

bearded bespeckled fat and Hawaiian shirt-clad with no social consequences

It's maybe the most powerful

storytelling job there is especially when you can marshal millions of dollars and

hundreds of people into realizing your vision. Most of the time a handy

director is a drawback, too many thinky effects, too much

screwing with the story under the guise of telling the story and almost any film

can devolve into the Acid Trip section of Easy Rider.

...