Screen:

...One need not agree with all of Lee's points to appreciate their timeliness...

...Do the Right Thing, which Lee directed, produced, wrote, and stars in, is loud, often foul-mouthed, and extremely frank about racial antagonism-not just between white and black, but between black and Latin, Asian, and others...

...The comic byplay between him and Ford is handled well, even though both actors are slumming...

...He's got good instincts, sees every point of view, tries to explain things to mutual enemies-but fortunately isn't too good not to get distracted from work by friendship, mischief, a shower, or sex...

...he calls his own production company, "Forty Acres and a Mule...

...But at least The Last Crusade involves no sacrilege...

...In the end, he doesn't even do the right thing...

...hence benign neglect of black and white tensions on screen for almost two decades...

...But conservatives haven't wanted to hear such discourse, and liberals are often too polite to face all the issues...

...one can really review Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade...

...The cliche about "the movie industry" gets too cozy from frequent reiteration...

...The movie rounds up the usual suspects: Nazis, criminal masterminds, a blonde villainess...

...Fortunately, The Last Crusade at least touches on two important subjects, the family and the grail...

...But as director, Lee certainly makes the movie ask what might be, for all of us, the right thing to do about race hatred, mob violence, the intolerable conditions of ghetto life, and police over-reaction...

...Some religious sensivity is used in treating the legend of the grail's whereabouts and meaning...

...In fact, those old B-movies have become A-movies...

...The theme is resumed in Indiana's later life...

...the episode is a slight but noteworthy pop culture Freudian slip...

...Like Dick Gregory in his prime, Lee is unembarrassed by racial subjects...

...His blend of comic honesty, lack of self-righteousness, genuine pride, valid protest, and a larger vision of social causes is provocative...

...We see Indy as a boy scout (River Phoenix) on his first adventure, saving a conquistador's cross from pillage by archeological vandals...

...At least, the new frills dollying up The Last Crusade are slightly intelligent...

...but sequels remind us of its plain truth...

...In short, The Last Crusade substitutes the new au courant romance of home life-fathers and sons in some movies, mothers and babies in scores more-for the traditional romance of boy meets girl...

...The earlier invisibility is key: it lays the groundwork for the family plot in which, amid harum-scarum adventures, father and son find new closeness...

...what you do is analyze product design...

...The plot centers on a Bedford-Stuyvesant pizzeria owned by a middle-aged Italian (Danny Aiello, in his best role ever) who refuses to get out despite his son's disgust with the decay around them...

...some unpleasantness with rats and snakes...

...Spielberg, ever in love with boyhood {Empire of the Sun) and the father-son theme (E.T...

...But then, on screen at least, no one believes in that kind of thing anymore...

...here provides Indy (Harrison Ford) with a a daddy-Sean Connery as a professor of medieval literature who has been obsessed with grail legends all his scholarly life...

...No longwinded study better condenses the film history of our times...

...At least Denholm Elliot, as Jones's friend, gets to point out that it really "stands for the divine in all of us...

...Neither can Lee, who puts himself in the middle as the pizza delivery man, often trying to diffuse the simmering anger between Aiello, his sons, and their customers...

...As Spike Lee shows, it is not illiberal to face all the issues, and to acknowledge both the internal (as well as imposed) problems of ghetto life...

...But like Gregory, Lee is able to deflect his satire away from blacks to the cycles of poverty that keep some of them trapped...

...The industry sells toys-not tie-ins like dolls and sweatshirts, but the movies themselves-and it designs new ones simply by adding attachments, see, for example, Star Trek V, Karate Kid III, Ghost-busters II...

...One sequence involves a set of expletives directed at everyone, so universal and absurd that it both disgusts and amuses, only half a comic purgation...

...Spielberg's deft hand is evident in the rapid-fire, breathless opening: an exuberant, immediate chase sequence aboard a circus train allows him to lasciviate in all sorts of boyhood fantasies...

...The Nazis and their cohorts want it for occult reasons, or, as one claims, because it will confer eternal youth...

...The chase ends in Indy's home-with an invisible dad too involved in his own scholarship to pay attention to his son's exploits...

...Spielberg manages to give the theme of fathers and sons against the woman his usual (unconscious) Oedipal twist...

...hair's breadth escapes and chases (by air, sea, land, you name it...

...With both the Spanish cross and other artifacts stolen by bad guys, Indy also gets to say, "that belongs in a museum...

...In Do the Right Thing he presents-first from a comic and eventually a tragic perspective-some harsh aspects of black and other minority group life whose benefits from the civil rights movement have not included liberation from the ghetto...

...Connery is tweedy, daffy, and both scared by and mad at his son's tendency to draw machine-gun fire...

...Lack of frank discourse about these subjects hasn't helped us lately, nor lack of recent film treatments (until Mississippi Burning...

...In previous films such as She's Gotta Have It and School Daze (both made on shoestring budgets), and in his new Do the Right Thing (financed by Universal Pictures), he provides an exciting but uneven blend of pop theatricality and social realism...

...Across the street, a Korean has opened a fruit stand and faces some of the same problems...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...He doesn't hide excessive drinking, laziness, and the likelihood, on a hot summer day, of adolescent tempers rising to unreason and riot...

...This seemed like penance at the time, and perhaps he still aims at some...

...But because frankness on black-white relations has become so rare-from any perspective- you really hope that someday he does...

...Spielberg was much closer to real magic and the supernatural with Encounters of the Third Kind...

...If curatorial ethics become a firm part of his heroism, it might even confer prestige on museum-going...

...As usual, the rousing John Williams score strikes up the triumphant Indy theme at appropriate climaxes...

...Veteran actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis are also present as older blacks unable to diffuse rising racial tensions...

...Ford (who varies Indy adventures with the finer Witness, Mosquito Coast, and Working Girl) gives Jones his usual tongue-in-cheek individuality...

...At the 1987 Oscars, Steven Spielberg, director of all Indy movies, said that "we must renew our romance with the word...

...As producer and story contributor George Lucas says of The Last Crusade and its predecessors: "they're like old 1940s' B-movies...

...In the opening sequence, Spielberg also provides Indiana Jones with a prehistory in the manner of Godfather II...

...He uses a jumbo ghetto blaster as a precipitating prop-a machine that older blacks as well as white characters know is really a weapon...

...For young viewers of this kind of movie, any encouragement helps...

...Still, one takes small crumbs when offered...

...The Last Crusade is nowhere near Chretien de Troyes, or Parsifal, even on a pop level...

...Wearing an old Dodgers' T-shirt with Jackie Robinson's number, Lee plays the delivery man as a frail thread holding the memory of an older Brooklyn together...

...It is hard to combine the two, and Lee doesn't always succeed in his new movie...

...Except for The Last Temptation no other mass market American film in two decades has even mentioned such things...