Spike Lee is stupid; Clint Eastwood is Smart

A few weeks ago Spike Lee attacked Clint Eastwood's films Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, stating things such as, "While refraining from using the word 'racist', Lee said that rewriting Second World War history was typical of Hollywood."

I do not like Spike Lee. His movies are mediocre and seem to always be spouting the same tune. And I kind of get the feeling this latest charade is simply to promote his own movie about black soldiers.

However, today (or yesterday, maybe) Clint Eastwood gave a response, which is worded so well I won't butcher it with a synopsis. BBC News reports:

"The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that," he told the Guardian. "It's not accurate."

Eastwood added that he would not compromise the facts with future projects.

"I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is," he said.

"When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people," said Eastwood

Exactly. None of the flag-raisers were black, so why should he change the race of those specific heroes? Eastwood says, "I'm not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy." Exactly. You cannot re-write the color of a person's skin in the history books. I'm sure a director would get even more flak for ruining historical accuracy than, I don't know, not.