<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\n On TV, antiheroes are thriving on Mad Men and Breaking Bad, behaving terribly and getting away with it. At the Sundance Film Festival, people are surviving and grappling with the consequences of all sorts of bad behavior: an affair (Nobody Walks), a life-or-death lie (Wish You Were Here), plagiarism (The Words), and abuse (Simon Killer). No two films confront our worst impulses more directly than Spike Lee's Red Hook Summer and Nicholas Jarecki's Arbitrage.\n\n In the white-collar world of Arbitrage, everything is negotiable, from mergers to marriages. In a steely, unsympathetic performance that will attract awards attention, Richard Gere plays Robert Miller, a Madoff-like patriarch who gets what he wants, when he wants it, always\u2014whether it's an affair with a hot artist (Laetitia Casta) or a high-profile merger. Then suddenly, he's on the brink. That mean-bastard calm is just a cover. A sudden accident threatens to expose his affair to his wife (Susan Sarandon), and his number-crunching CIO daughter, played by the extraordinarily WASP-y Brit Marling, has discovered that he has defrauded his company out of nearly half a billion dollars. Yet, Miller moves through his world without regret. He doesn't apologize, he doesn't atone. Why should he, given how many ecs get prosecuted in this country? With the counsel of his attorney, he works the angles.\n\n Director Nicholas Jarecki's traditional film is more staid and less cartoonish than, say, Wall Street 2 (though both films boast hilarious cameos by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter). It's also more focused, more specific. It's not telling a story that will be unfamiliar to anyone who has ever read a story about crooked CEO, but it hones in carefully on those Tom Wolfe-ian status details as it follows in the wake of Miller's corruption and cover-ups. As in the original Wall Street, this film's tick-tock action inspires some of the same, sick thrill of watching\u2014and, even, despite yourself, rooting\u2014for this manipulative one-percent sonofabitch to get away with it all, once again. In the film's final minutes, there's a twist that makes it seem as if one part of his life might come crashing down\u2014but to believe that he will be truly punished, you'd have to forget the slippery Houdini act he's just pulled off.\n\n There's almost no way to talk about the sinner at the heart of Spike Lee's latest labor of love\u2014the messy, frustrating, fascinating Red Hook Summer\u2014without giving away the huge twist that upends this film and makes you rethink everything you've seen about halfway through. So if you want to go in relatively blind, know that this is a film about a 12-year-old kid who moves from his privileged suburb of Atlanta to stay with his evangelical Baptist bishop grandfather in the projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. Mookie (from Do the Right Thing) makes a return cameo, all grown up but still living in Red Hook and working in the pizza shop. Gentrification is afoot, drug dealers are still on corners, and Lee shoots it all on over-saturated, brightly-colored HD video, sometimes even using an iPad 2. It's Instagram chic, sloppy and slick at the same time. From scene to scene, the film weeble-wobbles from inspired to insipid. Lee has always been able to pull strong performances out of great actors, but the kids' acting is so unnatural and methodical it feels like they're being directed by metronome. On the other hand, his feel for the neighborhood is old-school early-Spike fun. Scripted by the novelist and memoirist James McBride, whose family founded the small church where much of the action takes pace, the film is charged with gospel music and barn-burning sermons by the grandfather, Enoch, and The Wire's Clarke Peters plays him with righteous, desperate fury.\n\n Now, About That Spoiler Alert.\n\n Without warning, about two-thirds through the film, it's suddenly revealed that Peters had molested a young boy fifteen years earlier\u2014when that boy was about the same age as his grandson. Enoch got away with it. In a violent flash, Lee's fish-out-of-water Brooklyn pastoral suddenly becomes an excoriation of the church, which covered up Enoch's abuse, and a test of religious forgiveness: How do men live with the sin they've committed? How can their families and friends forgive? Lee doesn't soft-shoe the issue. There's a flashback sequence in which you see the good bishop caressing the boy's neck and asking him to recite Bible verses before his head drops down into the boy's lap. There's a bloody, violent confrontation. In short, this is one of the strangest films at this year's Sundance, a deeply felt and deeply erratic film that jerks from one extreme to the other. The overlong film needs another edit, and many of its problems probably can't be fid, but none of this is the fault of Peters. Large swathes of the movie veer off the rails, but his powerhouse, perorating performance rings true."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/sundance-film-festival-spike-lee-red-hook-summer>