![]() (More on that final chapter later.) These chapters are held together not so much by theme as by pungency. He has also mined the film canon for off-kilter references-often to his own œuvre-and collaged all this into four episodes divided into two chapters apiece, each of which is roughly an hour long, with the exception of the last. Lee has conducted two hundred interviews, rooted around for decades’ worth of television-news ephemera, and surfaced upsetting footage of catastrophe and corruption. The documentary is not just visceral but a kind of viscera: Lee’s thought process enfleshed. Unpredictably, the director splays himself across its seven and a half hours, offering up his messiness and his provincialism in equal proportion to his brilliance and his sensitivity. You can watch “NYC Epicenters” as a raw paean to the unbreakable city, but you can also watch it as a twilight retrospective of Lee by Lee. The ego is all there in the informality of the title, which gives off the weird gravitas of an epiphany scribbled in the Notes app. ![]() He wants to have you in his custody from the moment you learn the name of the “joint.” It is possible that, among all of Lee’s projects, “NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021 ½,” an oral history for HBO, reveals the most about his mammoth political and aesthetic appetites, in part because of its mammoth subject: twenty-first-century New York City, his home and muse. Spike Lee cannot wait for the picture to begin. ![]()
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