Its been a long time since filmmaker Spike Lee has made a film set exclusively in Brooklyn. In fact, it hasn’t been since 1998′s He Got Game which was set in Coney Island. But Spike is back, and in Red Hook Summer he doesn’t disappoint. Red Hook Summer follows Flik, a young boy from Atlanta that is shipped up to Brooklyn, NY to spend his Summer with his grandfather Bishop Enoch in the Red Hook Projects. His middle class upbringing doesn’t translate well to the concrete jungle but finds solace in the friendship with a young girl named Chazz. From the start, Red Hook Summer is vintage Spike. The bright colors, the characters, the quirky dialog… it’s all here. We even get a glimpse of older characters as we catch Mookie still delivering pizzas for Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, and the once promiscuous Nola Darling has found the light and is a Jehovah’s Witness. But this seemingly PG rated storyline becomes a monster around the second half of the film, and then we’re reminded that we’re watching a Spike Lee joint. In typical Spike fashion, the rug is pulled out from under us. Urban life, with the black church at the center of the commentary, becomes nitpicked. Everything we thought we saw in the first half of the flick then becomes closely examined and stripped away, leaving the characters (especially Bishop Enoch) left naked and bared for all to see. Clarke Peters is amazing as the glory stricken Bishop Enoch and his power is so evident in the last (and powerful) of three sermons in the film, that it gave me chills down my spine. Colman Domingo (Blessed Rowe) delivers a heartfelt performance that is intensified with one of Spike’s most effective uses of his signature dolly shot. Nate Parker, as the neighborhood blood Box, is also strong as he resembled a lot of the lost people I’ve come across in life. If there was one minor flaw, it’d be the performance of Toni Lysaith (Chazz) as her lines were very rehearsed feeling, stiff and as if she were slowly reading her lines being fed to her behind the camera. Whereas her counterpart and the lead child actor, Jules Brown (Flik), came off very cool and laid back. Personally, it has been a long time since I’ve left a theater so buried in thought that I had to sleep on it before giving an opinion. But Red Hook Summer managed to be funny, upbeat, disturbing and downright thought provoking by the time the 2-hour mark clocked in. Do yourself a favor and catch Red Hook Summer NOW at one of the select theaters its playing at!

@MRMARIN88