As usual, Spike Lee finds the hot button and pushes it. His latest flash point is the film version of James McBride’s novel, Miracle at St. Anna. Making its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on the weekend and opening theatrically Sept. 26, the movie deals with African-American soldiers of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division behind enemy lines during the Second World War in Italy. Besides exposing race issues and touching on mystical matters of faith, Lee graphically re-enacts a real-life German SS retaliatory massacre of 560 men, women and children in the village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema. That has left some of the atrocity survivors questioning the director’s motives. If that wasn’t enough, Lee also criticized Clint Eastwood at the Cannes Film Festival for not depicting activities of black soldiers in his two war movies Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima . But Lee wasn’t interested in resurrecting old controversies at the Four Seasons Hotel Sunday. He was focused on explaining how committed he was to the multiple themes of his new film. “We had a duty to try and get his right,” maintained Lee. Actually, the 51-year-old said that he’s lucky to have made the film at all. After the box-office success of his 2006 crime thriller Inside Man , he figured backers would be lining for his next project. That was supposed to be a biopic of soul singer James Brown or an ensemble movie study of the Los Angele ...
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