Spike Lee banished to the video store? The maker of She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing hunted out of the cinema? Yes, in Holland at least, where Columbia didn’t know what to do with Lee’s Get on the Bus. A scandal, because with Get on the Bus Lee shows that he is still rightly the figurehead of film-making Afro-America. Get on the Bus is a gripping portrait of a group of men who travel from Los Angeles to Washington for the so-called Million Men March, a demonstration organised in 1995 by the controversial radical Moslem leader Louis Farrakhan. Spike Lee uses the journey to show us a cross-section of the Afro-American community, in which he picks up on the conversations of bus passengers to look at topical social problems. Hot topics are not avoided: hatred of anything white, an aversion to gays and sexist behaviour are all examined in a film that is never didactic, but that moves convincingly towards a dramatic climax.
