Images From Spike Lee's Red Hook Summer

Just when we think we might have a handle on what Spike Lee has in store for his next film, the director goes and throws another curveball. "Red Hook Summer" has pretty much been kept under wraps thus far, with few details about the film being revealed other than a vague logline about the story centering on a young man from Atlanta who goes to the titular neighborhood to hang with his grandfather, who he's never met, for the summer. But as the Sundance Film Festival draws near, a couple more pics, a full synopsis and an intriguing bit of trivia about who scored the movie has been revealed.

Clarke Peters (aka Lester Freamon from "The Wire") leads the cast of mostly unknowns in the film that is being described as a return to the roots of Spike Lee's early filmmaking days, but if you were to tell the director two decades ago that he'd enlist Bruce Hornsby to score one of his movies, he would have said you were crazy. But indeed, Lee seems to have taken a quick break from his usual go-to guy Terence Blanchard and enlisted the Grammy winning songwriter behind "The Way It Is" to write the score for the film. Huh. Maybe he just really dug what Tupac did with the song on "Changes." Either way it's a pretty interesting choice, and also marks Hornsby's first film score.

When his mom deposits him at the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn to spend the summer with the grandfather he’s never met, young Flik may as well have landed on Mars. Fresh from his cushy life in Atlanta, he’s bored and friendless, and his strict grandfather, Enoch, a firebrand preacher, is bent on getting him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Only Chazz, the feisty girl from church, provides a diversion from the drudgery. As hot summer simmers and Sunday mornings brim with Enoch’s operatic sermons, things turn anything but dull as people’s conflicting agendas collide.

"Red Hook Summer" is definitely high on our list of films for 2012, and we're eager to see the reaction out of Park City in just a few weeks where it will premiere.

When his mom deposits him at the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn to spend the summer with the grandfather he’s never met, young Flik may as well have landed on Mars. Fresh from his cushy life in Atlanta, he’s bored and friendless, and his strict grandfather, Enoch, a firebrand preacher, is bent on getting him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Only Chazz, the feisty girl from church, provides a diversion from the drudgery. As hot summer simmers and Sunday mornings brim with Enoch’s operatic sermons, things turn anything but dull as people’s conflicting agendas collide.

Playfully ironic, heightened, yet grounded, Spike Lee’s bold new movie returns him to his roots, where lovable, larger-than-life characters form the tinderbox of a tight-knit community. A story about the coexistence of altruism and corruption, Red Hook Summer toys with expectations, seducing us with the promise of moral and spiritual transcendence. Spike is back in the ’hood.

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