She didn't direct the movie, she was one of the producers.
I mentioned "directors" in reference to the article that started this thread. We're talking about women not getting work as directors, right? But producers don't finance movies out of their own pockets, either.
Inside Man was one of Spike's first foray into widening his horizons as a movie-maker. As for finding work, I don't imagine he has trouble either, but he might have some trouble getting the work he wants. He wanted Ali, he didn't get it.
Again, I'm not sure what you mean about Spike Lee's horizons. He didn't seem to have been particularly pigeonholed before
Inside Man -- he did comedies and character dramas and biopics with a diverse range of stories and themes. I guess if he'd always been longing to make a movie about a bank job,
Inside Man might be seen as a departure. But IMO, it was probably the least interesting of the movies of his I've seen (though one of the more interesting bank-job movies I've seen -- you could tell it was directed by someone with imagination).
As for wanting particular movies but not getting them, I would guess that happens to most directors sometimes. He did direct
Malcolm X, which I would think of as similar to
Ali as a biopic of a familiar figure from recent history starring a popular A-list actor.
My point is, I don't think Spike Lee has been suffering from lack of interesting work in the way that the article in the OP talks about women directors not getting interesting work. I'm sure there probably ARE black directors who are in that boat; it just doesn't seem to me that Spike Lee is one of them.
Marie, that blog essay was interesting and the writer sounds like she knows what she's talking about. Thanks for posting it. I've never thought of female critics being in short supply, what with the legendary Pauline Kael as well as several of the critics I most often read now -- the excellent Dana Stevens in Slate, Stephanie Zacharek in Salon -- but she's probably right, and it's interesting to consider how that might shape what films get anointed.
I also think this paragraph is important:
It isn't just that many men--including male critics--somehow think their balls are going to fall off if they watch a movie about a woman. It's that what speaks to any of us is going to be characters or emotional issues we can identify with. And since one of our primary identities is gender (see my previous post), that means that stories about men's lives and emotional dilemmas are naturally going to resonate more with male critics. They are going to find more of a "human" story in something like "There Will be Blood" than something like "Veronica Guerin".The fact is, males don't like to watch movies about females, whereas the reverse is not true. Disney historically has used far more male lead characters, under the assumption that only girls will watch movies about girls. And it's not just action or sports movies. Comedies in which the central characters are all women are chick flicks, but male ones aren't ghettoized as dick flicks.