Jamie Foxx: Spike Lee's "Django" Criticism is "Shady" and "Irresponsible"

The verbal crossfire erupting over Quentin Tarantino's "Django" is heating up. Responding to director Spike Lee's criticism of the film, which he's refused to see because it is "offensive to his ancestors," Jamie Foxx, who plays the titular Django, fired back in an interview with The Guardian. He basically calls into question Lee's relevance and judgment of certain black actors' choices.

Foxx says, "The question for me is: where's Spike Lee coming from? He didn't like Whoopi Goldberg, he doesn't like Tyler Perry, he doesn't like anybody. I think he's sort of run his course. I mean, I respect Spike, he's a fantastic director. But he gets a little shady when he's taking shots at his colleagues without looking at the work. To me, that's irresponsible."

Foxx then cites Eminem and Elvis Presley as precedents to Tarantino: white artists who performed "black" music or told "black" stories and were such geniuses that they transcended their race and perceived limitations of what they could and could not say. Lee has repeatedly criticized Tarantino for his excessive use of the n-word, particularly in his 1997 film "Jackie Brown." It's worth noting that Lee never claimed Tarantino couldn't use that word, but he was disturbed by how obsessively he used it.

"Django Unchained," the Golden Globe and Oscar nominated revenge fantasy in question follows Django, an ex-slave turned bounty hunter who roams the country with his German counterpart colorfully killing off white bigots and slaveholders in bloodbath after bloodbath. It takes place in a gruesome antebellum America rife with racial violence and injustice. The key word here is fantasy, though. Tarantino is playing with historical fantasies, and he isn't the first one to do so. He is one of the few directors (except for the creators of the one-dimensional, racist Blaxploitation flicks of the 1970s) to dare to take it to the big screen in his typical campy, exaggerated style.

No matter your opinion of his treatment of the fairly recent trauma of slavery, accurately described as a holocaust by Spike Lee and many others, he's opened up a conversation in the States about American history and identity, and particularly how central racial violence is to both of those.