‘New York, New York’: Check Out Spike Lee’s Short Film Honoring the City’s Healthcare Workers!!

At this point we’ve maybe gotten a bit too comfortable calling things a “love letter”, but if you want a pure, perfect definition of the phrase look no further than New York, New York, the three-minute short film Spike Lee put together about the city he calls home. Set to that classic Frank Sinatra tune, the short is just a pleasant trip through the Five Boroughs that turns melancholy when it falls on the healthcare workers risking their lives during the COVID outbreak.

Man, maybe it’s the fact that I’m currently riding out a pandemic 3,000 miles from the east coast city I grew up in, but this brief little thing Lee posted casually to Instagram hits hard. The Oscar-winner has always had a knack for capturing a city in a way that feels larger than life but not in an unrealistic way. It’s not the dreamy, idealized version of, say, Hollywood in Quentin Tarantino‘s latest. It’s just the very real, breezy type of magic you get in your gut walking down 5th Avenue. That’s an extremely dramatic way to describe a 210-second short film, but if ya know, ya know.

Next up on Lee’s docket is Da 5 Bloods, a historical drama set in Vietnam that’s headed to Netflix. That film, Lee’s follow-up to BlackKklansman, stars Chadwick Boseman, Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Paul Walter Hauser, Jonathan Majors, and Jean Reno.