This variety story tells me three things:

1. Spike Lee is going to direct a movie that is "framed around" (their words) the L.A. Riots of 1992. Depending on how things work out this could be his next feature work.
2. Lee is also developing a sequel to Inside Man
3. Brian Grazer looks crazy.

Racially charged dramas aren’t exactly new territory for Lee, but I’m glad to see him return to it. With the right material, material that he cares about, Lee can be quite an amazing filmmaker. And the L.A. Riots certainly offer plenty of meat for an interesting and thought provoking story. I also think that Lee is coming out of a more experimental series of film, which mostly didn’t work, and returning to serious but grounded work, and I’m glad for that too.

I’m not sure about the Inside Man sequel, though. And by that I mostly mean that I have no idea of what it might be about. I mean, Inside Man was a pretty one off kind of thing. How do you follow it? What other story is there to tell? If they just want to get the actors back together in a caper type of film, they could do that with another title and save themselves the effort of trying to come up with a contrived explanation of why this is a sequel to what happened before. But I dunno, perhaps they have a very clever idea about how to do it.