Right: Reuters / Vincent Kessler

Clint Eastwood (left) and Spike Lee.

OK, I'm back. But instead of paying attention to the mountain of new releases facing me this week, or the surprising box-office success of Sergei Bodrov's Genghis Khan epic "Mongol," countering the tsunami-like summer hits "Iron Man," "Kung Fu Panda" and "Sex in the City," let's consider an irrelevant pseudo scandal.

There's been a bit of a dust-up, as the Brits say, between Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood lately, largely fomented by the Guardian (a left-leaning English daily). Among the highlights, if you want to call them that, are Eastwood suggesting that Lee should "shut his face" and Lee retorting, "The man is not my father and we're not on a plantation." The whole thing is unfortunate for all kinds of reasons, not least because it involves a British paper gleefully stirring up a racially tinged dispute between two contentious Yanks, right in the middle of our so-called season of racial reconciliation. Also because Lee and Eastwood, despite their differing backgrounds and political inclinations, are far more similar than different as old-fashioned filmmakers and storytellers.

» Continued