Spike Lee's Chi-raq

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/magazine/chi-raq-and-the-myth-of-chicago-gang-wars.html?mwrsm=Facebook

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Monday, December 7, 2015 10:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i still haven't seen it but fuck this movie

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Monday, December 7, 2015 10:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

do the paragraphs in this article about the spike lee movie have anything to do with the paragraphs in this article which aren't about the spike lee movie

the Bed-Stuy of DtRT also has mythical elements

o fkn rly

sorry if i blew your mind

Amused at how much most people don't even want to pretend to engage with this movie on its own terms.

morbs which is the worst spike lee movie iyo

i haven't seen them all

(i find very few, if any, worse than mediocre)

i find it hard to pick a spike lee movie i'd point and say yeah, that one? that's a bad movie. not even the sperm donor one, for example, which is kind of a huge mess. or the million man march one. or even the minstrel show one.

Girl 6 and Oldboy are the two I'd cite.

Bamboozled I liked alright; way less pedestrian than Malcolm X

The tougher one is how many great films has he made. One or two? Three?

But who's counting?

He's made two great films and a whole bunch of middline-to-bad ones

What's the great one besides do the right thing? (genuine question not snark, only seen about half his films)

bamboozled has acquired an interesting rep, nymag ranked his movies the other day - http://www.vulture.com/2012/08/spike-lee-films-ranked-from-best-to-worst.html - and had it pretty high, and the list wasn't esp idiosyncratic (i'd quibble w/ some of the rankings but there's nothing where i'm like wtf)

"She's Gotta Have It" imo

xp

I guess tbf I would rate Inside Man, 25th Hour and probably Malcolm X as good (as opposed to "middling")

if we're saying great doesn't necessarily equal perfect (and frequently greatness can be tied to that lack of perfection) i'd give him three great (dtrt, x, 25th hour), four maybe five if you include docs.

Malcolm X isn't even in my upper half for Lee films.

Jungle Fever ridiculously too low on that list.

the ones i'd watch again: she's gotta have it, school daze, do the right thing, mo better blues, maaaybe jungle fever, malcolm x, crooklyn, clockers, 4 little girls, he got game, the original kings of comedy, bamboozled, , 25th hour, inside man, when the levees broke, if god is willing and da creek don't rise, bad 25

haven't seen but could imagine watching: she hate me (i think kerry washington might be naked in this), red hook summer, chi-raq, the jim brown doc

i did not like bamboozled at all. maybe i should see it again. i felt like everything before and after the filming of the actual minstrel show was bad. like he just really wanted to film a network minstrel show and everything else was an afterthought. but maybe i was just in a bad mood when i saw it.

The tougher one is how many great films has he made.

"You only need one." - Orson Welles

Never liked He's Gotta Have It aside from the Mars character; some really bad acting and scripting.

like he just really wanted to film a network minstrel show and everything else was an afterthought.

this was my feeling too (granted I didn't even make it to the end - I ended up just fast-forwarding to the notorious credits sequence)

do people even go back to jungle fever or do the right thing and school daze and watch them now? i haven't seen them in forever. i haven't listened to a public enemy record in forever either though. they might just seem like artifacts now. crooklyn i could watch any old time.

Do the Right Thing def holds up. I haven't seen School Daze is a reaaaaal long time. Jungle Fever I tried to watch when it was on TV awhile ago and man that's just a mess.

i did not like bamboozled at all. maybe i should see it again. i felt like everything before and after the filming of the actual minstrel show was bad. like he just really wanted to film a network minstrel show and everything else was an afterthought. but maybe i was just in a bad mood when i saw it.

the minstrel show is the only part that was actually captured on film, right? the rest was shot with digital handheld cameras to give it an ugly dingy look. I think Bamboozled is a great movie, flaws and all.

but a compelling mess. that's what i'm hoping this movie could be. xp

Bodymore Murderland

re: SGHI Morbz is right that there's some rough acting/scripting but idk it successfully evokes a particular era in black culture that I'm sentimental about and its virtues outweigh its faults imo. The Mars Blackmon sequences are obviously the strongest.

It is interesting that he's tried so hard/spent so much time - right from the beginning - with central female characters and sexual politics and still seems to fundamentally misread or misrepresent both, often quite forcefully.

like you'd think eventually he'd get better at it or learn something but nope

but Suzan Lori-Parks wrote Girl 6, right?

ppl being all "oh see the movie before you judge, you're not meeting it on its terms" like the movie's a person with feelings or something... lol

I'd imagine it was made by people with feelings

I think the largely improvised scene of black women talking about "jungle fever" in that film is p incredible, tho not in a way that won much praise.

Exactly. That scene alone justifies the sprawl and mess.

As does Samuel L. Jackson's performance (still his best).

those bits are both good yeah but the rest oi

liked Turturro and the Bay Ridge goombahs also (trust me, you can find those ppl there 25 years later)

yeah jackson is why i'd see it again. i'm curious if there's an interesting critique or examination of buppies in there also, no way i would've picked up on it at the time but what i remember of him at the firm suggests maybe? i remember sciorra was great and gorgeous and wesley snipes could act once. mo better has some bad bad stuff in it (not just the antisemitism) but the stuff that centered on jazz i remember liking a great deal even if wow talk about fantasy and even if spike's jazz love is centered in that marsalis/crouch axis. bamboozled i found a mess at the time but i've heard it spoken of so well lately i'd watch it again. summer of sam i caught alot of a few months back, i liked it more than i liked it then but i still don't like it very much. i think i'd be more interested in watching that miniseries of the bronx is burning again than summer of sam. not sure which has the better turturro performance though.

mo better has some bad bad stuff in it (not just the antisemitism) but the stuff that centered on jazz i remember liking a great deal even if wow talk about fantasy and even if spike's jazz love is centered in that marsalis/crouch axis.

I was shocked how much I liked this movie when I finally got around to it.

denzel is good in mo better, i think that mode of denzel performance (basically that and devil in a blue dress) is my favorite. when he's not doing gregory peck but he's also not 'going dark'. just a sexual scoundrel. i always wish someone would make another easy rawlins movie, maybe do little scarlet. cheadle in devil in a blue dress is still easily my fave performance by him.

my memory is it's pretty good until the ending, which just tries to cram a whole lot of development into too short a timespan

re: MMB

er MBB

do the paragraphs in this article about the spike lee movie have anything to do with the paragraphs in this article which aren't about the spike lee movie

― thwomp (thomp), Tuesday, December 8, 2015 12:21 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes

at this point i almost wonder if spike was deliberately trolling chicago's weird inferiority complex w/ new york

― balls, Tuesday, December 8, 2015 11:01 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fucking lol

its weird how ppl want to separate the film from the politics in a film explicitly about its politics

it's certainly not weird that a white chicagoan who has made a career policing and criticising what is and isn't real black culture might not be interested in seeing a movie that places some of the blame for the violence in chicago on white gentrifiers

you aim for the personal gut shots but you've always got a blindfold on

yes, i think this movie probably sucks because i'm feeling defensive about being a white gentrifier, you nailed it, very smart