Spike Lee's BLACKKKLANSMAN

Most intriguing/amusing casting that had escaped my notice til this week: Topher Grace as David Duke.

https://www.filmcomment.com/article/it-happened-here/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFc6I0rgmgY

looks great

Seconded

Can't wait to see this.

I hear from reputable sources that it is....not so good. But I hope they're wrong!

this will be the second Spike joint I've seen in the last 22 years

looks better than anything else he's done recently. cautiously optimistic. Topher stuntcasting is p good, I must admit.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/07/spike-lee-on-blackkklansman-the-trump-era-and-his-place-in-the-canon

missed the screening last week cuz of late work night; word is pretty good

Reviews are gen positive, but ones like Pinkerton's suggest this is gonna strike me as broad and 'sketchy'...

http://reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/2454/BlacKkKlansman

This one's a little different: I talked to BLACKKKLANSMAN screenwriters Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz, mostly about anti-Semitism. It's a little more personal than usual. https://t.co/URRu7fB5Co pic.twitter.com/WION6FjQwZ

— Vadim Rizov (@vrizov) August 9, 2018

I'll probably see this one - antisemitism angle is interesting

The ending hits so damn hard.

Agree. It's so obvious (as in, simply put the footage up there) and so familiar, I was surprised that I found it as powerful as I did.

A couple of things that cracked me up: 1) Stallworth's job interview. I'm thinking, "Where do I know that voice from?" (you can't mistake it for any other voice)...Clay Davis from The Wire! And then, the perfect punchline, he says that word as only Clay Davis can say it. 2) "Lucky Man."

Liked the film overall, but I think the ending is more memorable than the rest.

Had no idea the lead actor is Denzel Washington's son.

I know there's a separate thread for ridiculous Armond White reviews, but I'll instead link to his ridiculous review here:

http://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/movie-review-blackkklansman-spike-lee-most-confusing-film/

I didn't love the film, but there's a lot that's good, and White may as well have written that review before actually seeing it. Which I think he partly did.

lol @ Armond being a Dolemite fan, I guess he has some redeeming qualities

Hey I saw this last night. Thought it was pretty good. I think I'd re-watch Blindspotting again before this one, though. And I still need to see Sorry to Bother You to round out my viewing on the topic of "anything is possible when you sound white on the phone."

god what a disgusting first paragraph, stopped reading

From White's review: "blaming Old Hollywood through the opening scene’s grim mockery of Gone with the Wind and, later, misinterpreting D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation."

He really ought to explain what misinterpretation he's referring to. I mean, it's been ages since I saw Birth of a Nation in film class, so I don't want to ridicule that statement too strenuously--he must have something in mind there; he's thought about it--but don't leave something like that just hanging there, not when the clips that Lee incorporates don't seem vulnerable to a whole lot of misinterpretation.

Meant to say that at one point, someone--Shuttleworth's FBI chief, I think--says "clusterfuck." The film is set in the early '70s--that term's existed for 10 years at the most, no?

It’s military slang, I see some sources saying it originated in the Vietnam era. See also snafu and fubar

Didn't know that, interesting. I think it went into hiding for a few of decades and reemerged a few years ago.

Armond White's been despicable for two decades, he's just found himself a safer space in which to operate more despicably now.

this was good

i thought that the very explicit echos/calls-to modern day white nationalism (eg the whole "david duke might be president someday") were a little on the nose, but the lack of subtlety was clearly the point. and the closing footage was genuinely moving/shocking, despite having seen it before on the small screen so many times

honestly though if the plot hadn't been based on a true story, i'd have rolled my dang eyes at all the stupid mistakes/coincidences. like, why continue to have the split between phone-ron and in-person-ron? after the first couple encounters just have flip do both guys sheesh. and the tidiness of the denouement with felix and the other two guys was, well, a little too tidy. truth is stranger etc i guess?

From Pinkerton's review:

To disdain the Klan and its membership is morally correct, but when as an artist Lee commits himself to making a film which relies heavily on scenes of developing trust and intimacy with Klan members, failing to go deeper than this disdain limits his movie as an exposé. It’s not that Lee needs to make his racists endearing or “complex”—this is the impulse that gave us the atrocious scenes of Matt Dillon caring for his sick pop in Crash (2005), after all, and life is full of simple characters—but given the movie he’s set out to make, it would have been edifying to learn what they’re on about beyond received wisdom on wearing bedsheets and burning crosses. Duke, introduced as the well-spoken, camera-ready face of the Klan, seems intended as a Richard Spencer-like figure, but the nature of the new focus on optics or programmatic pivot that his ascendance represents is explicated no further

To complain the film is obvious is to complain about the nature of tracts, agit-prop, pamphlets, and so on, but much of it was leaden or lacking crispness. I admire as always Lee's editing and respect for oratory. The ending, as clemenza said, hit me.

Ok. Here's are some thoughts on #Blackkklansman.

Contains spoilers, so don't read it if you haven't seen it and you don't wanna spoil it. pic.twitter.com/PKfnePrFGy

— Boots Riley (@BootsRiley) August 17, 2018

I think Boots misreads the ending there - will type more when not on Zing

Loved this and loved the stylings of it; for example the Kwame Ture scene with the faces floating, or the entire Belafonte sequence, the Baldwin opening sequence, or the discussion by the river with the blaxploitation movie posters, few directors would have the guts to pull those out. I laughed a lot and I was horrified. Lee just knows how to make good cinema.

Mild spoilers:

I agree that Boots is wrong on the ending - it's shot in such a surreal, sinister way that I don't think Stallworth and the love interest work as symbols of some glorious resistance, they are just two black individuals faced with the reality that the nightmare of white supremacy continues and flourishes...leading directly to Charlottesville. There's nothing in the movie that merits even bringing up black-on-black crime - Kwame's conference may have mischaracterized the man's politics at that time but he's clearly shown to be a laudable individual and the fact that they get stopped by the racist cop later on makes it clear Lee knows which side is the opressor. I also think Laura Harrier's character, while an invention, is good and necessary for the movie, because she consistently embodies an anti-cop stance and sticks with that to the very end - when she says she can't date a cop it sounds like she means it.

That being said, I agree with Riley that the movie as a whole is pro-cop in a way that's really at odds with the current (or 1970's) reality: the scene where the racist cop gets busted, which got laughter and applause at my screening, was so cringeworthy, the entire department one happy anti-racist family shunning the bigot, it seemed like a vindication of right-wing "a few bad apples" rhetoric regarding police brutality. There are hints of more systemic oppression keeping Stallworth down within the police force but they are so vague and brushed past so quickly. Kwame's car gets stopped by the One Racist Cop, when clearly in real life this would've been an intimidation tactic approved by the department. And what I kept asking myself was, "so there's a klan chapter and none of them are cops, or even buddies of cops"?

I still admire Lee's rhythms and the sense in which this was pop entertainment with Something to Say, but this film keeps fading in my estimation as time passes.

Thought this was a great movie, about so many things at once and beautifully unafraid to be at turns pulpy crowd-grabbing suspense, heartwrenching history lesson, and fabulously unsubtle political comment. It's at the level where I allow any number of distracting plot holes or "wait, wouldn't they...." thoughts in the name of the overall mood and momentum, and any number of potential political missteps because I believe the film is intentionally putting uncomfortable, irresolveable conflicts onscreen. I did think the "we got the racist cop!" scene was a step too far, but it was then brilliantly undercut by the following conclusion - there is no happy ending here. Maybe Lee felt he had to walk us through a conventional feel-good kind of ending in order to have the opportunity to pull the rug back out from under us, and it's Ron and Patrice's last on-camera moment that sticks with me.

Could also be why he chose not to represent a (more believable) 1970s police department where, one imagines (I haven't read the book!) that Stallworth would have been more apprehensive about other officers even knowing about the investigation because they might have Klan ties, etc.... more plausible yes, but would make it much harder to convey a Stallworth who would keep working at this job even after his experience at Ture's speech. Patrice's viewpoint is not defeated or invalidated, and gains strength even as Stallworth does prove he can do some good in his role: Belafonte's account, and the final flash-forward, are all the proof we need that the authority figures are not on the side of the victims, even if one department appears to conform to the "just a couple bad apples" myth. I do think it's fair to say that risking the perpetuation of that myth isn't worth any other effect you might be going for, but given how much of this movie is explicitly about Stallworth's choice to be a cop and what that cuts him off from, I think Lee's leaving us the space to come to specifically that critical conclusion.

The only thing I wanted a little more of on this front was the respective fates of the KKK and of black liberation movements, with regard to law enforcement. The signposts of this are there but imho this is the biggest risk of the "good department, one bad cop" construction: by the end we've lost track of the early effort to infiltrate black spaces, so we get that the law ultimately permitted the Klan to survive through to Charlottesville, but it's not as clearly stated that the absence of the Panthers in 2017 is down to the white supremacist state's infiltration, division, and murder of their leadership, largely in the time before the film is even set. Maybe this is all taken as understood by the characters, but it's the kind of thing Patrice or her friends could be pointing out to Stallworth, or that the one cop with glasses could bring up during the "could someone like David Duke be President" exchange (the closest the film's earnest point-underlining comes to being genuinely groan-worthy).

But meanwhile, the other riches: the audience shots during Ture's speech, the warmth and life in the dancing scene, Flip discovering his own privilege and its fragility along with a forgotten pride, Washington's final two exchanges with Grace (which apparently really happened, though I was also fine with them as it-should-have-happened-this-way catharsis, Inglourious-Basterds-style), the terrifying climax after the two intercut meetings, all the harrowingly tense shit with Almost Michael Biehn.... great flick.

I wish that had been the film I'd seen, Doc. Once I know where it was going I was looking at my watch.

my biggest wtf about the film was the dept's decision to approve the sting on the KKK despite their overt racism. I thought a missing time episode had occurred: I'd gone to the bathroom and no one had told me

their = the Colorado Springs police

There is different types of racism in real life, pretty clear from the get go that chief of police racism does not align with the KKK's.

I really don't think Spike Lee really needs to drive the point of systematic police abuse in every of his films and he can choose to approach the subject from different angles with all the nuances he wants at this point. I don't know what's more puzzling to me: that some wouldn't give Lee the benefit of the doubt when it comes to representing one of the core component of black's america abuse; or this desire to have every character of a film somewhat representative of a larger truth. Like, Lee and his crew work fine details over dialogue, framing, editing, acting for years and all of that for a person to go: Man, how come the police department (with jews) and the chief of police (who hires a black person and seems to want a to nourish his potential, despite some racist beliefs) would approach (they are reluctant at the beginning) a KKK sting (once it's done they make sure everything disappears). Maybe yea you shouldn't read your watch.

That's my thing, though -- I don't think the dialogue, framing, editing are that well worked out. The film's saving grace is Lee's instinct for melodrama

Chi-Raq, which is not a good film either, took more risks, I thought.

i'm gonna be compelled to see this, aint i

https://perilsandpitfalls.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/221.jpg?w=320

liked this more than I thought I was going to, big audience was probably key, kinda got away with being tensionless and the contrivance of the ending by consistently delivering laughs until the denouement. Pinkerton is very otm about the kkk dudes, felix was super inconsistent, ‘are you circumstanced’ then figuring out the whole plot (was that a mason thing when he shook Duke’s hand?). also the trump refs just felt super grating, obvs if your going all out at the end why be subtle but also come on. strangest scene was when they bust the one cop who is too racist for the other cops, felt like Sirk levels of artifice (maybe on purpose, like the falsity of the deer at the end of All that Heaven Allows), then the next scene Ron and Flip act as if they haven’t seen each other since the climax and it never happened, idk was odd. Some stunning moments though: any time anyone was making a speech, the dancing, the use of texture. was expecting the coda but still shocked at how suddenly my eyes started to well up, pure cinema and distillation of the most interesting parts of this, re the emotional power and political potential of oration and cinema.

this is going to sound like a really terrible catch-all excuse but this is a movie that explicitly points up the phoniness and racism endemic to silent-age film and the hollywood golden age, and which features characters debating whether shaft and superfly represent exciting representation or blaxploitation. so maybe he wants you to be in a frame of mind where you're questioning the racism of comfy old genre tropes. or something!!!

I did like it, and the ending roiled me , but I too had issues with why they would continue to make Ron Stallworth a double agent after initial contact.

It was indeed done in real life, however in real life, they didn't bust up a terrorist plot, either. It was more low level infiltration, identifying members, observing actions, so using a surrogate to appear in the field makes more sense there, especially if that person is better in person and you're better on the phone.

Not when your agent's life is in danger because of an ongoing terrorist threat - especially given that Driver didn't even remotely try to sound like Ron, if not in timbre, but the way he actually pronounced words.

I saw this a week ago and have been waiting to post my thoughts here. First of all I think it's easily his best film in over a decade, since at least Inside Man or even 25th Hour. It's a procedural, not stylized much, solid performances, good pacing - OK. But then finally he uses his signature dolly shot with Ron and Patrice, and they move down the hallway like a fuse that's been lit, and suddenly we're at a cross burning, and then we're in Charlottesville. I knew about the ending in advance but good lord I never expected it to hit me so hard, I saw it with someone who also knew the ending and we were equally skeptical but we were both in tears at the end. "Pure cinema" is dead on - that final shot of the upside down flag being drained of color... just stunning.

Maybe the idea of the movie as a fuse and the ending as a bomb was in my head because of the climax with the C-4 or whatever, but that's what I felt the ending did: it exploded the true but small story into a much larger context and put everything into a greater, bleaker perspective. If we're going to talk about "movies where sounding white on the phone is an advantage," this is far superior to Blindspotting (a confident but modest buddy comedy) and Sorry to Bother You (a total mess, the further away I get from it). I've heard friends complain that BlacKkKlansman is "too centrist" - oh, please! Like VHS said, you really aren't going to give Spike Lee of all people the benefit of the doubt? He didn't write this on spec, Jordan Peele brought him the story and he did his thing with it.

Now, whether or not the movie holds up past that explosive ending, I'm not sure. Like I said, it's a very competent but very rote police procedural, and it's not short. It's been a week though and that ending is still just astonishing to me, and it props the movie up as a small story with a somewhat happy ending within the much larger and abyssal darkness of American brutality. That flag, man. Goddamn.

Thanks for that review. I've been putting this off because, yeah, I don't think I've liked a Spike Lee movie since "25th Hour" (as "Inside Man" is barely a Spike Lee movie, though it's at least hyper competent).

this was pretty good, and even though I've been skipping his stuff for about a decade I have no doubt its his best in awhile. It still has some typical Spike problems - uneven tone + characterizations, random plot dynamics, intermittently terrible music. But what's good about it is very good, and sometimes it's whiplashing between humor and horror is very effective. Some random thoughts:

- you could've heard a pin drop in my sold out theater with that final shot with the flag, holy shit. oddly my immediate reaction was to think of the cover of Stankonia.
- The juxtaposition of different groups chanting "white power"/"black power" - idk what Spike was really going for there. To argue for equivalency of those positions seems positively Trumpian. But maybe Spike was just trying to make it clear that choosing a side is required?
- the KKK viewing of "A Birth of a Nation" seemed like a sort of inferior version of what Tarantino did with the Nazi propaganda film in "Inglorious Basterds", minus the payoff (ie everyone in the Nazi audience getting brutally murdered) and the underlying implication/complicity of the IB (or BlackkKlansman) audience.
- seemed weird that Zimmerman literally made no attempt whatsoever to sound like white Ron Stallworth.
- Stallworth cornering Zimmerman in the records room about him not putting any skin in the game distinctly reminded me of Spike and Turturro's similar scene in Do The Right Thing, where he gives Turturro shit for having black heroes
- I had no idea there was another acting Buscemi brother

signature dolly shot with Ron and Patrice, and they move down the hallway like a fuse that's been lit

also ^^^ this, I was glad to see this type of shot actually used with purpose for once

also lol at the racist patrolman being played by the same guy who played Brian Wilson on the Beach Boys tv biopic, that made my head spin for a second

- The juxtaposition of different groups chanting "white power"/"black power" - idk what Spike was really going for there. To argue for equivalency of those positions seems positively Trumpian. But maybe Spike was just trying to make it clear that choosing a side is required?

Maybe? I was also kind of dumbfounded by his making a point to show both black activists and Klansmen calling the police pigs, like the latter group and its descendants don't worship cops...

So was I.

Loved the messiness of STBY and the horse-dudes made me laugh a lot. I almost wished it was messier actually, reminded me of Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man. There was some elements that were a bit 'undergrad film school' like the television show, the worryfree ads or Detroit's art performance piece, but that was drowned by the other funny stuff.

The only comparison that interests me is that both film have female characters that are more radical than the male lead. In both films the male leads are dealing with situations of compromise and navigating the waters of living in a white world, and are in direct opposition with the female leads that are more into rejecting the whole of the oppressive system, they both have conversations about their respective positions at around the same time in the narrative structure. I am still a neophyte when it comes to african-american cinema, but is that a common trope in african-american culture?

maybe the idea is to start you where the klan seem laughably dated and old-fashioned and incompetent, and then during the film we see how even bumbling and moronic klansmen pose incredible danger, and then conclude with the reminder that actually this was never remotely laughable and very definitely not dated.

this seems right

I walked in a few seconds after the movie started (afaict) and I took Alec Baldwin's intro to be an explicit Trump reference to bookend the film's finale. A rhetoric-spouting stooge who doesn't even know what the fuck he's talking about, needing to call "line" multiple times.

BTW totally vital movie imo, and I forgive any and all lapses in taste or judgement.

You get from the film that these combine to make up the systemic racism of an environment, but also the notion that not all forms of racism are the same, how one form hides another and how a black person need to navigate it all.

I think the movie severely underplays this: everyone hates Landers, and while at the beginning of the movie they're like "but he's one of us, can't do anything about it" as soon as the opportunity presents itself they jump to get rid of him. The characters whose racism is more benign contribute more to the fight against racism than they do to its proliferation. It really doesn't drive home how powerful systemic racism is.

However, Lee (and Peele, Rabinowitz, Willmott) are smarter than 'all pigs are racists', the point of view of Patrice, which is the point of view in film that is the most theoretical, the less impactful.

I think it's kinda unfair to the movie to say that's Patrice's pov, they give her more respect than that! Patrice's anti-police stance comes from the idea that if you're police, you've effectively signed up to be part of the oppressors - which from a black militant viewpoint in the 1970's seems to me pretty inarguable, regardless of what any cop's personal stances on the matter are. The idea that ppl are criticizing the film for not saying that all cops are racists - something Lee has brought up too - is a total red herring, the grievance isn't about personal bigotries.

Like VHS said, the police burn all evidence of the investigation at the end. That's hardly a "cops are the good guys" or a "Blue Lives Matter" story

The superior's explanation for this is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene and the fact that the rest of Stallworth's team are as angry about it as he is quickly pushes it into "damn those pencil pushers!" cop movie trope territory. I agree that systemic racism is a pretty likely explanation for the decision there is no time given to tackling that - perhaps because it would lack subtlety, but I dunno if that's really a valid argument considering the rest of the movie.

(tbf in the real world the police dept would probably be more than justified in halting the investigation at least since Flip has been compromised but I don't think it's very useful to look at the movie in those terms)

I think most people have highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the movie, especially the ending which felt like a gut punch.

Probably not the scene most people will remember the movie by, but really, really loved the dance sequence to ‘Too Late to Turn Back Now’ in the bar which was just a joyous, beautiful piece of cinema.

That scene was fantastic--in part because, of all the great early-'70s soul, that song tends to be overlooked.

Criminally never heard it until seeing it in the movie. Checking Wikipedia it was #2 in US, but failed to chart in the UK, too busy listening to Slade and T-Rex I guess.

I missed Lee saying what year this was supposed to be. Would have assumed it was early 70s from the clothing styles worn by the black power group. Looked up when the true story happened which was 78 so think it looks a bit anachronistic.
Enjoyed it quite a bit as a film though.

Did leave me wondering about things like recording and transmitting technology given the time I thought it was supposed to be. & how far a wire would be able to transmit and not be conspicuous as soon as a jacket was taken off or the wearer had to move around a lot.
& if a basement room would have allowed a signal to get out.

The end did put tears in my eyes. But I think that footage tends to.

The film shifts the action to the early 70s - we see Nixon re-election posters in some scenes, and Nixon of course resigned in August 74.

Spike has recently joined the "Fuck John Ford" crowd. Ford made at least 3 better films on American racism that this one.

He gives his villains really atrocious dialogue and they're usually performed badly (the Danish actor who played Felix here, plus his wife).

Would Nick Turturro be accepted in the KKK? Don't they consider Sicilians and southern Italians mongrels?

Best move: borrowing Hillary's "superpredators" for Baldwin's opening rant.

So lucky for Ford “optics” never got in the way.

We'll remember this is as a not very good film that deserved watching.

the Charlottesville footage was not "so familiar" to me bcz I avoided seeing it last year.

odd that he dubbed over Vivien Leigh's voice in the GWTW clip; i think it was the same actress who was cueing Baldwin tho.

i thought maybe the Nixon posters were kept up for several years by his fans in the Klan. Does any of the needledrop score postdate '72?

Probably not the scene most people will remember the movie by, but really, really loved the dance sequence to ‘Too Late to Turn Back Now’ in the bar which was just a joyous, beautiful piece of cinema.

this was, for reasons I don't completely understand, the most moving scene to me - perhaps because, simple as it is, I've never (?) seen a scene like that before

i seem to remember a similar "musical number" in Malcolm X?

Does any of the needledrop score postdate '72?

I wondered how much of the decision to set it in the early '70s rather than 1979 had to do with the soundtrack. Then I thought, well, something off Breakfast In America would be just as batshit/awful a song choice as "Lucky Man."

finally saw this. Best movie of the year? Close if not.

also cried over the ending. that lead up with Ron and Patrice floating out was some amazing shit to me.

I really liked this. Ending was terribly moving. Lee can really choke me up when he wants to and there's usually a moment or two in his better fiction films that just get me "right heah".

I liked this, even if Lee was too blunt with the Trump allusions throughout (something which makes the concluding montage, powerful as it is, a bit redundant). I love the space that he makes for things that he cares about, though; even though this is a fairly long police thriller, there are still a number of speeches and, best of all, the "It's Too Late To Turn Back Now" dance sequence.

This movie was a (better than usual, but still) Spike Lee mess and imo a slog that really needed a trim, better character development and a better sense of thematic focus. To that end, I really would have preferred a Spike Lee Charlottesville/Trump-era doc, and in fact would still like that. Dude just has such a tough time with scripts and keeping narratives under control, but I think his documentaries, with their sort of externally imposed structures, really allow him to be his best. The most inspired bits of this, successful or too on the nose or not, were clearly speaking about the present, so I wish he didn't hide behind this tonally incoherent dress up party and just focused on the present.

Super weird that for a movie with so many great soul songs and a soulful score (love the electric guitar), its big victory lap scene is set to ELP, basically the whitest music ever made. Was that ... intentional?

Outside of a couple of documentaries, only thing that meant anything to me at the movies last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxkVu3Fa27M

That scene, along with a couple of others, also makes me wish Spike Lee had made a different movie. The movie's characters are great, wasted on a weak story. I wanted to know more about all of these people and couldn't have cared less about the foregrounded clownish-or-no Klan stuff (which would have been more powerful and effective playing out quietly in the background, imo, its violence and hate lurking like a monster waiting to pop out).

one of those scenes that takes a song i have heard and loved for many years, and still manages to claim it --- i guarantee you in thirty years when i hear that song, i'll picture that room full of joyous, young, loving, proud black faces, under that gorgeous warm lighting.

Great description--it's such a heartfelt tribute to Soul Train, too.

The cinematographer is Chayse Irvin, of Beyoncé's Lemonade.

"The movie's characters are great, wasted on a weak story. I wanted to know more about all of these people and couldn't have cared less about the foregrounded clownish-or-no Klan stuff (which would have been more powerful and effective playing out quietly in the background, imo, its violence and hate lurking like a monster waiting to pop out)."

ok maybe but the whole premise of the movie is the black-guy-infiltrating-the-klan. The movie wouldn't have existed without that story.

...which is highly fictionalized here. So they could've fictionalized it in a better way.

a better lead actor might have helped

Yeah, the lead actor was nice and ok but lacked charisma to carry this imo.

There's a line in some exchange with Driver's character where Driver accuses Washington of being driven by some deep-seated passion or personal vendetta, but I felt like we never really saw that. Same with his dedication to the police (which obv. some have found problematic). I wish we knew more about their internal and personal lives, as the procedural/police aspects of this movie are its weakest parts, imo.

Both of those points were handled kind of discreetly: him going after the KKK was was a tit for tat thing for having to investigate the Carmichael speech, as if to say, let's look at the radicals in our area who really have blood on their hands. And as for Stallworth being dedicated to the Police, he said he always wanted to be a cop, just like others wanted to be baseball players or astronauts. He was in the right place at the right time to make that dream come true, and was using his position to try to change things from within.

The way it was depicted it felt to me that Stallworth's character was driven more by boredom than passion.

Also reminded me a bit of the part in "The Untouchables" where Connery tells Costner, oh, everyone knows where the crime is. Fine, you want to arrest some people, let's go! Then they grab guns, walk around the corner from the station and bust some mobsters. (Except The Untouchables is great.)

Spike only does 3-D characters when he wants to. This was a "broad strokes" film, like Bamboozled (which I prefer).

I think that's fair. I've always said that as much as I like Lee, almost every one of his bad films or what I consider missteps are based on his decisions as a director. Good or bad, you almost always know what you're going to get, and even said missteps have a lot of merit.

even his best films don't really have what you'd call 3-D characters... do the right thing is a great movie, but its virtue and limitation is the elaborate system of relationships between characters that, aside from the protagonist (who's less a rounded character than a cipher, really), have one or two very obvious functions and that's it. i find that it's a film that gets a little grating after you've seen it many times, because while there's a lot to admire and stuff to discover in terms of its form, there's not a lot there in terms of character or emotion beyond what strikes you the first time.

I think Do the Right Thing sort of circumvents the issue by taking place over one long day.

yes, DTRT has very Brechtian qualities, it's not "naturalistic" for sure.

right, it's diagrammatic, but successfully and cleverly so, while some of his other films kind of shade toward just being simpleminded.

I misread that as darraghamac.

on that note

this was very meh on most levels, you'd have to think detaching spike lee's name from it would see it reviewed at 5/10 and certainly nowhere near oscar noms

I agree with your rating. It's not like Spike is a regular at the Oscars though, so not really sure why this one broke through in the way it did

accumulation of years of being shamefully overlooked is my guess, i guess its always been a feature of the awards

detaching spike lee's name

do you think it’s his best since Inside Man though

.....yes?

no followup questions

yeah but why did that new Margaret Atwood book win Man Booker?