Spike Lee's BLACKKKLANSMAN

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?