Spike Lee's BLACKKKLANSMAN

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?