Movie Review: BlacKkKlansman

BlacKkKlansman ***** / *****

Directed by: Spike Lee.

Written by: Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott and Spike Lee based on the book by Ron Stallworth.

Starring: John David Washington (Ron Stallworth), Adam Driver (Flip Zimmerman), Topher Grace (David Duke), Laura Harrier (Patrice Dumas), Ryan Eggold (Walter Breachway), Jasper Pääkkönen (Felix Kendrickson), Paul Walter Hauser (Ivanhoe), Ashlie Atkinson (Connie Kendrickson), Robert John Burke (Chief Bridges), Brian Tarantina (Officer Clay Mulaney), Arthur J. Nascarella (Officer Wheaton), Ken Garito (Sergeant Trapp), Frederick Weller (Master Patrolman Andy Landers), Michael Buscemi  (Jimmy Creek), Damaris Lewis (Odetta), Ato Blankson-Wood (Hakeem), Corey Hawkins (Kwame Ture), Dared Wright (Officer Cincer), Faron Salisbury (Officer Sharpe), Victor Colicchio (Steve), Paul Diomede (Jerry), Danny Hoch (Agent Y), Nicholas Turturro (Walker), Harry Belafonte (Jerome Turner), Alec Baldwin (Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Mr. Turrentine).

 

Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is the year’s angriest, most provocative film – and also one of the funniest and most entertaining. Lee has the skill to craft both of those things, and somehow bring it together into a coherent whole. The film takes place in the 1970s, in Colorado Springs, and yet from the beginning, Lee makes it clear he is talking about today, 2018, as much as he is talking about the 1970s. The film is meant to provoke and prod you – make you uncomfortable – to borrow a phrase from many earlier films, this is another “Wake Up” call from Lee. And its wrapped in a package that is as entertaining as anything as Lee has ever made. It’s a masterpiece.

 

In the 1970s, and Ron Stallworth (John David Washington, showing his father’s charisma) wants to become a cop in Colorado Springs. They have never had a black cop before, but for the sake of optics, they want one. His interview is uncomfortable, as he is told that he would be the Jackie Robinson of the CSPD, and they would expect him to turn the other cheek like Robinson did – even if a fellow officer called him a nigger. “Would that happen?” Stallworth asks. If I tell you one of the interviewers is Isiah Whitlock Jr., you know what the answer is.

 

They stick him in the records room, but Stallworth hates it. He gets his chance to move up, when Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins, great in his one scene) is coming to town to make a speech – and for obvious reasons, Stallworth is the only officer who can attend and draw not attention. There he meets the leader of the Black Student Union, Patrice (Laura Harrier) – and a tentative romance starts between the two of them, complicated by the fact that she (justly) think the police are racist, and the fact that he cannot tell her who he really is. This gets Stallworth moved up to undercover work – which will start the assignment that takes up the rest of the film. Seeing an ad for the KKK, Stallworth calls the number, spouts off a lot of racist rhetoric, and gets himself invited for a face-to-face – which obviously he cannot attend. Enlisting a white officer, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), a non-practicing Jew to play Stallworth in the in person meetings. The real Stallworth keeps up the talk on the phone – getting so far as to talk to the leader of the KKK, David Duke (Topher Grace) on the phone.

 

Lee almost splits the movie in two. The scenes on the phone between Stallworth and KKK members – particularly Duke – are almost played for laughs, despite the racism being spewed. There is something undeniably funny to see a black man like Washington, spewing out that racism (Dave Chappelle knew this well, more than a decade ago, when he created the blind KKK member who doesn’t know he’s black). Stallworth is playing the KKK for fools, and they unwillingly play along with him. Stallworth is also given scenes with Patrice – she has drawn the attention of the KKK, and they have reason to think she, and their group, will be a target at their next major speech. As tough as all this is on the real Stallworth, there is also joy there – and a life outside of the investigations.

 

Driver’s Flip is given none of that – and it makes him perhaps the most fascinating character in the film. There’s no real, immediate danger for the real Stallworth on the phone, but Zimmerman faces it each and every time he meets with the group – one of whom, Felix (Jasper Pääkkönen), who is truly frightening, has Zimmerman pegged as a Jew from the start, and never really lets up. Zimmerman has to spew the same vile rhetoric Stallworth does, and do it face to face. He is someone who has never really thought about being Jewish – he is, but it was never a big deal in his life. Now he is, of course, forced to deal with it on a larger level than ever before. While Stallworth’s scenes are often funny, despite the racism on display, Zimmerman’s scenes never cease to be anything but truly frightening.

 

All of this comes to a head, of course, in one of the best sequences Lee has ever directed. First, there is the scene where he intercuts a speech about the lynching of a young black man in 1916, told by a legend, with a scene of the KKK gathering together to watch D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) – which they cackle and laugh through. This isn’t the first time Lee has took direct aim at Griffith’s “masterpiece” – not even the first time he’s done so in this film (he opens the film with a scene from Gone with the Wind, and then cuts over to Alec Baldwin, playing someone called Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard (a shot at Jeff Sessions perhaps?) giving a vile speech about integration, which uses a lot of footage from Griffith’s film). Griffith, and his film, has been a long time target of Lee’s – with justification of course, as the film is vile in ways that the technological and storytelling advances Griffith’s film had in no way justifies or excuses. In this film, Lee is using the film against itself – and indicting those watching.

 

He indicts others as well. Throughout the film, there is an unmistakable rhetoric being spouted by the more “moderate” members of the KKK like Duke, that sound deliberately like the rhetoric used by the current occupant of the White House. To make this even clearer, there is a scene where an officer lays out precisely how people like Duke are going to move away for deliberately racist language – no one likes to be called racist – and couch their racism is kinder, gentler, less provocative terms, but the outcome will be the same. “But America would never elect someone like that President?” Stallworth asks, and is told that it is an incredibly naïve thing for a black man to say.

 

Lee drives home the point one last time in his closing – just when you think he wasn’t going to use his “people mover” shot, he does (it’s one of his best uses of it) and then cuts to footage from last year’s Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally – and the response from both the President, and modern day David Duke. I know there will be some who say that Lee perhaps could have – and should have – been more subtle. But subtly isn’t Lee’s style – it never has been – and he’s going to ensure no one can leave the theater thinking he has made a movie about America’s racist past, and remark on how far the country has come since then. The effect of that footage is overwhelming, and ends this masterpiece on the perfect note. This is one of the very best films of 2018 – and one of the very best of Lee’s career.

The Films of Spike Lee - Conclusion and Re-Ranking

After re-watching all of Lee’s theatrical features (non-documentary) in the span of the month, my admiration for the filmmaker has never really been higher – it is one of the most daring and ambitious filmographies of any contemporary director. When Lee won the Lifetime Achievement Oscar a couple years ago, I know a lot of people (most who believed Lee deserved the award) said his filmography was incredibly uneven – which is a sentiment I both agree and disagree with. If I were to judge Lee strictly on the old Siskel & Ebert Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down scale, then Lee would be 19/2 – which is as high as you could expect. But, many of the films on Lee’s filmography – even some of his best – are uneven, are messy and do have flaws. That’s just the way Lee works – and its what makes his films special – the energy his best work has would not be served by cleaner, tighter, more “perfect” films. And yet, because of this style, I do think that Lee has made three essentially perfect films – and another eight that I completely, wholly admire, even if I have quibbles here and there, and eight more that are more flawed, yet fascinating or at the very least interesting. Yes, it’s an uneven filmography, made up of mostly imperfect films. This may explain why Lee has never been one to win a bunch of awards at the end of the year – everyone there seems to like to pick apart flaws. But it’s also why his films last – and often are more admired years later than they were when they were released – because those flaws fade from your memory, but what Lee gets right in his films never really does.

 

Anyway, after –re-watching all his films again, this is how I would rank them now – it’s pretty similar to the original ranking – the top 3 didn’t change, and only one film rose 3 spots, and only three other films whose rise or fall was +/- 2: I'll add BlacKkKlansman next week.

 

21. Girl 6 (1996) – Sadly the film I thought was the weakest going in, ended up the weakest coming out. I still don’t think Lee really understood the movie, the lead character, or how to tell the story. Quite simply the only film in Lee’s filmography that just completely, totally does not work.

 

20. Red Hook Summer (2012) – Lee returned to the kind of small, indie film that he made his name doing in the 1980s with Red Hook Summer. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t really work – it feels like two movies that have been forced together, and neither really works. It is redeemed, somewhat, by the energy Lee brings to the film, and a great performance by Clarke Peters as a fiery Preacher, with a dark past.

 

19. Oldboy (2013) – I’m still trying to piece together why Lee’s version of Oldboy doesn’t work as well as it should. There certainly is a lot to admire about it – Lee goes all out stlystically, and much of it is brilliant. Most of the changes he makes to the narrative of the original also make sense – and are not done to soften the material. Josh Brolin is quite good in the lead role. And yet, it all combines to a fairly underwhelming film, for reasons I’m not exactly sure of. It’s still worth a look, but I think it should have been better.

 

18. She Hate Me (2004) – I’m torn here, because while the film is less successful than some other entries, it also gives you a lot more to think about and chew on than some of the ones ranked higher (like, say, Mo’ Better Blues). I want to encourage more to watch the film – even if they end up hating it, and being offended by it, because there is so much going on in it.

 

17. Miracle at St. Anna (2008) – There is no question that Lee’s war film is overlong and flawed, with too many characters and subplots that don’t add as much as they should have given how much screen time they get. Still, at its best, the film can be quite good – the war scenes themselves are visceral and bloody, some of the dynamics among the soldiers are fascinating. Lee was trying to make a corrective to 70 years of WWII films in one foul swoop – and if his major sin is over ambition, so be it.

 

16. Mo’ Better Blues (1990) – Is this Lee’s most forgettable good movie? Probably – it is well made, has a lot of great music, and a great Denzel lead performance – as well as solid work by Wesley Snipes and Cynda Williams. The problematic bookends don’t help much, and when all is said and done, you forget it soon after it’s over – which is not something you can say about too many other Lee films.

 

15. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014) – I think you can make a case that Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is Lee’s oddest film – a very strange remake of Bill Gunn’s Ganja + Hess, which is very different from the original in terms of its tone, and is also very much a Spike Lee film. The tone is the most subdued of Lee’s career – which is doubly odd considering all the sex and blood. I still don’t know entirely what to make of this film after watching it twice – but I know I was enthralled this time through, and am more likely to revisit this than even several better, Lee films.

 

14. She’s Gotta Have It (1986) – I’m still bothered by some of the more problematic aspects of the film – the rape near the end, the depiction of the main character’s lesbian friend – but I’m even more bothered by how the lead character, Nola Darling, exists more as concept than character. I like Lee experimenting, even on a limited budget his first time out, and the three men are all interesting. But I’ll still insist that the movie’s social importance has little to do with how good it actually is, and more to do with the time period it came out in, and that Lee was doing something they hadn’t really been seen before – and the Netflix series is a far better version of this story.

 

13. Get on the Bus (1996) – The film plays like exactly what it is – a quick and dirty feature, made on the fly for little money, gathering a group of talented actors to tell the different stories of those who attended the Million Man March. That was its intent, and that’s what it accomplishes. A modest achievement, but a worthy one.

 

12. School Daze (1988) – Lee’s second film shows his tremendous ambition, as his depiction of life on the campus of an Historically Black College is expansive and stylistic, and unafraid to take chances – including a couple of great musical numbers. The best parts of School Daze are great – the musical number, the scene in the chicken restaurant with the locals, Giancarlo Esposito’s cruelty, etc. – but the film does feel like less than the sum of its parts as a total package.

 

11. Chi-Raq (2015) – You have to admire the guts Lee has making this film – about modern day Chicago, but written entirely in verse, that is also an all-out musical and a comedy, and yet has such heavy subject matter like the epidemic of gun violence in that city. It’s exuberant and ecstatic and incredibly odd and one I think I’ll watch and re-watch trying to figure it all out. Is it flawed? Sure – but I wouldn’t want it any other way.

 

10. Crooklyn (1994) – The only film in Spike’s career that could be described as nostalgic, this semi-autobiographical story about his and his sibling’s childhood – focusing mainly on the lone sister – is heartfelt, funny and sweet – yet still clear eyed – view of Brooklyn in the 1970s, and by contrast, the changes since then. An understated – and underrated – film.

 

9. Jungle Fever (1991) – Jungle Fever is a fascinating film about inter-racial relationships, which is better around the edges than it is at its core. The crack subplot – featuring on the best ever Samuel L. Jackson performances – is great (and climaxes in one of the best ever Lee sequences in the crack house – is great, as are some of the conversations about the central relationship. The central relationship is more symbolic than dramatic – and the ending is, um, not good – but there is a lot of great stuff things in the film, making it one of the most provocative films of Lee’s career.

 

8. Summer of Sam (1999) – Perhaps the most underrated films of Lee’s career, this sprawling, overheated examination of fear and paranoia in an insular Bronx neighborhood in the summer of 1977 when the Son of Sam was terrorizing New York. A companion piece of sorts to Do the Right Thing – another neighborhood, boiling in the heat, simmering in fear, paranoia and a constant threat of violence. I like this much more than most – but I’m right.

 

7. He Got Game (1998) – A father/son drama that doubles as an indictment of the basketball machine that commodifies black bodies for financial gain, there is so much here to love – a great Denzel performance (where he gets to play an asshole, something he does better than anything else) – and a view of basketball that still loves the game, but hates the business around it. Yes, it tries to do too much (everything with Milla Jovovich for example) – but the core of the film is fantastic.

 

6. Inside Man (2006) – Inside Man is a great genre film – tense and exciting, with terrific performances, pacing and exciting twists and turns. And yet, underneath all of that, there is a terrific Spike Lee movie here as well – a film about just how far people will go for money, how they will sell their soul – which links it to most of the films Lee had made the decade prior to this, but this time wrapped in an audience friendly package.

 

5. Clockers (1995) – Lee had studiously avoided movies about gangs and drug dealers until he made Clockers – a film that should be mentioned alongside Boyz in the Hood and Menace II Society. The film shows the culture of drugs and violence, and how it effects everything and everyone in the neighborhood. The film also doubles as a police procedural genre film. The more times I see this, the more I love it. One of Lee’s very best films.

 

4. Bamboozled (2000) – Only Spike Lee would make a film like Bamboozled – a big, messy masterwork of satire, which is deliberately off-putting to everyone, strikes out in a thousand different directions, and is both hilarious and offensive. I’ve seen Bamboozled countless times now, and it still has the same effect each time. I understand why some people hate it – cannot even make it through it – but I think even that reaction validates Lee’s overall point. And oddly, for such a specific film, in many ways, it hasn’t aged at all.

 

3. 25^th Hour (2002) – This is a great New York film, a great post 9/11 film and a terrific character piece about the last day of freedom of a drug dealer (Edward Norton) before he turns himself in for a seven year prison sentence. The film is a terrific character study not just of Norton’s character – but his girlfriend (Rosario Dawson), his father (Brian Cox), his best friend (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a high school student (Anna Paquin). That the film was released just a year after 9/11 is a miracle – as is the fact that Lee combines so many elements together in one perfect package. A stunning masterpiece.

 

2. Malcolm X (1992) – Is Malcolm X is the best biopic of all time? The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that it is. It starts with Denzel’s absolutely magnificent performance – truly one of the best in cinema history – and it goes through every other element of the film. Lee is interested in the complete man – flaws and all – and finds a way that could have played like a series of speeches into something so much deeper and more tragic.  Every time I see it, I am just as stunned as the first time I saw it. Another masterpiece.

 

1. Do the Right Thing (1989) – I doubt that a filmmaker will ever make a better film about race in America than Spike Lee made with Do the Right Thing – a film as relevant today (perhaps even moreso) than it was the year it was made, nearly 30 years ago. Lee’s mosaic of stories, all over one hot Brooklyn day, that eventually burst into violence, is both epic and intimate, sweeping and specific. It truly is one of the best films ever made – a masterpiece in every way imaginable.

The Films of Spike Lee: Chi-Raq (2015)

Chi-Raq (2015)

Directed by: Spike Lee.

Written by: Spike Lee & Kevin Willmott based on the play by Aristophanes.

Starring: Teyonah Parris (Lysistrata), Nick Cannon (Chi-Raq), Wesley Snipes (Cyclops), Angela Bassett (Miss Helen), Samuel L. Jackson (Dolmedes), John Cusack (Father Mike Corridan), Jennifer Hudson (Irene), David Patrick Kelly (General King Kong), D.B. Sweeney (Mayor McCloud), Dave Chappelle (Morris), Steve Harris (Old Duke), Harry Lennix (Commissioner Blades).

 

No matter what you think of Chi-Raq – and this is one of those films where the reactions are all over the place – I don’t think you can fault Spike Lee for not being ambitious enough when he made the film. It is a film about the crisis in Chicago – where gang violence takes victims every day, both ones directly involved in the gangs, and those who are just trying to live in their lives in the dangerous streets. I’m not quite sure why Lee – and co-writer Kevin Willmott – chose to address this issue by adapting a play written a couple thousand years ago, by Aristophanes, or why they felt the need to write the whole movie in rhyming verse, or why they also chose to make the film both a full-fledged musical and a demented comedy. That the film can be all of those things, and also be a painful howl of rage is more than a little bit remarkable. As I said with a few other films of Lee’s over the course of this series, you may well hate Chi-Raq – but dammit, you’re not going to forget it.

 

The Jean-Luc Godard inspired opening has you sit there and listen to the title song of the movie play out in full, as the lyrics flash onto the screen. The song is angry at the state of Chicago, and saddened at the same time. It will set the tone for the rest of the movie. We are then introduced to Dolmedes (Samuel L. Jackson), our narrator, who will explain why the rest of the film will be spoken in verse, and introduce us to the rest of the characters – he doesn’t have a role beyond doing this throughout the film, and yet it remains one of Jackson’s best performances for Lee – a kind of profane, extended rant that evokes everything from the play they are basing it on, to Patton. The main character will be Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), the girlfriend of Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon), a rapper and a leader of one of the two gangs doing all the fighting in Chicago. An energetic performance – complete with large scale choreography by the crowd in the club – is ended when gunshots ring out – and people are left on the ground bleeding. This doesn’t much bother either Chi-Raq or Lysistrata – it doesn’t stop them from having sex when they get back home. But two events will get Lysistrata thinking – the first is when their house is burned down, and she’s forced to move out for a little while, and in with Miss Helen (Angela Bassett), who activates her conscience. And the second is she sees Irene (Jennifer Hudson), wailing in pain at the site where her little girl was murdered – a victim because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lee stays with Irene for a long time at that scene – as she tries to scrub the blood off the pavement. Lysistrata’s idea on how to stop the violence is simple – the women will stop having sex with their men until they make peace. She gets a remarkable level of buy-in.

 

Tonally speaking, Chi-Raq is deliberately all over the place. There are scenes of sadness – like Irene scrubbing the blood of her daughter off the pavement, scenes of pure anger – a remarkable, and long, sermon at the daughter’s funeral delivered by John Cusack (curious choice, but it works) as he goes after everyone from the gangs to the politicians to the police to the NRA. There are almost moments of pure comedy – Dave Chappelle shows up for one scene as a strip club owner, explaining that the strippers are honoring the strike, and as such, there is no dancing going on. There are ecstatic musical numbers throughout the film – and a brilliant set piece near the end, when Chi-Raq and Lysistrata get together to try and see who can outlast the other, as he is trying to bring the strike (and, by that point, the women’s occupation of the armory) to a halt – all on a bed set up as if on stage. The performances, as a result, run the gamut as well – from Cannon’s more serious role, to Wesley Snipes high pitched giggling psycho as his rival. Best of all is Parris, who somehow anchors the movie, and makes the tonal shifts work. It’s a short list of female protagonists in Lee films – but hers is clearly the best, most well-rounded of them all.

 

I honestly don’t know what precisely Lee was trying to accomplish with this film. He doesn’t give any real solutions to the problems presented here – they aren’t any easy ones, and Lee doesn’t pretend there are any (even if, he gives the film a relatively upbeat ending). If he wanted to reach more people with his howl of rage, he wouldn’t have wrapped in musical numbers and comedy, and written the whole thing in verse. Yet the whole movie is completely and totally fascinating, and also one of the most entertaining films Lee has made in years. With a film like this, there is no way it was going to be perfect – there are certainly flaws, although I think many may disagree on what they are. But it is an energetic film – a powerful one, and an entertaining one. And one only Spike Lee would even attempt to make.

The Films of Spike Lee: Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)

Directed by: Spike Lee.

Written by: Spike Lee based on the film Ganja & Hess by Bill Gunn.

Starring: Stephen Tyrone Williams (Dr. Hess Greene), Zaraah Abrahams (Ganja Hightower), Rami Malek (Seneschal Higginbottom), Elvis Nolasco (Lafayette Hightower), Thomas Jefferson Byrd (Bishop Zee), Joie Lee (Nurse Colquitt), Felicia Pearson (Lucky Mays), Naté Bova (Tangier Chancellor).

 

What precisely are we to make of Spike Lee’s Da Sweet Blood of Jesus – his remake of Bill Gunn’s cult film, Ganja + Hess, which is both faithful, basically, to the story, and yet a completely different film? I feel too many critics saw the film once and dismissed it back in 2014 (if they saw it at all) – noting the stilted dialogue and strange tone of the film, criticizing the two lead performance by Stephen Tyrone Williams and Zaraah Abrahams as existing in two seemingly different movies. The score two, is a mixture of different sounds – rap plays at times, at others, it’s Bruce Hornsby’s jazz score – and as with many Lee films, the music is up loud throughout the film. Is Da Sweet Blood of Jesus a horror film? Yes, in the sense that it is about vampires – even if they are never called that in the film – and there is copious amounts of blood split in the film. But it’s more than that, as the film really isn’t trying to scare the audience. This is another one of Lee’s films where his themes overtake the story – this time in some fascinating ways. Yes, the film is perhaps a little slow, and not what we are expecting when you say a horror film – but I found it endlessly fascinating – much more so now than when I first saw the film.

 

In the film, Williams plays Dr. Hess Greene – the wealthy son of two (now dead) parents – the first African Americans to own a firm on Wall Street, who sold it, and left him their vast fortune. He is highly educated and refined – but he doesn’t seem to work very much, preferring to spend all his time on his spacious estate (not coincidently, it’s 40 acres) on Martha’s Vineyard, holding parties that The Great Gatsby would feel at home attending, surrounded by his collection of African artifacts. The most recent one to enter his collection is a ritual dagger of some kind. When a houseguest, Lafayette Hightower (Elvis Nolasco), tries to commit suicide – and ends up fighting with Greene, the dagger eventually makes an appearance – and you know what happens next. When Lafayette’s now widow, Ganja (Abrahams) shows up looking for her husband – who she hated – and finds Greene, she doesn’t leave – and soon both of them share the same thirst.

 

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is then, a horror film, because it does contain two people who become monster and literally feast on the blood of their victims. But Lee is more interested in how Greene in particular is a figurative vampire himself – and how various American institutions, are vampires as well – sucking the wealth out of people it considers less than. Oddly, the film Da Sweet Blood of Jesus reminded me most of is David Cronenberg’s much maligned Cosmopolis (2012) – which featured Robert Pattinson as a Wall Street millionaire, depicted as an emotional vampire of sorts. The Greene in Lee’s film would despise Pattinson’s character – but they share a lot in common. As do the performances, which are very quiet and deliberately emotionally closed off. Abrahams, as Ganja, on the other hand takes her performance almost over the top – there are times when it seems to almost be slipping over into camp, but it never quite gets there (Rami Malek, as Greene’s ever loyal servant, does the same thing).

 

What is perhaps the most impressive thing about Da Sweet Blood of Jesus – especially coming from Lee – is the mastery of tone he shows here. You may not like the dreamy tone he sets – but he keeps it consistent throughout, whether they are bloody scenes, sex scenes, or the closed off parties, etc. There are a lot of elements Lee is juggling here – they don’t all cohere – but the tone he wants never falters. Lee has often made deliberately messy films – and while this film is as packed with meaning as his others – he doesn’t let the various elements get out of control.

 

I’m not trying to argue that Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is one of Lee’s best films – it isn’t, because some of the complaints people have against the film are true. The film is too slow – and at two hours, too long, and while I admire Williams’ commitment to his performance, and the way he controls his emotions, it doesn’t exactly make him the most interesting person to spend two hours with. But I do find Lee’s exploration of race, class, religion, capitalism, addiction and everything else he throws at the wall here to be fascinating. It’s a film very much in line with his other, perhaps more overt films about the same issues – there are elements here of Jungle Fever, Summer of Sam, She Hate Me, Inside Man, Red Hook Summer among others, all wrapped up in a genre package, with a tone of a dream that turns into a nightmare. It’s not one of Lee’s best films, but it is one I’m still trying to unpack.

The Films of Spike Lee: Oldboy (2013)

Oldboy (2013)

Directed by: Spike Lee.

Written by: Mark Protosevich based on the manga by Garon Tsuchiya & Nobuaki Minegishi.

Starring: Josh Brolin (Joe Doucett), Elizabeth Olsen (Marie Sebastian), Sharlto Copley (Adrian / The Stranger), Samuel L. Jackson (Chaney), Michael Imperioli (Chucky), Pom Klementieff (Haeng-Bok), James Ransone (Dr. Tom Melby), Max Casella (James Prestley), Linda Emond (Edwina Burke), Elvis Nolasco (Cortez), Rami Malek (Browning), Lance Reddick (Daniel Newcombe), Hannah Ware (Donna Hawthorne), Richard Portnow (Bernie Sharkey), Hannah Simone (Stephanie Lee).

 

I have to admit that I am somewhat at a loss as to why Spike Lee’s remake of Oldboy doesn’t work as well it should. On the surface, I like much of the movie. Lee accepts the challenge of remaking a film that was already very bold, very stylized, is smart enough to know the stylistic tricks he cannot top, so he keeps them, but raises the level on some of the others. Most of the changes made to the narrative are small, but are quite smart. Josh Brolin is very good in the lead role. And yet, when taken as a whole, the film just seems kind of, what? Not bland per se, but just that while everyone has clearly put a lot work into it, there wasn’t necessarily a lot of passion. Even some of Lee’s films that are worse that Oldboy are still very clearly his films – their failures are his failures. But Oldboy feels strange impersonal – and Lee isn’t very good at faking it.

 

The film is a remake of Korean director Chan-wook Park’s 2003 film of the same name (spoilers for both films will be throughout the rest of the review, but come on, you’ve had 15 years). In that film, a man is kidnapped off the street, and held in what looks like a hotel room for 15 years, with no contact with the outside world, just a TV he cannot control, and is fed the same dumplings every day. After being in jail all that time, he is released – and is obsessed with figuring out who put him away and why. He meets a young woman who helps him. And then, the villain makes himself - and eventually – his reasons known. And it becomes clear that releasing the man from prison wasn’t the end of his torment.

 

Lee’s film basically follows the same plot. Lee does spend more time with his protagonist – Joe Doucett (Brolin) – before he is kidnapped and imprisoned, driving home the point of just what a terrible person he was., He is a drunk, who barely seems to care about his 3-year-old daughter, who he blows off her birthday party to attend an important business dinner – that he proceeds to blow to offending the man he is trying to impress. He stumbles around drunk until he’s just – poof – gone. Waking up in the prison, he slowly starts to go mad. He sees the news on the TV that his ex-wife was raped and murdered – and there is an open and shut case against him. Throughout the years, he’ll get updates on his daughter through the crime shows that keep exploring the murder. Eventually, he starts writing undeliverable notes to his daughter – and is determined to make right when he gets out. He also trains, turning himself into a muscular fighter. Lee keeps him inside longer than the first film – 20 years this time – but he is released pretty much the same way. The young woman he meets is a nurse, Marie Sebastian (Elizabeth Olsen) – who doesn’t know what this strange man is up to, but cannot help but try and help. And then, Adrian (Sharlto Copley) appears.

 

As a visual experience, Lee’s Oldboy is impressive right from the start – but there are two sequences in particular where he outdoes himself. The original film has an extended fight sequence between the main character and a bunch of goons – all in a hallway, seen from the side in one long take. Lee takes this sequence to another level – literally – by staging the scene on a ramp. This raises the difficultly level of the shot, but Lee and company pull it off spectacularly. Another sequence, late in the film, where Adrian flashes back to the worse moment in his life, the real reason why everything happens, is another long take of bloody violence – and again Lee makes it look effortless. The film is full of shots and moments that work wonderfully – a slow pan out when the big secret is revealed for example, is a brilliant example of showmanship by Lee. No matter what I think about the film, it’s clear Lee is bringing his A-game, technically, speaking to the film.

 

I also like, for the most part, the changes Lee and company make to the narrative of the film. I was worried, obviously, that any Hollywood version of the story would soften it somewhat – that they would take the edge off the story, and slink away from the shocking moments. Lee doesn’t do that in the least. He does change the ending of the film – not the reveal, but what the main character decides to do after the reveal. It’s a more selfless act on his part than what the character in the original does.

 

Lee doesn’t solve some of the problems with the original film though – the most problematic being the character of Marie. In both versions of the film, she is more a screenwriter’s idea than a character – who behaves in ways that don’t make a lot of sense, because the plot requires her to do so. Because Elizabeth Olsen is a fine actress, she is able to paper over some of those flaws, but her biggest act – the one the whole movie hinges on really – makes no sense given everything we know about her character up until then. It doesn’t really work.

 

The bigger problem here though really is that the whole thing seems impersonal. Lee has always poured himself into his work – even the previous examples where he was little more than a director for hire on a studio genre piece – Inside Man, for example, is every bit a Spike Lee film. Oldboy doesn’t feel like a Lee film. It feels cold and impersonal – that Lee is showing off stylistically, without really caring about the plot or the characters. At 104 minutes, it’s very short for a Spike Lee film – his films are often too long, because he’s trying to cram so much in. That’s preferable to something like this, stripped to the bone, but with a director whose fingerprints have been erased.

 

I do think that this version of Oldboy is fascinating – it deserved better than being ignored, which is what happened in 2013. It’s makes an interesting companion piece to the original film, has some amazing set pieces, and some weird, interesting performances – Brolin, yes, but also Samuel L. Jackson as the jailer, and Copley as the villain. No, I don’t really think Copley’s performance works – but dammit all if it isn’t one of the most distinctive performances in recent years. Many will hate it, and fair enough. But man, it’s odd. If you are only going to one version of this movie, then yes, see the original. But after that, you should see this one too. Does it work? Not really. But I’ll remember it just the same.

The Films of Spike Lee: Red Hook Summer (2012)

Red Hook Summer (2012)

Directed by: Spike Lee.

Written by: Spike Lee & James McBride.

Starring: Jules Brown (Flik Royale), Clarke Peters (Da Good Bishop Enoch Rouse), Toni Lysaith (Chazz Morningstar), Nate Parker (Box), Thomas Jefferson Byrd (Deacon Zee), Jonathan Batiste (Da Organist T.K. Hazelton), Heather Simms (Sister Sharon Morningstar), James Ransone (Kevin), De'Adre Aziza (Colleen Royale), Isiah Whitlock, Jr. (Detective Flood), Spike Lee (Mr. Mookie).

 

With Red Hook Summer, Spike Lee attempted to go home again – to make a film in his native Brooklyn quickly, cheaply and one the fly. The fact that he brings back Mookie from Do the Right Thing shows you what type of film Lee was aiming for in Red Hook Summer. And the film does in fact have the energy of a much younger filmmaker – someone winging it, and putting everything he can into one movie, because they’re never sure they’ll get to make another. That has a downside though, in that Red Hook Summer doesn’t feel entirely thought through and that’s true even before the twist that comes about 80 minutes into this two-hour movie, which essentially means the last act is a completely different movie from what came before – and raises all sorts of questions the film doesn’t answer. Red Hook Summer is, in short, a mess – a sometimes entertaining one, with a great central performance, but a mess just the same.

 

The plot of the film is almost an inverse of the part of Lee’s Crooklyn (1994) where the daughter went to visit wealthy relatives down South. This time, Flik (Jules Brown), a kid of about 12, from Atlanta is dropped off by his mother to spend the summer with the grandfather, Bishop Enoch Rouse (Clarke Peters), that he has never met before in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. Enoch lives in a small apartment, is a widower, and his entire life revolves around the Church – A Little Slice of Heaven – where he preaches every Sunday, to what seems like dwindling numbers. His sermons are fiery though – and really make up the backbone of the film, as he rails against poverty, drugs, the internet and other things plaguing the youth. Peters delivers this sermon with passion and control – and they are the best moments in the film, whether you agree with them or not.

 

Flik is enlisted to help out at the church – he resists at first, but is slowly won over. He spends much of his time behind his iPad – using it to film the world around him. He develops a friendship with a girl around his age – Chazz (Toni Lysaith) – and the two play and flirt in the way of 13 year olds who don’t know how to express themselves in any other way. Chazz’s mother and Enoch are circling each other in a similar way – just decades down the line.

 

For the first 80 minutes or so Red Hook Summer seems to be a film very much like Crooklyn – more of a series of vignettes about the people in this neighborhood, focusing on Enoch and Flik, but generous with everyone who surrounds them. It doesn’t work as well as Crooklyn – it lacks the focus of that film, and the specificity of detail that Lee (and his siblings, who co-wrote Crooklyn, about their own childhood), brought to that film. Whether that’s because Lee is now a fifty-something year old filmmaker, trying to make a film about kids today, rather than about his past, or something else, I don’t know.

 

And then, at the 80 minutes of film, Lee basically throws a bomb into the plot of Red Hook Summer – and the whole movie changes. It doesn’t change in way that re-contextualizes everything we’ve seen before – that would require things to be more thought through than they appear to be here. Revelations about Enoch’s past are revealed, and basically take over the plot for the rest of the films – at least until the strangely upbeat, sentimental montage that ends the film.

 

Why did Lee and co-writer James McBride make this choice? I honestly don’t know, because I really don’t know what they make of the revelations, or what they say about Enoch. I will say that for his part Peters’ performance never wavers – he is great from beginning to end, and those closing scenes are among the best in the film for his work alone. They also raise a lot of questions – the biggest one being why Flik’s mother left him there with Enoch in the first place? She clearly knew about them – which is why she hasn’t seen her father in years – but the film never does explain why she needed to leave Flik, and once we know what we know, her decision is irresponsible.

 

I admire Lee and his willingness to experiment. There are a lot of filmmakers of Lee’s stature who talk about returning to making smaller, more personal movies where they have more control – but very few actually do it. Here, Lee captures the energy of his earlier films, but the plot mechanics undermine him at every turn – as does the fact that Flik just isn’t all that engaging of a character. Red Hook Summer is a mess in many ways – and while you can say that about a number of Spike Lee films, I think here the mess is far less interesting than normal.

The Films of Spike Lee: Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

Directed by: Spike Lee.

Written by: James McBride based on his novel.

Starring: Derek Luke (Staff Sergeant Aubrey Stamps), Michael Ealy (Sergeant Bishop Cummings), Laz Alonso (Corporal Hector Negron), Omar Benson Miller (Private First Class Samuel “Sam” Train), Matteo Sciabordi (Angelo Torancelli – The Boy), Pierfrancesco Favino (Peppi ”The Great Butterfly” Grotta), Valentina Cervi (Renata Salducci), John Turturro (Detective Antonio "Tony" Ricci), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Tim Boyle), Kerry Washington (Zana Wilder), John Leguizamo (Enrico), D. B. Sweeney (Colonel Jack Driscoll), Robert John Burke (General Ned Almond), Omari Hardwick (Platoon Commander Huggs), Omero Antonutti (Ludovico Salducci), Sergio Albelli (Rodolfo Berelli), Lydia Biondi (Natalina), Michael K. Williams (frightened soldier), Christian Berkel (Eicholz), Jan Pohl (Hans Brundt), Alexandra Maria Lara (Mildred Gillars), Luigi Lo Cascio (Adult Angelo).

 

Spike Lee was very clear about his reasons for making Miracle at St. Anna – he was tired of American movies overlooking the contributions of black soldiers during WWII. Just two years prior to this film’s release, he got into a public spat with Clint Eastwood – about Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, about Iwo Jima, that had no black soldiers represented. To Lee, Miracle at St. Anna was meant to be a corrective of sorts – to finally tell the stories of black soldiers who fought and died for their country – a country Lee makes clear, didn’t treat them well at home. The goal is both admirable and necessary. Miracle at St. Anna though is a big, messy film – full of unnecessary diversions and subplots – the most egregious of which is unnecessary bookending scenes set in 1984. It is almost as if Lee wanted to counteract 70 years of movies in just one film – so the result is necessarily messy. I will say this though – I admire Lee’s efforts here, and the best things about the film truly are wonderful. A tighter film would have been better probably, but perhaps it would have been a little less of Spike Lee film, and a more typical war movie.

 

The film is mainly set in the waning days of WWII, in the Italian countryside. An all-black unit is one of many being tasked to advance on the Nazis, and take back control. After a bloody river crossing goes horribly wrong – in part because of a racist, white senior officer, who positioned himself well back from the front line, didn’t believe it when his black soldiers told them they made it to the other side of the river, and needed support, so he fired mortars that killed rather than helped his soldiers – four black soldiers are trapped on the other side of the river. Staff Sergeant Stamps (Derek Luke) is the de facto leader – and has the most sense of the bunch. Sergeant Bishop (Michael Ealy) is a little bit of a hothead, just trying to survive. Corporal Negron (Laz Alonso), a Puerto Rican, is the radio man – and actually speaks Italian. And then there is Private Train (Omar Benson Miller), a gentle giant of a man, who is a little slow, but also incredibly sweet. He saves a young Italian boy, Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi) from a collapsed barn, and then pretty much adopts the boy. They will end up in a small, mountainside village, surrounded by Nazis who are closing in, with orders to capture one of them in order to confirm intelligence reports. The villagers are wary of them at first. The partisans are also close by – although after years, they are getting tired and frustrated.

 

The biggest mistake I think Lee makes in the film is the bookend scenes – that add little other than celebrity cameos and runtime to the film. In 1984, Harlem a now much older Negron, working at the Stamps window at the post office, sees someone he clearly knows, pulls out a German luger, and calmly shoots him in the chest. Negron refuses to answer anyone’s questions as to why he did it – but the mystery is deepened when they find a stone head from a bridge in Florence in his apartment. Eventually, all of these questions will be answered in the body of the film, but the rather slow opening of about 20 minutes is more boring than anything else – despite the presence of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a cub reporter, John Turturro as a hardened cop and John Leguizamo as, well, I’m not quite sure. The film ends with the resolution of this case – adding in Kerry Washington as a high powered lawyer for good measure – but these scenes don’t really go anywhere, or add anything to the narrative. They’re just kind of there.

 

Lee’s ambitions get him trouble elsewhere as well. It’s as if he wants to give everyone a fair shake – so we get stories of the partisans, of Germans – both good and bad – the villagers, etc. He also adds in some weird, magical realism touches – how the old man in the village gets his power back for example. A love triangle of sorts develops between Stamps, Bishop and the beautiful Renata (Valentina Cervi) – the only villager who speaks English. It is resolved, but not in a way that makes sense (Renata makes a choice, but the movie seems to have no idea why she makes the choice she does. Other diversions work better – like a flashback to when the men are in training in the South, and head into town to get something to eat. They see German POWs being fed by at the restaurant, but its owners tells them to go around back- whites only.

 

There is a lot of great stuff in Miracle at St. Anna as well. The opening battle on the river is bloody and intense – not Saving Private Ryan great, but pretty damn great just the same. The final battle, in the streets of that small village, is equally as intense – and even more emotional, as by know we have gotten to know the characters. Derek Luke and Michael Ealy are both very good as Stamps and Bishop – they have a kind of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X dynamic between them. Omar Benson Miller has the kind of role that can go horribly wrong – but he makes it work.

 

So yes, it is certainly true that Miracle at St. Anna is a flawed film – a deeply flawed film. But like almost all of Lee’s films, it is flawed because of its ambition – flawed because Lee is trying to do too much, and he is swinging for the fences. That seems to be the only way he knows how to make movies – and bless him for that. I’ll always prefer a film that goes big, and doesn’t quite make it, then a film that plays it safe, and succeeds on its more modest terms.

The Films of Spike Lee: Inside Man (2006)

Inside Man (2006)

Directed by: Spike Lee.

Written by: Russell Gerwitz.

Starring: Denzel Washington (Detective Keith Frazier), Clive Owen (Dalton Russell), Jodie Foster (Madeleine White), Christopher Plummer (Arthur Case), Willem Dafoe (Captain John Darius), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Detective Bill Mitchell), Carlos Andrés Gómez (Steve), Kim Director (Stevie), James Ransone (Steve-O), Bernie Rachelle (Chaim), Ken Leung (Wing), Gerry Vichi (Howard Kurtz), Waris Ahluwalia (Vikram Walia), Peter Frechette (Peter Hammond), Amir Ali Said (Brian Robinson), Ed Onipede Blunt (Ray Robinson), Marcia Jean Kurtz (Miriam Douglas), Cassandra Freeman (Sylvia), Peter Gerety (Captain Coughlin), Victor Colicchio (Sergeant Collins), Jason Manuel Olazabal (ESU Officer Hernandez), Al Palagonia (Kevin), Florina Petcu (Ilina), Peter Kybart (Mayor of New York City).

 

I remember sitting in a theater in 2006 and seeing a preview for the new Denzel Washington movie Inside Man – which looked to be a neat little thriller – the type of which Washington can churn out without breaking a sweat, but is normally of a higher quality than most simply because he’s Denzel, and he elevates everything. And then, in the final moments of the trailer, when the credits flash by quickly, I noticed it said “Directed by Spike Lee”. They didn’t make that part of the advertising campaign – and there was probably a reason for that – Summer of Sam, Bamboozled, 25^th Hour and She Hate Me had been his last few films, and none of them had made a lot of money – and other than 25^th Hour, they weren’t really critical hits either. It was clear the marketing department thought Lee may be a detriment to the campaign – or at the very least, wasn’t a selling point. I think part of that has led to Inside Man being underrated through the years – looked at as little more than Lee taking a studio paycheque to churn out a genre film – so while the reviews were mainly good, and the box office was far and away the best of Lee’s career- it’s still looked at as minor Spike Lee. I thought the film was better than it was given credit for back in 2006 – and still think so today. Watching it again, so close to the films he was making before – that were angry about capitalism, and the treatment of black bodies like commodities – I see the connections in Inside Man – even if it is, on the surface, a bank heist film. Lee found a way to make his points, but wrap it in a package audiences felt more comfortable with. Whether that message sunk in, I don’t know, but I admire the hell out of Lee for smuggling it in – and still think Inside Man is the one of the best examples ever of an auteur filmmaker taking a studio paycheque, and making their own film buried in genre trappings.

 

In the film, Denzel stars as Detective Keith Frazier, a NYPD cop who is currently sidelined – put on desk duty because a criminal has accused of stealing $140,000 from him (which, of course, Frazier denies). He gets his chance to get back in the game though when a hostage situation develops at a Manhattan bank – and the regular hostage negotiator is out. From the start, something doesn’t sit right with Frazier about this situations – the criminals inside seem too smart and organized to be making the demands they are making. He thinks all they are doing is buying time. Things get more complicated when he is approached by Madeleine White (Jodie Foster), a fixer who works for the wealthy in New York, who has been hired by the bank’s owner, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) – because he has his personal safety deposit box in that location, and he wants to make sure the contents of which are either recovered, or destroyed. We do see inside the bank – the robbery is being led by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) who speaks directly to the camera, and we sometimes flash to interviews with people after the robbery has concluded – which shows the confusion about who was actually doing the robbery as it played out.

 

As a nifty genre film, Inside Man works remarkably well. Lee has always been a talented craftsman, and here he seems to instinctively know that a film like this needs to move at crackerjack speed, and handles that well. Lee can sometimes give himself over to offshoots and tirades in his films – that can be interesting, but also drag the films down a little, and pad the runtime – but he doesn’t much do that here. He does allow himself a little leeway – the conversation with the young, African American kid playing a video game called “Gangsta” or the way a Sikh hostage is treated when he is released – because he’s wearing a turban (that five years after 9/11 people still couldn’t tell the difference between Sikhs and Muslims is amazing – and they still cannot today, although, of course, they still hate them). But Lee doesn’t dwell here – he makes his point, and moves on quickly. He doesn’t let the pacing flag.

 

The last act of the movie – the part that plays out after the robbery is over – is perhaps the most interesting to me. It’s still a genre film – as Frazier is interviewing everyone to try and figure out what happened – but it’s packed with subtext that makes it a little deeper, a little more fascinating. Frazier is a black cop – so is his partner (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) – and he knows how he is perceived, especially as the investigation brings him into contact with people in Madeline’s world – people who are open minded and liberal, until the black guy pushes their buttons a little. The final act of the film asks the same basic question that Lee had been asking basically since Girl 6 a decade earlier – what exactly are you willing to do for money? At what price will you sell your soul?

 

The film works as a straight ahead thriller. Washington, Owen, Foster, Plummer and the supporting cast (who is filled with actors overqualified for their roles, like Ejiofor or Willem Dafoe) all do their jobs, and do it well. The robbery is, of course, more than a little unbelievable, but we kind of expect that in these sorts of films, and Lee handles it better than most. The film is something that Lee hadn’t really made before – or since for that matter: an audience pleaser. But there’s more here than that, and it elevates the whole movie to a level that most studio genre films like it. For example, answer me this question: For all the talk about the $140,000 Frazier was accused of stealing, for all the denials he issues throughout the film, does the movie ever, explicitly prove he didn’t take it? And what is he going to do with what he finds in his pocket at the end? And what does that say about him – and us in the audience watching him?

The Films of Spike Lee: She Hate Me (2004)

She Hate Me (2004)

Directed by: Spike Lee.

Written by: Spike Lee and Michael Genet

Starring: Anthony Mackie (John Henry "Jack" Armstrong), Kerry Washington (Fatima Goodrich), Jim Brown (Geronimo Armstrong), John Turturro (Don Angelo Bonasera), Q-Tip (Vada Huff), Woody Harrelson (Leland Powell), Dania Ramirez (Alex Guerrero), Monica Bellucci (Simona Bonasera), Lonette McKee (Lottie Armstrong), Michael Genet (Jamal Armstrong), Ossie Davis (Judge Buchanan), Brian Dennehy (Chairman Billy Church), Ellen Barkin (Margo Chadwick), David Bennent (Dr. Herman Schiller), Joie Lee (Gloria Reid), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Frank Wills), Michole Briana White (Nadiyah), Paula Jai Parker (Evelyn), Bai Ling (Oni), Sarita Choudhury (Song), Jamel Debbouze (Doak), Isiah Whitlock (Agent Amos Flood), Lemon (Eugenio Martinez), Kim Director (Grace), Rick Aiello (Rocco Bonasera), Don Harvey (G. Gordon Liddy).

 

Out of all of Spike Lee’s films, I’m not sure there’s one as universally disliked as She Hate Me – at least among those who have seen it, which I guess is not many (according to Box Office Mojo, it’s the second lowest grossing film of Lee’s career at only $366,037). It is easy to see why critics savaged the movie – and audiences mainly stayed away. The film is overlong and overstuffed – running two hours and fifteen minutes, and lashing out in all sorts of different directions its runtime. It not only indulges, but actively embraces, stereotypes about the virility and sexual prowess of black men, and could easily be read as massively homophobic in its depiction of all the lesbians in the film. It’s far easier to rip this movie to shreds and move on, rather than sit with it – and actively engage in what it has to say. I hadn’t seen the film since it came out years ago – and yet, the film has stuck with me – I’m not going to make the case that it’s a misunderstood masterpiece – it certainly is not that, but I do think that Lee is a smart filmmaker, who knows precisely what he is doing with this film. He probably even knew the reaction the film would get.

 

The film centers on John Henry “Jack” Armstrong, played by Anthony Mackie. He is a young, successful executive at a pharmaceutical company, whose stock price keeps going up and up because they keep saying they are about to introduce a vaccine for AIDS. Early in the film, the doctor in charge of that drug jumps out a window, and leaves his video diary to John – a diary in which he confesses that the vaccine they are hanging all their success on doesn’t really work. Overcome with a pang of conscience, John reports this to the SEC – which sets off everything else that happens in the film. He is promptly fired from his job, cannot even get an interview anywhere else, and has his assets frozen because – even if it was him who prompted the investigation, he is also now the subject of it. And here’s where the movie takes a strange twist I don’t think anyone could have predicted. John’s ex-fiancée Fatima (Kerry Washington) – who left him a few years ago when she discovered she was a lesbian – comes to him with an offer – both she and her girlfriend Alex (Dania Ramirez) want to get pregnant – and will pay him $5,000 to make that happen (the old fashioned way). Soon, Fatima is bringing all her lesbian friends around for the same procedure – at $10,000 a pop. John has a remarkable ability to not only impregnate all these women – often 5 a night – but bring them all too screaming orgasm while doing so.

 

This central conceit of the film is what overshadows everything else in the film. Lee is really making a statement about capitalism in the George W. Bush era – and really, America forever – where the rich get richer by exploiting those beneath them, and if they happen to be black all the better. There is a subplot involving Frank Wills (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the night guard at the Watergate, who actually discovered the break-in, and ended up dying early, alone and penniless – even while most of the perpetrators of the crime ended up making a lot of money. Lee is making a case here – as he did in He Got Game (and to a lesser extent, Girl 6, which Lee seems to have learned from, as John’s “audition” for the women is handled much better than the similar scene that opened Girl 6)– about the commodification of black bodies in order to get rich, and stay rich. The film is a none too subtle indictment of late stage capitalism – and lets you know that during the opening credits, which is a series of America currency floating by, ended with a Three Bill Dollar with George W. Bush’s face next to the Enron logo on it (like I said, not exactly subtle).

 

So yes, Lee drives his point home by embracing stereotypes about the sexual prowess and virility of black men – even if John has to pop a Viagra now and then, and chug red bull between sessions, what he accomplishes is still fairly amazing. I think this stretches back to Jungle Fever – another film that he built upon stereotypes about black men and their sexual ability, but that time he wanted to undercut it – show it as a dangerous fetish. His goal here is similar, but his methodology is precisely opposite – by taking that stereotype to the extreme, he shows just how utterly and completely ridiculous it really is.

 

Less easily defensible is his depiction of homosexuality and homophobia in the film – although I will say I feel it is an honest, if flawed, attempt on Lee’s part to deal with the issues. His first two films – She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze both contain material that really is homophobic. Since then, Lee has largely either avoided the issue altogether, or else has depicted masculine groups who respond negatively to being called gay (like Summer of Sam) – although that’s not the movie being homophobic, but rather the characters. Here though, Lee is deliberately trying to address it – he is trying to get to the root of John’s discomfort with homosexuality – whether his discovering Fatima with another woman upset him so much because it was the woman he loved cheating on him, or because it was with a woman. The black community has always been portrayed - fairly or not – as more homophobic than the white community. Lee I think is wrestling with those feelings in himself in this film, and doing so in a less than perfect way. I do think the reason that John not only has sex with all the lesbians in the film – but also is able to get them all to screaming orgasm – is Lee indulging in another cliché to show how ridiculous it really is – that all a lesbian needs to become straight is a really good dicking. The scenes in the film are ridiculous, but knowingly so. It’s also telling how the women Fatima brings over to his house progress – the first group of women are all stereotypically hot, and as each new group arrives, they become more and more the stereotype that people have in their mind as lesbians (the get bigger, stronger – they wear more flannel, etc.).

 

She Hate Me really is more in line with Bamboozled than any other film Lee had made until this point of his career – although a far less successful version of it. Both films embrace stereotypes, and then brings them to an absolute extreme level. Both films lash out in a million different directions at a million different targets. In both films, reasonable viewers will find things they agree with, and things that will offend them to their core. That’s all by design for Lee – and is the most daring things about the films, and the reason to watch both. Neither are films that will be embraced by people who like to see their politics reflected back to them by their entertainment. Both want to challenge and provoke and disturb. It’s just that Bamboozled does it all far better than She Hate Me, and Lee seems to be more on target there.

 

Like much of the rest of the film, the ending of She Hate Me is a mess – but unlike the rest, it’s not a very interesting mess. The film comes fairly close to moralizing and definitely gives way to speechifying in the last 15 minutes or so with ideas that Lee seems to be delivering earnestly, but are almost as problematic as the ones he is rallying against for much of the rest of the film.

 

So yes, She Hate Me is a hugely problematic film – and I haven’t even mentioned that the film is nowhere near as interesting as drama as it is as a social document, and visually the film doesn’t quite live up to the stylistics normally on display in a Lee film (not that Lee doesn’t continue to experiment throughout the film). But I will say this for She Hate Me – as flawed as it is, as much as it is admittedly one of Lee’s least “successful” efforts (whatever that means) – it gives you a lot to chew on and think about – as the length of this review no doubt indicates. I wish more people would see She Hate Me – many (most) would probably hate it – but they wouldn’t forget it.