BEFORE: There were 8 films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards this year (which is technically films from LAST year, but you know that) and I've only seen 5 of them so far, today's film will be number 6. I saw only one nominated film, "Black Panther", in the theater during its release, and I started playing catch-up after New Year's - I watched "Vice" in January, "A Star is Born" in April, and "Green Book" in May. Then I had to wait until after my Documentary Month to program "The Favourite" in August's Britfest, and now that September is here, and I know for sure that I don't need to save my Adam Driver films to link to "Star Wars: Episode 9" in December, I can knock out the sixth Best Picture nominee in September. That leaves just "Roma" (nearly impossible to link to, so who knows when I'll get to it) and "Bohemian Rhapsody", which is going to fall through the cracks this year, I can tell. I promise to try and get to that one early next year if I can.
But the burning question - which is the "better" film, "Green Book" or "BlacKkKlansman". Was Spike Lee right to raise a fuss over winning the Best Director Oscar and not Best Picture, or did the Academy get it correct? Common wisdom states that whatever Oscar you win, or don't win, it might be best to act graciously, especially if you want to get more nominations in the future, which seems to be a lesson that Spike hasn't learned. But tonight's viewing should shed more light on the situation.
Isiah Whitlock Jr. carries over from "The Old Man & The Gun" - and so does one other actor, it turns out, one who had a very small role yesterday, but has the main role tonight. But this was always planned to be an Isiah Whitlock connection, the other one is really a bonus.
THE PLOT: Ron Stallworth, an African-American police officer from Colorado Springs, CO, successfully manages to infiltrate the local Ku Klux Klan branch with the help of a Jewish surrogate.
AFTER: I admit that I've had an uneasy relationship with Spike Lee over the years - I enrolled in NYU film school a couple years after he left the graduate program there, and his 1983 film "Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads" was practically required viewing by the time I got there in 1986. Personally, I thought that thesis film sucked, it was boring as hell - but what do I know, I didn't even MAKE a thesis film, I graduated early and found my own way around that little requirement. I suppose I sort of regret that now, but since I didn't have any good ideas I felt like pitching to the class, graduating seemed like the easiest way (aka the coward's way) out. I guess I'd rather make NO film than a film that I'm not proud of, and I sort of wish other filmmakers/filmworkers would follow suit.
But by the time I graduated, and was working for the summer in a movie theater while looking for other work, "Do the Right Thing" was heating up the screen. Finally Spike was saying something that felt important, even if you didn't agree with it, it still felt like he had a point to make. Then (if you ask me) he floundered and farted around for a very long time - "Crooklyn", "Clockers", "She Hate Me", "Girl 6" - seriously? He made a few films that weren't all bad, like "25th Hour" and "Inside Man", but I never found his work particularly ground-breaking. A lot of the time it felt like he was just killing time, making films because he didn't know what else to do, kind of like Woody Allen.
"BlacKkKlansman" sort of feels like one of those films that's a clever idea on paper, but then once the film gets into the mechanics of the plot, like how is that set-up actually going to WORK in a movie, there's just no workable way to pull this off. (It almost feels like that Dave Chappelle skit about the black man who's also blind, so he doesn't know the color of his own skin, and accidentally ends up becoming a racist and a Klansman.) Back in the day, before you could look somebody up on Facebook or some kind of biographical database, I suppose it COULD be possible for someone to join the Klan over the phone, or at least make contact that way, and then once he paid the entry dues, maybe he'd get a membership card, but upon first meeting, it would be patently obvious to the KKK that they'd accepted someone who probably didn't share their opinions about desegregation and miscegenation.
At this point in the writing process, most filmmakers would probably crumple up the piece of paper and start again with something a lot more manageable. But in this case, the black policeman, working in the "intelligence" division, decides that now that he's made contact with "The organization", he should enlist another white officer to attend the Klan meetings under his name, to get the information about what they're up to. Earlier in the film, the officer is sent undercover to a Black Power rally, a place where only he can go, because of the color of his skin, and the fact that he's the only black officer at that station.
But a strange thing happens by juxtaposing the Black Power rally with a Klan meeting - we know what the P.C. police will tell us, that one of these is currently acceptable, and the other one is not. It's like a little pop quiz where you can tell what the "right" answer is, because the teacher has given you a lot of hints and context. We're supposed to feel inspired, uplifted by the Black Power rally (Spike gives us a ton of hints here, like the long, lingering montage shots of the beautiful black faces in the crowd) and we're supposed to feel loathing and disgust when we see the Klansman ceremony and the cross-burning. But here's where Spike Lee made a HUGE mistake, because putting both of these things in the same film comes awfully close to equating them - it allows us to do a compare/contrast, and if the two things are too similar (which they are, let's face it) then logically they either have to be BOTH right or BOTH wrong. In one case we've got a crowd united by their black skin, and the speaker is talking about violence against white people, and in the other the crowd is united by their white skin, and the speaker is advocating violence against black people. How are those NOT essentially the same?
The job of the filmmaker here should be to explain to us - in a SUBTLE way - what he wants us to believe, that the Black Power rally is acceptable and the Klan rally is not. But it seems like Spike Lee somehow forgot to do this, which feels like a glaring mistake, and could easily lead to the conclusion, among the simple-minded or the impressionable, that these two events are merely opposite sides of the same coin. And then this leads me to the logical conclusion that if white radicals are bad, and black radicals are also bad, then the problem isn't race, it's something inherent to radicalism itself. How can we get people to enact social change the proper way, through legislation and the courts, instead of picking up guns or bombs and violently hurting others, and ultimately themselves?
Unfortunately, Spike Lee has not really grown that much as a filmmaker since making "Do the Right Thing" - in many ways it feels like we're all back where we started with him, only instead of Mookie asking, "Hey, Sal, how come you ain't got no brothas on the wall at the pizzeria?", we now have Ron asking, "Hey, chief, how come you ain't got no brothas working undercover at the police department?" So there goes one of Spike Lee's main complaints, that "Green Book" was just a race-switched and gender-switched version of "Driving Miss Daisy". (But I covered this during my review of "Green Book", the very fact that the races had switched was de facto proof that some racial progress, however slight, HAD been made since 1989.) Anyway, Spike, it seems that you've shot your mouth off again, because "BlacKkKlansman" is therefore just "Do the Right Thing" only the action got moved from a Brooklyn pizzeria and neighborhood to a Colorado Springs police department.
Don't believe me? What about that most controversial part of "Do the Right Thing", where the Brooklyn citizens rattle off every racial epithet they can for blacks, whites, Koreans, Jews in rapid-fire fast language, which serves no narrative purpose other than to shock the audience, and maybe stir up racial hatred, like pouring gasoline on the fire. In the final phone conversation between Stallworth and KKK President David Duke, Lee falls back on the very same crutch, with Ron working every possible racial slur for both blacks AND whites into the same conversation. You keep leaning on that same crutch, Spike Lee, and one day it's going to break. There must be a way to make a film about race without sounding racist yourself, and Spike just hasn't found it - I wonder if he's ever even taken the time to look for it.
The film opens with some kind of newsreel broadcast, some fictional racist from the 1970's who would be that decade's equivalent of our Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones, spouting a bunch of obviously wrong ideology about how white America is under attack, black children are now going to school with white ones, so our holy white Protestant value system is under attack, black people are rapists, murderers, mongrels - we've heard it all before and it was wrong then, it's wrong now, so why bring it all up again? And then at times this horrible person occasionally spouts random syllables, as if he's having a stroke - but that's a low blow, you shouldn't have to resort to tactics like that to make this guy look stupid, when his words are enough to do that for you. Anyway, he claims that the whole Negro takeover of America is a result of an international Jewish conspiracy, which makes no sense - why would Jews want Negroes to take over, when they could (according to your twisted logic) take over the world for themselves? The casting of Alec Baldwin to play this part is probably not a coincidence, because he's been playing Donald Trump on SNL, and this seems like a veiled attempt to connect the dots between the Klan of the 1970's to the President of today.
Then, just in case there's any doubt left about the filmmaker's intent, the movie ends with real news footage of the alt-right (modern KKK) marches in Virginia, and the riots in Charlottesville, after which the President pointed out that there were violent protestors and "good people" on both sides. MMM, thank you Mr. Lee for spoon-feeding the concept right into my mouth, since apparently you thought I wasn't smart enough to make the connection on my own. Hell, this isn't even spoon-feeding, this is chewing the food and regurgitating it right into my mouth like a mama bird. Duuhhh, thank you for informing me that we have a racist president, durrrr durrr.....
It doesn't even make SENSE how the movie gets from the conclusion of the story to Donald Trump. We see Ron and Patrice in an apartment, there's a knock on the door and they both draw guns, but instead of someone threatening being at the door, they both sort of float/roll down the hall of the building in a dolly tracking shot, and they roll to a window where they see a cross-burning outside. This is followed by the montage of news reports about the Charlottesville race rally violence from August 2017. HUH? I mean, the stories are important, but how do you justify the movie jumping ahead 30 years like that, it's certainly not motivated by the plot, so are the characters having a dream where they foresee the future, or are we just finishing up a piece of dramatic fiction with real news? You can't just skip ahead to your answer, you've got to show your work, make the connection, and you can't just count on montage to do it for you!
Again, it feels like the teacher (Lee) is giving the kids in the class the answer that she wants them to put on the test, but that's not really teaching, is it? At least "Green Book" put the problem on the board and let the audience work out what the answer should be - and this is a case where we need to feel like we're part of the process, part of the solution and not part of the problem. A teacher could get a whole class to act like parrots and repeat the fact that Columbus "discovered" America in 1492, but what good does that do if the fact that they've learned to recite is now considered intrinsically wrong? (Because indigenous tribes, Vikings, etc.) At the end of "Green Book", I felt uplifted, just like the central character, there was that revelation of "Oh, I GET it now, there's a better way to treat people of different races..." but at the end of "BlacKkLansman" I was thinking, "So that's the big reveal, that the President is a big racist doozy-head? Big deal, we already KNEW that."
Also, this was marketed as being based on a "true story", but I'm not sure how a film can be marketed that way when the year was changed from 1979 to 1972, the bombing plot was added in from a separate incident, and the identity of Stallworth's white surrogate who infiltrated the Klan in his name was kept secret in reality, so Adam Driver's character here was created for the film. I guess this is "based on a true story, only we changed a bunch of stuff". So, therefore, NOT based on a true story, or based on a partially-true story.
I don't even feel the need to get into the unlikely contrivances that move the plot forward - like the guy who happens to recognize the undercover officer from a previous encounter, and then the whole thing with the bomb is an even larger contrivance. So sorry, Spike, but the Academy voters appear to have gotten this right, at least from where I sit. You should have just accepted the Best Director award and thought of it as a career-topping achievement, then been a little bit more gracious about this film not winning the top prize.
Also starring John David Washington (also carrying over from "The Old Man & The Gun"), Adam Driver (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Laura Harrier (last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Topher Grace (last seen in "Mona Lisa Smile"), Jasper Paakkonen, Ryan Eggold, Paul Walter Hauser (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Ashlie Atkinson (last seen in"Eat Pray Love"), Corey Hawkins (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Michael Buscemi (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Ken Garito (last seen in "Summer of Sam"), Robert John Burke (last seen in "True Story"), Frederick Weller (last seen in "The Fundamentals of Caring"), Nicholas Turturro (last seen in "Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2"), Harry Belafonte (last seen in "Bobby"), Alec Baldwin (last seen in "A Star Is Born"), Damaris Lewis (last seen in "The Rewrite") with archive footage of Vivien Leigh (last seen in "Gone With the Wind"), Martin Luther King (last seen in "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine", David Duke, Steven Mnuchin (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Donald Trump (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work").
RATING: 5 out of 10 surveillance photos
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