Spike Lee's ""BlacKkKlansman"

[Larry Kart]

Anyone seen it? Any thoughts? I saw it last night and left my seat to wait for my wife in the lobby halfway through. Among other things, it was as inept a piece of film-making as I could imagine.

My thoughts: 

Even at this late date, Lee just doesn’t know how to get through a scene or how to get from one scene to another. Like at one point the black undercover cop goes dancing at a nightspot with a black female activist to whom he’s attracted. OK — so they dance and they dance and they dance and they dance, among many like-minded other people who are dancing, for what seems like forever. And there’s no point to this — emotionally, plot-wise, whatever. 

 

Among all the rave reviews, there was one strong demurral from a critic on Vox (you can find it on the ’Net),  who accurately IMO pointed out that politically the film was pretty much nowhere. It tells us that the KKK people we see are really stupid oafish bigots, but we, the current mostly or entirely white audience in our seats, are implicitly not like them, nor is it suggested that we are. She also wondered what the heck a black audience would make of the movie.

 

 A little sign of Spike’s magic touch — the movie begins with a KKK spokesman, played by Alec Baldwin, spouting right at the camera reams of racist talk, much of it aimed at the Jews as well as at …, but he keeps blowing his lines and then talking back in an angry manner to the  unseen person who’s filming him for this circa mid-1960s join the Klan commercial. What is the point of this character's not being able to read his pro-Klan racist copy without making mistakes? KKK spokesman can’t read? They’re so inherently angry that they’re just waiting to lose their temper/lash out?  What?

 

On a personal level, I left the theater in mid-film in part because in addition to the gross ineptness of the filmmaking and the sheer murkiness of the lighting and/or film stock,  all the racist talk from the KKK characters, especially the prominent "Jews are vermin" stuff, got to be … well, I can’t say this for sure, no doubt I’m going many steps too far here, but it felt to me like Spike was not so much depicting this vile stuff but inflicting it on us in some weird ugly under-handed manner

 

My wife didn’t really like it, but she took to heart some of its “lessons" more seriously that I did/could — particularly  a scene where Harry Belafonte recounts to an audience of black college students (after showing them clips from “Birth of a Nation”)  the time he saw a friend of his lynched. (I was in the theater lobby long before this.) Also, she was caught up in the implicit/explicit links the film made between its particular tale and the rise of Trump. Again, do I need Spike Lee to assemble and deliver a lecture/demonstration on this topic?

 

P.S. Again, the film stock Lee used here looked as though it had been run through a sewer. My wife noticed this too but said that this might have been an aesthetic, expressive choice on Lee's part. As my very young son used to say in protest over one thing or another: “No! Not!"

 

 

 

 

 

[JSngry]

Have you know any Klan members in real life?

I have, and they are curious creatures. Even the ones who manage to be "normal" enough can't help but trip on something somewhere. I think it's their baggage of trying to be something other than they are for other people.

The really ovet ones...they are what they are, and they make no bones about it. But the ones who lead some sort of weird double-psychology...creepy people.

Well, they're all creepy. But the ones who try to be respectable so they can have access to be evil...if people need to see that, then let them see it.

[Larry Kart]

6 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Have you know any Klan members in real life?

I have, and they are curious creatures. Even the ones who manage to be "normal" enough can't help but trip on something somewhere. I think it's their baggage of trying to be something other than they are for other people.

The really ovet ones...they are what they are, and they make no bones about it. But the ones who lead some sort of weird double-psychology...creepy people.

Well, they're all creepy. But the ones who try to be respectable so they can have access to be evil...if people need to see that, then let them see it.

Nope -- have know no Klan members in real life, not that I know of, though I've known some people who were, or who I thought were, pretty close to being bigoted/racist. What you say is very interesting.

[JSngry]

Really, being a Klansman - as opposed to "simply" being a racist/bigot...that's a whole other mindset, I think...

I'm not proud of knowing them, but where I grew up and when I met them, it was somewhat inevitable, really. And, lessons learned about how people end up there, specifically, rather than somewhere else with that mentality. The Klan is really a gang and/or lodge, members seem to have convinced themselves both that they're serving community and fighting mortal enemies. There's no doubt a few of them that "race gene" in them, there's no other way to explain it, but most of them seem to be people who have been culturally zombie-fies, and there really does seem to be some fundamental dissonance in them about what they're consciously thinking and what they unconsciously know.

As for Spike, I like his movies as much as I like anybody's. He's got his thing and so be it. If nothing else, he deal with subjects that need to be dealt with in one way or another. Who else is going to do it, really? What kind of a Malcolm X dio would "Hollywood" have come up with? Would anybody else have done School Daze or Jungle Fever? Or most anything he's done? Never mine who "could" do it (up to the point of who knows?), who WOULD d it?

He's far from a perfect filmmaker, but he does tell stories, always. I'll take it.

 

[clifford_thornton]

Second half of the film was much better. The first half was an absolute mess, as you point out.

[Soulstation1]

I’m going to see it and support Denzil’s son John David Washington 

 

[medjuck]

I liked it and the dance scene could have gone on for another 5 minutes before I would be tired of it.  BTW There's an interesting critique of it making the rounds by the guy who directed Sorry To Bother You which I also liked.  It's a more interesting film but not as much fun. 

[jlhoots]

1 hour ago, medjuck said:

I liked it and the dance scene could have gone on for another 5 minutes before I would be tired of it.  BTW There's an interesting critique of it making the rounds by the guy who directed Sorry To Bother You which I also liked.  It's a more interesting film but not as much fun. 

[Simon Weil]

7 hours ago, JSngry said:

Really, being a Klansman - as opposed to "simply" being a racist/bigot...that's a whole other mindset, I think...

I'm not proud of knowing them, but where I grew up and when I met them, it was somewhat inevitable, really. And, lessons learned about how people end up there, specifically, rather than somewhere else with that mentality. The Klan is really a gang and/or lodge, members seem to have convinced themselves both that they're serving community and fighting mortal enemies. There's no doubt a few of them that "race gene" in them, there's no other way to explain it, but most of them seem to be people who have been culturally zombie-fies, and there really does seem to be some fundamental dissonance in them about what they're consciously thinking and what they unconsciously know

That's a fine description. In the sense of a description of the internal of these people in a subtle way. You don't often get that - a rings true view of the inside of this sort of horrible person - and it's valuable for that reason (IMO).

I don't think Lee he is capable of fine. Like he takes on this sort of  "serious" subject and then never really delivers any sort of insight into what's  actually going on. He sort of flatters to deceive in that way (also IMO).

[ghost of miles]

Not related directly to Lee’s latest movie, which I have not seen, but I’m sorry I missed the opportunity to meet this gentleman when he recently played at the Bloomington Boogies festival (I was out of town):

Blues musician Daryl Davis has persuaded 200 Klan members to quit

He’s also the subject of a 2016 documentary:

Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race And America

Edited August 27, 2018 by ghost of miles

[riddlemay]

23 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

Anyone seen it? Any thoughts?

I agree with you right down the line, Larry, and add that (unless I missed something, which is possible) some of the basic storytelling was incompetent. I have in mind the scene near the end when Ron Stallworth tears off in his car after Connie Kendrickson--who we know is about to plant a bomb, which Stallworth has no way of knowing. What motivates him to do this? If the essential information about her purpose was at any point communicated to him, I didn't see it.

Edited August 27, 2018 by riddlemay