BlacKkKlansman

The way BlacKkKlansman ends, felt in terms of formula almost as if I was supposed to have just seen some unsubtle propaganda, which seemed a very unusual note to go out on. It did sort of make me step back a bit, but it absolutely did not temper my enjoyment of the movie. I was engaged from the word go, and everybody in it is so good.

Final rating:★★★½ - I really liked it. Would strongly recommend you give it your time.

Polemical, didactic, confrontational, angry, trenchant - a state-of-the-nation address

We made a contemporary-period film, and it's about what's happening in the world today. Don't make the mistake that this stuff is just happening in the United States; it's worldwide.

[...]

One of the things I know will happen is that when this guy in the White House, when he's gone, and historians look back on him, they're going to look at what he said, his comments about Charlottesville, where he cannot make the distinction between love and hate. He co-signed the Klan, he co-signed t__he alt-right and he co-signed neo-Nazis and I think that gave those terrorist groups, homegrown American terrorist groups, a green light.

• Spike Lee; "BlacKkKlansman's Spike Lee On Trump's Legacy, Harry Belafonte & 2020 Election - Awardsline Screening Series"; Deadline (January 10, 2019)

BlacKkKlansman is a film with a whole hell of a lot on its mind. It opens with one of the most (in)famous scenes from Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind (1939), before pivoting to a fictional precursor of Alex Jones lecturing the audience on the dangers of the "negroid", and later takes in everything from Kwame Ture and the All-African People's Revolutionary Party to David Duke and his political aspirations, before lambasting D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), criticising the tropes of classic Blaxploitation films such as Gordon Parks's Shaft (1971), Gordon Parks Jr.'s Super Fly (1972), and Jack Hill's Coffy (1973), going into agonising detail regarding the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington, sardonically criticising police bureaucracy, and concluding with a montage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, including raw footage of James Alex Fields, Jr. ploughing a car into a crowd of counter-protestors, resulting in the death of Heather Heyer, intercut with Duke championing Donald Trump's presidency, and Trump's own reluctance to cond...

BlacKkKlansman is an incredible bio-flick that shows the parallels between the 1970s and todays political landscape. The performances by Washington and Driver were absolutely brilliant. With the addition to all the Klansman performances, they really sell the world and the treatment towards minorities in a very serious but brutal way which I really appreciated. For a biographical piece, it really keeps you engaged and interested in the bigger message of what they are trying to deliver. I think this is an incredibly important film that everyone should watch in their life.

Verdict: Masterpiece

I think the last film of Lee's watched and enjoyed was his Malcolm X biopic... but to be honest I don't think I really enjoyed the film so much as I did Denzel's performance. I mean, isn't it nice to see Denzel Washington playing something other than the smart law enforcement officer and actually bring his all to a film?

I guess I should be fair and say that it's not as horribly bad as Son of Sam was... but it's bad in a way that Nicholas Cage is had to watch in all of his movies... almost all of his movies. He actually has a few good ones.

I guess Lee's approach to this was to tell all of his actors to over-act as much as humanely possible for even the smallest roles. There is not a line that isn't over done, not a part that isn't over-acted. There is nothing naturalistic about this and it makes it so very hard to watch.

The result is a serious subject that could have been a compelling biopic, that was turned into a cartoonish mess.

This is a cracking depiction of the infiltration of the KKK by the courageous (and the first) black Colorado Springs police officer Ron Stallworth (John David Washington). Initially assigned some fairly mundane tasks in the records room, his boss decides that his skills might better be used working with the "radical" black student group - led by Patrice Dumas. Dumas has invited civil rights leader Kwame Ture to come and speak to them, and it falls to this undercover cop to ensure that this all goes off with as few hitches as possible. Meantime, he also answers an ad in the local press and pretty easily his voice is able to infiltrate the local KKK operation. An obviously problematic face-to-face meeting is required, and for that purpose he is soon allied with colleague Flip Zimmerman, a Jew not unfamiliar with racial slurs himself. It is the latter man who impersonates Stallworth and his initiation amongst these profoundly violent and suspicious individuals proves pretty perilous. Spike Lee now takes us on a dangerous, quite frequently edge-of-the-seat, journey as these men become more and more subsumed into cultures that they both begin to understand and increasingly loathe in equal measure. The pace of this film is superb, with the degree of menace increasing as the narrative develops. The pair in the lead are great character actors and are well supported by Laura Harrier (Dumas); by the truly odious David Duke - the KKK supremo (Topher Grace) and Corey Hawkins (Kwame Ture). The levels of ignorance and bigotry displayed here are eye watering and 2½ hours just flies by.