Words like confrontational, controversial and audacious have often been used to describe director Spike Lee. Now those same words, and more—think boisterous and dynamic for a start—and can be applied to his new film, “Chi-Raq,” a modern day adaptation of the Greek play “Lysistrata” by Aristophanes, first performed in 411 BC.
Set in modern day Southside Chicago a.k.a. Chi-Raq, the update sees the neighbourhood torn apart by gang violence. Rapper Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) and his girlfriend Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) are at the center of the action, a glamour couple affiliated with the Spartans. Across town Cyclops (Wesley Snipes, complete with glittering eyepatch) leads the Trojans. A nightclub shooting at one of Chi-Raq’s gigs, arson at his home and the death of a young neighbourhood girl caught in the Spartan v. Trojan’s crossfire pushes Lysistrata to find a solution to the violence that plagues her home. Her outlandish plan is simple but ingenious. She convenes the wives and girlfriends of all the gang members, Spartans and Trojans alike, and urges them to withhold sex from their men until the guys agree to put down the weapons and sign a peace treaty.
That’s the story in broad strokes. There’s more, including a seasoned community activist played by Angela Bassett, Jennifer Hudson as a grieving mother, John Cusack as a fiery priest and Samuel L. Jackson’s flowery-tongued one-man Greek chorus named Dolmedes but the pieces are stitched together with such daring creativity that paragraphs of description won’t prepare you for the cheeky experience of watching “Chi-Raq.” Lee mixes and matches powerful anti-violence statements, large-scale dance numbers and outrageous comedy in an olio of social commentary that shouldn’t work, but does.
When Irene (Lawrence) scrubs her daughter’s blood from the street, pouring water on the stain only to watch it spread and grow bigger, Lee effectively and lyrically makes the metaphorical point that no matter how hard you scrub, the bloodshed will increase.
Later as the women are holed up at the National Guard Armoury the men use romantic songs broadcast over loudspeakers to break their will. Just as they begin to swoon to the smooth sounds of “Oh Girl” by The Chi-Lites, Lysistrata provides them with earplugs and the sex strike goes unbroken.
The tone is all over the place, made all the more bizarre by the dialogue, which is all in verse. “The situation is out of control,” says a strip club owner (Dave Chappelle) after his employees join the strike, “and I’m in front of an empty stripper pole.” It’s today’s language filtered through Aristophanes, Tupac and Kendrick Lamar, vital and bold.
“Chi-Raq” is a heady experience. Lee is fearless in his handling of the material (he co-wrote the script with Kevin Willmott), taking chances narratively and visually, to tell the timely and hot button story of a “self-inflicted genocide.” It is powerful, preachy, maddening but ultimately unforgettable.
Richard interviewed legendary filmmaker Spike Lee in a no-holds-barred on stage interview at Canadian Music Week. They discussed everything from watching movies on the big screen–“It kills me today that young people see Malcolm X on this (holds up his Blackberry) for the first time. We worked too long. Look, I know Blackberry is a Canadian company. We couldn’t see the future. Now if you’re on a plane, alright, but to see Malcolm X, Do The Right Thing, and not just my films, to see Apocalypse Now the first time, the first time you see 2001 on this? As a filmmaker, I know I might sound like a dinosaur, but that pains me.”–to race in America–“This whole stuff is not new. This thing’s happened forever — back to lynchings. So please do not believe that this is a phenomenon that all of the sudden is sweeping America. Now it’s just being caught. Everybody now, with a camera, is a photojournalist. Here’s the thing though, even with the footage, those cops in New York City got off with the stranglehold of Eric Garner.”
Years before Mekhi Phifer played the stern-faced “Dauntless” enforcement officer Max in this weekend’s The Divergent Series: Insurgent, he displayed a dauntless attitude that got him his first acting job.
The year was 1994, the movie was Spike Lee’s Clockers and over 1000 people showed up for an open casting call.
“I went with my cousin,” he says, “not knowing anything about the audition or open casting call process. Spike Lee auditioned me about seven or eight different times. I had to read with Harvey Keitel and Isaiah Washington and do improvisations. I had never done that type of stuff before so to have gotten that was a whirlwind; I just thought that was the norm. That’s how you cast movies—a thousand people come in.”
He won the lead role and parlayed that success into a string of memorable characters in movies like 8 Mile and TV shows like ER, where he played Dr. Greg Pratt for six seasons and the Dr. Who spin-off, the sci-fi series Torchwood: Miracle Day.
“I am a big fan of sci-fi,” he says. “and that was part of the allure [to signing on for the Divergent series], but the other part was that it was good. I’m not looking for one particular genre or one particular type of film I usually just gravitate towards what’s good.”
He plays Max, leader of Dauntless, the warrior bloc of a Big Brother style government that has divided the post-apocalyptic Chicago into five factions. In the new film his job is to hunt down and capture fugitives Tris (Shailene Woodley) and boyfriend Four (Theo James) because she is she is divergent, a person who cannot be pigeonholed into just one designation.
“He’s not a villain at all in any way shape or form,” he says. “He’s tasked with protecting the society and I really feel that he believes in expunging the divergents and the rebel factions. He’s not doing it in a malicious way. He’s not getting pleasure from other people’s pain. He looks at it as a necessary evil.”
Phifer hasn’t read the Veronica Roth books that make up the source material for the films—“For me it seemed like more fun to do the series and then read the books and compare.”—so he’s not sure what’s going to happen with his character, but he hopes Max comes back for next year’s instalment Allegiant – Part 1.
“I don’t know what’s happening next so I’m on the journey with the audience,” he says. “I would love to see some of who he is come full circle.”
The plot of “Oldboy,” Spike Lee’s new remake of a cult Korean film from 1993, is labyrinthine, relying on twists, turns and suspension of disbelief.
After seeing the film one has to wonder if “Oldboy” isn’t some elaborate real-world scheme of Lee’s. It occurred to me that the filmmaker, who moonlights as a New York University film professor, might well have gone through the convoluted machinations of bringing the movie to the big screen to teach his students how not to make a remake of a well liked film.
Sure, he calls the exercise a “re-interpretation,” not a remake, in the same way that Miles Davis’s version of “My Funny Valentine” is a transformation of the tune and not a cover version, but instead of elevating “Oldboy” onto a different plane, he hits all the wrong notes.
Josh Brolin is Joe Doucett, an advertising executive with an ex-wife, a three yar old daughter and a crippling addiction to booze. He’s the kind of guy who shows upon your doorstep at 3 am yelling, “No one wants to have fun anymore,” when you don’t let him in.
One night, after a bender he wakes up in a cell—actually more like a bare bones Motel Six with no windows but with a television and a mail slot for room service. From the TV he learns that he is accused of the brutal murder of his ex-wife, but is given no clue as to why he has been locked away.
For twenty years he rots in the room, so starved for human contact he fashions a friend à la Wilson in “Castaway” out of a pillowcase.
He emerges from his two decade sentence cleaned up, looking like a movie star, although a somewhat slightly dazed one, in a box in the middle of a field.
A mysterious stranger (Sharlto Copley) contacts him with a deal. Answer two questions and the entire experience will be explained and he will get to see his daughter. Fail and the mysterious goings on will continue.
Along the way the moonfaced Marie Sebastian (Elizabeth Olsen) and bar owner Chucky (Michael Imperioli) try and help Joe get to the bottom of the mystery.
If anyone should have been able to pull this off it should be Josh Brolin. There is no more manly-man actor in the mold of Lee Marvin or Lee Van Cleef working today. You believe him as a slickster with a drink in his hand and a practically indestructible force of nature able to withstand physical punishment that would make Grigori Rasputin look like a wimp.
But yet, in “Oldboy,” you don’t care.
The original movie was an epic tragedy, a twisted story (there will be no spoilers here) driven by revenge and dark secrets. All those elements are in place in Lee’s version, but the focus has shifted to the mystery, which is the least interesting thing about the story.
As a collection of red herrings and mumbo jumbo about “faceless corporations” it’s an incoherent mess of information searching for a form. As a story device it deflects the focus from the mental to the procedural, giving Brolin little to do except glower into the camera.
Add to that a badly botched remounting of the original’s most striking scene—a hammer battle in a long hallway—and you’re left wondering what Miles Davis might have done with this instead of Spike Lee.
Inside Man is director Spike Lee’s take on a heist film, and predictably he puts his own spin on an old genre and offers up something unpredictable. It’s like an episode of Law and Order minus the order.
Lee forgoes the usual set-up for movies like this and gets us directly into the action. Five minutes into the movie we are inside the bank and the bad guys—led by the charismatic Clive Owen—have already taken control, closing off the building and taking hostages. On the outside a team of detectives led by Spike Lee regular Denzel Washington—they’ve made four movies together—tries to keep the situation under control.
It sounds rather standard, but Lee crafts a story in which the moral compass can’t find true north, and the good guys aren’t always good and maybe the bad guys aren’t as bad as they seem.
Also unexpected for a thriller of this kind is how much humor Washington and Owen bring to their roles. Their conversations crackle with sharp one-liners that diffuse some of the tension of the story.
In one effective scene Owen spends some time with the youngest hostage as the street-wise kid plays with a violent videogame on his PSP. Owen inspects the game that includes drive-by shootings, stabbings and most outrageously, a hand grenade stuffed into the mouth of a pedestrian. As the videogame character’s head explodes Owen says, “I’ll take you back to your Father. I think should have a word with him about that game.” It’s a humorous moment, but one also laden with social comment. In earlier films Lee has employed a heavier hand when trying to get his message across, but it seems he has learned that a spoonful of sugar can sometimes more effectively help the medicine go down.
Inside Man will keep you guessing until the end, and maybe even after you leave the theatre. Lee chooses not to tie up all the loose ends, and the film is more intriguing because of it.
I often find Spike Lee’s work very frustrating. I usually like fifty percent of each movie, but then there’s the remaining fifty percent that just infuriates me. It’s not bad filmmaking; it’s just unnecessary filmmaking. While the stuff that’s good is really, really good I find a lot of material in his films that doesn’t further the story, that is preachy, and simply doesn’t belong there. At almost three hours his new film, the World War II drama Miracle at St. Anna, is simply the latest in a long line of Lee’s films that could benefit from judicious editing.
Based on the novel of the same name by James McBride, Miracle at St. Anna tells the story of four African-American soldiers from the all-black 92nd Infantry Division fighting in the Italian Campaign. When one of them risks his life to save an Italian boy the four get trapped near a small Tuscan village.
The bones of the story were, in part, inspired by the August 1944 Sant’Anna di Stazzema massacre wherein hundreds of Italian men and women were slaughtered by the Waffen-SS in retaliation to Italian partisan activity.
The film starts string with an extended clip from the John Wayne war movie The Longest Day. As Lee’s camera pulls back we see an older African-American man watching the movie in his apartment. “Pilgrim,” he mumbles to himself and the television, “we fought for this country too…” It’s a powerful moment, followed by a stunner of a scene set in the early 1980s that sets up the murder mystery subplot that bookends the World War II scenes that make up the bulk of the film.
Unfortunately once the film settles in WWII Italy it loses much of its steam. The story of the Buffalo Soldiers is an important and often overlooked story but Lee stretches the narrative past its breaking point, adding in a mystical element involving a statue head—the gritty realism of the war scenes are at odds with the supernatural aura surrounding the head—a Cinema Paradiso-esque child and characters that seem sketched rather than richly drawn. The movie, at two hours and forty-five minutes, feels overlong, but may have worked better had Lee given us some really compelling characters.
The four young actors portraying the soldiers, Laz Alonso, Michael Ealy, Omar Benson Miller and Derek Luke, hand in good performances—Benson Miller is particularly effective as the gentle giant Train—but are stymied by a script that presents them as plot devices or points of view rather than fully rounded people.
Miracle at St. Anna has some great moments. An early battle scene with the 92nd Division crossing a river is gripping, the massacre at St. Anna shocking and a claustrophobic clash between the Buffalo Soldiers and Nazi troops in an Italian village beautifully shot and edited. But for every high point Miracle at St. Anna has two more that seem out of place or inappropriate and I don’t want to even discuss the film’s final scene, a bit of magic realism that will leave many an audience member scratching their heads.
Spike Lee came to this material with a noble purpose—to shine a light on an underreported part of WWII history—but his heavy hand with the story undermines his good intentions.
In recent years I have found Spike Lee movies to be very frustrating. Fifty percent of each movie I really like, but then there’s the remaining fifty percent that just infuriates me. It’s not bad filmmaking; it’s just unnecessary filmmaking. There is a lot of stuff in these films that doesn’t further the story, that is preachy, and simply doesn’t belong there. But the stuff that’s good is really, really good, and I found The 25th Hour to be another example of that.
plays small-time drug dealer Montgomery Brogan, who, after being arrested by the DEA, reevaluates his life in his last 24 hours before beginning a seven-year jail term. Interesting premise. Why then muddy it up with a commentary on September 11th that seems out of place, and kind of badly chosen? Exploring the relationship between Brogan and his two best friends, Jacob and Frank (Phillip Seymour-Hoffman and Barry Pepper) and how their friendship will change once Montgomery goes to jail would have been a great character drama.
Instead Lee adds a September 11th angle that feels tacked on and doesn’t add to the movie. Don’t get me wrong, it probably comes from a very sincere place. Spike Lee makes incredible movies about New York and is passionate about the city and probably felt like he had to find a way to tell this story, but he ties the September 11th angle to Montgomery’s story, and in the context of the whole movie I didn’t really understand the connection. If we are supposed to infer that the life New York was changed by the terrorist attacks just as the life of Edward Norton’s character was changed by getting arrested I think it is a weak comparison, and frankly, inappropriate. The dynamic between the three friends is great. I wanted more of that. Loose the September 11th stuff, some of the peripheral story lines and just tell me that story and it would have been a better movie.
25th Hour is classic Spike Lee – brilliant, fearless but at the same time troublesome.
