Blunt force trauma. That’s my three word movie review for Chi-raq. I feel like I was clubbed with a clumsy hammer made of recycled wood and bog iron. Sorry, that was too complicated. Hit in head, feels bad, got hit in head, makes me sad.
Spike lee has never been subtle, in my mind at least, but he’s been on the nose before. His movies are a lot like a sermon; you’ve heard it before, it always comes out of the same book and never ambigious about what’s good and what’s bad.
So, this was supposed to be a modern retelling of Aristophanes “Ly-something-or-other” I could look it up, but why? Even in that he’s not subtle, the lady’s name in the movie is Ly-something-or-other, and the plot is loosely the same, women hold back sex in protest. I’m not sure I ever read the play and I am sure I don’t recall much Aristophanes at all except it’s a hard name not to remember. I’ve got twenty bucks that says it wasn’t done in iambic pentameter, even in translation, though it probably was done in verse. Only one of the many things that makes Chi-raq so very hard to watch.
The cast is good, I like the cast, and for all the very awkward bits of the movie none of it them are due to poor delivery, though, I can’t imagine how … nevermind, the cast did their job well under near impossible conditions. Hmmm, I’m saying that as though I 1) paid attention throughout and 2) made it to the end. Even the fucking name — Chi-raq — is, shit, blunt force trauma. Best as I can figure spike lee is telling us Chicago is like a war zone and figures we’ve all heard that there is a war in Iraq. I can’t imagine I missed something subtle, some reference to middle eastern ideology or even, for the love of Allah, a reference to fucking anything east of Lake Michigan or north of pussy.
Yes, pussy, the most polite of the five thousand references to female anatomy in the movie, which, you know, so fucking what, except for the movie might be about sexism and, well, blunt force trauma. I’m willing to bet among three folks who liked the movie and had an IQ pushing near triple digits or at least north of the mid sixties, thought the movie addressed sexism, racism and civil disobedience, and, you know, maybe it did, with blunt force trauma.
It’s a little hard to believe that in 2016 civil rights issues have remained exactly the same as they were in the 1960’s or the — shit, I don’t even remember the time period Aristophanes was writing in. The actual event that spurred the iambic events that followed in the movie was a kid getting shot in a drive by. That’s bad. Spike Lee seems to be against kids getting shot. Women in south Chicago don’t seem to care for it much either. I think national, in real life, there aren’t a lot of vocal pro-kids getting shot organizations.
And yeah, there is a nod to socio-economic factors and black on black crime, in a blunt force trauma sort of way. So the women withhold sex and the men are mad about it and the verse is sort of like rap and maybe one of the things the movie is trying to get at is the old saw about men making war and women having to clean it up which sort of makes spike lee an aging lesbian who hasn’t changed his protest sign since 1972. Just saying. My personal experience is men don’t like kids getting shot either. My personal experience is, too, that not all kids that get shot are shot by accident or by black gang members. I might get out more often than spike lee. It’s 2016 and I might be more capable of making a spike lee movie than spike lee is. I’m not saying I know how to make a spike lee movie, I’m saying spike lee looks like a bad caricature of himself.
I was going to go on, but even my own rant about this movie leaves a oily film on my skin that I just can’t wash off. You should see it. Amazon is proud; it’s exclusive!
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