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Just came out of it, really loved it. Liked rhe use of humour to make uncomfortable scenes even more uncomfortable. Kind of wish they hadn't made the klan look so stupid because these people should not be underestimated and people still hold these lovely backwards views, but hey, it was pretty funny too. At the end was anyone elses cinema perfectly silent after they showed the footage of Charlottesville? I didn't breathe, or move, and I don't think anyone else in the cinema did either. Really powerful shared experience that I will remember for a while.
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Sep 6, 2018 21:56
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Stooge posted:Just came out of it, really loved it. Liked rhe use of humour to make uncomfortable scenes even more uncomfortable. Kind of wish they hadn't made the klan look so stupid because these people should not be underestimated and people still hold these lovely backwards views, but hey, it was pretty funny too. In a way, it's hard not to make them look stupid since what they believe is stupid. It's also incredibly dangerous. And it sets up one of the strongest arguments in the film. Consider the ending, which made my theater silent. Throughout the rest of the film, you're laughing and in a way, the ending is there to tell you that this isn't funny, this is still going on. And in a way, it's almost calling you out for laughing at the film while someone like Trump, who is a white nationalist (I was going to say he adopts their language, but that is undercutting what he is really doing) remains president. It challenges you.
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Sep 7, 2018 04:12
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Miss Lonelyhearts posted:
I thought it was meant to be the quote ‘slow’ KKK member (the one who always needs to be told not to talk about the Klan etc). Didn’t he have a beard?
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Sep 7, 2018 11:41
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Red Oktober posted:I thought it was meant to be the quote ‘slow’ KKK member (the one who always needs to be told not to talk about the Klan etc). Didn’t he have a beard? I thought he was in the car when it exploded?
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Sep 7, 2018 13:51
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Stooge posted:I thought he was in the car when it exploded? I was thinking this as I wrote the post, but couldn’t remember.
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Sep 7, 2018 16:40
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Did anyone else get the feeling that the ending of the actual plot was kind of crummy and sitcom-like on purpose? i thought the humor and feel-good qualities of those final scenes were pretty jarring, but when the real-life footage followed it hit me like a truck. As we walked out of the cinema, it struck me that the real-life footage had been far less effective if the preceding scenes had been just as somber (much like how real life photos and quotes biopics usually don't move me at all), I get the feeling that Lee put those final scenes in the so that the viewer would emotionally disengage with film like it's the ending of an ALF episode - which in turn means that the real-life footage feel like a bat to the face. It's more than just an author's Haneke-like "oh you don't get to feel good", it made it such a visceral experience. The fact that we had walked past an actual neo-nazi rally on our way to the cinema probably didn't help.
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Sep 8, 2018 08:58
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We saw it in an empty cinema at 11:30am yesterday. It was a subtitled showing so that might be why there were so few people. I enjoyed it a lot other than the bits that were just Spike Lee talking to the camera. The biggest bit was (as someone else mentioned) the weird "pigs" part. It reminded me a lot of when they're talking to Lee in Do The Right Thing about Louis Farrakhan and he's correcting the white guy about who Farrakhan is. There's a few more bits like that and it really took me out of it because it felt so much like Lee just talking.
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Sep 13, 2018 09:19
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I read that the ending with Charlottesville was tacked on and not originally planned. Really punched you in the balls after giving you a kinda sorta high note. I think it worked.
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Sep 14, 2018 13:11
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SpaceSDoorGunner posted:I read that the ending with Charlottesville was tacked on and not originally planned. Really punched you in the balls after giving you a kinda sorta high note. I think it worked. The movie itself also ends on a low note - Ron manages to stop cross burnings and weaken the local KKK while on the case (and indirectly leads to the death of several local, murderous members) - but when the case is shut down and buried, what did he change? The film ends with the KKK active as ever, burning a cross on Ron's lawn. It's a bummer.
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Sep 14, 2018 14:15
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Blast Fantasto posted:The movie itself also ends on a low note - Ron manages to stop cross burnings and weaken the local KKK while on the case (and indirectly leads to the death of several local, murderous members) - but when the case is shut down and buried, what did he change? The film ends with the KKK active as ever, burning a cross on Ron's lawn. What I mean to say is the original ending is pointing out that while he did some good and clean up the attitude in that one police department but the KKK was still there, overall there was some limited sense of satisfaction. The Trump “Very fine people” and the footage of Heyer’s death and the upside down flag ending just stomps that remaining kernel of relief. Which I think was a great artistic choice for the message he wanted to send, but it totally reframed the movie.
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Sep 14, 2018 20:07
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Good movie would recommend it to anyone.
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Sep 14, 2018 21:02
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Boy that ending didn’t gently caress around.
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Sep 16, 2018 17:40
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That line from Felix before they carry out the attack: "I love you, Honey Bunny", was definitely a jab at Tarantino right?
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Sep 17, 2018 19:03
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Bedshaped posted:That line from Felix before they carry out the attack: "I love you, Honey Bunny", was definitely a jab at Tarantino right? It's sort of hilarious to me that Spike Lee just desperately wants to beef with Tarantino and Tarantino is just... literally ignoring him, iirc.
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Sep 18, 2018 03:07
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Stooge posted:Just came out of it, really loved it. Liked rhe use of humour to make uncomfortable scenes even more uncomfortable. Kind of wish they hadn't made the klan look so stupid because these people should not be underestimated and people still hold these lovely backwards views, but hey, it was pretty funny too. I had only 3 other people in the cinema when I saw it, which was on a Monday afternoon cuz my nearest cinema only seemed to be showing it on weekdays for some reason and I wasn't near any of them so I can't really assess that It had me really loving shaken up though, like from sort of going over a lot of stuff in my head to near tears of rage within seconds Also I had salted popcorn while watching it and I ended up really craving it juuuuust when the scene with the Klan watching Birth of a Nation while eating popcorn while I was eating popcorn which suddenly felt ironically awkward as hell
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Sep 19, 2018 20:55
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K. Waste posted:The film doesn't represent Ture as violent. Boots Riley: "I’ve met Kwame Ture two or three times, and heard him speak more than that. By the time he was calling himself Kwame Ture, he had formed the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) and was living in Africa most of the time. The program of the AARP for Black folks in the US at the time was to help create a revolutionary Black intelligentsia. They did this through an immensely long reading list and rigorous study groups. He cam back to the US and toured colleges to talk to Black folks for this reason. At SF State in 1989/90, I took part in a few of these study groups. If you really went up to Kwame Ture and asked him what we should do right now–as Ron Stallworth does in the film–he would have said what he usually said– 'Study!!!' But, it made the Black radical group look more dangerous to have Ture say something that sounded like he was calling for armed insurrection–which they were not calling for in the US at the time. I mean, this movie is trying to make a Cointelpro operative into a hero. It needs every little piece of help it can get." I appreciate the Malcolm X reference you make. But arguing that it is intelligent to arm yourself is different than putting those words in someone else's mouth in order to make a cop look better.
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Sep 27, 2018 19:25
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Sir Kodiak posted:Boots Riley: "I’ve met Kwame Ture two or three times, and heard him speak more than that. By the time he was calling himself Kwame Ture, he had formed the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) and was living in Africa most of the time. The program of the AARP for Black folks in the US at the time was to help create a revolutionary Black intelligentsia. They did this through an immensely long reading list and rigorous study groups. He cam back to the US and toured colleges to talk to Black folks for this reason. At SF State in 1989/90, I took part in a few of these study groups. If you really went up to Kwame Ture and asked him what we should do right now–as Ron Stallworth does in the film–he would have said what he usually said– 'Study!!!' But, it made the Black radical group look more dangerous to have Ture say something that sounded like he was calling for armed insurrection–which they were not calling for in the US at the time. I mean, this movie is trying to make a Cointelpro operative into a hero. It needs every little piece of help it can get." What's happening here is that Riley is already completely steamrolling the context of the scene - which is not that Stallworth asks, in some general or vague way, "what we should do right now." He asks Ture, the character, specifically about whether he believes that repressive, counter-revolutionary violence against black folks is imminent. It is not "the movie" that is trying to make Ture seem more violent than he actually was. It is Stallworth and the police who have an invested interest in prodding Ture to affirm his radical beliefs as much as possible, and Stallworth is simply characterized as being enterprising in asking Ture - the character - to expand upon the logical conclusions of his arguments. It is not enough to simply say that the "real life" Ture that Riley met nearly two decades after the specific historical context and social milieu of the film arranged most of his radical program around consciousness raising, of building up a revolutionary intelligentsia. Because what is the point of a revolutionary intelligentsia without radical praxis? This is the same as when liberals attempt to downplay X's renewed political radicalism after his conversion to Sunni Islam, or to portray the Black Panther Party as merely a social welfare organization, when what the latter specifically billed their welfare programs as were survival programs, in anticipation for revolutionary struggle that they believed to be imminent. Anybody can support education and critique of the status quo - that's not what made black revolutionary struggle inconvenient, or why it was specifically targeted by counter-intelligence. The reason it is targeted, in "real life" as in the very film we are watching, is because of its logical conclusion in radical praxis of some kind. That is what the film is attempting to illustrate, the inherent conflict of interests between Stallworth's chosen profession and the logical trajectory of black liberation. The proposition that Riley makes, and that you are in effect supporting - that the representation of this intractable conflict within the film is there to make revolutionary struggle look scary and counter-intelligence look heroic - can not be supported by the text of the film. The film does not show Stallworth being heroic in this instance, it shows his being compliant in the subterfuge of political discontents, which is then implicitly connected to the subsequent flashback of Ture and his comrades being outright harassed and molested by explicitly white supremacist pigs. It does not show Ture being irrational or dangerous. Stallworth himself vouches for the idea that Ture is not dangerous, that, from Stallworth's perspective as a character, that Ture's belief in the necessity of black folks arming themselves in self-defense is a cathartic fantasy with no tangible connection to future violent acts. But furthermore, Ture's beliefs in the imminence of white supremacist violence against people of color are shown to be absolutely correct. This is what happens in the film. Everything Stallworth does, meanwhile, is portrayed as very much the sort of cathartic, ideological fantasy that he uses to characterize Ture: He accomplishes nothing by working within the system, the fundamental contradiction between white supremacy and black liberation remains, and accelerates to the present day.
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Sep 27, 2018 20:19
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Stooge posted:Just came out of it, really loved it. Liked rhe use of humour to make uncomfortable scenes even more uncomfortable. Kind of wish they hadn't made the klan look so stupid because these people should not be underestimated and people still hold these lovely backwards views, but hey, it was pretty funny too.
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Sep 28, 2018 16:22
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I've been looking forward to seeing this ever since I almost got into a screening at a festival back in June but only got to it now on BR. Somebody mentioned they had an issue with the title and while I wouldn't put it that way, I think it did set me up with a wrong expectation. I really thought this would be mote blaxploitationy than it ended up being, though it definitely had its moments of course. The burning cross at the end should've been sufficient to make the point to anyone with two braincells left, but I guess the last two years have proven then no, even blatantly beating people over the head with Charlottesville stuff might not be sufficient. Overall pretty good but not quite what I imagined it would be.
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Nov 11, 2018 10:18
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:It's sort of hilarious to me that Spike Lee just desperately wants to beef with Tarantino and Tarantino is just... literally ignoring him, iirc. Has Tarantino every officially said anything about Spike Lee? I imagine Tarantino would have nothing but respect for Lee, probably even enjoys a lot of his movies. mobby_6kl posted:Somebody mentioned they had an issue with the title and while I wouldn't put it that way, I think it did set me up with a wrong expectation. I really thought this would be mote blaxploitationy than it ended up being, though it definitely had its moments of course. Yeah I just watched it recently since I missed it in theaters, and I guess I low-key had the same expectation for some reason? But it didn't surprise me, because it's based on an actual memoir of real events. I half-expected the black detective to actually wear the robes, but it didn't happen that way for real so Lee didn't embellish it for tension or laughs. I mean, he did that in other respects like making the narcotics officer Jewish when he wasn't in real life, but having Stallworth infiltrate a real rally in robes would've probably been too far. Anyway, really good movie and that ending had me on-edge. poo poo's still happening and it was a major gut punch to be reminded of it.
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Nov 11, 2018 16:54
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Tarantino respects one person.
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Nov 12, 2018 20:46
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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:Tarantino respects one person. A giant foot? Also, the ending montage’s music comes from Spike Lee’s Katrina documentary, When the Levees Break. It’s on HBO and is one of my favorite documentaries of all time. Incredibly brutal, really overlooked.
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Nov 13, 2018 10:36
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 Looking very pale, must have been extremely ill, poor man.
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Nov 13, 2018 22:58
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