The Current Cinema - BLACKKKLANSMAN - The best American movie of the year

“…. Such a timid and uninspiring film…” Christos Tsiolkas, The Saturday Paper

“….an unashamedly partisan feature for a divided nation…Lee takes us out on that (comedy) limb only to return to the vicious realities of racism…” John McDonald, The Australian Financial Review

BlackkKlansman may well be the American movie of the year, a combined thunder storm over and a sabre jab at American racism which you would hope pierces all the way to the head if not the peanut-sized heart of the mentally challenged buffoon elected (‘by the Electoral College not the people’ as Stephen Colbert says loudly frequently) US President in 2016.  Trump’s idiotic moral equivalence words, following the disgrace of KKK encouraged violence in Charlottesville, fittingly end the movie and indicate that in near fifty years between the events of the film and today things have only got worse. Even worse in fact ,because the film takes us all the way back to the strident racism of DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation  and to David O Selznick’s  Gone with the Wind, both of them paeans to white supremacy.

After the Cannes prizes the chatter has been widespread, sufficient for the New York Times to run a piece which gathers up much of the written conversation both in the (liberal) press and online and provides links to all of them. Publicity to dream about.  

John David Washington, Laura Harrier BlackkKlansman

The story itself is so bizarre as to be worth dwelling on simply for its improbabilities ---

 Young cop in some Colorado backwater, given a job in some moment of affirmative action in the backwater of Colorado Springs, Utah, is first dumped into the records cage and then plucked from it and allowed to run a hokey undercover operation in which he is 

aided by a Jewish cop who says he’s not Jewish really, a ‘secular’ Jew

He is regularly bullied and insulted by a vicious racist white cop,

 During the course of the efforts to embed himself into the KKK the Jewish undercover cop has hair-raising run ins with a vehement white racist with a racist wife who twigs early on that something is not kosher (oops) in the masquerade.

Four separate film eras are  incorporated – the aforementioned Birth of a Nation  and Gone With the Wind, Ron Stallworth’s Black Klansman adventure and then the abysmal footage of Trump apologizing for the Nazi racists of Charlottesville. Spike Lee skates across a hundred years of screen time to tell us that the problem is getting worse. 

And as well there is a quick doco moment when Ron Stallworth and Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier) discuss the then (70s) current vogue for blaxploitation superstars, male and female. 

This is a movie which rewards cinephiles. It also reinforces the notion that the dangerous evil that Trump represents indeed seems to have normalised. 

Spike Lee