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| Movie Name : |
BlacKkKlansman
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| Cinema Type : |
Hollywood
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| Release Date : |
10-Aug-2018( 6 years, 139 days ago)
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| Directed By : |
Spike Lee |
| Production House : |
Spike Lee, Jordan Peele, Jason Blum, |
| Genre : |
Comedy |
| Lead Role : |
Adam Driver, Topher Grace, Alec Baldwin
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R
Rating:4.5/5
“BlacKkKlansman” presents racism as a dichotomy between the absurd and the dangerous; the film’s intentional laughs often get caught in one’s throat. Director Spike Lee and his co-screenwriters Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott adapt a tale of deception based on some “fo’ real, fo’ real sh*t” that was first covered in Ron Stallworth’s 2014 memoir. Stallworth was a Black Colorado Springs police officer who successfully infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, going so far as to speak with David Duke on several occasions. Stallworth’s undercover police work, aided by an immeasurable assist from his White partner, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) helped expose and quash an attack on Black activists.
This is not Lee’s first cinematic depiction of the KKK. In “Malcolm X,” he presented them riding “victoriously” into the night while a preposterously large moon hung in the sky. It’s a quick scene but its intentions are unmistakable: Lee is evoking D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” one of the most effective pieces of propaganda racism ever had, but he’s not paying it any tribute. Instead, the obvious fakery of the gorgeous, celestial backdrop behind the Klan served as a middle finger to Griffith and his film. Though the action in Lee’s scene is dramatically potent and played straight, the technique itself is parodic, as if to call bullshit on the notion that Griffith’s filmmaking prowess excused the vileness of what he depicted.
In “BlacKkKlansman,” Lee has more middle fingers to wave at Griffith’s alleged “masterpiece,” starting with the use of footage from “The Birth of a Nation” itself. We are shown it being screened at a Klan meeting, and it also figures in a pre-credits short film starring Alec Baldwin, playing the awesomely named Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard. As in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” he sinks his teeth into a ranting monologue, except rather than harping on steak knives and potential unemployment, this incarnation of Baldwin is peddling racism on a filmstrip. And he’s far from perfect at doing so; several times he stammers over his words or needs to be fed lines from an off-screen script person.
What Dr. Beauregard says is disgusting, yet it prepares us for the horrible slurs and comments we’ll hear almost non-stop for the next 135 minutes. Lee projects distracting images over Beauregard as he delivers his imperfect line readings, highlighting his incompetence to the point where you might ask yourself “who’d believe a thing this guy is selling?” But Dr. Beauregard will have plenty of buyers. They’ll forgive that he looks ridiculous because they believe, as Randy Newman once sang, that “he may be a fool, but he’s our fool.”