Jacob Dickens

Excellently constructed and the usage of body cams and CCTV footage is truly impactful but I do have a few quibbles here and there (I'm unsure the ethics of including footage of the family being told about the death and as much as I appreciate the film being so focused in its presentation I think it left a lot of commentary about the inaction of the police on the back burner).

Works pretty well on a macro level (ensemble is strong, Luca's direction goes off) and a little less on the micro level but not the disaster I feared. At the very least, I'll be ruminating on some of its points over the next few weeks, especially the last moment which caught me so off guard.

Here's a dilemma for you: how do you balance an uproarious sex comedy with ludicrous punchlines like an army general clothed only in Confederate flag briefs humping a cannon and shouting about Black pussy with an impassioned attack on our nation's gun culture and racial inequities that boils with rage in the wake of a renewed social justice movement? Not many filmmakers are as crazy as Spike Lee to try blending these two but Chi-Raq manages to walk the line better than I thought possible. At this point, I will find something to love in every Spike Lee film. His indignant and blunt politics mixed with gorgeous filmmaking and a burst of life in every frame will always be at the very least a good time and worth picking at. Chi-Raq, though, is among his more conceptually strange films and speaks to a late period experimentation in form that he would ride to success with his next film BlacKkKlansman. Adapting Aristophanes's Lysistrata to the city of Chicago by way of the rival Spartan and Trojan gang may be a silly premise and Lee doesn't shy from the more ridiculous aspects from the rhyming verse to the eventual sex battle. But for every scene of lunacy there's an equally impassioned cry for peace and justice yet one never overpowers the other or ruins their capability to make us respond. Great ensemble including Jackson's narrator, Cusack's furious screed in the middle, and Bassett doing the thing. NO PUSSY NO PEACE!