Movie Capsule: The critics are mostly raving about Spike Lee's latest movie, BlacKkKlansman. And, as usual, the critics are mostly wrong. Based on the autobiographical account of the first African American cop on the Colorado Springs police force, the film opens with the words: "Some fo real, fo real shit." It's the first clue that the film will be almost pure fiction, despite what the PR flackeys and media lackeys profess. And, just as advertised, Lee's fo real narrative resembles the true story as much as a McDonald's FishWich approximates a rock cod fillet.
In BlacKkKlansman, Ron Stallworth is the first African American cop on the Colorado Springs force in the 1970s. At first relegated to monotonous and demeaning file clerk duties (including enduring the requisite racist honky cop shenanigans), Stallworth leaps at the chance to go undercover at a black power talk given by former Black Panther Stokely Carmichael (now calling himself Kwame Ture in honor of two Africans no one has ever heard of). The Colorado Springs police want to see what nefarious subterfuge Carmichael/Ture and his local sponsors, the Colorado College black activist club, are up to.
True to cliché, Carmichael tells the 100% African American audience members to arm themselves for the coming war against the white racist government. All the young men and women are stylish, attractive, have afros, wear neo-African jewelry, and possess the kind of passionate docility one finds in Japanese baseball fans doing the wave. Of course Stallworth manages to meet Patrice, the "fine sistah" who runs the black student club, an attractive lass in an Angela Davis-do who bubble-drones on about empowerment and the man and liberating themselves by seizing the means of production and blah blah blah. It's so superficial and trite that it treads the delicate line between world-class dumb and chicken-coop racist. If Spike Lee is somehow a true artistic voice for the African American struggle, then the movement is in a more precarious position than a Loretta Lynch tarmac meeting.
But nitpicking aside, Stallworth (engagingly played by John David Washington, son of Denzel), soon spots a newspaper recruitment ad for the local Klan chapter. He responds, then receives a phone call from the local Wizard, who invites him to say hello to a few of the local boys. Officer Stallworth, being black, attends the meeting in the form of a veteran white cop named Flip, who just so happens to be a non-practicing Jew. There's mild tension, some cookie-cutter tail-spotted-in-the-rearview mirror type silliness, and a crew of card-carrying white supremacist buffoons bordering on mentally retarded. Lee had a chance to show the Klan as vile and dangerous, but Jackie Gleason's portrayal of redneck sheriff Buford T. Justice in Smokey and the Bandit is Hamlet compared to these flamboyant Kluckers, who drink, tell racist jokes, and shoot guns (and sometimes in reverse order). This is the film's main problem: its clumsy, brutally dumb parody of real people, which diminishes the issue of racism (institutional and otherwise) in America today.
And while Lee's unfunny Klan yahoos are hackneyed and ineffective, Patrice and the hip young black radicals are only marginally less clichéd. For example, Stallworth and Patrice have a long talk about the relative merits of blaxploitation films and b-movie stars like Richard Roundtree of Shaft and Pam Grier whose Black Power/Cold Shower charms lit up the screen in pictures like Women in Cages and Scream Blacula Scream. This kind of lowbrow schlock talk, interspersed with polemics about "pigs" and "killer cops," reveals a script about as sophisticated as a bright ninth grader who idolizes Michelle Obama. If Tarantino's ludicrously violent and absurd Django Unchained reminded you of Richard Wright, then BlacKkKlansman will uncork your flask.
In his role as superior human masquerading as bigoted idiot, Stallworth even manages to get on the phone with David Duke, the Grand Wizard himself down in Louisiana. Over the course of several conversations, the unlikely pair bond over the black, commie and Jew menace, proof of the Klan's abject cretinism. This isn't beating a dead horse, it's hitting the incinerated corpse with a tactical nuke, then turning ground zero into a Walmart parking lot.
I don't want to ruin the plot for you, but the movie goes on in cloying twists and insipid turns. Stallworth eventually saves Patrice from being blown to smithereens by a C-4 cocktail, which instead kills a carload of evil Klan morons. On a side note, the bad racist honky cop is fired from the police department, but then Stallworth quits and Flip, the non-practicing Jew with spiritual stirrings, storms out when the chief declares the Klan investigation is over, forthwith and post haste.
The film ends with archival footage of Trump trumping it up in his inimitable style, and clashes between Antifa and white power marchers, blood, cars plowing into protesters, and a snapshot of the general mayhem lurking on street corners from South Boston to Santa Fe. Because Spike Lee needed to remind us that what we're watching is, like, hip, brother. Are you down with that, my man?
But in cruel (i.e., non-Hollywood) reality, Stallworth and his fellow cops stopped no bombing of black students or speakers, because none were ever planned. The overwhelming majority of Colorado Springs lefties agitating for racial justice in 1979 were white; the one woman Stallworth met at Stokely Carmichael's speech was in fact a white German (a generally redundant description). The Ku Klux Klan chapter was making noise about targeting not ethnic minorities, but local gay bars, those degenerate minefields of overpriced margaritas and Judy Garland sing-alongs.
Though it might seem ironic, if not pathological, I didn't hate the movie. It went fast and wasn't painful, which is more than can be said for Marie Antoinette's wedding night. My issue is that it's a pure b-movie, a blaxploitation flick masquerading as an important and urbane discussion of racism and America. Last year's Get Out was superior in every way. Which means BlacKkKlansman will probably win several Oscars, which in turn will swell Klan rolls from Barstow to Bend, Oregon.
In the meantime, millions of Americans like me will look forward to the next bit of Tom Cruise super-heroics, an honest and humble spy-vs-spy-vs-Godzilla caper that doesn't pretentiously bill itself as Sophie's Real Choice: Vegan or Gluten-Free? I can see Tom now, working out his eyelid muscles, practicing his smile, drawing us closer, getting us clear: Mission Impossible: Stop Lying! Fo real fo real!
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