Spike Lee

DA 5 BLOODS: a few compelling elements

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Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters, Delroy Lindo and Jonathan Majors in in DA 5 BLOODS. Cr. DAVID LEE/NETFLIX © 2020

Spike Lee’s latest film, Da 5 Bloods has some compelling elements, but the movie isn’t compelling as a whole. It’s too long and drags in places. The Wife and I stopped watching after the first hour. I finished it a couple days later.

Da 5 Bloods works best as a reflection on the Vietnam War and on the Black experience in America; how Spike handles those themes is far more evocative than is the story itself.

The story: four African-American vets return to Vietnam fifty years after their service. They are seeking to recover the remains of their beloved commanding officer. What they keep to themselves, is that he is buried with a fortune in gold bars. This quest is remarkably similar to Treasure of the Sierra Madre (and Spike even throws in the most famous quote from Sierra Madre).

Delroy Lindo in DA 5 BLOODS. Photo courtesy of NETFLIX.

The best reason to watch Da 5 Bloods are the performances of Delroy Lindo and Clarke Peters. Lindo has the best role of his craeer – as a man who is tormented by PTSD from wartime guilt and a family tragedy back home.

The old actors play themselves in the fifty-years-before flashback scenes. I suspended disbelief, but it decidedly did not work for The Wife.

Besides Delroy Lindo’s searing monologues, the highlights of the movie are an unexpected family reunion for the Clarke Peters character and a gripping sequence in a minefield.

The supporting cast is excellent, especially Melanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser, Jean Reno, Le Y Tan and first time actress Sandy Huong Pham, Jonathan Majors, so great in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, is fine but wasted in an underwritten role.

Da 5 Bloods does showcase an impressive selection of soul shakes. Spike also drops in has signature double dolly shot in the epilogue, to effetively cap the Clarke Peters story line.

One of the best things about Da 5 Bloods is the soundtrack; I can’t get enough of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and neither can Spike. Time Has Come Today by the Chambers Brothers is underused in the movie, but dominates the great trailer embedded below (and the trailer is better than the movie).

Da 5 Bloods is streaming on Netflix.

BLACKKKLANSMAN: funny and razor sharp

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Adam Driver and John David Washington in BLACKKKLANSMAN

In BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee takes the stranger-than-fiction story of Ron Stallworth and soars. Stallworth was a real African-American rookie cop in Colorado Springs who infiltrated the local Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s.

Stallworth (John David Washington) seduces the KKK with a racist rant on the telephone, and then has his white partner Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) impersonate him at the KKK meetings. Stallworth and Zimmerman race against the clock to quash KKK violence. Along the way, Stallworth tries to romance the comely cop-hating militant Patrice (Laura Harrier).

All of the actors are excellent, but it’s Spike Lee who is the star here, taking this oddball novelty story and transforming it into an exploration of hate in America – then and now.

The local KKK is a bunch of clowns. Paul Walter Hauser (Shawn in I, Tonya) plays a member of the Colorado Springs Klan posse, which tells you all you need to know about their efficacy. Suffice it to say that this gang who can’t burn a cross straight will get their comeuppance. Even their media-slick national leader, David Dukes (Topher Grace), is ripe for an epic prank.

As the moronic Klansmen bumble around and even name Stallworth their leader, BlacKkKlansman is riotously funny. But Spike makes it clear that racial hatred is not going to be wiped out in the 70s with the Colorado Springs KKK. When David Dukes lifts his glass to “America First”, it’s chilling.

At the end of the film, Spike lets go with his patented dolly shot, and we are sobered by a racist symbol unbowed. Then, Spike takes us seamlessly into the present with some actual scenes from contemporary America. It’s very powerful, and, when I saw it, many audience members wept.

John David Washington and Topher Grace in BLACKKKLANSMAN

Spike is inclusive – inclusive with intentionality – and this goes beyond the Ron/Flip buddy partnership. The Civil Rights movement benefited from Jewish support, and Black leaders like Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. worked hand-in-hand with Jewish colleagues. But Jews (and all whites) were less welcome in the Black Power age. In BlacKkKlansman, Spike makes it clear that African-Americans and Jews are natural allies in the struggle against bigotry, and seeks to revive the alliance.

Spike also celebrates the Afro.  BlacKkKlansman boasts the most impressive assembly of Afros, perhaps ever, especially Harrier’s.   Oscar Gamble, Franklyn Ajaye and Angela Davis would be proud.

Spike also masterfully employs period music to tell this story: Ball of Confusion, Oh Happy Day, and, of course,  Say It Loud -I’m Black and I’m Proud.  Somehow, he even found a place for Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).  But Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Lucky Man may be the most perfectly placed song.  It’s all pretty stellar.

Spike Lee has made two cinematic masterpieces: Do the Right Thing and 25th Hour.  BlacKkKlansman may not be a masterpiece, but it’s right at the top of Spike’s other films and it’s perfect for this age in America.

CHI-RAQ: Spike’s plea for peace with justice…and a sex comedy

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Teyonah Parris in CHI-RAQ
Teyonah Parris in CHI-RAQ

Chi-Raq is Spike Lee’s impassioned plea for peace with justice in the inner city.  The Chi-Raq of the title is Chicago, where there have been more gun deaths in the past 15 years than there have been Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined – a shocking and wholly unacceptable statistic that opens the movie.

Lee has adapted the Aristophanes play Lysistrata, where the ancient Greek women withhold sex until their men negotiate an end to war.   Here, it’s the women of today’s Chicago who suspend the sexual privileges of their gang-banging boyfriends.  Lee stays pretty close to the original Lysistrata, with lines sometimes in rap verse and with increasingly dapper Samuel L. Jackson as a one-man chorus who comments directly to the audience.

In a particularly inspired tactic, the men try to soften the woman’s resolve with Oh Girl by the Chi-Lites.

Lysistrata herself, the women’s ring leader, is played by Teyonah Parris, who pulls off the responsibility of being in virtually every scene. In her skanky outfits and massive Afro, Parris is unrecognizable as the controlled and restrained Sterling Cooper secretary Dawn Chambers in Mad Men.

John Cusack plays a bleeding heart priest, whose diatribe against the systems that breed violence is the weakest part of the movie (not Cusack’s fault – it’s the writing).   Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Hudson and Angela Bassett are all excellent.  Overall, Chi-Raq is pretty watchable.

a searing scene from Ruby Dee

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Ruby Dee, who died this week at age 91, was a great actress of film and stage, as well as the artistic and political partner of her husband Ossie Davis. One of her most affecting scenes is “Gator’s Last Dance” in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever. Samuel L. Jackson (in the breakthrough performance that set up Jackson for his star-making turn in Pulp Fiction) plays a crackhead.  Badly strung out, he bursts into the home of his parents (Dee and Davis) looking for some dope money.  At first look, Dee seems to have less of a role in the scene than Jackson or Davis. But the key is her intense desperation to avoid – and then to mitigate – the encounter between son and father. And, finally,  her fears are realized and manifest into profound grief. It’s a searing performance (and it’s worth sitting through the advertisement).