Review of BlacKkKlansman (2018) by Scowly X — 06 Sep 2018

Damn good movie. Does a great job of displaying the prejudices of the past while not letting the present off the hook. I love a lot of the editing in the film, especially the whole Kwame Ture speech. The fading in of each face as they are changed by his powerful words becomes especially effective when we see Ron in the crowd. It was a lot funnier than I expected, perfectly walked the line between making the klan members look like the fools they without ever making them nonthreatening. Very likeable protagonists, I loved that Ron and Patrice could fight about whether you can change a system from within it without the movie really ever taking a side. The references to the modern day Trump-isms were incredibly on the nose, but you quickly catch on that it's purposefully ham handed. Spike Lee wanted to make sure that no one could miss the joke, and it becomes so blatant that it sails past being eye rolling and right around to making you feel like you're in on the joke, being nudged in the arm sarcastically.

I'm not quite sure how to feel about the framing bits at the beginning and end of the film. The top is a funny little scene of Alec Baldwin spouting racist propaganda, mixed in with shots of him messing up lines and doing vocal warmups. At the end is film of the Charlottesville protests and Trump's reaction to them. The movie ends not with an image of one of the black people still getting killed in the streets by cops, but with Heather Hayer. A white woman killed by a white nationalist. It's a deliberate choice that I'm not sure I understand in the context of the film. I'm fairly conflicted about these odd choices at the begging and the end, taking us out of the narrative of a film that was already effective in making us think about the modern day. There's also the strange almost-reveal of the cross burning at the end. I won't go into it for spoiler reasons, but it was more confusing than it was enlightening.