Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman Is One of the Best Films of the Summer
“BlacKkKlansman” is fiercely felt, indulgently overlong, proudly provocative and excitingly experimental. It’s full of great performances (and a couple of scenery-chewing ones). It has a dreamy reverse-dolly of two people walking (but actually gliding) toward the camera. It brilliantly dramatizes a vital issue, and the debate over two diametrically opposed responses.
In some ways, it’s the most Spike Lee movie since “Malcolm X” (and not just because it’s got one of Denzel’s kids, John David Washington, in the title role). It’s a story that’s based on recent history, but draws direct parallels to today. It mixes fictional characters and documentary footage. And it ends with the same message Lee has been shouting for decades.
Wake up.
Its “fo’ real” story, as the opening titles call it, is about Ron Stallworth, a black police officer – actually, the black police officer – in early ‘70s Colorado Springs, Colo. He’s eager and ambitious, and the white chief figures he’ll take advantage of that by assigning him to undercover work --- planning to use him to infiltrate and report on the burgeoning Black Power movement.
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