Some Tweets about Spike Lee's Chi-Raq (2015)

Some Tweets about Spike Lee's Chi-Raq (2015), seen at Saffron Screen

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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5 February

Some Tweets about Spike Lee's Chi-Raq (2015), seen at Saffron Screen, which - perhaps as an antidote to the cynicism of the musical or film called Chicago ? - looks to sisters in Ancient Greece, also tired of warfare, as a source of hope...

Nick Cannon (as Chi-Raq)

As we are shown by titles on the screen during the opening number, whose lyrics are otherwise displayed on a dark screen, the film is predicated on the fact that more men died violent deaths in 2015 in Chicago than US servicemen up to that point in Afghanistan and Iraq together : hence the name Chi-Raq, by which one of the gang-leaders (Nick Cannon) also calls himself (his opposite number is Cyclops (Wesley Snipes), and there is a loquacious chorus-figure, played by Samuel L. Jackson).

Above : John Cusack (Fr. Corridan), Wesley Snipes (Cyclops), La La Anthony (Hecuba) and Spike Lee

Below : Samuel L. Jackson (Dolmedes)

The sex-strike is started by Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) – as in his Greek model, but with the encouragement of Miss Helen (Angela Bassett).

Teyonah Parris (Lysistrata), Angela Bassett (Miss Helen), and
Jennifer Hudson (Irene [= Greek for Peace])

Spike Lee additionally gives a role for the black evangelical church : the real St. Sabina’s in Chicago (all of the locations shown are in the city), fronted by John Cusack (as Father Michael Corridan), but with the support and appearance of its own Father Michael Pfleger, and its music and dance-groups.

Above : John Cusack (Fr. Michael Corridan) and Father Michael Pfleger

Below : Spike Lee, Al Sharpton (not credited ?), and Father Pfleger

At @Saffronscreen, Chi-Raq (2015) from Spike Lee was sometimes a little patchy, but had a stonking speech from John Cusack in St. Sabina's !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 5, 2017

John Cusack and Spike Lee

Necessarily, obstacles are in the women’s way, otherwise no drama and no action to the film, but it ends with an unexpected act of mercy, and a revelation by Nick Cannon of the extent to which – except physically – his acting has been subdued until that moment.

Maybe not the best translation, but the modest outlay - a few decades ago - allows it to be seen where Lee bent the play-text to his will... pic.twitter.com/qZNBocobzy

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 7, 2017

Spike Lee offers a message of hope, and we would do well to heed him.

Angela Bassett (as Miss Helen)

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

A butler - with that gait ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

19 November

64 = S : 13 / A : 11 / C : 10 / M : 11 / P : 7 / F : 12

A rating and review of The Butler (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



Maybe this is the butler that breaks the mould (or would break some sort of mould frequently enough with the unsteadiness of that gait), but the breed is always portrayed as light and efficient on its feet, not as if it cannot walk straight - serving things and not placing one's feet precisely really do not go together. The film takes the bother to age fairly unremarkable lead actor Forest Whitaker (as Cecil Gaines) and the undisappointing Oprah Whinfrey (as his wife Gloria), and to find a convincing look-a-like for Jackie Kennedy in Minka Kelly (but not one for John F.), but not to get right whether, from the waist down, he holds himself like a butler : if it was essential to have him, the things to have done was not have full-length shots of how clumsily he looked walking.

The major criticism of the film, apart from the too obvious effect of composed and pre-recorded music, is the pacing - it was a hot and stuffy Screen 3, which did not help, but the film could simply have done what it did with Jimmy Carter, the President of the US whom Whitaker facially and vocally most resembled, and skip over his term in office (and, IMDb makes clear, that of Gerald Ford) without anyone impersonating him (except Whitaker). Of the Presidents, the initial - but overcome - hesitation was that Alan Rickman looked too little like Reagan (and John Cusack as Nixon), but he and Jane Fonda as Nancy were the scene-stealers that one would have expected.

So, eight years passed over seemingly just to telescope apartheid with the US race issues that are the centre of the film, along with the typical theme of father eventually coming to realize that the rebellious son was right to stand up to opposition for what he believed. And, as usual, that individual falling-out is set against the bigger picture, too lazily invoked by having people see (or hear) the clips that are needed to tell the national story, rather than telling it in the dramatic writing - the danger is that, in a slow-paced story where only poor diction or sound-recording / re-recording (maybe deliberate in the case of the story about clapping the hands) requires one to be much more than passive (i.e. not having to make the effort of working out what is happening), one does not switch over to a mode (the usual one of a documentary) where one has to absorb material.

Right from the start, and not because of Whinfrey, the spark that was set up by this film was Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985), which truly does a whole lot better than this 'inspiration' from a true story (Wil Haygood's article 'A Butler Well Served by This Election'), and where one maybe does not feel that the struggle for equal rights, in which Gaines' son Louis plays his part (and, in turn, David Oyelowo plays him excellently), was so likely to be won. All down the line, the stories where sons break with sons whom they believe wrongheaded (or even immoral) chime in and give this film a resonance, because they did it better, that it does not have, just as borrowing Brahms or Schumann adds an otherwise undetectable gravitas, and the voiceover / framing device of Cecil waiting to be received takes away from any effect with its over-gravelly impression of age - from whatever time-perspective Cecil is talking, we do not need it, for it adds nothing.


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