Wow… I did not read it that way at all. I thought them laughing at the end then going to the cross burning and then straight to now was to say that they were patting themselves on the back despite having done nothing to change the status quo. Eliminating the “bad apple” and then saying no longer any credible threat. I found the ending incredibly bleak. I mean, David Duke wins?
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Like surely we don’t need Spike Lee of all people to turn to the camera at the end and say “you know, I had fun making this movie, but just so we’re all crystal clear, fuck the police”
judging from the commentary i’ve seen that wld help
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also his response has literally been not all cops are bad and we need them
idk i don’t think the text is really ambiguous on this point
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It’s a heavily fictionalized, fantastical movie about the first black cop in a local PD being idealistic enough to think that he can redirect the police state to confront white supremacy, that cuts immediately from their first minor victories achieved mainly through the incompetence of their targets and also by eliminating a single bad cop who never should have been on the job in the first place to documentary footage illustrating how utterly and completely they and everyone else have failed to do anything to curb the spread of white supremacy.
Everyone can read the film however they want I guess but acting like a handful of scenes shot to suggest that the cops are themselves happy about doing cop shit means that the whole movie is a celebration of the police is just not convincing to me.
let’s also not forget that the only reason Ron is able to save Patrice is because he abandons his actual police assignment, which literally being David Duke’s bodyguard, this movie totally makes cops look awesome and necessary right…
Like if the movie was just Spike Lee staring into the camera and saying “we need cops” I would agree with you but it looks like famous cop-lover Spike Lee fucked up and accidentally made a movie that quite clearly underlines the fact that the police and other government institutions have been almost uniformly ineffective at combatting home-grown terrorism despite the fact that they are really good at patting themselves on the back about whatever
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i think even this is at least kind of a generous read but i do think it’s roughly what the movie is trying to do and it’s bullshit - the cops are not ultimately ineffective/imperfect allies in the the good fight; they are themselves the de facto homegrown terrorists; i think saying otherwise is irresponsible at best
police do fail to curb the spread of white supremacy, i guess, in that they have only ever existed to do literally the opposite
including the people the characters in this movie are based on
et cetera!!
again i love spike lee and i like a lot of this movie
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I guess my position is that while that absolutely has been true and continues to be in many cases, if you look at the various ways that police have failed to serve minority communities, there is at least a split between malice and incompetence – especially when you look across junior and senior levels of police bureaucracy, especially when you consider how incompetence can be basically as harmful as malice – and I’m not sure that it’s a betrayal for Spike Lee’s Fun Cop Movie to mainly portray the latter. especially considering all the fun cop movies out there and how Spike Lee has never ever done what people want him to. and for people to reduce this to “the movie is pro-cop” is pretty unsubtle.
in conclusion,
“radio raheem tho”
lol
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pacific rim uprising had such a promising opening and i’m really disappointed it wasn’t all the weird post apocalypse slums and exploring that stuff cause that bottom of the world view is way more interesting than just robot top gun or whatever. i liked the monster fights but setting up a three as “pre-emptive strike” the movie sounds shitty as hell
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Guhhh
no way, it’s gonna be awesome
2 hours of opening up rifts and doing the end of the first movie over and over and over, broken up by the court martial of the kid who gets the Indian kid killed during the last fight of Uprising
the final frame of blackkklansman being an upside-down american flag made me want to stand up and raise my fist in the air in the theater in the goofiest fashion. seeing that in an amc theater was just so nuts
i got dragged into seeing crazy rich asians and it’s just like… every other bourgeois romcom but with fleeting themes of familial piety and uncomfortable use of aave for humor’s sake. no more pro-plutocrat films. there’s a weird napoleon quote in the beginning. representation is cool and stuff but everyone is the descendant of a landlord in this movie. there’s going to be a really good essay written on it one day
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like the final three minutes or so of blackkklansman functions as a widely released anti-american arthouse documentary. that’s so sick
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i know this isn’t what you mean but
seriously though i’m about to walk into a film exec meeting and just write “SANE PROLETARIAN ASIANS” on the whiteboard and everyone is gonna throw buckets of money at me
but really i feel like the movie itself is like not a work of revolutionary genius or whatever and yet that really doesn’t matter. like i was gonna say no one was complaining about how everyone in black panther was a neoliberal technocrat but they actually were so i guess people just can’t enjoy things.
honestly one of the most succinct takes re: this is from forum cinema criticism darling walter chaw, who tweeted thusly:
https://twitter.com/mangiotto/status/1034538043514925056
and viet thanh nguyen has written about in various places i don’t have a paid subscription via the concept of ‘narrative plenitude’
https://twitter.com/viet_t_nguyen/status/1030325085368799233
there have also been like a plethora of articles about awkwafina but i can’t find the best one right now. i think she probably shouldn’t do that accent but her whole career is based on it and her character in the movie is like a milder version of everything else she has done up to this point so, welcome everyone to this problematic joke rapper i guess.
anyway the movie made me cry like 5 times and i still can’t figure out why. i also think it was kind of bad though. i just react really strongly to media these days.
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hey hi what’s up
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