Polemical, didactic, confrontational, angry, trenchant - a state-of-the-nation address
BlacKkKlansman is a film with a whole hell of a lot on its mind. It opens with one of the most (in)famous scenes from Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind (1939), before pivoting to a fictional precursor of Alex Jones lecturing the audience on the dangers of the "negroid", and later takes in everything from Kwame Ture and the All-African People's Revolutionary Party to David Duke and his political aspirations, before lambasting D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), criticising the tropes of classic Blaxploitation films such as Gordon Parks's Shaft (1971), Gordon Parks Jr.'s Super Fly (1972), and Jack Hill's Coffy (1973), going into agonising detail regarding the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington, sardonically criticising police bureaucracy, and concluding with a montage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, including raw footage of James Alex Fields, Jr. ploughing a car into a crowd of counter-protestors, resulting in the death of Heather Heyer, intercut with Duke championing Donald Trump's presidency, and Trump's own reluctance to condemn the Neo Nazi/white supremacist component of the rally. The film then ends with an evocatively worded tribute to Heyer, before fading to an upside-down black and white American flag (which is not, as is often stated, a political protest, but is actually a governmentally approved signal for "dire distress"). Yep; this is a film with a lot to say.
For my complete review, please visit: https://boxd.it/w7oJr
Review by Stephen CampbellBlockedParentSpoilers2022-10-14T09:38:05Z
Polemical, didactic, confrontational, angry, trenchant - a state-of-the-nation address
BlacKkKlansman is a film with a whole hell of a lot on its mind. It opens with one of the most (in)famous scenes from Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind (1939), before pivoting to a fictional precursor of Alex Jones lecturing the audience on the dangers of the "negroid", and later takes in everything from Kwame Ture and the All-African People's Revolutionary Party to David Duke and his political aspirations, before lambasting D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), criticising the tropes of classic Blaxploitation films such as Gordon Parks's Shaft (1971), Gordon Parks Jr.'s Super Fly (1972), and Jack Hill's Coffy (1973), going into agonising detail regarding the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington, sardonically criticising police bureaucracy, and concluding with a montage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, including raw footage of James Alex Fields, Jr. ploughing a car into a crowd of counter-protestors, resulting in the death of Heather Heyer, intercut with Duke championing Donald Trump's presidency, and Trump's own reluctance to condemn the Neo Nazi/white supremacist component of the rally. The film then ends with an evocatively worded tribute to Heyer, before fading to an upside-down black and white American flag (which is not, as is often stated, a political protest, but is actually a governmentally approved signal for "dire distress"). Yep; this is a film with a lot to say.
For my complete review, please visit: https://boxd.it/w7oJr