Spike Lee was talking about 21 years ago what people are talking about today.
This movie is what happens when you give a first year college student that's trying to be edgy the chance to make a real movie. The quality of the film is awful but that's artsy right? The sound is all over the place but that's innovating right? The scenes and camera angles are awkward but that's rebellious. The acting is mediocre but that's just taste.
This movie, like most of Spike Lee's movies, was not for me.-
I didn't imagine that I would see a movie so heavy and with a raw message like this. Spike Lee could make a very surgical critic from an unusual situation. This movie is like a hill, because the situation is always getting worse. At the ending, we stay completely horrified... the credit scenes open our eyes to how the racism is something structural and it is in things that we couldn't notice if we don't look it better.
A unique, angry near-masterpiece.
This is an interesting movie with an interesting message that accidentally becomes a Spike Lee movie at the end - which means it stumbles over it's own message and breaks into a prolonged montage.
You should watch it, I'm glad I did, but I probably won't watch it again.
Parody requires cunning of the highest order because the parodist must use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, all the while being cognizant of the structural inequities that make the ruse necessary in the first place.
– Jackie Goldsby, “Lynching’s Mass Appeal and the ‘Terrible Real’: James Weldon Johnson”
Review by JCVIP 4BlockedParent2021-11-13T04:58:03Z
It’s amazing the reviews that called this heavy handed and overwrought when the same year Jimmy Fallon was doing blackface on SNL. When this predicted the Chappelle Show three years later, Chappelle leaving due to the wrong people laughing six years later, and Chappelle becoming Delacroix today, all too happy to punch down and pal around with the same white opportunists he hated for the money and social capita. When there’s always another blackface episode of something being taken down. When Tarantino proudly gets away with his racial slurs up to Django and Hateful Eight.
You can feel all of that bitterness of past, present, and future in this film. Lee didn’t come to play. The writer’s room is a standout; the stammering ‘blank people of color- of Africa’ is pitch perfect. The last crowd scene with Honeycutt is so unnerving. And Jada-Pinkett Smith, Savion Glover, and Tommy Davidson are all just excellent. The biggest things holding this film back is the muddled treatment of the radicals- I see the point of how too often it’s the black actors or crew or workers just trying to get by who suffer the consequences and so rarely the whites in power, but it still lacks nuance for the radicals and reeks of condescension- and Damon Wayans. That accent. Why.
But Delacroix is mostly a device to get the film moving, and that film is a cutting and furious experience I’m glad I watched.