BlacKkKlansman
Director: Spike Lee
Cast: John David Washington, Adam
Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace
Ron Stallworth was the first
black police officer in the Colorado Springs Police Department and in the late
1970s he went undercover to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. The story is
relatively straightforward on the surface, the cop skillfully played by
Washington, infiltrates the local chapter of the Klu Klux Klan by phone and
attempts to gather intelligence info on the organization. The officer teams up
with white officer Flip Zimmerman, who was a stand-in when a white version of
Stallworth was needed. The infiltration was a success with the duo being
invited to lead the Klan's local chapter. The film first debuted at Cannes where
it competed for the Palme d’Or and eventually won the Grand Prix.
This drama is among Lee’s most
politically passionate films. No movie better connected today's shameful social
and political realities with America's history better than Spike Lee's latest
movie. The fact he was able to do so using the prism of the (mostly real) story
of a black police officer who infiltrated the KKK is incredible. The fact it
was often righteously funny—even when it was interrogating race, religion, and
deep-seated hatred was even more remarkable. Often, the film plays like the
pilot episode of a TV show given an essayistic overhaul. In addition to drawing
connections to cinematic history, from Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation
to Super Fly and Cleopatra Jones, he makes more than a handful of knowing nods
to the political present, having characters mimic the catchphrases of President
Donald Trump and ending the film with actual footage from last year's Unite the
Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Lee's message is proudly, defiantly
blunt; his stylistic approach is multi-layered and tonally ambitious.
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