Spike Lee's more ambitious films

Rating: 7/10 (2 May 2019)

I personally consider BlacKkKlansman to be one of Spike Lee's more ambitious films. Throughout the film he incorporates so many historical, yet topical nuances that force the viewer to see the uncanny parallelism of the trials and tribulations African Americans have undergone, ranging from all the way back in 1939's Gone with the Wind to the 2017's Unite the Right Rally. However, some of the films' strongest moments don't happen to be plot twists or cliffhangers. Instead, they are the beautifully, interwoven layers that speak the loudest volumes without explicitly saying their truer intentions. For example, Lee chose to overlap the jarring story of Jesse Washington told by Jerome Turner to the Colorado Black Student Union for their "All Power to all da People" campaign with the inauguration of the false, white Ron Stallworth into the Ku Klux Klan. By switching back and forth between the Klansmen's celebrated screening of 1915's Birth of a Nation and the Black Student Union's tiering prints of adolescent lynching, we get an impactful almost side by side visual comparison of two paradoxical environments that inherently highlights the abhorrent beliefs and values of the Klansmen.
However, Lee's dryly-comic approach to such a sensitive piece evokes frustration and disappointment from his peers and rightfully so. Although an interesting perspective on this may be that the individuals who found portions of the film to be comical weren't ridiculing a shameful part of America's past, but rather found the actions and values of the Klansmen so shockingly preposterous that their default response was humor. Overall, I feel this film exemplifies a strong African-American film by the way it encompasses critical pieces of the civil rights movement's past so as to not only be reminded of their significance, but also prevail their relevancy to today's culture.