According
to that unimpeachable source of information known as Wikipedia, Spike Lee’s
latest film (I don’t care what he calls it; it’s not a “joint” cus’ you can’t
smoke and get high on it), ‘BlackKklansman,’ is a biographical dramedy based on
the hard-to-believe but real life story of Ron Stallworth, a funky-groovy-cool
cat of a detective in the Colorado Springs police department who somehow
successfully infiltrated the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the late 70’s.
So
how did an Afro-haired dark-skinned brotha’ manage to ingratiate himself with a
vile and despicable white supremacist brotherhood like the KKK (by which I don't
mean Kim, Khloe and Kourtney)? Not
knowing quite what to expect, I admit I was half expecting some silly Wayans
brothers shenanigans as seen in the movie ‘White Chicks,’ but thankfully that
wasn’t the case at all. Stallworth (well played by John David
Washington, whose father happens to be “The Equalizer” himself) merely misrepresented
himself as an appropriately racist angry white male over the phone who’s interested
in furthering the KKK's not-so-noble causes, and sold it so convincingly that he even
fooled none other than David Duke (Topher Grace from ‘That ‘70’s Show’). Any face-to-face was handled by
his partner-in-deception, a fellow detective named Flip Zimmerman (Adam
Driver), whose being Jewish only made screwing with the KKK that much more fun.
Timely,
provocative and packed with wry humor, ‘BlackKklansman’ is as surely a byproduct
of our troubled times as its protagonist was in his, a time when racial
tensions are on the rise due to a spate of police shootings nation-wide which
made Rodney King look like he got off easy and gave rise to the “Black Lives
Matter” movement. As such, ‘BlackKklansman’
may be Spike Lee’s most resonant and politically relevant movie since 1992's ‘Malcolm
X,’ which interestingly and coincidentally enough featured John David
Washington's famous dad in the title role.
Grade: A
Grade: A
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