Month: March 2016

February closed its doors with multiple shootings. This one, perpetrated by a 14 yr old was considered so ordinary by CNN that I had to search along the sidebar between Caitlyn Jenner stories and a cop-involved shooting to find it. Equally disappointing is the fact that another article, this one about a cop murdered on the first day of work, did not make the front page. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter anymore. It is the way rings were when I was a kid. People get shot, guns get overlooked, and the cycle continues. At least the very badly written and performed Chi-raq made an effort to show us the gravity of the numbers. Still, who is listening? I don’t think anyone is listening or truly worried. Superman doesn’t worry about catching a cold and Americans don’t worry about the lasting effects of our culture.

This latest shooting involves an 8th grader culture which through whatever form of social learning they partook in, recognized that bringing a gun to school and trying to take people out was a good idea. I get being fed up with bullying and the like, but I don’t get the mindset that says, “just shoot em” Of course, the shooter had to be crazy, right? Wrong. The problem with that thinking is that it dismisses any possible discourse about the conditions that led to the shooting. At first, everyone wants to know how someone can come to the point to shoot a bunch of people. Once the crazy label sticks, nobody cares about the conditions. The focus shifts to gun access and politics.

I feel like we live in a shoot em up culture that not only condones public violence but rewards it. In such a culture one cannot be surprised that people get hurt.

I think I figured out why nobody with skin like mine was nominated for Best Actor or Actress. They were all too busy wasting their damn time doing Chi-raq. Seriously. No wonder Spike Lee boycotted the Oscars. He didn’t want anyone to have a chance to talk legit smack about his latest movie come atomic bomb.

It is a bad movie.

I’ve seen bad movies. This is on par with Eraserhead. I mean what he tried to accomplish and what actually happened is as far apart as Bill Nye’s science and Ted Cruz’s reason. Let me start with the fact that Nick Cannon was playing the hardest gangster rapper in the whole movie.

Nick Cannon.

The story of Chi-raq borrows from a classic tale discussing the war between the Spartans and the Trojans. Lee layers his own baggage (the slow and steady gentrification of New York, his lack of faith in those who are servants of the church, a crap load of female tropes, the war in Iraq, his disgust over the dislike and distrust of Obama) into a narrative that is as sing song and rhyme as any rap song or nursery rhyme and the level of intelligence lies somewhere in between. Well, maybe closer to total idiocy than anything else.

There is actually a sequence where a general wearing a confederate flag blindfold and underwear is sitting spread eagle on a cannon called whistling dick and waiting for a cammo clad black woman to have sex with him. Yeah, that actually happened.

I cannot condone this movie in any way, shape, or form. I’m glad Spike got it out of his system but I truly must question why he published the dang thing. What, did he expect an Oscar? I expected to turn it off, which I still might. See, I’m writing as the show plays in the background. I am trying to distract myself in any way possible, because to really acknowledge that Lee fell this far (one chick said “You just like having your man by the Jackie Robinson’s”) would be to admit that one of the most important (if not the most important) black director’s in the history of cinema was done.

I’m not ready to say that. I am also not ready to say Chi-raq is worth the film it was printed on.