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.