Movie Summary:
Bitches, it’s always an excellent month in the us for an antigun movie. The most recent, may be the very best ever. And potent - a robust weapon in its right.
It’s an adaptation of Aristophanes’ 413 BCE antiwar satire Lysistrata, where the title character - whose name means “army disbander” - convinces the ladies of Greece to withhold sex to have the men to avoid fighting the Peloponnesian War. Lee shifts the battlefield from distant Sparta to the streets of Chicago, where young black males are busy killing young black males - along with unlucky bystanders, a few of them children. The title is a fusion of Chicago and Iraq - although a prologue highlights that fewer Americans have actually died in Iraq because the turn of the millennium. Rahm Emmanuel asked Lee to improve the name since it was bad for the town. (Hey, so is suppressing a video near a good runoff election showing a cop shooting a teenager 16 times.) But there’s no hiding that Chicago is a war zone and a mayor’s corrupt fiefdom.
In the film, Chi-Raq is also the nickname of a rap star (Nick Cannon) who happens to be the boyfriend of a bombshell by the name of Lysistrata, played by Teyonah Parris with all cylinders firing. She stares down the camera. She swings her derrière while eyes explode all over, like Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It. It's hard to believe she is the actress who played Don Draper’s secretary Dawn Chambers on Mad Men, who kept most of her thoughts (and private life) to herself - but she did, after all, go to Juilliard.
The great “classic” plays aren’t dead plays. A change in emphasis or setting and they bloom anew, as suited to our times as the first day they were staged. You know at once Lee gets that when he keeps the Greek chorus - and makes him Samuel L. Jackson, who strolls through the film in natty three-piece suits. Does it matter that Jackson has pumped more bullets into people onscreen than most living actors have? Yes. I’d like to have seen an acknowledgment of that - a goof on his own Tarantino-enhanced fan base, an admission that guns and attitude have made him an avatar of cool. Elsewhere in the films, guns and attitude make you look stupid.
Not long after, played by Angela Bassett - has an epiphany. She makes them take a pledge. “No peace,
Raunchy vaudevillian skits, lee requires a broad, which is filled with profanity and anachronisms. ”) But plenty of punch to compensate.
With every shot some sort of Brechtian placard. ” He also blames a community where not just one witness to the shooting should come forward.
That’s the realism part of Chi-Raq, which include scenes of real shooting victims speaking with the camera and real mothers holding blown-up photos of real lost children. Using Jennifer Hudson - who lost members of her family to guns - is another gesture toward reality. But even the most cartoonish performances - by Cannon, Wesley Snipes as a one-eyed person in the Trojans gang called Cyclops, Harry Lennix as the mayor’s aide, and D.B. Sweeney as the mayor - don’t wink at the audience. Broad comedy doesn’t have to be camp. It could be serious business.
Chi-Raq made me think back again to my 20s, when I spent time traveling around Europe seeing political theater - cabarets, melodramas, some staged in pubs at lunchtime, some in union halls. It wasn’t all good, however, many of the messiest productions were the most remarkable. They teamed professional actors with people locally. These were an ungainly mixture of tones. That they had references to events in the news headlines that week. These were urgent and alive. Chi-Raq has all that, and a couple of things more: (1) Sex, and a lot of it, and (2) Auto-criticism. Lee isn’t just blaming authority figures. He’s also trying to shame the type of macho nihilism which has poisoned the community from within.
And he hasn’t just let his movie do the railing. Lee has been leading marches in Chicago and New York - and mouthing off about Rahm Emanuel, a cartoon of a politician who’s more outlandish than anything in Chi-Raq (or The Wire, for that matter). Lee and Aristophanes have joined their voices across millennia, and they make beautiful music together.
DETAILS MOVIE
| Runtime: | 127 min |
|---|---|
| Rating: | Rated R for strong sexual content including dialogue, nudity, language, some violence and drug use |
| Production: | 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks |
| Genre: | Drama |
| Country: | USA |
| Language: | English |
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