BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, a pro-law and order and anti-terrorism tract, is based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, a black Colorado Springs cop who figured out a novel way of infiltrating the Klan in the early 1970s. As is his wont, Lee immediately begins by mingling straightforward polemics with emphatic artistry. We begin on the famous Gone with the Wind crane shot, unaltered by Lee, before moving to a diegetic slide presentation by a racist (Alec Baldwin) that fixes that Klan’s point of view in a historical and cultural context.

Throughout the film, Lee (who co-wrote the screenplay with David Rabinowitz, Charlie Wachtel, and Kevin Willmott) breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the now. These moments are jarring and are meant to be jarring. BlacKkKlansman is a kind of essay in narrative that predictably perceives a continuity of circumstance between past and present. Yet it resists platitudes and easy moralizing. It may be Lee’s most contemplative non-documentary film.

Stallworth (John David Washington) is the first black officer on the Colorado Springs department. Before gaining any real experience, he finds himself being put to use in the Criminal Investigations Division as an undercover sent in to collect intel at a Stokely Carmichael speech. Carmichael’s speech and the crowd’s reaction are depicted with expressionistic zest, focusing on faces in the crowd as much as the words of the speaker, who encourages the blacks of Colorado Springs to fight back against their oppressors. Stallworth, who we’ve already learned is a proud man who takes absolutely no shit, seems moved by Carmichael even as Stallworth is there in his capacity as an undercover “pig.”

Stallworth’s dual allegiances — pride as a black man  and pride in his job — is not dumped on us over and over but rather is simply set forth at the outset as a necessary tension. Lee accepts Stallworth’s double-consciousness, the Du Boisian term that is explicitly debated later in the film, without suggesting he must choose a “side.” In fact, the film seems to be nostalgic for a time when law enforcement was more pro-active in its disruption of hate groups. Stallworth is on the right side by being on both sides.

BlacKkKlansman works its magic beautifully in its first half, where the nuts and bolts of the operation are as fascinating as they are absurd. Often we move from a laugh-out-loud moment of ridiculousness to a sobering reminder of just how sick the Klan is. Sometimes these moments are one in the same, as when a particularly simpleminded Klansman childishly asks if he can touch a live C-4 explosive. One hundred percent of the comedy is making virulent racism look silly, with near constant dunking on the Klan members.

On a whim, Ron phones the local KKK chapter after noticing an ad in the newspaper that suggests they’re organizing locally. The inexperienced rookie unwittingly uses his real name on the phone call in which he uses his voice skills to “pass” as a racist white man interested in Klan membership. When it dawns on him that a black officer will have a difficult time blending in at a Klan meeting, the CID task force determines that Detective “Flip” Zimmerman (Adam Driver) will be the one to go in, while Stallworth will handle the over-the-phone stuff. Interestingly, many of the white cops are portrayed as accepting of Stallworth, joshing him only for being a naive rookie and not for his race; although other cops on the force are clearly hateful, referring to black suspects as “toads” if not worse.

The police, the film seems to argue, are imperfect and set in their ways (particularly in how they shelter and protect bad officers), but are integral to disrupting terrorism. Stallworth and his task force use cleverness and audacity and a lot of luck to infiltrate the Klan. The most interesting relationship in the film is not the romantic entanglement between Ron and a young anti-racist organizer named Patrice (Laura Harrier) but the relationship between Washington and Driver. It is revealed that Flip is Jewish, which, as Ron admonishes him, gives him “Skin in the game.” In the same way Ron’s elocution skills allow him to pass for white over the phone, Flip’s estrangement from his Jewishness has allowed him to coast as an officer without thinking much about the kind of hate the undercover operation has now ensconced him in.

When it becomes clear the local Klan chapter is planning a terrorist attack upon local black activists, Stallworth and his men must scramble to thwart the attack. All the while, Stallworth has also had a phone relationship with none other than David Duke, who is played with exquisite clownishness by Topher Grace. Grace never goes over the top but gives Duke a kind of pencil-neck aplomb that amounts to as perfect a lampooning of racism I can recall in a motion picture. “You’re darned tootin’,” Duke says over the phone, as if he were some sort of even more reprehensible version of Jerry Lundegaard.

As Stallworth carries on his telephonic friendship with Duke, he finds that the former “Grand Wizard” has dubbed himself the “National Director” of the Klan to make himself seem more mainstream. A key plot point has to do with Driver’s undercover “white Ron Stallworth” waiting to receive his Klan membership card in the mail. The members, hilariously, are sticklers for this. One must have his membership card in hand before one may participate in cross burnings and the like. The real, black Ron makes a call to the clueless Duke, who helpfully expedites the card’s arrival. We realize then that the Klan’s entire bureaucracy consists only of the sad little man Duke sitting in his office. “I can always tell a white man’s voice from a black man’s” Duke says. It could be a Mel Brooks sketch.

Ironically, the closer BlacKkKlansman gets to its violent climax the less riveting it becomes. The first half, in which the logistics and subterfuge of Stallworth’s operation is laid out in detail, is as watchable as any stretch of film I’ve seen this year. Lee’s film leans into serious points about what real lawlessness looks like and what its consequences are. The moments in which Lee explicitly connects the narrative to contemporary concerns are at once seemingly unnecessary and, well, quintessentially Spike Lee. It’s difficult to blame a veteran filmmaker for being himself.

BlacKkKlansman‘s coda includes footage of last year’s Charlottesville riots, in which a white anti-racism activist, Heather Heyer, was killed. The film is, in effect, dedicated to her. Footage of David Duke, filmed around the same time, sees the man himself endorsing Trump, and in doing so, providing the most forceful rebuke possible to the idea that Spike Lee sometimes lays it on too thick.

BlacKkKlansman — FOUR STARS

Directed by Spike Lee

Rated R

Focus Features

135 min.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Crafted to stay one step ahead of the crazy fans while simultaneously supplying them black-tar one-hundred percent pure good stuff they crave, The Last Jedi (the eighth episode of the main series of Star Wars movies) is transfixing, beautiful, and wildly uneven in its consumption of time. The movie, directed by  Rian Johnson, is most eloquent when it is wordless. When people are talking, they’re talking fast, shooting information at you, information you don’t need to know to understand what’s happening — for example, at one point they’re trying to destroy a big cannon thing-y — but we get the details nonetheless because of the population of people, grown men most of them, who are going to roast Johnson for years to come if they’re not told precisely how those shield generators were disabled.

Therein lies the difficulty of making one of these movies: they’re not normal movies. As I wrote with respect to The Force Awakens, these directors are playing a perilous game of managing expectations and safeguarding what is to some a secular religion. Johnson, who also wrote the screenplay, spins the plates admirably, finding the visual poetry in images Abrams found merely cool.

Three main story threads are shuffled for most of the two-and-a-half hours of The Last Jedi, but they all revolve around the same dramatic situation: stopping the First Order, which is the latest iteration of The Empire. General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) leads the Resistance during an opening space battle scene in which the evil General Hux (Domhall Gleeson) is attempting to block an evacuation. The battle of TIE fighters, star destroyers, and bombers is meant to wow us, but Johnson uses them in service of personal character moments. Amid the explosions, we always get a close up of someone feeling feelings. A resistance bomber pilot’s self sacrifice, Kylo Ren’s (Adam Driver) moral choice to not kill a certain someone from his fighter — these are what Johnson builds the action toward. Johnson, whose prior films include Looper and Brick, is all about the emotional payoff. In genre films, characters act out their feelings rather than discuss them. In Johnson’s genre experiments, they do both.

Of course, you’re wondering what of Rey and Luke Skywalker? When last we left our heroes, Rey (Daisy Ridley) was presenting Master Skywalker (Mark Hamill) with his light saber. At every turn, Johnson sees it as his duty to outsmart the fans who are trying to outsmart his film. The moment of Luke’s reaction to Rey has been built up, the tone even having been established by the solemn ending of the prior movie. Johnson immediately undercuts it. (To his credit, the humor in the film, which is ample, doesn’t feel like a string of punch-up jokes but rather arise organically from the scenes.) The Empire Strikes Back storyline lives — as the good guys attempt to defeat the dark force in the galaxy, a powerful but untrained young Force user seeks the help of a legendary old Jedi. Johnson doesn’t make as much use of Rey and Luke’s time together on Ahch-To (that’s the island). If anything, their time together suggests she didn’t really need to seek out Luke as much as she thought.

What Johnson has wrought is a complicated movie cluttered with dangling threads and new bright-eyed characters. Things get a bit crowded in the middle of the picture, when Finn (John Boyega) and Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) report to a Las Vegas-type planet to find a code-breaker who can disable the First Order’s tracking systems. We cut back and forth from there to Poe (Oscar Isaac) attempting to wrest control of the Resistance strategy from Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) to Rey and Luke’s bickering. This all happens while through a Force-powered Jedi mind meld, Rey and Kylo Ren are able to communicate telepathically. It’s a lot to take in. Johnson’s dialogue moves fast, contains lots of details, and knows you can’t keep up. You don’t need to. The nuts and bolts of what people are discussing is never as important as what people are doing (a stark contrast to George Lucas’ prequel trilogy).

The film is at its best when everyone shuts up and Johnson and cinematographer Steve Yedlin mine the territory of the Star Wars universe for beauty. Ships traveling at light speed is not just a gimmick here — it’s a single image that elicits oohs and aahs. Likewise, Supreme Leader Snoke’s (Andy Serkis) throne room is one of the most arresting feats of production design I’ve seen this year. The red guards, who in the original trilogy might as well have been mannequins, are now militarized and imposing; they seem to glare even as their faces are hidden. Johnson borrows from both Kurosawa and Irvin Kershner to create the effect. A final showdown between heroes lands as satisfying and surprising, with Johnson pulling out one more bit of plot trickery to fool the experts coming to the theater dressed as Sith Lords.

What will go under-discussed as The Last Jedi is digested by the masses is the extent to which Johnson has managed to coax intimate and relatively restrained performances from his leads. Daisy Ridley, who in the prior film must’ve felt the weight of the world on her shoulders, here seems more relaxed, poised. Adam Driver, an ungainly leading man if ever there was one, is likewise more comfortable — and more believable as a murderous villain who is conflicted about being conflicted. And as for Mark Hamill, Johnson gets the most out of the sixty-six year-old by using him sparingly, understanding that it’s Hamill’s mere presence in the film that has the desired effect, not what he does. (Hamill has always been a good sport; he is more charismatic when playing “Mark Hamill” than he ever was as an actor.) Carrie Fisher’s character, Leia, unconscious, flying through open space, will have a similar effect on audiences.

The jumble of delights and thrills that is The Last Jedi ends up being memorable in an almost predictable way — as in, here’s what happens when you let a young hotshot auteur have his way with a Disney film. And Johnson does have his way. There is a light saber battle in the film that is so handsome looking it transcends the genre of “light saber battle.” One wishes Johnson’s flair for the letting an arresting image speak for itself were conjoined with a skill for being less wordy in dialogue, but then again enjoying these films requires trade-offs, both on the part of the filmmaker and on the part of his audience. We trade a plot contrivance for a little dopamine jolt for nostalgia here, or a light saber fight there. And these films often, at this point, don’t have themes that aren’t already inherent in earlier films in the franchise, but we go along anyway. This one has a new theme that is essentially an invitation to the fans: loosen your grip on the past.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi — FOUR STARS

Directed by Rian Johnson

Rated PG-13

LucasFilm

Disney

152 min.

Logan Lucky

Steven Soderbergh’s recent projects, Behind the Candelabra and the masterful television show The Knick were fresher than the recently un-retired director’s new feature, Logan Lucky, which for all its technical pizzazz feels like Soderbergh mining old territory. The Liberace biopic and the deliciously brooding turn-of-the-century medical drama had the flavor of a veteran director, an undeniable whiz kid of editing and cinematography, maturing into new forms rather than backsliding into the familiar.

Which is not to say Logan Lucky isn’t fun. It is a devilishly constructed heist picture with charismatic stars, endearing characters, and more twists than a pack of Twizzlers.  Channing Tatum stars as Jimmy Logan, a West Virginia laborer who represents the embodiment of the simple country man. Soderbergh, whose wife Jules Asner is said to have written the screenplay under the pseudonym “Rebecca Blunt,” makes exposition dumps at least charming. The film opens with salt-of-the-Earth Jimmy tinkering with his F-150 while his daughter (Farrah Mackenzie) hands him tools. Their banter supplies what we’ll need later — mommy (Katie Holmes) has full custody with Jimmy having visitation, and the only thing Jimmy thinks cell phones are good for is taking pictures of his kid. Tatum and Mackenzie (a wonderful child actor) make the information delivery dialogue look effortless. Yet all Jimmy’s problems seem like they could be solved without pulling off an elaborate heist.

Together with his siblings, Clyde (Adam Driver) and Mellie (Riley Keogh), Jimmy, after losing his job, sets about orchestrating his Big Score. Formerly he had worked underneath the Charlotte Motor Speedway repairing landfill-caused sinkholes. The gig gave him keen knowledge of how the speedway vaults its cash (it involves a series of computerized pneumatic tubes that rocket wads of money into a central vault). The money, it seems, will allow him to see his kid with greater ease and remove some kind of family curse. It’s a stroke of perhaps ill-advised realism that the criminals’ motives seem inchoate, half-thought-out.

The siblings need a guy who has the know-how to blow the vault open during the biggest race of the year. They know only one man who can do this, Daniel Craig’s Joe Bang. So they have to bust him out of prison, then sneak him back in. To effectuate this, Clyde gets arrested and prosecuted and incarcerated in the selfsame prison as Bang. They’ll bust out together, then bust back in when the heist is done. Bang has two ne’er-do-well brothers whose help is also enlisted. You getting all this?

What makes the movie enjoyable is that these contrivances move by at a rapid clip. The characters speak rapidly and act decisively. Often their backwoods manner of speaking makes the dialogue difficult to hear. So much the better. The film doesn’t waste your time. Jimmy mentions Joe Bang and, well, bang — cut to the brothers visiting Bang in prison. This makes the thinness of the characters and the unimaginative motives of the hero more forgivable. Soderbergh is only interested in his characters’ inner lives insofar as a want or desire can get someone off the couch. And thank goodness for that. One probably wouldn’t want to watch a heist film in which the characters sit around interpreting each other’s dreams (Inception notwithstanding).

As the machinations of the robbery fly by — there are all the requisite surprises, mishaps, and close-calls, all of which are foretold by a list of things to keep in mind when robbing a bank that Jimmy magnets to his fridge — it’s clear Soderbergh sees this tale as an examination of class and our received ideas about red state America. The brothers are regularly borne back ceaselessly into the past that shaped them. Clyde is missing a hand from his service in the Iraq war. Joe Bang stashed some cash once, but his no-good ex-wife stole it and ran off with a trucker. Jimmy barely remembers a girl he’d kissed in high school (Katherine Waterston), back when he was a star quarterback, when life was set out before him and he could kiss a pretty girl and forget about it. Everyone got here somehow. The American south and its stereotypes, the trucker hats and NASCAR and “hillbilly” affectations, got here somehow.

What’s most interesting about the film is that it’s another example of how Soderbergh’s penchant for clever casting yields appealing results. Daniel Craig as a jailbird bomb expert is surprisingly apt. But it’s Channing Tatum who continues to impress me with his ability to do very little, just enough, as an actor. Here his surrounded by actors swinging for the fences, but his presence as the film’s star is steady, simple, naturalistic. Where the other characters seem variations on a single stereotype, Tatum’s Jimmy feels totally real, a brainy risk taker who is almost embarrassed by his own intelligence.

Soderbergh is a master of framing, staging exquisite compositions that you never catch him composing. Although Logan Lucky is not a great film, it’s the kind of grace note in a career that was clearly crafted by the master. Soderbergh just knows how and when to move the camera. In an era of flashy, disorienting action-movie quick cutting, Soderbergh lets us see the action. When the camera is locked down, he lets us see the actors’ whole bodies, the whole performance. When the camera swishes and swoops and dollys, it’s because something is happening. The technical prowess is undeniable. Even as the film ends on a strange, unsatisfying note — one too many pirouettes, as I sometimes say — it’s nice to have been brought there by someone who actually knows what he’s doing.

Logan Lucky — THREE STARS 

Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Rated PG-13. Bleecker Street. Fingerprint Releasing. 119 min.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” tracks so closely with the storyline of the original “Star Wars” movie that the two feel like long lost twins. Director J.J. Abrams wisely deputized Lawrence Kasdan, who worked on the scripts for “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi,”and Michael Arndt as co-screenwriters. Thus “The Force Awakens” plays at once as a sweet memory a fresh discovery.

Of the many elements George Lucas’ ill-advised prequel trilogy botched, the basic story was paramount. Obsessed by the actually-kind-of-boring notion of “What if we saw Darth Vader as a child?” the prequels unfolded as a kind of elongated nightmare for fans. The films were rife with poor pacing, laughable dialogue, and maddening “retcons” (ask your local Star Wars fanatic for a brief treatise on midicholorians; it won’t be brief). The prequels didn’t feel like “Star Wars.”

And that’s where the franchise left it a decade ago with “Revenge of the Sith.” Anakin had become Darth Vader. The two trilogies formed a lop-sided novel. Imagine if Melville got drunk and wrote about Ahab’s childhood.

Eneter Abrams, a man for whom the “Star Wars” saga is, essentially, his “Moby-Dick.” Handed Episode VII, his mandate was simple: Don’t screw it up, brother. Abrams vowed to rely on practical effects, jettisoning the CGI artificiality of the prequels, and to bring back beloved characters. For the first time in a long time, the fans were optimistic.

Thus Abrams had a lot of boxes to check. Evoke the scope and tone of the “Star Wars” we love; revive old, beloved characters; continue the saga in a believable way; don’t screw up.

What Abrams has produced is a fascinating work of American cinema, both as a piece of pop culture myth-making and as a movie in its own right. Viewing “The Force Awakens,” one has the sense of a seasoned trial lawyer arguing his final summation before a skeptical jury — the attorney must navigate a minefield, with each utterance being a potentially fatal misstep, and, above all, he must make the jury buy what he’s selling.

How does a filmmaker give the public what it wants while giving the public something new, something it didn’t know it wanted? In many ways, this is the question at the heart of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking. There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia and so-called “fan service” so long as it’s done artfully (e.g., Ryan Coogler’s “Creed”).

Some years after the Rebel victory that destroyed the Empire and its Death Star (watch the original trilogy), the galaxy is once again in turmoil. A new threat known as The First Order has emerged, led by Vader fanboy Kylo Ren (the miscast but admirable Adam Driver). The familiar opening crawl tells us that Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) has disappeared (!), and Princess/General Leia (Carrie Fisher) is looking for him, just as she sought the help of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original film. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems appears to be a settled issue.

There’s a difference between a story structure and a story formula. Abrams, with his confident non-anxiety of influence, is keenly aware of this difference. Abrams’ film is dominated by the plights of new heroes. The search for Luke and the quest to defeat The First Order is led by Rey (Daisy Ridley), a lowly scavenger on a desert planet who may well have an important lineage, and Finn (Jon Boyega), a young man who begins the film as a Storm Trooper seeking a kind of conscientious objector status. Early scenes evoke the majesty of adventures past while underscoring the fact that those adventures happened in the past. The film’s most beautiful shot is simply one of the Empire’s familiar star destroyers, now a pathetic wreckage lodged in sand, being picked apart for its scrap metal.

As actors, Ridley and Boyega are both as big as the environments they inhabit. With the exception of Driver (and Hayden Christiansen, for that matter), every actor appears to fit snug into what the film envisions for them. Fisher’s turn here is downright poetic in its restraint. In a movie such as this the characters of Star Wars past can be jazz musicians, relying, as the trite expression goes, on the notes they don’t play. And for the first time in years, Harrison Ford is well caffeinated and making an effort. The 73 year-old has always protested too much. He loves playing the now gray-haired Han Solo.

“The Force Awakens” is both a marvel and a masterpiece of sorts. Abarams evenly cooks together John Williams’ score, energetic performances, and tastefully integrated VFX into a space fantasy adventure that truly does feel like a continuation of the “Star Wars” saga.

There are missteps, of course. The second act is extremely poorly paced in the spots that should be the snappiest, and Han Solo’s catwalk confrontation with Kylo needed one more script pass. Likewise, the third act is too pat, almost half thought out. These snags invert the prequels’ pattern. Abrams got the big stuff right and a few little things wrong, not vice-versa.

Mr. Abrams has not re-invented the wheel. There is no cinematic innovation to be found in “The Force Awakens,” just as there’s no major innovations to be found in the Rogers-Astaire films. This kind of movie is a pre-fabricated product shaped by audience expectations. Is “Shall We Dance” all that different from “Top Hat”? Did it need to be? Or did we just want to see two perfectly matched performers dance through a thin plot? Does this stop “Swing Time” from being a truly great film?

Or put differently, if McDonald’s adds a new sandwich to its menu, we want it to taste a little different, but we also want it to taste like McDonald’s.

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” — FOUR STARS

Directed by J.J. Abrams. Rated PG-13. Lucasfilm, Bad Robot Productions. 135 min.