Jason says: “Every
once in a while, I’ll be watching a movie, think something clever, and
then have the clever sucked out when that thing is just stated plainly.
In this case, it’s thinking that it would be neat to see Teyonah Parris
in something where she gets to be full-on Pam Grier, only to have
Samuel L. Jackson’s chorus/narrator name-drop COFFY and FOXY BROWN in
describing her character a few minutes later. Still hope it happens,
though; she would crush that.
“She’s pretty terrific here, especially given that this is as odd as
anything Spike Lee has been doing in recent years, meaning her dialogue
(like everybody’s, mostly) is in rhyme because Lee is transposing a
satirical play by ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes to present-day
Chicago, whose murder rate rivals the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She’s charismatic as heck, though, as Lysistrata, a gang-banger’s girl
who, shaken by the sight of an eight-year-old girl gunned down in the
street, teams with her boyfriend’s rival’s lady to start a movement to
deny men sex until the fighting stops (with the delightfully tacky
motto ‘no peace, no pussy!’). She occasionally wavers, but so does most
everybody in the cast – including Wesley Snipes, John Cusack, Jennifer
Hudson, and Nick Cannon – at some point, although it’s less their
failure than Lee being kind of all over the place with his ideas.
“That’s no bad thing; Lee may swerve from strange comedy to forthright
preaching, but both work because they come from the heart, and if they
are fantasies, they are so plaintively stated that you can’t exactly
consider him delusional for positing some near-fantastical situations.
The film can also be too eccentric for its own good at times, leaving
the viewer wondering if Lee is trying to entertain, educate, or show
off, but when it’s on, it’s devastatingly funny and heartfelt. 4 cats
“Seen 14 December 2015 at AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)” |
