“People say it’s the white man I should fear / But it’s my own kind doin’ all the killin’ here.” Tupac Shakur, “Only God Can Judge Me”
“Women have all of the power because women have all the vaginas.” Dave Attell, comedian
Spike Lee’s latest film, Chi-Raq, is a re-telling of a classic Greek play by Aristophanes, Lysistrata. The original (which I read last week in preparation for viewing this film) tells the story of Greek women banding together to stop the Peloponnesian War by withholding sex from their men until the fighting has ceased. Chi-Raq is adapted to present-day Chicago, one of America’s most violent cities and earning its title here because there have been more murders in that city than deaths in the Iraq War over the last dozen or so years.
The Spartans and the Trojans are rival gangs whose violence continues to escalate, and the murder of a young girl by a stray bullet provides the impetus for the city’s women to take action. Lysistrata (Teyonah Paris), the girlfriend of gang leader Chi (Nick Cannon), reaches out to the girlfriends from the other side and organizes a sexual strike with hopes of bringing peace to the city. The ladies’ influence ends up reaching to cities around the world, with women of all backgrounds uniting, much to the dismay of sexually frustrated boyfriends and husbands everywhere. With chants of “No Peace, No Piece” (and other more risqué iterations), the women are able to bridge the divide between warring gangs and bring hope for a safer and more prosperous future to the streets of Chicago.
Chi-Raq is one of the more enjoyable experiences I’ve had at the theater in a long time. I can honestly say that I haven’t anxiously waited to see what could possibly happen next this much while watching a film since last year’s Birdman. It has unparalleled energy, daring scene constructions, and a willingness to embrace ridiculousness that is both artistically admirable and fun to watch. It dares to use poetic verse as dialogue, has a Greek chorus (played by Samuel L. Jackson) speaking to the audience, and employs song and dance numbers. It has much of the dynamic camerawork indicative of Spike Lee, from sweeping overheads to powerful close-ups, as well as his reliance on music to support his story, including a rap opening that reminds us of Do The Right Thing. It is an explosion of rhetoric and emotion.
The lead actors are all solid, as are Jennifer Hudson and Angela Bassett as mourning mothers. John Cusack, as an activist preacher, however, borders on cringe-worthy as he often takes on a black dialect other lily-white celebrities and politicians have ignominiously attempted. I was most impressed with some forgotten supporting actors. Wesley Snipes, D.B. Sweeney, and Steve Harris are great. And a slightly pudgier Dave Chappelle cameos as a strip club owner whose women have abandoned him in one of the funniest scenes of the year.
However, as enjoyable as Chi-Raq is as a film experience, it is one of the most discombobulated and narratively sloppy works you will see on screen. It’s almost as if Lee attempted to cram so much social commentary and visual presentation into one film that it just ended up spilling all over the place and no one bothered to clean it up. For starters, Chi-Raq has a major problem with tone. The original Lysistrata was an obvious comedy, with exaggerated actions and props, and with the violence never occurring in front of the audience as the fighting took place in distant lands, there was a pragmatic distinction between the seriousness of war and the silliness of the stage. Chi-Raq constantly shifts between vivid violence and absurdist comedy, and while it is entertaining, it comes off as distracting rather than coherent. Lee may have intended such juxtaposition to remind viewers how intertwined such horrors are in our daily lives, but mothers crying over dead children alongside choreographed dance numbers and graphic sexual jokes just doesn’t work.
Lee’s genderism is also problematic here, and one wonders what today’s ladies will think of his portrayal of them. Aristophanes wrote his women as singularly stereotypical and even objectifying one another, but he did this in all likelihood to poke fun at them and slyly reinforce the patriarchy of ancient Greece. Lee also has one-dimensional women, constantly parading in sexy attire, even when there are no men around. While Lysistrata’s crew has taken over a military armory, completely sequestered from the rest of the town, they still wear the shortest, tightest, most revealing clothing imaginable. For whom are they wearing such ridiculous clothes? While the joke is that sex is all men think about, the ladies’ actions and attire demonstrate they must have a similar obsession. Therefore, aren’t they just as bad as the men they are condemning? This was, to a certain degree, Aristophanes’s point; but it is also Lee’s?
While the women overtake the armory, the Police Commissioner (a confused and funny Harry Lennix from NBC’s The Blacklist) calls the women thugs for their hostility. Lysistrata and her friends angrily shout back at him, “We are not thugs! We deserve respect!” Apparently oblivious to the fact that they have hi-jacked a government building and kidnapped and held hostage its inhabitants, the women strangely seek a moral high ground. If their goal is to eliminate violence, hasn’t their own violence just reflected everything their men are also doing? They are in this scene, indeed, thugs—just much hotter.
Furthermore, why so many single mothers? Isn’t this a stereotype that deserves to be addressed? The film’s premise of women being more guarded of their sexuality in order to incentivize a better quality of men is a valuable one. After all, today there are more women completing college than men; more men are out of the workforce than ever before. Much research has shown women are having a more difficult time finding educated, employed men to marry. Why are more men resorting to video games and fantasy football instead of responsible work and home life? The truth is, they don’t have to be respectable, because women still sleep with, date, and marry these infantilized men. Therefore, the film’s intent to show women taking ownership of their bodies and convincing men to change their ways is immensely useful. It just doesn’t go far enough, and eventually the film gets sidetracked in about a hundred different directions.
These directions often end up with the film’s problematic racial and economic rhetoric, both its inconsistency and its inaccuracy. The foundation of the film is its exploration of black-on-black crime, as indicated by the film’s opening dialogue. Yet, as one would imagine, Lee can’t help but include various rants about white violence and discrimination. There are also several diatribes about poverty and economic opportunity, disregarding mountains of evidence that show that, though the two are often correlated, poverty doesn’t cause crime. (Many of our nation’s harshest economic times saw crime decrease, while many of its booms saw crime spike.) It’s also hard to blame poverty in the film when every major character is head-to-toe in gold jewelry, the guys all wear $200 Nikes, Lysistrata carries Coach luggage and talks on her $500 iPhone, and the ladies all have their hair in new and immaculate styles in every scene. The characters can also afford to lounge the days away smoking weed. Most of us regular middle-class folks can’t afford any of these expensive things.
The narrative chaos comes to a zenith as the final act of the film shows a truce between the gangs, along with assistance from the city government to invest in housing, schooling, and medical facilities for the city. Sure, because government housing projects, public schools, and VA hospitals have always been the standards of efficiency and excellence, amiright? Lee’s final statement here completely undercuts the entire message of the film, that individuals can make decisions and take actions to affect behavior and change a culture. The film’s conclusion implies that what the women have done is nice and all, but no real changes can happen unless government (i.e. males, as all political positions of power are played by men) intervenes. Worse yet for Lee’s polemics, Chicago has been run by the same political party for last 85 consecutive years. Yes, 85 years. I’ll let you Google which party has let Chicago become what it is. Sigh.
I had high hopes for this film, one that could’ve presented a creative way to address society’s sexual, cultural, and legal problems. Alas, Lee can’t keep focused enough for that. Lee, inexplicably, even chooses to take a quick shot at Dr. Ben Carson. Now, I’m no supporter of Carson’s presidential bid, but one would think the man’s escape from poverty, embrace of education, and mission of saving children’s lives as a world-renowned neurosurgeon would be worthy enough for a director to leave him out of a film commentary on America’s problems. But Lee’s demagoguery just won’t let him. Lee has always had a gifted eye behind the camera. If only his logic were as keen.
Viewers beware: Chi-raq is VERY R-rated, so if sexual content and heavy language make you squeamish, you should probably steer clear. If you are interested in seeing one of the most glorious messes on film this year, check it out.
Ambition and entertainment grade: A
Muddled social message grade: D
“Women have all of the power because women have all the vaginas.” Dave Attell, comedian
Spike Lee’s latest film, Chi-Raq, is a re-telling of a classic Greek play by Aristophanes, Lysistrata. The original (which I read last week in preparation for viewing this film) tells the story of Greek women banding together to stop the Peloponnesian War by withholding sex from their men until the fighting has ceased. Chi-Raq is adapted to present-day Chicago, one of America’s most violent cities and earning its title here because there have been more murders in that city than deaths in the Iraq War over the last dozen or so years.
The Spartans and the Trojans are rival gangs whose violence continues to escalate, and the murder of a young girl by a stray bullet provides the impetus for the city’s women to take action. Lysistrata (Teyonah Paris), the girlfriend of gang leader Chi (Nick Cannon), reaches out to the girlfriends from the other side and organizes a sexual strike with hopes of bringing peace to the city. The ladies’ influence ends up reaching to cities around the world, with women of all backgrounds uniting, much to the dismay of sexually frustrated boyfriends and husbands everywhere. With chants of “No Peace, No Piece” (and other more risqué iterations), the women are able to bridge the divide between warring gangs and bring hope for a safer and more prosperous future to the streets of Chicago.
Chi-Raq is one of the more enjoyable experiences I’ve had at the theater in a long time. I can honestly say that I haven’t anxiously waited to see what could possibly happen next this much while watching a film since last year’s Birdman. It has unparalleled energy, daring scene constructions, and a willingness to embrace ridiculousness that is both artistically admirable and fun to watch. It dares to use poetic verse as dialogue, has a Greek chorus (played by Samuel L. Jackson) speaking to the audience, and employs song and dance numbers. It has much of the dynamic camerawork indicative of Spike Lee, from sweeping overheads to powerful close-ups, as well as his reliance on music to support his story, including a rap opening that reminds us of Do The Right Thing. It is an explosion of rhetoric and emotion.
The lead actors are all solid, as are Jennifer Hudson and Angela Bassett as mourning mothers. John Cusack, as an activist preacher, however, borders on cringe-worthy as he often takes on a black dialect other lily-white celebrities and politicians have ignominiously attempted. I was most impressed with some forgotten supporting actors. Wesley Snipes, D.B. Sweeney, and Steve Harris are great. And a slightly pudgier Dave Chappelle cameos as a strip club owner whose women have abandoned him in one of the funniest scenes of the year.
However, as enjoyable as Chi-Raq is as a film experience, it is one of the most discombobulated and narratively sloppy works you will see on screen. It’s almost as if Lee attempted to cram so much social commentary and visual presentation into one film that it just ended up spilling all over the place and no one bothered to clean it up. For starters, Chi-Raq has a major problem with tone. The original Lysistrata was an obvious comedy, with exaggerated actions and props, and with the violence never occurring in front of the audience as the fighting took place in distant lands, there was a pragmatic distinction between the seriousness of war and the silliness of the stage. Chi-Raq constantly shifts between vivid violence and absurdist comedy, and while it is entertaining, it comes off as distracting rather than coherent. Lee may have intended such juxtaposition to remind viewers how intertwined such horrors are in our daily lives, but mothers crying over dead children alongside choreographed dance numbers and graphic sexual jokes just doesn’t work.
Lee’s genderism is also problematic here, and one wonders what today’s ladies will think of his portrayal of them. Aristophanes wrote his women as singularly stereotypical and even objectifying one another, but he did this in all likelihood to poke fun at them and slyly reinforce the patriarchy of ancient Greece. Lee also has one-dimensional women, constantly parading in sexy attire, even when there are no men around. While Lysistrata’s crew has taken over a military armory, completely sequestered from the rest of the town, they still wear the shortest, tightest, most revealing clothing imaginable. For whom are they wearing such ridiculous clothes? While the joke is that sex is all men think about, the ladies’ actions and attire demonstrate they must have a similar obsession. Therefore, aren’t they just as bad as the men they are condemning? This was, to a certain degree, Aristophanes’s point; but it is also Lee’s?
While the women overtake the armory, the Police Commissioner (a confused and funny Harry Lennix from NBC’s The Blacklist) calls the women thugs for their hostility. Lysistrata and her friends angrily shout back at him, “We are not thugs! We deserve respect!” Apparently oblivious to the fact that they have hi-jacked a government building and kidnapped and held hostage its inhabitants, the women strangely seek a moral high ground. If their goal is to eliminate violence, hasn’t their own violence just reflected everything their men are also doing? They are in this scene, indeed, thugs—just much hotter.
Furthermore, why so many single mothers? Isn’t this a stereotype that deserves to be addressed? The film’s premise of women being more guarded of their sexuality in order to incentivize a better quality of men is a valuable one. After all, today there are more women completing college than men; more men are out of the workforce than ever before. Much research has shown women are having a more difficult time finding educated, employed men to marry. Why are more men resorting to video games and fantasy football instead of responsible work and home life? The truth is, they don’t have to be respectable, because women still sleep with, date, and marry these infantilized men. Therefore, the film’s intent to show women taking ownership of their bodies and convincing men to change their ways is immensely useful. It just doesn’t go far enough, and eventually the film gets sidetracked in about a hundred different directions.
These directions often end up with the film’s problematic racial and economic rhetoric, both its inconsistency and its inaccuracy. The foundation of the film is its exploration of black-on-black crime, as indicated by the film’s opening dialogue. Yet, as one would imagine, Lee can’t help but include various rants about white violence and discrimination. There are also several diatribes about poverty and economic opportunity, disregarding mountains of evidence that show that, though the two are often correlated, poverty doesn’t cause crime. (Many of our nation’s harshest economic times saw crime decrease, while many of its booms saw crime spike.) It’s also hard to blame poverty in the film when every major character is head-to-toe in gold jewelry, the guys all wear $200 Nikes, Lysistrata carries Coach luggage and talks on her $500 iPhone, and the ladies all have their hair in new and immaculate styles in every scene. The characters can also afford to lounge the days away smoking weed. Most of us regular middle-class folks can’t afford any of these expensive things.
The narrative chaos comes to a zenith as the final act of the film shows a truce between the gangs, along with assistance from the city government to invest in housing, schooling, and medical facilities for the city. Sure, because government housing projects, public schools, and VA hospitals have always been the standards of efficiency and excellence, amiright? Lee’s final statement here completely undercuts the entire message of the film, that individuals can make decisions and take actions to affect behavior and change a culture. The film’s conclusion implies that what the women have done is nice and all, but no real changes can happen unless government (i.e. males, as all political positions of power are played by men) intervenes. Worse yet for Lee’s polemics, Chicago has been run by the same political party for last 85 consecutive years. Yes, 85 years. I’ll let you Google which party has let Chicago become what it is. Sigh.
I had high hopes for this film, one that could’ve presented a creative way to address society’s sexual, cultural, and legal problems. Alas, Lee can’t keep focused enough for that. Lee, inexplicably, even chooses to take a quick shot at Dr. Ben Carson. Now, I’m no supporter of Carson’s presidential bid, but one would think the man’s escape from poverty, embrace of education, and mission of saving children’s lives as a world-renowned neurosurgeon would be worthy enough for a director to leave him out of a film commentary on America’s problems. But Lee’s demagoguery just won’t let him. Lee has always had a gifted eye behind the camera. If only his logic were as keen.
Viewers beware: Chi-raq is VERY R-rated, so if sexual content and heavy language make you squeamish, you should probably steer clear. If you are interested in seeing one of the most glorious messes on film this year, check it out.
Ambition and entertainment grade: A
Muddled social message grade: D