Roger Friedman, Showbiz 411, May 14, 2018

Spike Lee’s “Blackkklansman” just premiered in Cannes. It’s his most controversial film yet, brilliant in its telling of a true story from the 70s and tying it to Trump and Charlottesville. Starring John David Washington and Adam Driver, “Blackkklansman” is Lee’s best movie also.

It will be most incendiary as well. What Lee has done here is make a movie of a book, a memoir from the early 70s of a black cop in Colorado Springs, Colorado who infiltrated the KKK in a kind of Cyrano way — he used a white cop to meet with the hooded white supremacists but he, Ron Stallworth, spoke to them by phone and convinced them of his hatred for blacks and Jews.

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Lee shot the movie before the events in Charlottesville, Virginia last year. It was done. Perhaps it ended with a shot of JDW and Harrier going into the future together with a signature Spike Lee “glide.” That would have been a good movie. But now the “glide” segues into footage from Charlottesville. The movie gains a “Schindler’s List” moment as Lee flashes forward to racism in our time. (“SL” ended with real life Holocaust victims and their families paying their respects to Oskar Schindler decades later.)

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Is this an Oscar contender? Certainly a Best Picture nominee, Best Director, screenplay and multiple acting noms will be coming its way. {snip}