Hacker Cinema
BlacKkKlansman
2018 · Film · 136 min
Directed by Spike Lee
Colorado Springs, late 1970s. Ron Stallworth, an African American police officer, and Flip Zimmerman, his Jewish colleague, run an undercover operation to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.
3 positive4 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent just came out this year. The plot was a bit over the top, but that was the point, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. Blackkklansman came out the same year as this article, and even though it was more comedy drive then most action movies, it had a down to earth plot of a black policeman infiltrating the KKK organization.
I agree that most action movies today have a pretty seen-it-before grandiose plot. But movies with down-to-earth original plots still come out (occasionally).
Blackkklansman was a relatively big budged film starring popular actors and made by an established director back in 2018, Spike Lee, and oh boy did he take risks. Despite being a historic drama/comedy the movie ends with the horrors of the Trump presidency. Just like Mel Brooks, the message is pretty obvious. Despite these risks this movie was aired in most big cinemas throughout the USA for several weeks (just like any other big budged drama/comedy would).
Casting: I don’t remember a time when casting didn’t cause the hate mobs to go haywire. When Noma Dumezweni was cast as Hermione Granger people went nuts. Some historians raised issue with the fact that Xerxes II was acted by a black man in the movie 300 despite being Persian. And I’m sure casting a black man as Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar was equally controversial. Now in the era of people realizing how much representation matters, of course it is going to cause controversy if you hire an actor to play a role of a underrepresented group while the actor does not belong to said group. This didn’t used to be the case, but it is today. However this has such an obvious solution that I doubt it has hindered the production of a single movie.
> "It’s been a decade since any comedy launched a blockbuster franchise."
The times change. At one point hiring a white actor to play a black role did not stir a huge controversy, now it does. Franchises come into fashion, people get tired of them, creators move on. Just because comedy franchises aren’t big today, it doesn’t mean they are not possible. More likely is that people have seen enough sequels in other genres that they don’t want to see Baby Driver 2 no more then they like to see Dump and Dumber 5. And I think for a reason, comedy sequels tend to be pretty shitty (and I guess it makes sense, how often can you tell the same joke before it stops being funny).
I think you are over-reading into the twitter mobs. I don’t think they have as much power as you give them credit for. I think the biggest achievement of the twitter mob in the film industry was to give Sonic the Hedgehog a makeover. I don’t know of a single example where a comedy was cancelled because twitter didn’t like it. And I think comedies get made today just like they did yesteryear. And I think producers of comedies had to be careful about the subject matter before just like today. And I think they stirred controversies before, and they will continue to do so, irregardless of the political climate.
Booksmart was the first thing I thought of too when he said, “since 2012, the only successful comedies have been animations aimed at young children.” (edit: I mean to say, you can still see movies with originality even if they're not "successful" i.e. blockbusters)
In 2018 when I originally got AMC A-list subscription, I tried going to 3 movie a week at first, so I went to a lot more movies I was unsure about but they were very original and memorable, but they weren’t super popular (at least I was the only person I personally knew who had seen it).
Sorry to Bother You ($18 million)
Blackkklansman ($93 million)
Eighth Grade ($14 million)
Crazy Rich Asians ($238 million)
As for happy endings etc., this have always been a mainstay of Hollywood. In the Hollywood satire "The Player" from 1992 it is actually a plot point how a script without a happy ending cannot get produced. (And that movie itself have an improbable tacked-on happy-end to drive the point home.)
For fun I looked up the term "Hollywood Ending" ("a film ending of a conventional type, characterized as sentimental, simplistic, or melodramatic, and often featuring an improbably positive outcome; frequently in extended use."). The first example of this usage is from...1929.
So not exactly a recent development.
As for every movie being a "super-hero martial arts movie." - well this genre is certainly big at the moment, but by far isnt the only type of movie. If you look at the most recent Oscar awards, you will see movies like Roma, Vice, The Favourite, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book. These are mainstream Hollywood movies (almost by definition, this is what the Oscars awards) but there is still a span of genres and narrative styles. I don't see this as notably more homogenized than any other year.
And despite the hand-wringing over superheroes, I would like to point out that the "Marcel Cinematic Universe" is actually a pretty original concept in itself. Never before have such a complex shared universe and storyline unfolded over so many coordinated movies. I don't know if this is particularly worse than bygone Hollywood fads like westerns, sword-and-sandal epics, musicals etc.
But if you don't like superheroes there is still plenty of movies to choose from, since the overall number of movies released is steadily growing.
Check out Logan Lucky and BlackKklansman -- Driver definitely has more range than the Star Wars movie would have you believe.
> So you get popular and uncontroversial.
I agree with you, but I don't know if that's the right way to describe them. Looking in the top 10 I can see, to name a few, Moonlight, BlacKkKlansman and Get Out, all items that SHOULD be discussed. I think these also include movies that have a social message that critics agree need to be discussed.
Saw the movie Blackkklansman yesterday and in the new member induction scene, he is mentioned as a Klansman and a friend of the grand wizard. I got curious and did a lil research and sure enough...