a review of 芝拉克

February: 15/28 Here's another one that I'd been curious about for a while: Spike Lee's retelling of "Lysistrata" set in modern-day Chicago had me 100% on board for roughly the first 45 minutes, which borrows cannily from sources like "The Warriors" and "Dolemite" to spin a modern myth from the problem of gang violence. The way in which Lee also laced in the real-world touchstones of Trayvon Martin and Black Lives Matter was also pushing all the right buttons for me. But roughly an hour in, it became impossible to ignore the severe swings in tone between extreme melodrama and hamfisted satire, which kind of muddled and trivialized the message. There's a lot of frankly very silly, lowbrow stuff here that doesn't do a lot to develop the themes of the film, and as a result we have long stretches where our main protagonists (Lysistrata and her all-woman army) and antagonists (Nick Cannon and Wesley Snipes as rival gang leaders) barely even interact with each other. There's a lot here to recommend, but it doesn't quite hold together as a coherent statement.