Teyona Parris in Chi-raqCHI-RAQ

Last month, Spike Lee received an honorary Oscar at the 2015 Governors Awards ceremony. It was an earned and long-overdue recognition, especially given that, for many of us, the writer/director's Do the Right Thing should've made him an Academy Award winner more than a quarter-century ago. (Then and now, Driving Miss Daisy notwithstanding, Do the Right Thing remains the true Best Picture of 1989.) But while Lee's statuette may have been late in coming, I can't help but think that the timing of its arrival could hardly be better. His new film Chi-raq, after all, is nowhere to be found in this year's Oscar conversation. Yet its creator deserves trophies and more for this gut-wrenching, hilarious, deeply profound satire that's stronger than at least 95 percent of the year's more-likely awards candidates - and maybe riskier than 100 percent of them.

Consider the opening five minutes alone. The first image we see is a red, white, and blue graphic of a United States map that proves to be composed entirely of weaponry - handguns, machine guns, and the like. Then come the statistics: 2,349 American deaths in the war in Afghanistan; 4,424 American deaths in the war in Iraq; 7,356 homicides in Chicago from 2001 to 2015. Then a powerfully sad and bitter rap number, "Pray 4 My City," delivered in its entirety by performer and Chi-raq co-star Nick Cannon, his presence bypassed in favor of the song's capitalized lyrics pulsing, in crimson lettering, against a black screen. Then the interior of a Windy City hip-hop club, where the emcee waves his arms in front of the glow-stick-waving clientele until the concert-goers abruptly freeze in a still frame. And then the emcee turns around, and faces the camera, and it's Samuel L. Jackson. Speaking to us directly. In verse.

This Greek-chorus figure explains that we're about to witness an update on Aristophanes' 411 BCE comedy Lysistrata, and as Jackson's Dolmedes informs/reminds us, "In the style of his time / Aristophanes made that shit rhyme!" So, we're promised, will much of Chi-raq. And if you haven't already been put off by the polemical imagery and stats, the profane lyrics, and the busting of the fourth wall, this news that you're also in for two hours of frequently rhyming couplets might be enough to have you searching for the auditorium's nearest exit sign. (The movie is currently playing at Iowa City's FilmScene.) Yet I urge you to simply sit back and go with the flow. Because while events are going to get even odder and ballsier with musical numbers, split-screen effects, a Patton parody, John Cusack preaching to an all-black congregation, and Twin Peaks' David Patrick Kelly humping a Civil War cannon in Confederate-flag underwear, you're definitely not going to forget Chi-raq. If you respond to the movie as I did, you also won't want to.

Nick Cannon in Chi-raqLike all ancient-Greek classics, Lysistrata's story is deceptively simple: In the hopes of ending the Peloponnesian War, the titular heroine convinces the women of Greece to refrain from sex until their country's men have agreed to make peace. (Complications, as you'd imagine, ensue.) This narrative is so simple that it's easily transplanted to modern-day Chicago, where, in Lee's and co-writer Kevin Willmott's telling, Lysistrata (Teyona Parris) hopes to end the gang war between the purple-clad Spartans and orange-clad Trojans by enlisting her gal pals in what Friends famously termed a "penis embargo." Yet as in its Aristophanes forebear, Chi-raq's situational threat quickly escalates. While the men initially scoff at her plan, Lysistrata and her allies prove their might first by recruiting even Chicago's hookers and phone-sex operators to the cause of abstinence, and then by infiltrating and taking over the General Richard L. Jones Armory - doing so, it should be noted, unarmed. (Horny guys are so easily manipulated.) News footage, however, reveals that Lysistrata's city-wide movement also gains national and even international traction. Before long, women are protesting in the streets of Brooklyn and Paris and Tokyo, and the universal rallying cry of "No peace, no p----!" demands an end to the senseless violence plaguing the entire planet.

Much of this is clearly farcical stuff, and Chi-raq finds its director staging some of his most enjoyable comedy in years: the lame-brained "think tank" session at the mayor's office, with staffer Oedipus (Wade F. Wilson) fretful about the strike's effect on his mommy; Lee's Jungle Fever star Wesley Snipes, as the eyepatch-sporting Trojan leader Cyclops, giggling at jokes that only he finds funny; the high dudgeon of Dave Chappelle's strip-club owner when complaining that "no one's on the pole." Meanwhile, every single one of Jackson's appearances is a delight. Riffing on his Mister Señor Love Daddy persona from Do the Right Thing, Jackson routinely pops up in flashy suits for exposition or gleefully vulgar color commentary, and his thrillingly mellifluous deliveries of Lee's and Willmott's tongue-twisters may constitute the actor's finest, freshest readings of the millennium.

Angela Bassett in Chi-raqYet for each segment that makes you laugh, there's another that, either subtly or with startling force, gnaws at your gut. (Astute, piercing references to Sandy Hook and Charleston and this year's July 4 shootings in Chicago boil the blood but don't feel merely tossed in for shock value.) One of the film's major subplots concerns the accidental killing of a neighborhood 11-year-old - a potentially melodramatic, manipulative detour from the Lysistrata blueprint that could've easily, unpleasantly, upended the movie's design. The emotionalism provided by this storyline, though, makes it absolutely essential, particularly in regard to Lee's obvious hope that we leave Chi-raq at least a little bit thunderously pissed off. Watching Jennifer Hudson, as the deceased child's mother, trying in vain to mop her daughter's blood off the sidewalk is a staggering, wordless heartbreaker. On the other end of the emotive spectrum, you have Cusack's inner-city minister sermonizing on the girl's death and our too-easy access to guns, and working himself into such a fiery state of righteous indignation and anger that he practically loses his voice ... and handily quells any doubts you might've had about the actor's casting. (Parishioners frequently interrupt the minister's sermon with exclamations of "Speak the truth!" and "Amen!", and when Cusack talked about how gun-control laws won't ever change "because politicians are in the pocket of the National Rifle Association," a patron at my FilmScene screening applauded.)

Lee, however, fills Chi-raq with equally devastating moments, many of them courtesy of Angela Bassett, whose natural imperiousness and almost unparalleled fierceness haven't been employed this advantageously since her Tina Turner in 1993's What's Love Got to Do with It. (With her first three perfectly elocuted words as Lysistrata's neighbor Miss Helen, I immediately began thinking of all the classical-Greek powerhouses - Medea, Hecuba, Clytemnestra - I'm now aching to see Bassett play.) And amidst a stellar cast boasting Steve Harris, D.B. Sweeney, and those marvelous Spike-Lee-joint regulars Harry Lennix, Thomas Jefferson Byrd, and Roger Guenveur Smith, Teyonah Parris is utterly incandescent, so funny, soulful, sexy, and gloriously incensed that her Lysistrata would've made the film work under far less harmonious circumstances. But harmony - of substance, of wildly varying styles, and, principally, of community - is what Lee's blistering, riotous, magical achievement is expressly about. The film leaves you overwhelmed, to be sure. Yet by its gorgeously big-hearted finale, you may also find yourself feeling unexpectedly hopeful. While our collective future may, on most days, look irredeemably grim, Chi-raq reminds you that, even within the darkness, there are precious, potent pockets of light.

 

Chris Hemsworth in In the Heart of the SeaIN THE HEART OF THE SEA

This is in no way the fault of director Ron Howard's latest, but after devoting so much enthusiasm, and so many words, to the Chi-raq experience, I hardly feel like discussing In the Heart of the Sea at all. Then again, I didn't feel like discussing this watery opus the moment its end credits rolled, either; Howard's heavy-spirited action adventure is too dully serviceable to get excited about, and too dully serviceable to get in a lather about. It just sits - or, rather, floats - there. Most of the film is dedicated to the true events that purportedly inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick, with Chris Hemsworth's hearty seafarer and his artfully mussed hair tangling with an unqualified ship captain (Benjamin Walker) and a really, really big whale before he and fellow sailors find themselves stranded on an uninhabited island. A lesser, far more irritating section of the movie finds Melville himself (Ben Whishaw) being told this tale, many decades after the fact, by one of its survivors (Brendan Gleeson) - an intrusive, unconvincing framing device that constantly impedes whatever momentum might have been building with Thor and company. And there you have it: In the Heart of the Sea is basically Jaws (more accurately Orca) meets Cast Away meets the lifeboat scenes from Unbroken, all tied together with a ribbon of pure Forrest Gump.

Some of the aquatic CGI effects are pretty cool, and the destructive whale, in particular, is an impressive effect; I'd argue that there's more genuine emotion in its baleful gaze than there is is Hemsworth's. (The whale suggests that he's staring at a person, while Hemsworth appears to be staring solely at a green screen.) The production design is appropriately grubby and lived-in. And I was happy to see some of the actors. Cillian Murphy can never really be around enough, and there are decent-sized roles for Game of Thrones' Michelle Fairlay and The Impossible's teen talent (and our latest Spider-Man-to-be) Tom Holland. Yet given Anthony Dod Mantle's murky cinematography and the overall defeatist presentation - more jokes early on would've certainly helped matters - a glum, depressive air hangs over even the most theoretically rousing encounters. By the time we get to the awkward moralizing of the finale, its anachronistic pro-environment message tacked on with sledgehammer subtlety, all the nominal fun of the oceanic man-versus-nature battles has been long forgotten. In the Heart of the Sea isn't an embarrassment, but sadly, it also isn't much of anything else.

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