One of my (many) frustrations with Blackkklansman was Spike using real, brutal footage of a woman's murder to close out the film, as if the point couldn't be made without it, and he opens this one with that. Then sort of splices in shots of real, dead, mutilated bodies throughout the movie when you're not expecting them. :( I get what he’s going for, but fuck it is just… not good. Sorry, I’m just truly not interested in seeing it.

This movie is carried on Delroy Lindo's back. And on Jonathan Majors' very jacked arms. It's always a little eye-rolly when movies insist on deeply incorporating Trump and Trump imagery in their films (and I feel VERY weird about the…

What a colossal disappointment. How does one go from making Blackklansman, a movie that subtly uses issues and events of the past to comment on our current society, to making a movie that does the same thing except just shoves it down your throat the entire runtime. 

Everything about this seems so rushed. It’s extremely ugly, it has the cinematography and color palette of a Hangover movie. Every dialogue scene is shot reverse shot until your brain melts. I felt nothing for the characters, because I barely knew anything about them despite the movie being two and a half hours long. It expects you to give a shit about the shoehorned love interest. The editing is messy. The production design…

the kind of mess only a brilliant overly emotional person with a thousand ideas could make, and i love that about it. of course this is about the way the state weaponizes anger and trauma, the cruel irony of two oppressed groups forced to fight each other for something they don't benefit from, but the thing i thought the most about was how hard it is to move forward when there are so many landmines from the past blocking your way, it's impossible, they make it impossible, state violence is an infinite ripple effect. whatever this movie's faults (and i am certainly not the right person to analyze them), this is an essential perspective on this clusterfuck of a war,…

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Da 5 Bloods is Spike Lee fully embracing his strengths as both an essayist and a pulp scavenger, finding form in adventure genre modes while taking to task a symbolic Vietnam space affected by American images, the threat of imperialism, and the dynamics of historical trauma. As much as this references Apocalypse Now (with a themed movie bar - the first of many acute details) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Spike Lee paints an expansive, often imbalanced picture of tension between the oppressed and the oppressor, particularly under the lens of colonization. Shades of Sam Fuller too. The interplay between vivid memories of the immoral war and the ghostly agony of the present converge and clash in…

O diretor Spike Lee já entregou ao mundo um conjunto de filmes e documentários que, com maior ou menor sucesso, carregam consigo uma de suas maiores marcas: o empolgante equilíbrio entre o entretenimento envolvente e a denúncia política. Não podia haver um momento mais propício para o lançamento deste seu "Destacamento Blood", disponível desde a última sexta-feira (12/06) na Netflix, do que este por que passam os Estados Unidos e o mundo com a deflagração das novas manifestações do #BlackLivesMatter.
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Sendo mais um de seus "lances" cinematográficos que já exibem as características militantes desde os minutos iniciais, sem quaisquer sutilezas ou restrições quanto a imagens impactantes de violência, isso já dá o tom da revolta que é mais do…

Wrote this review for an English assignment so I might as well put it to use here:

For some, the war was never over. Such is the idea perfectly encapsulated by Spike Lee’s latest war drama Da 5 Bloods. Undoubtedly the most important African American filmmaker, Lee literally gave black people a voice on the silver screen. And with the latest entry in his already astounding filmography, Lee delivers some of his most poignant and relevant work yet. Da 5 Bloods explores the story of four African American veterans of Vietnam – ‘bloods’ as they call themselves – venturing back to Vietnam in the modern day to recover the remains of their fallen squad leader, as well as a stash…

I love the way Spike Lee explores the PTSD of these characters after their war experience, showing the truly ugly aspects of how it affects themselves and those around them. When they all go back to the location of the warzone, you can see their trauma slowly bubbling back up to the surface. Delroy Lindo plays Paul to perfection; I was so glad to see how nuanced and flawed each of the characters were.

Although the main focus is the five dudes searching for gold, I'm glad it takes time out of its runtime to kind of explore the damage America has done to the country. It's not the main point of the story though, so I'm glad the movie…