Review: BlacKkKlansman (2018) (Spike Lee’s Pointless Sledgehammer…)

SPOILER FREE

“All power to all people”

When does unsubtly become too unsubtle? That’s the question I kept asking myself during BlacKkKlansman. Sometimes (especially with the issue of racism), it’s better to be bludgeoned to death with a message than to have it lingering in the background. But there are parts of BlacKkKlansman that were too much, even for a simple bloke like me. That’s pretty much how I felt about the film as a whole. True stories often make odd bedfellows with films, and Spike Lee’s interpretation of the true story behind BlacKkKlansman is one of those odd bedfellows.

Review: 2012 (2009) (Appetite For Destruction?)

“We’re going to need a bigger plane.”

President Donald Trump has been the most powerful man in the world for over a month. Yet the world is still in one piece. To prepare myself for disaster, I re-watched a film I hated at the cinema, ‘2012.’ I left the cinema less than impressed after ‘Deepwater Horizon,’ a smaller scale disaster film than Emmerich’s usual globe spanning adventures (read my review of that film here). Would ‘2012’ satisfy my appetite for destruction? No matter how many national monuments he digitally destroys, Emmerich finds it difficult to direct a decent film. Each of his disaster films are bloated, over-reliant on CGI, poorly scripted, illogically plotted, etc (just check out Independence Day: Resurgence for proof, and read my review here). And they are populated with good actors, giving them a veneer of respect.