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…

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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…

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,…

Spike Lee como sempre trouxe muita representatividade para esse filme, e sempre de uma forma genial. Os personagens são extremamente carismáticos e conseguem reproduzir suas duas facetas, a extrema carisma e o extremo trauma psicológico que uma guerra traz para todos que ali estão envolvidos, onde Spike Lee começa mostrando isso de forma sutil no começo e depois vai aumentando a intensidade até que chega em momentos muito extremos, onde todos os tipos de gatilhos são ativados, fazendo os personagens mergulharem no passado e ativar o espírito de guerrilheiro dentro deles.
O filme é claramente uma crítica a guerra do Vietnã. Onde a maioria dos soldados enviados para a linha de frente da guerra eram negros, assim lutando por uma…

I want to say up front I do understand why many find things to like within Da 5 Bloods, and it’s definitely no train wreck. But like Spike Lee’s other recent joints, Da 5 Bloods feels like a tonal mess, and forgive the pun, disjointed.

Let’s start, as I often do, with the good. Delroy Lindo is the best part of this movie, and his portrayal of a Trump-loving Vietnam vet with a screw loose is worth the Oscar attention it is receiving. The cast all have great chemistry together, and Spike Lee lets that be the focus of the film often when it should be, and that is commendable. There’s some creativity in the script, a few good surprises,…