More than a week after director and musician Boots Riley delivered a pointed and detailed critique of BlacKkKlansman and its portrayal of police officers, filmmaker Spike Lee has a response.
BlacKkKlansman director Spike Lee sees a lot of similarities between the Ku Klux Klan and today’s administration, specifically around fear-mongering and coded rhetoric (see: the origins of Trump’s popular slogan- “America first.”)
It begins with piano riffs and drum. Prince’s dulcet falsetto pours out the first verse, then drops a register for verse two. It is, in a word, sublime. It is Prince at his most soulful, with the growls and runs that mark his genius.
If you ask Marci Rodgers how she became a costume designer, her answer is simple: “God.”
“With the right white man, you can do anything,”John David Washington says as Ron Stallworth—the black Colorado Springs, Colo., police officer who went “undercover” in the Ku Klux Klan—in Spike Lee’s latest joint, BlacKkKlansman. This sentiment is also an entire mood. Oh, AmeriKKKa.
Spike Lee is well-respected as one of Hollywood’s biggest and blackest directors. On Friday, his latest, BlacKkKlansman arrives in theaters; the movie tells the story of Colorado Springs undercover detective Ron Stallworth, a black man who joined the Klu Klux Klan in the 1970s.
The man who inspired Spike Lee’s new movie, BlacKkKlansman, says that the man he conned forty years ago—none other than the KKK’s Grandwizard David Duke—is concerned that the critically acclaimed new film might make him look stupid.
While several of the entertainment industry’s elite flocked to England on Saturday to celebrate the royal wedding, other members of Hollywood royalty concluded their takeover of the French Riviera for the closing events of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
Spike Lee is not a man to mince words, and during a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival to promote his upcoming film BlacKkKlansman, the prolific director ripped President Donald Trump a new one because of his refusal to denounce the Ku Klux Klan after the Unite the Right white supremacy rally in August in…
Filmmaker Spike Lee’s latest offering, BlacKkKlansman, is set to be released on Aug. 10, the one-year anniversary of the deadly Charlottesville, Va., white nationalist rally. At its world premiere in Cannes, the film received 10 minutes of applause and standing ovation.
After two hours and 24 songs, the queen commonly known as Beyoncé still stepped offstage Saturday night looking as fresh as a member of an HBCU freshman class. How did she do it? While we’re tempted to believe she really does wakes up like that, her glowing, glittery-eyed makeup look was created by longtime makeup…
At my previous employer, we were responsible for doing our own time sheets for HR and salary purposes. The system required us to come up with a minimum of (I believe) a 12-character password that included a combination of numbers, letters and special characters. Also, we were required to change said password every 90…
It’s a powerful thing to channel your pain into positive change. On Saturday, Jennifer Hudson did just that when she took to the stage at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., to sing a soul-stirring rendition of Bob Dylan’s protest anthem “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”
Ruth E. Carter’s résumé reads like a list of iconic favorites from contemporary black cinema. In the 30 years since her first film, Spike Lee’s 1988 hit, School Daze, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated costume designer has amassed more than 60 film and television credits, including I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988); Do the…
Chicagoans are protective of their city, and for good reason. Over the past few years, the City of the Big Shoulders has been the go-to dog whistle for Republicans and what-about-black-on-black-crime enthusiasts alike. The city’s spot on America’s Wheel of Sensationalism has dominated the larger national media gaze as…
The man from New York City’s Brooklyn borough is having a good year.
I remember the first time I saw She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee’s groundbreaking, critically acclaimed and very first “joint,” which premiered in 1986. When it debuted on HBO a year later, I was 12, a latchkey kid, and the parental controls that would lock me out of my parents’ premium channels after school had…
In what undoubtedly was a black woman ahead of her time, the character Nola Darling (played by Tracy Camilla Johns) was introduced to the world by Spike Lee as the lead in his very first film, 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It (Lee also faced some pushback for a problematic rape scene in it, a scene he later said he…
Legendary black Hollywood stalwart Spike Lee is collaborating with upstart Jordan Peele on Black Klansman, a true-life account of a black police detective who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan.
