The Meg (*** out of five stars) v. BlacKkKlansman (**** 1/2 out of five stars)
Both films in wide release
by Walter G. Tarrow
The Hollywood Elite doesn’t even take the summer off from its continuous war on the White American Male… across the entire cinema landscape from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Back in the Summer of 1975, the blockbuster was born when fun seekers left the beaches in droves to brave the terror of “Jaws” in the cool safety of their local movie house.
This summer Sheriff Brody’s famous line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” has been doubled down with the ridiculous, but entertaining, The Meg, starring one helluva ginormous shark, a prehistoric megalodon. A by-the-numbers crowd pleaser with nary an original bone in its elasmobranchial body. Yet even here the leftist filmmaker community has to take every opportunity to attack the White American Male.
Dwayne Johnson wannabe Jason Statham (The Transporter, Crank) is the reluctant hero Jonas (hey, that’s an anagram of Jason!) recruited from a self-imposed exile after taking undeserved blame for the loss of lives during a horrific sea bottom encounter with the then unknown title creature. Starting with a new excursion to the deepest of the deep ocean depths, under a “cloud” of old timey gas that keeps the past in the past, a new, politically correct, crew of diversity is in jeopardy from the megalodon. Above them is their home base, a Sealab marine research facility funded by the requisite (gonna be using that word a lot seeing as this movie is pure formula) irresponsible egomaniacal billionaire (Rainn Wilson of TV’s “The Office”), with the rest of the expected, the requisite, demographically balanced team, an ethnic melting pot hailing from around the globe.
Along with Statham, himself English, in the lead, there are the requisite Chinese head scientist, his requisite daughter (also the requisite romantic object of Jonas’ affection) and her granddaughter, the requisite kickass lesbian engineer (the Australian actress Ruby Rose), the token (kind of getting tired of using the word requisite) black man from Detroit, a chubby nerd techie from Iceland, the doctor from Australia who ostracized Jonas, Jonas’ ex-wife played by another Australian actor, and even a Maori scientist from New Zealand. Again, the only White American Male is the duplicitous billionaire, the new requisite bad guy in current cinema. A salvo fired from Hollywood at the USS MAGA.
There are pretty much all the Jaws tropes with The Meg chomping down on everything and everyone and paying a visit to the requisite crowded beach, this time not on Amity Island, but Sanya Bay, China. People do dangerous and clumsy things and fall into the water a lot. It’s no Jaws but it’s comfort food fun.
And, SPOILER ALERT! Surprise. Surprise. As always, in this current hostile toward the White American Male climate, the sole White American Male is chum.
And the war on the White America Male continues…
Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, his wishful and nostalgic look at the true story of Ron Stallworth, the first black police officer for the Colorado Springs PD, and his investigation into the local chapter of “the Organization,” the Ku Klux Klan, becomes a throwback to that time, the 1970s, both in substance and style. It stylistically evokes the black man’s justice over White American Male oppression theme as portrayed in the blaxploitation films of that time (think Shaft). And through Stallworth and his crew’s takedown of the Klan, it reminds us, especially now, that though then was also a time of great racial injustice and rebellion, a black man might win, even if it was a small fleeting victory.
John David Washington, Denzel’s son, portrays Stallworth as an earnest, patient, eager to be of service, rookie cop who endures subtle, yet clearly racially biased, harassment from his fellow officers, initially being relegated to the mundane task of retrieving files for one racist cop in particular who refers to black criminals as “toads.” He asks the police chief to assign him to the undercover unit which the chief does, albeit with reservations.
Stallworth is assigned to “infiltrate,” with a wire, a speech by Kwame Ture, AKA Stokely Carmichael, sponsored by the Black Student Union at Colorado College. There he meets the president of the BSU, Patrice Dumas, and develops both a professional and personal relationship with her. And listening to Ture speak finds himself motivated to stand up for his people.
On a whim, he calls the number from an ad in the newspaper (remember them?) recruiting for the Klan. To Stallworth’s surprise, the chapter president encourages him to follow through on the call with a face to face meeting. He enlists, with the chief’s approval, the help of his fellow Jewish cop Flip Zimmerman to pass as him in person. There are numerous humorous, but disturbing, subsequent encounters where Flip is accepted, then questioned, then doubted, then accepted again, as Stallworth.
And throughout all of Stallworth’s (both Ron and Flip) interactions with the local chapter, off to the side Ron is developing a deeper relationship with Patrice and his black brothers and sisters, and by phone with David Duke (played brilliantly low key and clueless by Topher Grace of TV’s “That ‘70s Show”), the Grand Wizard of the KKK. The members of the local chapter are seen as blindly racist, buffoonish (the source of much humor), but ultimately very dangerous, leading the chief, the department, and even the FBI to realize that the real threat is not the black community, but the Klan.
Spike Lee has crafted a modern, even-keeled, fair and honest, depiction of a time in America’s recent past where there was hope for justice, and equality and unity. The film has aspects of a historical recollection including a sequence where Harry Belafonte, as Jerome Turner, tells a small group of the BSU a personal tale of a horrifying lynching of a black man. And BlacKkKlansman also has elements of a buddy cop picture with Flip and Ron. After Flip is interrogated with pistol and lie detector about whether or not he’s Jewish, Ron reminds Flip that he also “has skin in the game.” Do we all?
But, ending with footage of David Duke today, and the tragedy of the Charlottesville protests, Spike finally reminds us that racism is still very much alive today, and that wouldn’t it be loverly if the black American nation would get a break every once in a while.
And the war on the White American Male continues…
