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| If anything, himself. |
First, Spike Lee’s Chi-raq (2015) is, especially upon one’s first viewing, an uneven,
or at least unwieldly movie, and reactions to the film reveal it as such. After
all, while the film garners only a 5.7 rating on IMDB, the film also topped Paste Magazine and The NewYorker’s best films of the year lists. The metamorphic
girth of this satire makes it typical of Spike Lee’s artistic wheelhouse, which
has less to do with George Lucas pastiche and Stephen Spielberg perfection than
Woody Allen’s strolling rants. Even more, Spike Lee’s New York sensibility—his ranting
away from traditional plot structures and streamlined coherence—places him in
constellation with African-American satirists doubling as novelists.