What Oscar forgot: Finding Teyonah Parris' formation in Chi-raq

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.

You had me at: Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout'

Part of an ongoing column about the sentences and paragraphs that force a reader onward:

When not shoveling snow the last few days, I plowed through much of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) as it turned away from what was the Bob Marley moment in Jamaica to the void left by his death and the drug trade that filled it. Of course, James’ novel is much more complicated than that reduction I just offered and is not brief, but a novel exhausting in both its focus and scope. So not knowing what to read in the wake of a truly large book, I picked up Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015) yesterday.

On Snowball's Chance by John Reed

John Reed's novella is no longer new and neither is it old. Published originally in 2002 by Roof Books, Snowball's Chance begins "The old pigs were dying" (3)--Napoleon included. The death of the old totalitarian regime creates a porous opportunity for Snowball's return. And he does, with a goat at his side.